- Who
Alexander Schrier arrived at Penn from Gaithersburg, Maryland, unsure of his path. On the first day of New Student Orientation, he says, he found that path through a conversation with a classmate from Afghanistan.
The classmate had arrived in the United States just four days earlier, during the 2021 Taliban offensive, and wanted to return to Kabul one day to make a positive impact on his country.
At that moment, Schrier says he was inspired. “I got into Penn and I felt like I should do something important, too,” Schrier says. “I had always loved to learn about the world and [international relations] was a field that I really could go down into.”
In early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and added another dimension to his studies. “From that, I started to understand a place in the Russian-speaking world that not many people were looking at but was changing a lot and had very interesting geopolitical dynamics. That was Central Asia.”
- What
Now a fourth-year, Schrier’s experience as a Perry World House Student Fellow has given him insight into possible career paths. He will be attending the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies for a master’s degree in international relations, spending a year in Italy and another in Washington, D.C.
“I had a mentor who said, ‘You can either be on the sidelines or you can play in the game.’ I would like to play in the game,” he says. This spring, he is also taking an international law class at Penn Carey Law with William Burke-White, which he said may offer him alternative career insights.
His senior thesis, “Reigniting the ‘Silk Road Spirit’ and the New Age of Central Asian Diplomacy,” tackles complex issues of international diplomacy. During the summer, he traveled to Uzbekistan as a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Advanced International Studies in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. During his work there, he was able to talk with Uzbeks, from people on the street to academics and diplomats. “Being able to talk to taxi drivers about politics is an interesting view, especially when we talk about America,” Schrier says.
His thesis research focuses on the rise of regional sovereignty initiatives in Central Asia, policies that focus on increased cooperation between nations in the region as well as diversification towards outside powers, such as Saudia Arabia and Türkiye.
In the past, the Central Asian nations—which include Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—didn’t work together closely. His research focuses on how they are operating more in concert after the launch of the Russia-Ukraine war, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the rise of China as an economic power, as well as the influence of the new “middle power” nations, such as India, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Azerbaijan.
He has met with current U.S. ambassador Jonathan Henick; George Krol, former ambassador to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan; and the former press secretary to the late Uzbek president Islam Karimov, Ulugbek Khasanov.
And along the way, he spoke at the Global Youth Festival in Samarkand, traveled to six regions of the country, and ate foods such as horse and plov, the national dish of Uzbekistan.
- Why
Schrier says his research shows that regions that had not previously cooperated and collaborated can start to unite. He points to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America as areas in similar situations. “This might be the springboard to show that other regions could work together,” he says. And Uzbeks generally “do want to work with America; they want America to balance the powers that are in the region.
“Central Asia is an example of what I would say a multipolar world order looks like where the U.S. isn’t the biggest leader in that region,” Schrier says. For example, the Chinese electric car company BYD has opened a production facility in Uzbekistan, supplanting a former General Motors monopoly.
More broadly, the time he spent in Uzbekistan “was quite pivotal for myself, learning about Central Asian culture,” Schrier says. “It changed the way I see the world in many ways.”
