Acknowledgements A multitude of individuals have contributed to this report during the course of the project. This includes all the experts who participated in SIPRI’s five regional workshops held in Beijing, Astana, Islamabad, Moscow and Brussels respectively; and experts from academic, think tank, government, non-governmental organization and media bodies whom we met in the aforementioned cities as well as in Shanghai, Urumqi, Lanzhou, Bishkek, Almaty, New Delhi, Leuven and Stockholm. In total, 156 experts from 84 different institutes were consulted for the project. They kindly made time to support our endeavour and to broaden our knowledge on the subject of this report. Special thanks go to the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations(CICIR), the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of Kazakhstan(KazISS) and the National Research University Higher School of Economics(HSE) for co-hosting our workshops in Beijing, Astana and Moscow respectively. In addition, we owe a debt of gratitude to multiple distinguished peer reviewers who were very generous in making time to reflect on sections of this report: T. C. A. Rangachari, Imtiaz Gul, Pál Dunay, Jabin Jacob, Khalid Aziz, Frans-Paul van der Putten, Vasily Kashin, Gulshan Sachdeva, Shahbaz Rana, Yulia Nikitina, Xie Tao, Fraser Cameron, Jos Boonstra, Liu Zongyi, Vladimir Paramonov, Andrew Small, Kemel Toktomushev, Sebastian Schieck, Daniyar Kosnazarov, Balazs Ujvari, Matthieu Burnay, Mikko Huotari, Thomas Eder, Muzaffar Olimov, Farkhod Aminjonov, Anatole Pang, Stephan Mothe, Lars-Erik Lundin, John Hart and Timo Smit, as well as the SIPRI Editorial Department for help with its final publication form. Nadine Godehardt, Dietmar Dirmoser, Bernt Berger, Sebastian Schiek and Alexey Yusupov also contributed valuable inputs at the project’s inception workshop. We would like to express a very special thanks to Dr Lora Saalman, SIPRI’s Director of the China and Global Security Programme, for editing this report and for her contributions to the workshop and interview process. Her tireless efforts are sincerely appreciated. Our gratitude also goes to Dinara Kozhakhmetova for providing research support in the final stages of the project and to Christian Dietrich for creating the two figures in this report. This project was funded through the generous support of the Friedrich-Ebert­Stiftung(FES), for which we are very grateful. FES Berlin and FES local offices kindly facilitated all of the five regional workshops and a great number of one-to-one meetings, and enriched our field research with valuable insights about the region—we are much indebted for this and greatly enjoyed working with them. In particular, we would like to extend our gratitude to Knut Dethlefsen, who coordinated the entire project with much dedication from the FES side, Jürgen Stetten, Christoph Pohlmann, Stefan Pantekoek, Henriette Kiefer, Marc Saxer, Rolf Paasch, Abdullah Dayo, Mirko Hempel and Uwe Optenhögel. Any faults in the report are our own. The Authors