ASEEES NewsNet
Nov 2023 • v. 63, n. 6
An Environment for People-to-People Diplomacy: Impressions from the Aral Sea Summer School by Sarah Cameron This year marked the fifth anniversary of the Kazakh German University (DKU) Aral Sea summer school. The ten-day program, which is targeted at young Central Asians and Afghanis working or studying in fields related to water, offers students an introduction to the challenges facing residents of the Priaral’e, or Aral Sea region, a vast area that encompasses parts of present-day Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Once one of the world’s largest inland bodies of water, the Aral Sea began to shrink dramatically in the 1960s when Soviet officials directed an increasing amount of water towards cotton production. As a result of the declining water levels, the climate and ecology of the surrounding region changed. People who lived near the sea began to experience a dramatic increase in health problems and the sea’s once vibrant fishing industry collapsed. In 2005, the World Bank sponsored the construction of a dam that led to the partial restoration of water levels on the Kazakhstani side. In recent years, however, rising temperatures (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that Central Asia is one of the world regions most exposed to climate change) and increasing water demands from upstream countries, have left the future of the region and its residents uncertain. The Aral Sea disaster cannot be resolved by the efforts of any one state. The “Aral Sea basin,” the drainage basin for the Aral Sea, 12 encompasses a vast area that includes most of Central
Asia plus parts of northern Afghanistan and Iran. Though national divisions have inflamed the crisis (some Kazakhs blame Uzbekistan’s reliance on cotton for the Aral Sea’s demise), cooperation among different nations is also widely understood as vital to managing the region’s water issues. Soon after the Soviet collapse, for instance, the five Central Asian states formed the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS) to facilitate collaboration on issues relating to the Aral Sea. The summer school brings the concept of regional cooperation down to the more basic level of people-topeople diplomacy. Roughly twenty students from across Central Asia and Afghanistan are selected for participation through an open competition. Those chosen are fully funded (past supporters of the summer school have included the Barsa-Kelmes nature preserve, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), the German Foreign Ministry, and IFAS), and the very format of the summer school, which includes camping, yurt stays, and long train and car rides, encourages collaborative thinking and close communication. Friendships form and, if the lively summer school student text group I joined is any indication,endure well beyond the summer school itself. Indeed, according to some sources, the program has even resulted in at least one marriage.
