During the latter part of the 20th century, illegal drug production for Western markets has developed and consolidated in various parts of Asia. The near entirety of the heroin consumed in Europe originates in Afghanistan, with major individual and societal problems in the countries of consumption. However, the production and smuggling of heroin causes even worse problems in the production and transit countries. In the states along the smuggling routes, narcotics affect the general health conditions of the population, with severe diseases including HIV/AIDS as a result. It also contributes to crime and social conflicts, exacerbates corruption and threatens sovereignty, fuels extremism and terrorism, and plays an important role in civil wars.

Since the end of the Cold War, the need to widen the concept of security and distinguish between "hard" and "soft" security threats has been increasingly accepted, but the implementation of strategies to face "soft" security threats has been less prominent. This has changed somewhat but the problem that we now faces is that the separation between hard (traditional) and soft (non-traditional) security threats has been almost total, and in many ways artificial. It has been a positive trend to elevate the so called new security threats, but there has been a failure to understand in what way old and new security threats overlap and in many ways in fact reinforce each other. This book aims at analyzing both the traditional and traditional security threats in Eurasia, but more importantly conncecting these with each other to see how they interact and reinforce each other. Another aim is to understand what the impact is on the region and what can be done to combat the security threats in Eurasia.