Mongolia’s Place in the World
Professor David Sneath, 22 May 2024 19.00 BST
Embassy of Mongolia, 7-8 Kensington Court, London
We are very grateful to the Embassy of Mongolia for their generous hosting of this event.
Trapped between two geopolitical heavyweights, Mongolia is forced to walk a diplomatic and economic tightrope to maintain its critical supply of fuel from Russia in the north, and other essential goods and resources from China in the south. The implementation of structural reforms since its transition to multiparty democracy, in the early 1990s, has left Mongolia with a stable economy and a strong, vibrant democracy in a region known for autocracy.
Since 2000, Mongolia has pursued a multi-pronged foreign policy aimed at reducing reliance on any one country, this has meant developing close strategic, military and economic ties with key regional states including Japan, India, China, Russia and the USA. Despite its efforts Mongolia still remains heavily dependent on its autocratic neighbours with the invasion of Ukraine highlighting the precariousness of its geopolitical position. Not committing to condemn Russian aggression nor the sanctions imposed on Russia by the West and trying to navigate China’s position on the conflict has opened Mongolia’s eyes to the potential for complex maneuvering ahead as the West, Beijing and Moscow drift ever further apart.
David Sneath is a Professorial Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the past and present of political economy, pastoralism, land-use and the environment and post-socialist transformation across Inner Asia. He has carried out extended fieldwork in and returns regularly to Mongolia and other parts of Inner Asia and is Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge, co-editor of the journal Inner Asia and Director of Studies in Social Anthropology for Corpus Christi College. He has authored more than twenty books and papers on Inner Asia, his latest monograph is Mongolia Remade: Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics
