Former PM opens conference marking two decades without the Soviet Union

Former Prime Minister the Hon. Bob Hawke presented the address at the opening of the 10th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-Communist Studies (AACaPS).  Also speaking at the opening was CAIS Director Professor Amin Saikal.

The conference looks at the transformations that have occured in the two decades since the break-up of the Soviet Union.  The collapse of the USSR in 1991 ushered in a period of unprecedented change across the Eurasian continent affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people, redrawing political maps, and generating new challenges and opportunities for the rest of the world.

The two-day conference, entitled Two Decades without the Soviet Union: Transformations in Eurasian Space is being convened by Dr Kirill Nourzhanov, Senior Lecturer at CAIS.

AACaPS - X brings together distinguished scholars, policymakers and journalists from Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe, and North America who will take stock of various aspects of political, strategic, economic and cultural transformation from the Danube to the Pacific in the past two decades.

The conference, held at the ANU Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (The Middle East & Central Asia),  is on currently and will run until Friday 4 Febraury.