Cummings, Sally (Nikoline)

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CUMMINGS, Sally (Nikoline)

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Office—School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, Scotland. E-mail—snc@st-and.ac.uk.

CAREER:

Educator, editor, and author. Keele University, Staffordshire, England, temporary lecturer, 1995; University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, temporary lecturer in politics, 1998-1999, lecturer in politics, 1999-2003; St. Andrews University, St. Andrews, Scotland, lecturer in politics, 2003—. Held research posts with NATO and the European Union.

WRITINGS:

(With Clifford Chance and Nigel Peters) Doing Business in Kazakstan, Kogan Page (London, England), 1995.

Kazakhstan: Centre-Periphery Relations, Royal Institute of International Affairs (London, England), 2000.

(Editor, with Mary Buckley) Kosovo: Perceptions of War and Its Aftermath, Continuum (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor and contributor) Power and Change in Central Asia, Routledge (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor and contributor) Oil, Transition, and Security in Central Asia, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Understanding Central Asia, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Author of various scholarly papers on the politics of Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sally Cummings is an educator, researcher, and author whose focus is the politics and international relations of Central Asia, particularly Kazakhstan, with an emphasis on postcommunist regime and elite change. Having conducted several years of fieldwork in Central Asia, her interests extend to nationalism, territorial politics, and security.

In Kazakhstan: Centre-Periphery Relations, she discusses the nation's role as a leader in structural reform following the breakdown of the Soviet Union, as well as its potential as an energy producer, noting the difficulties inherent in Kazakhstan's position between Europe and Asia. Gregory Gleason, in a review for International Affairs, called the book a "compact yet methodologically sophisticated treatment of the internal dynamics of Kazakhstan." However, Gleason went on to note that "the book may leave some inquisitive researchers with a sense that an important part of the story has still not been told," and suggested that any expanded editions of the work might benefit from further discussion of the less formal, and potentially underhanded, dealings of the Kazakhstan government.

The editor of Power and Change in Central Asia, Cummings also contributes an introduction, an essay on Kazakhstan, and an essay on Turkmenistan that she wrote with Michael Ochs. The edition was compiled on the tenth anniversary of the Central Asian states' gaining their independence. The book analyzes the political progress of the five major states, noting that none of them have made great strides toward instituting democracy. Writing for Asian Affairs, Togzhan Kassenova stated that "the comparative analysis of the presidential regimes in these countries presented in Cummings' edition represents a timely contribution to academic discussion on the role and patterns of leadership in the post-Soviet states."