Gulnoza Ismailova heads Uzbekistan’s El-Yurt Umidi Foundation, which supports Uzbek students and professionals pursuing education and training at leading institutions abroad. Her career has spanned academia, diplomacy, public administration and the Central Election Commission.

In this interview with Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, she discusses Uzbekistan’s growing investment in human capital, the return of internationally trained specialists, cooperation with European universities, the changing expectations of young Uzbeks and the Foundation’s ambition to move “from mobility to co-creation.”

Novastan: To begin, could you introduce yourself to our readers? Your career has taken you through academia, diplomacy, public administration, the Central Election Commission and now El-Yurt Umidi. Looking back, what experiences have most shaped your understanding of Uzbekistan’s development?

Gulnoza Ismailova: Looking back, I realise that every stage of my career has shown me a different dimension of Uzbekistan’s transformation.

I began my career in academia, working with young people preparing for careers in the civil service and diplomacy. Those years convinced me that successful reforms always begin with people. They also showed me that Uzbekistan’s development depends on strengthening our own institutions while engaging confidently with the world, learning from international experience and sharing our own ideas and achievements.

My years in public administration taught me another important lesson: successful reforms are never simply about adopting the right policies. They also depend on strong institutions, professional civil servants and the trust of citizens. Building that trust takes time, consistency and people who genuinely believe in public service.

Together, these experiences naturally led me to my current role at the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation. If there is one lesson my career has taught me, it is that lasting reform begins with people. Strategies and institutions provide the framework, but it is talented and committed professionals who turn ambition into reality. That lesson continues to shape the way I think about education, public service and leadership today.

For readers who may not yet be familiar with it, what is the mission of El-Yurt Umidi? What challenge was the Foundation created to address?

Many people assume that the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation is simply a scholarship programme, but our mission is much broader.

The Foundation was created because the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, recognised that reforms require people with the right knowledge and international experience. A country can invest in infrastructure and technology, but without qualified specialists it is very difficult to achieve lasting change. That is where we come in.

Each year, we support around 500 talented young people who want to study or undertake professional training at universities and educational institutions included in the world’s top 300 rankings. Our scholars specialise in many different fields, from healthcare and engineering to public administration, education and digital technologies. What unites them is their desire to contribute to the country’s development.

Investing in human capital has become one of Uzbekistan’s key priorities. The economy is changing, technology is changing and the skills countries need are changing as well. If we want to remain competitive, we must prepare people who can work to international standards and introduce new ideas into our institutions and industries.

How has the way Uzbekistan thinks about education, talent and international cooperation evolved over the past decade?

I think the biggest change has been in the way we look at talent. Ten or fifteen years ago, studying abroad was often seen primarily as an individual achievement. Today, it is increasingly viewed as an investment in the country’s future.

There is also a much stronger understanding that education does not end with earning a diploma. We live in a world where technology, economies and labour markets are changing very quickly. Continuous learning, international exposure and the ability to adapt have become essential, both for individuals and for institutions.

The same shift has taken place in international cooperation. It is no longer simply about signing agreements or organising official visits. Today, partnerships are expected to produce tangible results, including joint research, academic exchanges, dual-degree programmes, scholarships, professional training and innovation. The emphasis is on creating long-term relationships that benefit both sides.

When selecting scholarship recipients, what qualities do you look for beyond academic excellence? What kind of future leaders does Uzbekistan hope to cultivate?

Academic excellence is certainly important, but it is only one part of the picture. High test results or admission to a prestigious university do not automatically mean that someone will make a lasting contribution to the country.

We also look for motivation, a clear sense of purpose and a genuine commitment to Uzbekistan’s development. We want to understand why a candidate has chosen a particular field of study and how they see themselves applying that knowledge when they return.

Another quality we value is curiosity. The world is changing so quickly that technical knowledge alone is not enough. We are looking for people who are open to new ideas, willing to learn from different cultures and able to work across disciplines and borders. These qualities are becoming just as important as academic achievement.

Many countries worry that students who study abroad will never return. How has Uzbekistan approached this challenge?

This is a question that every country investing in international education has to consider. There is no single solution, and I do not believe it is only about requiring graduates to come back. The more important question is whether they have meaningful opportunities when they return.

In Uzbekistan, our approach combines commitment and opportunity. El-Yurt Umidi scholars agree to return and work in Uzbekistan after completing their studies: three years for master’s graduates and five years for bachelor’s and doctoral graduates. We hope they see this not merely as a contractual obligation, but as an opportunity and a privilege to contribute to the country’s development at a time of profound transformation.

That commitment must be matched by real opportunities. Over the past several years, Uzbekistan has changed significantly. As reforms have accelerated, so has the demand for professionals with international education and experience across public administration, higher education, healthcare, industry and many other sectors.

Of course, our graduates may receive attractive opportunities abroad. What encourages them to return is the feeling that they can make a real difference here. They come back at a time when new ideas are welcomed, institutions are evolving and there is genuine space to contribute. Many tell us that this sense of purpose is one of the strongest reasons for building their careers in Uzbekistan.

Could you share some examples of former scholarship recipients whose experience abroad has made a tangible contribution to Uzbekistan?

There are many inspiring stories, and what I find most rewarding is seeing how differently our graduates contribute after returning to Uzbekistan.

One example is Bobur Turaev, a paediatric cardiac surgeon who studied at University College London with the support of the Foundation. After returning home, he became part of a team that successfully performed a highly complex heart-valve reconstruction on a six-year-old child using the patient’s own tissue. Today, he performs numerous life-saving paediatric heart operations, giving children the chance to grow up healthy and offering their families hope for the future.

Another example is Islombek Ismailov, a lecturer at Urgench State University. After completing his studies abroad, he dedicated himself to nurturing young mathematical talent. Under his guidance, his students have achieved outstanding results in international competitions. At the RUDN Math Olymp in 2025, they won one gold, one silver and two bronze medals. At the VI International Open Mathematics Olympiad in Ashgabat in 2026, they earned two gold, three silver and two bronze medals, while the university’s teams also received silver and bronze medals in the team competition. Editor’s note: RUDN Math Olymp is an international mathematics competition organised by RUDN University, also known as the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia.

I would also mention Husniddin Khidirov, who is involved in strategic projects at the Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Company. He is applying the knowledge and international experience he gained abroad to one of Uzbekistan’s most important industries, helping strengthen the company’s strategic planning and project-management capacity.

These stories are very different, but they share a common thread. One graduate is helping save children’s lives, another is mentoring future mathematicians and another is contributing to the modernisation of a strategic industry. They remind us that the value of a scholarship extends far beyond the individual recipient.

This is how we assess the impact of our programme. We certainly look at the number of scholarships awarded, but what matters even more is what happens afterwards: whether our graduates improve institutions, introduce new ideas, advance research, mentor young people or contribute to the country’s development in other meaningful ways.

Which fields of study are currently the highest priority for Uzbekistan?

At the moment, our highest priority is STEM disciplines, as they provide the foundation for innovation, industrial development and economic competitiveness, all of which are central to Uzbekistan’s long-term development strategy.

Beyond STEM, we also focus on sectors that are driving the country’s economic transformation. These include energy, manufacturing, transport and logistics, agriculture and food production, tourism and services, healthcare, education and public administration.

We prioritise these fields because they are directly linked to Uzbekistan’s development goals. The country is modernising its economy, expanding digital infrastructure, improving public services, strengthening its healthcare and education systems and creating higher-value industries. Achieving these ambitions requires specialists who not only possess strong technical expertise, but also understand international standards and best practices.

As the country’s needs continue to evolve, our scholarship priorities evolve as well. We regularly review priority fields to ensure they remain aligned with Uzbekistan’s economic strategy and the skills that will be needed in the years ahead.

You have worked at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy, the Academy of Public Administration and now El-Yurt Umidi. How has the relationship between universities and public institutions changed?

I think there has been a very noticeable shift over the past decade. When I worked at the Academy of Public Administration and later at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy, cooperation between universities and public institutions certainly existed, but it was often limited to traditional areas such as internships, guest lectures or recruitment.

Today, the relationship is much more strategic. Universities are increasingly seen as partners in national development rather than simply as providers of education. Government institutions are working more closely with universities to identify the skills the country needs, develop new academic programmes, support research and innovation and prepare specialists for priority sectors of the economy.

At the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation, we see this transformation every day. We work closely with ministries, universities and employers to ensure that scholarship priorities reflect Uzbekistan’s long-term development goals.

Of course, there is still room for further progress. We need even closer cooperation between universities, government and industry to ensure that graduates have the skills employers are looking for and that research contributes more directly to innovation and economic development.

Compared with ten years ago, however, I believe we have made significant progress. There is now a shared understanding that developing human capital is a collective responsibility and that universities and public institutions achieve much more when they work together than when they work separately.

During your time at the Academy of Public Administration, you helped train future civil servants. What qualities do today’s public officials need that perhaps were not emphasised a generation ago?

The fundamental values of public service, including integrity, professionalism and responsibility, remain as important as ever. But I believe the expectations placed on public officials today are quite different from those of a generation ago.

One of the biggest changes is that we have become much more people-centred in the way we think about public administration. In the past, greater emphasis was often placed on hierarchy and administrative procedures. Since 2016, the focus has increasingly been on serving citizens, understanding their needs and improving the quality of public services. Ultimately, the success of any reform is measured by the difference it makes in people’s lives.

This shift requires a different set of skills. Today’s public officials need to be adaptable, open to new ideas and comfortable working across institutions. They need to use data and evidence to inform decisions, communicate effectively and build partnerships with universities, businesses, civil society and international organisations. Public administration has become much more collaborative.

I also believe that international exposure has become an important asset. It is not about copying what other countries do, but about learning from global experience and adapting successful practices to Uzbekistan’s own context. That is one of the reasons why the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation’s targeted traineeships are so valuable.

International education is about much more than acquiring technical knowledge. What ways of thinking do Uzbek students bring back from studying abroad?

I think the greatest benefit of international education is not simply acquiring new knowledge or technical skills. It is learning to understand context.

Today, almost any information can be found online. You can watch lectures from the world’s leading universities, read textbooks, access scientific journals and even learn new technical skills without leaving your home. But what you cannot learn from a textbook or the internet is how things actually work in practice.

When students study abroad, they are exposed to different academic cultures, institutions and ways of solving problems. They begin to see that every policy, institution and management system is shaped by its own history, culture and social context.

That experience changes the questions they ask. Instead of saying, “This is how they do it abroad, so we should do the same,” they begin to ask, “Why does this work in this particular context, and how can we adapt the underlying principles to Uzbekistan?”

I think that is a much more mature way of approaching reform. The ability to interpret context is one of the most valuable outcomes of international education. It is also one of the reasons why our graduates are often able to become effective agents of change within their own institutions.

Europe remains an important destination for Uzbek students. Beyond rankings, what makes European universities particularly valuable partners?

It is their educational philosophy. The mission of many European universities is not simply to produce highly qualified specialists, but to educate responsible citizens and future leaders who understand their role in society. This humanistic tradition has shaped European higher education for centuries and remains one of its greatest strengths.

Students are encouraged to think independently, question assumptions, engage in respectful debate and reflect on the broader social impact of their work. In other words, universities cultivate judgement, not just expertise. They place great emphasis on holistic development alongside academic achievement, helping students develop intellectual curiosity, ethical responsibility and a strong sense of civic engagement.

For us, this is particularly valuable. Uzbekistan needs highly qualified professionals, but it also needs people who are prepared to take responsibility, contribute to public life and help strengthen institutions.

That is why we look beyond rankings when choosing international partners. We value universities whose academic culture is built on openness, academic integrity, critical inquiry and a commitment to serving society. Those qualities help shape graduates who are not only excellent professionals, but also active citizens and future leaders capable of contributing to Uzbekistan’s long-term development.

What opportunities would you encourage French and European universities to explore in Uzbekistan?

I would encourage them to think beyond the traditional model of international cooperation. Student mobility will always remain important, but I believe the greatest opportunities now lie in building long-term institutional partnerships.

Our ambition is to move from mobility to co-creation: from simply sending students abroad to creating knowledge, innovation and solutions together.

I see particularly strong potential in joint research projects, dual-degree programmes, faculty exchanges, the co-supervision of doctoral students and collaborative research centres in areas such as green technologies, water and environmental sustainability, healthcare, space and engineering. These are fields where international cooperation can generate tangible benefits for both Uzbekistan and Europe.

I also believe there is significant untapped potential in strengthening cooperation between universities and industry. One example is our recent partnership involving the French National School of Civil Aviation, ENAC, Airbus and Tashkent State Transport University to develop a joint educational programme in civil aviation.

Initiatives like this demonstrate how academia, government and industry can work together to prepare specialists whose skills are directly relevant to the labour market, while also supporting technological development and innovation.

Can educational cooperation achieve things that traditional diplomacy cannot?

I believe higher education is one of the most powerful forms of diplomacy. Governments can sign agreements, but it is people who build lasting relationships. Universities create those human connections.

Every student, researcher or professor who spends time in another country gains something much more valuable than academic knowledge. They develop friendships, professional networks and a deeper understanding of another culture. Those relationships often last for decades and continue long after a particular project or government programme has ended.

In that sense, educational cooperation can sometimes achieve things that traditional diplomacy cannot. Diplomacy operates through governments, while universities connect societies. They build trust, encourage dialogue and create communities of people who continue working together throughout their careers.

I also believe education creates a different kind of ambassador. When students study abroad, they represent their country every day, not through official speeches, but through their work, their values and their interactions with others. At the same time, they return home with a deeper understanding of another society.

Political priorities may change over time, but relationships built through education, research and shared knowledge tend to endure. That is why I see higher education not only as an investment in human capital, but also as an investment in peace, mutual understanding and the future of Uzbekistan’s partnership with Europe.

Uzbekistan is becoming increasingly visible in Europe, yet many people still know relatively little about it. What would you most like European audiences to understand about the country today?

I think the biggest misconception is that many people still have an outdated image of Uzbekistan. Over the past several years, Uzbekistan has changed remarkably, and it is transforming much faster than many people outside the region realise. Today, it is a country of opportunities, yet perceptions often take longer to change than reality.

I would also encourage people to look beyond the headlines and discover Uzbekistan’s rich intellectual, scientific and cultural heritage. Central Asia has been a crossroads of civilisations for centuries, and Uzbekistan has a long tradition of scholarship, science and cultural exchange. Today, we are building on that heritage while embracing new ideas and international cooperation.

Finally, I hope more people will see Uzbekistan not simply as a country seeking partners, but as a partner with something meaningful to contribute. We believe international cooperation works best when it is based on mutual respect, shared learning and common goals.

Whether in higher education, research or innovation, we see our relationship with Europe as a genuine partnership, one in which both sides learn from each other and grow together.

Having worked with several generations of students and young professionals, how would you describe today’s young Uzbeks?

If I had to describe today’s young Uzbeks in a few words, I would say they are full of hope, dynamic, highly motivated and remarkably diverse.

They have a wide range of interests and aspirations. Some are passionate about artificial intelligence and engineering, others about entrepreneurship, science, public service, culture or the creative industries. This diversity is one of the greatest strengths of today’s generation.

I also find them to be much more globally connected than previous generations. As both an educator and a mother, I see this not only through the thousands of scholarship applicants I meet, but also through my own children. Their curiosity, confidence and ability to navigate an increasingly interconnected world reflect the qualities I see in so many young Uzbeks today.

What impresses me most is their confidence during interviews. They communicate easily across cultures and are eager to learn from the best universities around the world. At the same time, many of them have a strong desire to contribute to Uzbekistan’s future. They do not see international education as an opportunity to leave the country forever, but as a way to gain knowledge and experience that they can bring home.

Their expectations are also changing. They want opportunities to grow, to be challenged and to have their ideas heard. They value merit, openness and continuous learning, and they are looking for environments where initiative and creativity are encouraged.

Women are playing an increasingly visible role in Uzbekistan’s public and professional life. What trends have you observed among female scholarship recipients?

Over the past several years, I have seen a very encouraging change. More and more young women are pursuing international education, taking on leadership roles and building successful careers in fields in which women were traditionally underrepresented.

This progress has not happened by chance. It reflects the strong political commitment of the President of Uzbekistan to expanding opportunities for women and ensuring that girls’ education and women’s leadership are recognised as national priorities.

As a result, society has become increasingly supportive of women’s education, and today we see more women serving in senior leadership and decision-making positions across government, academia and the private sector.

At the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation, we see this trend very clearly. Nearly 30 per cent of our scholarship recipients are women, and every year we meet more talented young women studying engineering, artificial intelligence, medicine, public administration, economics and many other fields. They are ambitious, highly motivated and increasingly confident in pursuing their professional goals.

At the same time, I believe there is still more we can do, particularly in STEM disciplines, where women remain underrepresented around the world. This is not simply a question of representation. Countries are stronger when they are able to benefit from the talents of all their people.

That is why we are working with the British Council to launch a joint Women in STEM scholarship initiative. The programme is designed to support talented Uzbek women pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, while also encouraging more young women to consider careers in these fields.

We see this as an investment not only in individual scholars, but also in the future scientific and technological capacity of Uzbekistan.

Artificial intelligence, digitalisation and the green transition are transforming labour markets worldwide. How is El-Yurt Umidi adapting?

The pace of technological change means that no scholarship programme can remain static. We have to anticipate the skills that will be needed not only today, but five or ten years from now.

At the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation, we regularly review our scholarship quotas for priority fields to ensure they remain aligned with Uzbekistan’s national development priorities and the changing demands of the global economy.

This is an ongoing process. Every year, we assess emerging trends, consult with ministries, universities and industry and adjust our priorities accordingly.

Today, we are placing particular emphasis on areas such as artificial intelligence, information and communication technologies, cybersecurity, biotechnology, advanced engineering, renewable energy and other STEM disciplines.

At the same time, we recognise that technological transformation also requires strong expertise in public policy, education, healthcare and management to ensure that innovations are implemented effectively and responsibly.

But I believe the future will depend on more than technical expertise alone. The professionals who thrive in the coming decades will be those who combine deep knowledge in their field with adaptability, critical thinking, digital literacy and the ability to work across disciplines and cultures.

As technologies evolve, the ability to continuously learn, unlearn and relearn may become the most important skill of all.

Across the different institutions where you have worked, what have been the most encouraging changes in Uzbekistan’s governance? What challenges remain?

The most encouraging change, in my view, has been the transformation of public administration itself.

Today, there is a much stronger focus on strategic planning, project management, digital transformation, evidence-based policymaking and performance measurement. Public institutions are increasingly expected not only to implement policies, but also to think strategically, anticipate future challenges and evaluate the real impact of their work.

We have also seen a major shift towards a more people-centred approach to governance. A good example is the mahallabay approach, which brings public services and decision-making closer to communities by identifying needs and solving problems at the neighbourhood, or mahalla, level.

Today, success is measured not simply by whether a task has been completed, but by whether it improves people’s lives. I believe this represents an important evolution in the philosophy of public administration.

At the same time, every reform brings new expectations. One of the greatest challenges is ensuring that these new approaches become embedded in institutional culture rather than depending on the enthusiasm of individual leaders or teams.

Strategic planning, project management and digital transformation are not simply new management tools. They require new ways of thinking, stronger coordination across institutions and continuous investment in people’s skills.

Looking ahead, what would success look like for El-Yurt Umidi in ten years’ time?

I am a very ambitious person when it comes to investing in people and in my country’s future.

I hope the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation will be known not simply as a scholarship foundation, but as one of the key institutions driving Uzbekistan’s human-capital development.

I hope the Foundation will strengthen its broader strategic role. Beyond supporting individual scholars, we want to help identify the skills Uzbekistan will need in the future, strengthen cooperation between education, government and industry and contribute to shaping national human-capital policies.

In other words, I would like the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation to become not only a scholarship provider, but also a centre of expertise in talent development and workforce planning.

Internationally, I hope we will be recognised as a trusted partner by leading universities, research institutions and governments around the world. Our ambition is to move from mobility to co-creation, from sending students abroad to building long-term partnerships in education, research and innovation that create value for everyone involved.

I would like people to look back and say that El-Yurt Umidi helped shape a generation of professionals who transformed Uzbekistan not only through their knowledge and expertise, but through their integrity, openness and commitment to serving society.

If, in ten years’ time, our graduates are strengthening institutions, advancing science, improving healthcare, modernising industry and building lasting bridges between Uzbekistan and the rest of the world, I believe we will have fulfilled our mission.

Finally, what message would you like to send to European universities, researchers, students and policymakers about Uzbekistan today?

My message would be very simple: this is the right time to engage with Uzbekistan.

I would encourage European universities, researchers and policymakers to look beyond old perceptions and discover today’s Uzbekistan for themselves. You will find talented young people, ambitious universities, committed institutions and partners who are genuinely interested in learning, collaborating and creating knowledge together.

Uzbekistan is a country with a rich history, a vibrant culture and a young generation determined to shape a better future. We are proud of our heritage, but we are equally excited about the future we are building, one that is open, innovative and connected to the world.

I would also encourage students and researchers to consider Uzbekistan as a place for academic exchange, joint research and innovation. International cooperation should always be a two-way process. We have much to learn from Europe, but we also have our own experience, perspectives and ideas to contribute.

I sincerely hope that more European colleagues will visit our country, meet our people and experience Uzbekistan first-hand. I am confident they will discover not only a reliable academic and research partner, but also the warmth, hospitality and openness that define our nation.

The best way to understand today’s Uzbekistan is to experience it.

Interview by Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post “This is the right time to engage with Uzbekistan”: Gulnoza Ismailova on education, talent and the country’s future appeared first on Novastan English.

Clarinetist Sayyod Mirzomurodov and pianist Mariya Akhadjanova have released Contemporary Uzbek Music for Clarinet and Piano, the first commercial album devoted entirely to contemporary Uzbek repertoire for the two instruments. Issued by the British label Clarinet & Saxophone Classics, the 72-minute recording brings together nine works by six composers, all presented as world-premiere recordings.

The project combines established pieces with new works written specifically for Mirzomurodov. It grew out of his effort to document, expand and bring international attention to a repertoire that had often remained inaccessible beyond Uzbekistan because of the scarcity of published scores, professional recordings and international distribution.

In this interview with Novastan’s Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, Mirzomurodov discusses his path from Surkhandarya to the United States, the influence of maqom and other Uzbek musical traditions on contemporary composition, his collaboration with Akhadjanova and the wider challenge of bringing Uzbek academic music to international audiences.

Novastan: Could you begin by telling us about your path as a clarinetist and your relationship with Uzbek classical music?

Sayyod Mirzomurodov: I was born and raised in O’zgarish, in the Sariosiyo district of Surkhandarya, in southern Uzbekistan. Music was present in my family from an early age. My father, Sultonmurod Saidov, was an artist and founded the Tajik band Parvin, which was known not only in Surkhandarya but also in Samarkand, Bukhara, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

He was a perfectionist who expected a very high standard from himself. His seriousness towards artistic work had a lasting influence on me.

When I was in the fifth grade, I moved to Tashkent and entered the V. A. Uspensky Specialized Music School, where I began studying the clarinet. I later continued at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan. My clarinet teacher, Bakhodir Salikhov, played an especially important role in my development.

Read more on Novastan: From Uzbekistan to Strasbourg: Aziz Shokhakimov, a conductor between cultures and languages

Another major influence was Timur Vyacheslavovich Mirzaev, the conductor of the student wind orchestra. His detailed and inspiring approach encouraged me to think beyond simply playing the correct notes and to understand the larger meaning, character and structure of the music.

In 2017, I moved to the United States to study with Amanda McCandless at the University of Northern Iowa, where I completed a Master of Music degree in clarinet performance. I later began a Doctor of Musical Arts programme at the University of Iowa, studying with Jorge Montilla and working as a teaching assistant.

Most of my early formal education was centred on the Western classical tradition. I played the standard European clarinet repertoire but did not yet have a deep understanding of the history and richness of Uzbek academic music.

As my career developed, especially after I left Uzbekistan, I became increasingly interested in my own cultural and musical roots. I began searching for works by Uzbek composers, speaking with composers directly, researching maqom and Uzbek musical history and presenting this repertoire in my recitals.

What began as a personal search eventually became a central part of my artistic work and a responsibility that I felt towards this repertoire.

How did the idea for an album devoted entirely to Uzbek clarinet music emerge?

The idea first came to me when I was an undergraduate at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan. Even then, I understood that the main problem was not necessarily an absence of repertoire. Much of the repertoire was simply insufficiently documented, professionally recorded, published or made available internationally.

When I began my doctoral studies at the University of Iowa, I learned that I could complete a major creative recording project as part of my doctoral work. I immediately knew that I wanted to record Uzbek music.

Initially, I imagined documenting several existing works. But I also wanted the project to stimulate the creation of new repertoire. I first approached Nurali Erkaev and explained my idea to him. He responded enthusiastically and wrote Sonata-Fantaziya for me.

Through that collaboration, I developed connections with other composers. Sherzod Sobirov wrote his Fantasy, Farrukh Akramov composed his Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, and Mustafo Bafoyev wrote Buxorcha. All four works were dedicated to me. Bafoyev later wrote another piece for me, Ston Serdtsa – Cry of the Heart – which will be included on my next album.

What began as a smaller doctoral recording project eventually expanded into a 72-minute album containing nine works by six composers.

I realised there was enough material for a complete album when I saw how the new commissions could be placed alongside important existing works, including Anvar Ergashev’s Eastern Capriccio, Mustafo Bafoyev’s Clarinet Concerto and lyrical pieces representing other dimensions of the Uzbek school of composition.

The album is therefore not simply a collection of unrelated works. It presents several generations, forms and artistic directions, including fantasy, sonata, song-poem, poem-ballad, lyrical miniature, capriccio and concerto.

Together, these pieces demonstrate that Uzbek clarinet music already possesses considerable artistic depth and diversity, even though none of them had previously been commercially recorded.

Who are the composers represented on the album?

The album includes six composers from different generations and artistic directions within Uzbek professional music.

Mustafo Bafoyev is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Uzbek music. His catalogue includes symphonic, chamber, operatic, ballet and stage music. His works combine Uzbek and Tajik intonational traditions with a sophisticated contemporary language.

Four of his works appear on the album, making him a central figure in the programme. They reveal different periods and dimensions of his music, from the early lyricism of Lirik Hikoya to the large-scale Clarinet Concerto and the newly composed Buxorcha.

Habibulla Rahimov is an established composer and educator with extensive experience writing for wind instruments. His music has been performed in Uzbekistan, elsewhere in Central Asia and internationally. His Poema-ballada represents one of the album’s more abstract and experimental sound worlds.

Anvar Ergashev was one of Uzbekistan’s most influential composers, as well as an accomplished pianist and conductor. His music is distinguished by vivid imagery, theatrical energy, rich instrumental colour and strong emotional intensity. He combined European classical forms with Eastern melodic and rhythmic traditions in a highly individual manner.

His Eastern Capriccio, written for the clarinetist Bakhodir Salikhov, is probably the most frequently performed Uzbek clarinet work represented on the album. It combines virtuosity, lyricism, improvisatory freedom and a strong theatrical character.

Nurali Erkaev is a composer, scholar and educator whose work combines serious academic research with creative imagination. His Sonata-Fantaziya brings together maqom-inspired phrasing, contemporary harmony, rhythmic transformation and the dramatic freedom of the fantasy genre.

Farrukh Akramov represents a younger generation of Uzbek composers connected with international contemporary-music festivals and masterclasses. His music combines modal lyricism and carefully developed musical ideas with modern harmony and texture.

Sherzod Sobirov is a composer and educator whose work includes chamber music, orchestration and music for traditional Uzbek instruments. His Fantasy has strong rhythmic energy, lyrical contrast and a contemporary treatment of Uzbek musical colour.

Together, these composers show that Uzbek academic music cannot be reduced to a single style. The album connects established senior figures with younger composers who are continuing and transforming the tradition in their own ways.

Is there something recognisably Uzbek about music written for Western instruments such as the clarinet and piano?

Yes, although it is not always a matter of hearing a direct quotation from a traditional melody. In many of these works, the Uzbek character is expressed through melodic behaviour, ornamentation, modal colour, rhythm, flexibility of phrasing and the relationship between instrumental music and the human voice.

Maqom and shashmaqom are especially important sources. Their influence can be heard in characteristic modal patterns, melodic turns, ornamental figures, rhythmic organisation and the gradual development of a musical line. Certain passages use modal inflections resembling a Phrygian colour, as well as augmented seconds and other intervals associated with Eastern melodic expression. Traditional rhythmic cycles, or usul, also influence contemporary works, sometimes through irregular or changing metres.

Another important quality is nola: an emotionally charged melodic sigh or cry. In Uzbek music, a line is often expected to breathe, bend, ornament and intensify almost as a singer would. The clarinet is particularly suited to this language because its sound can be very close to the human voice. It can move from an intimate, almost whispered tone to intense expression, laughter-like brightness or virtuosic energy.

Bafoyev’s Buxorcha, for example, draws on the musical world of Bukhara and on intonations related to mavrigi, shashmaqom and local song-and-dance traditions. The clarinet takes on a vocal and ornamented role, while the piano provides a flexible harmonic and rhythmic framework and participates actively in the musical dialogue. Together, the two instruments move between reflective lyricism and energetic, dance-like motion.

Sobirov’s Fantasy uses a Phrygian-flavoured sound world, song-like melodic lines, rapid changes of character and dance-like rhythmic energy. Erkaev’s Sonata-Fantaziya places maqom-inspired phrasing and rhythmic patterns within a contemporary harmonic framework.

Ergashev’s Eastern Capriccio uses augmented seconds, chromatic figuration, ornamentation, changing metres and rhythmic freedom to create an improvisatory character.

The music is therefore recognisably Uzbek not because every work imitates traditional music, but because the composers have absorbed its way of breathing, shaping melody, creating rhythm and expressing emotion.

How did the encounter between European classical forms and local traditions shape Uzbek composition?

The development of Uzbek academic music during the twentieth century involved a complex encounter between two musical systems.

Uzbekistan already possessed highly developed traditions such as maqom, shashmaqom, folk song, regional dance music and the ustoz-shogird teacher-student system, through which music was passed from one generation to another through listening, imitation, direct practice and close personal instruction.

During the Soviet period, Western systems of notation, harmony, counterpoint, formal design, orchestration and conservatory education became institutionalised.

This encounter transformed both traditions. Uzbek composers began using Western forms such as the sonata, concerto, symphony, opera, ballet and chamber ensemble while drawing on local modes, melodic gestures, rhythms, poetry and instrumental colours.

The move towards notation and institutional education was also important. Figures such as Yunus Rajabiy helped preserve and notate maqom repertoire, allowing later composers and conservatory-trained performers to study this material and reinterpret it for modern instruments.

Earlier composers such as Mutal Burhanov, Sulaymon Yudakov, Tolibjon Sadikov and Mansur Mansurov helped establish the foundations of Soviet-era Uzbek academic music. Later composers, including Felix Yanov-Yanovsky, developed increasingly individual and sophisticated musical languages.

Since independence, the interaction between national tradition and contemporary composition has continued, but it has become more stylistically diverse.

Some composers remain close to maqom, folk melody and recognisable regional traditions. Others use abstraction, dissonance, experimental textures or international contemporary techniques while retaining subtler elements of Uzbek musical thinking.

Contemporary Uzbek academic music is therefore not simply Western music with Eastern decoration. It is the result of more than a century of creative interaction between different systems of musical thought.

How did you locate the music, and what was it like to work directly with the composers?

The process was based largely on personal research and direct contact with composers, their families and performers connected with the repertoire.

None of the nine works on the album had previously been commercially recorded, although some, especially Ergashev’s Eastern Capriccio, already had a performance history.

Most of the scores were not available through international publishers or standard music catalogues. Many were sent to me directly by the composers or obtained during the collaborative process.

Eastern Capriccio requires a special explanation. Although the work circulated among clarinetists and appeared in certain collections, it had never been formally issued by a commercial publisher and could not be purchased through a regular catalogue.

I obtained the musical material from Anvar Ergashev’s widow, Namuna Ergasheva, who holds the copyright. I also consulted my former conservatory professor Bakhodir Salikhov, for whom the work was composed and to whom it was dedicated.

Bafoyev’s Clarinet Concerto had an orchestral performance available online, but there was no commercial recording and no known recording of the piano reduction used on the album.

For the newly commissioned works, the process was much more collaborative. The composers sent initial versions from Uzbekistan, and I played through the clarinet parts in the United States.

I then shared observations about register, breathing, articulation, technical difficulty, balance with the piano and which passages felt natural or less effective on the instrument. The composers revised the scores, and gradually polished versions emerged.

The artistic voice remained entirely the composer’s. My role was to contribute the practical and expressive perspective of the performer and to help the composer use the clarinet as effectively as possible.

During a meeting with Nurali Erkaev in Tashkent in the summer of 2024, we discussed Sonata-Fantaziya in detail, including its musical character, phrasing, harmony, form and the relationship between the clarinet and piano. This direct discussion had an important effect on the way I interpreted the work.

Four of the newly written pieces were premiered during my doctoral recital in March 2025 with Mariya Akhadjanova. Performing them before the recording allowed us to understand what worked in a live setting and continue refining our interpretation.

For me, this was one of the most meaningful aspects of the project. I was not only preserving repertoire from the past. I was participating in the creation of repertoire that had not previously existed.

How did your collaboration with pianist Mariya Akhadjanova shape the recording?

My collaboration with Mariya began while we were studying at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan. We performed together frequently in concerts, masterclasses and special events in Tashkent.

She was the natural and ideal partner for this project. She is an outstanding pianist and collaborative musician, with a beautiful sound, refined technique, musical intelligence and the ability to understand both the large structure of a work and its smallest expressive details.

I was also fortunate that she was studying at the University of Iowa. Being at the same institution allowed us to rehearse regularly, return repeatedly to difficult passages and work over a long period rather than preparing the album in only a few concentrated meetings.

Mariya is from Uzbekistan and studied at the State Conservatory before continuing her education at the University of Northern Iowa and beginning her doctorate at the University of Iowa. She therefore has a deep understanding of both Uzbek musical traditions and Western classical performance practice.

That shared cultural background was important because many stylistic details are difficult to explain through words or notation alone. We often understood naturally how a phrase should breathe, where the music needed flexibility, how an ornament should be shaped or when a rhythm should feel more like speech or dance.

At the same time, we did not assume that cultural familiarity alone was sufficient. We studied the scores carefully, researched the composers, discussed the structure and character of every section and tested different balances, articulations, tempos and colours.

We also wanted to avoid treating the piano as a secondary accompaniment. In many of these works, the piano creates the rhythmic environment, dramatic tension, harmonic colour and orchestral scale. The clarinet and piano function as equal partners in a dialogue.

The album was recorded in December 2025 in the Concert Hall of the Voxman Music Building at the University of Iowa. Our aim was to respect the Uzbek character of the works while presenting them at a high professional chamber-music standard.

Why has Uzbek classical music remained relatively unknown internationally?

There are several interconnected reasons.

The first is access. Many scores by Uzbek composers are not distributed by major international publishers. A musician outside Uzbekistan may not know that a work exists, may not know where to obtain it or may need a personal connection with the composer, the composer’s family or another musician.

The second problem is the lack of professional recordings. A score is important, but notation alone cannot fully communicate all the stylistic details of Uzbek music.

A performer unfamiliar with the tradition may read the correct notes but still miss the national intonation, ornamentation, flexibility of phrase, rhythmic freedom or an expression such as nola. Recordings provide an essential interpretive reference.

Another reason is that Uzbek music abroad is often represented mainly through folk or traditional genres. Those traditions are extremely important, but they do not represent the country’s entire musical culture.

The contemporary academic layer – sonatas, concertos, chamber works, operas, ballets and symphonic works – is much less visible.

There have also been limited systems for publishing, professional recording, rights management, promotion and international distribution. An important work may be performed at a concert in Uzbekistan and then disappear from public access because the performance is not professionally documented or distributed.

Programming habits are another factor. International performers and institutions naturally return to established repertoire that already has scores, recordings, teaching traditions and audience recognition. It is much more difficult for unknown music to enter that cycle.

The album has already begun to change this situation. For the first time, all nine works exist together in a professionally produced commercial recording, released by the British specialist label Clarinet & Saxophone Classics and available internationally.

I am also collaborating with a publishing company, the composers and the relevant rights holders to prepare official editions of the scores. The recordings are already accessible internationally, and the scores are being prepared for publication so that the repertoire will also become officially and practically available to performers around the world.

Which works and composers would you recommend to listeners who want to explore Uzbek academic music further?

For a clarinetist beginning to explore this repertoire, I would recommend Anvar Ergashev’s Eastern Capriccio. It is virtuosic, colourful and theatrical, and is perhaps the most established Uzbek clarinet work internationally.

I would also recommend Nurali Erkaev’s Sonata-Fantaziya. It presents a particularly strong synthesis of Uzbek-inspired intonation, contemporary harmony, formal development, rhythmic energy and expressive freedom. It has a clear national character without depending on direct quotation, and gives both the clarinetist and pianist substantial artistic roles.

Bafoyev’s Buxorcha offers a strong connection to the musical traditions of Bukhara, while his Clarinet Concerto demonstrates the larger symphonic possibilities of Uzbek clarinet writing. Akramov’s Sonata and Sobirov’s Fantasy show two contrasting contemporary approaches.

Beyond the album, I would encourage listeners to explore composers such as Felix and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, Mirsodiq Tojiev, Ikrom Akbarov and Rustambek Abdullaev, as well as other composers whose work has shaped modern Uzbek academic music.

Uzbekistan is becoming increasingly connected internationally. Are you seeing a similar opening in its classical-music scene?

Yes, I believe there are clear signs of greater international openness. This process is already taking place through composers, performers, universities, festivals, recordings and digital communication.

Uzbek composers are increasingly participating in international festivals, masterclasses, research conferences and contemporary-music programmes. Farrukh Akramov’s music, for example, has been presented in the United States, Europe, Asia and other former Soviet countries. Sherzod Sobirov’s works have also been performed internationally.

Nurali Erkaev is another important example. He combines composition, scholarship and education, and his work is rooted in serious study of Uzbek orchestration and national musical identity while also using a contemporary language that can communicate internationally.

My collaboration with him demonstrates how these connections can develop. He wrote Sonata-Fantaziya for me in Uzbekistan while I was studying and performing in the United States. I premiered the work, discussed it with him directly in Tashkent, performed it at Carnegie Hall and at universities and concert venues, and then recorded it commercially for an international label.

Performers and students from Uzbekistan are also studying abroad and creating connections between institutions and musical communities. Digital platforms make it possible for composers and performers to exchange scores and recordings almost immediately, even when they live on different continents.

The release of this album by a British label is another concrete example of this opening. It has placed works by six Uzbek composers in an international commercial recording catalogue and made them available to listeners, libraries, educators, researchers and performers in different countries.

What would success for this project ultimately mean to you?

For me, this project is already a success.

It is the first commercial album devoted entirely to contemporary Uzbek music for clarinet and piano. The fact that these nine works now exist together in a professionally produced and internationally available recording is already a major artistic and cultural achievement.

They can be heard internationally, studied by musicians and researchers and used as interpretive references by performers who previously had no practical way of encountering this repertoire.

I am deeply grateful to Victoria Samek and her team at Clarinet & Saxophone Classics for believing in the project and helping bring it to completion. Their experience and commitment gave this repertoire a professional international platform.

The effect is also visible in live performance. After concerts, students, professors, clarinetists and other musicians regularly approach me to ask about the composers, recordings and scores.

Musicians are already studying the repertoire, requesting the music and beginning to perform it themselves. The album is therefore not simply being heard as a finished recording. It is generating further musical activity.

Even before the recording was completed, I saw an example of this effect. After I premiered several of the new works, another performer contacted one of the composers to learn more about a piece and discuss the possibility of commissioning another work. This showed that the repertoire had already begun creating new artistic connections.

The official publication of the scores is the next stage. I am working with the composers, rights holders and a publishing company so that musicians around the world can obtain and perform the complete repertoire represented on the album.

The project has demonstrated that contemporary Uzbek academic music can stand on an international stage not simply as a cultural curiosity, but as substantial, expressive and artistically valuable chamber music.

For people from Uzbekistan and Central Asia living abroad, the album can create a connection to culture, memory and the feeling of home. For listeners with no previous connection to Uzbekistan, it opens a musical world they may never have encountered before.

Contemporary Uzbek Music for Clarinet and Piano is available through Clarinet & Saxophone Classics.

Interview by Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post When the clarinet speaks Uzbek: bringing an overlooked classical repertoire to the world appeared first on Novastan English.

From Kazakhstan’s pine-covered lakes to Kyrgyzstan’s walnut groves and the tugai forests of the Amu Darya, Central Asia is considerably greener than its international image suggests. But fires, mass tourism and development are testing whether landscapes designated as protected are also protected in practice.

In the height of summer, a spark can be enough.

It may come from a campfire left smouldering beneath the trees, a cigarette discarded beside a road or machinery operating in dry grass. Heat, wind and vegetation do the rest. For the foresters and rangers responsible for Central Asia’s protected landscapes, the first sign may be a thread of smoke rising behind a mountain ridge. By the time a fire is visible from the nearest village, reaching it may already require hours on rough tracks with limited equipment.

Wildfires have made forests an urgent political issue far beyond Central Asia. Yet the region is rarely included in international conversations about them. To many outsiders, Central Asia remains a land of steppe, high mountains and desert: spectacular, certainly, but largely treeless.

The reality is more complicated.

Spruce forests climb the slopes of the Tian Shan. Walnut and wild-fruit trees cover parts of southern Kyrgyzstan. Pine and birch grow among the lakes and granite formations of northern Kazakhstan. Juniper woodlands survive in the mountains of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Along the Amu Darya and other rivers, fragments of tugai forest still provide shelter to deer, wild boar and migratory birds. Turkmenistan’s mountains and deserts contain pistachio woodland, juniper, tamarisk and saxaul adapted to some of the harshest conditions in Eurasia.

These landscapes store water, stabilise soil, support rural livelihoods and shelter wildlife. They are also being asked to perform another function: attract a rapidly growing number of visitors.

The result is a regional dilemma. Central Asian governments are creating and expanding protected areas, promoting ecotourism and announcing ambitious restoration targets. At the same time, their forests and parks face hotter conditions, fires, grazing, construction, waste and, in several countries, limited enforcement capacity.

Read more on Novastan: From the Pamirs to the Aral Sea: Following the Amu Darya Through Central Asia

The important question is therefore not only how many national parks Central Asia has. It is how effectively they are protected.

A region greener than its reputation

Central Asia’s forests are not the continuous temperate woodlands found elsewhere. Many are fragmented, highly localised and adapted to mountain, river or desert environments. Their relative scarcity makes them particularly valuable.

In eastern Kazakhstan, Katon-Karagay National Park reaches from forest and meadow to alpine tundra in the Altai Mountains. Siberian larch, fir, spruce, birch and cedar pine provide habitat for maral deer, brown bears, lynx, ibex and the elusive snow leopard. Kazakhstan describes Katon-Karagay as its largest national park and one of its most intact protected landscapes.

Read more on Novastan: How Central Asia is trying to protect the snow leopard

Farther west, the pine forests of Burabay and Bayanaul emerge almost unexpectedly from the surrounding steppe. Their lakes and accessible landscapes have made them popular tourist destinations, but accessibility brings pressure: more vehicles, more informal campsites, more rubbish and a greater likelihood that human activity will start a fire.

In Kyrgyzstan, the walnut-fruit forests around Arslanbob are among the region’s most distinctive human landscapes. Walnuts grow alongside wild apple, pear, plum and hawthorn. Local families have long depended on collecting nuts and fruit, meaning that conservation cannot be separated from questions of access, income and community rights. Forests cover only a small proportion of Kyrgyzstan’s territory, but they remain an important ecological and economic asset.

Higher in the Tian Shan, Schrenk spruce and juniper forests surround parks such as Ala-Archa, Chong-Kemin and Besh-Tash. Camera traps in Besh-Tash recorded snow leopards, argali, Siberian ibex, wolves and foxes in 2025, a reminder that protected areas contain living ecosystems rather than simply scenic backdrops for visitors.

Read more on Novastan: Artists and activists raise awareness for Bishkek’s waste problem

Uzbekistan’s mountain parks protect juniper woodland, wild-fruit species and habitats used by bears, ibex, lynx, vultures and other birds of prey. In the west, the newly created Aralkum National Nature Park represents a very different experiment: protecting life emerging in and around the former bed of the Aral Sea. Uzbek authorities report that the park contains 25 animal species, including four listed in the national Red Book.

Tajikistan’s forests cover only a small part of the country, but their ecological function is disproportionate to their area. Juniper, pistachio, almond and riverine vegetation help hold mountain soils together and regulate water. Our media partner Asia-Plus has reported that forest cover is now approximately three percent of Tajikistan’s territory and that the country’s once-extensive tugai forests have contracted dramatically under agricultural pressure.

Turkmenistan relies less on the designation “national park” than its neighbours. Its conservation system is organised largely around state reserves, including Badkhyz, Köýtendag, Repetek, Kaplankyr and Syunt-Hasardag. These protect ecosystems ranging from pistachio woodland and mountain habitat to saxaul desert, along with species such as kulan, goitered gazelle, urial and markhor.

Together, these landscapes dismantle the idea of Central Asia as an ecologically uniform expanse of empty land.

How many parks does Central Asia have?

The simple answer is that no simple regional figure is entirely reliable.

Kazakhstan consistently identifies 14 state national nature parks. In Kyrgyzstan, however, published totals vary according to whether sources count only parks administered by the principal protected-areas department or include additional sites under different arrangements. Uzbekistan distinguishes between national parks, national natural parks, natural parks and other protected categories. Tajikistan uses several park and reserve classifications, while Turkmenistan’s system centres on state nature reserves and sanctuaries.

A regional total can therefore be misleading unless the legal categories are harmonised.

This is more than a technical problem. It demonstrates how governments can report growth in protected territory without necessarily making clear what each designation permits. A strict reserve may substantially limit human activity, while a national or nature park can contain zones for tourism, roads, grazing or other forms of use.

All five countries have framework legislation governing specially protected natural territories. Kazakhstan’s principal law dates from 2006, Kyrgyzstan’s current framework from 2011, Uzbekistan’s from 2004, Tajikistan’s from 2011 and Turkmenistan’s from 2012. But these laws operate alongside forest codes, land legislation, fire regulations and individual decisions establishing or rezoning particular parks.

The legal designation is therefore only the beginning. The practical questions are more revealing: Can a hotel be built inside the park? Can livestock graze there? How many rangers patrol it? Who responds when it burns? Can its boundaries be altered to accommodate development?

When ecotourism becomes mass tourism

Kazakhstan illustrates the contradiction particularly clearly.

Its national parks have become central to the country’s domestic-tourism strategy. New roads, visitor centres, accommodation and marked routes can make nature more accessible and generate income for remote regions. But growing visitor numbers also produce waste, soil erosion, traffic and fire risk.

Research and regional reporting have already raised concerns about damage to vegetation and soils along heavily used routes. Kazakhstan is now developing a new biodiversity framework for 2026-2035, under which the total area of specially protected natural territories is expected to increase from approximately 31 million to 33.2 million hectares.

The expansion is significant. Yet adding hectares does not by itself solve overcrowding in the most accessible parks or guarantee that tourism revenue is reinvested in conservation.

Kyrgyzstan faces a similar tension. More than 250,000 people visited the country’s protected zones in 2025, generating 38 million soms in revenue. Environmental specialists interviewed by 24.kg warned that roads and hotels were increasingly reaching previously undisturbed forests.

This raises an uncomfortable question: when a protected landscape becomes economically valuable as a destination, which institution is strong enough to say that no further construction should be allowed?

Tourism is not inherently hostile to conservation. Visitor fees can fund rangers, waste collection, trail maintenance and ecological monitoring. Guides and guesthouses can give local communities an economic reason to preserve wildlife and forests.

But this requires rules based on ecological carrying capacity rather than the assumption that every increase in visitor numbers represents success.

A park can receive more tourists and earn more money while becoming less capable of fulfilling the ecological purpose for which it was established.

New parks, old capacity problems

Uzbekistan is moving rapidly in the opposite direction: rather than confronting only the overcrowding of established destinations, it is significantly enlarging its protected-area system.

On 25 March 2026, the government created the Ovjazsoy-Moviy Toglar, Pskem and Fergana national natural parks, covering a combined 188,800 hectares. It also expanded Pop National Natural Park from 10,000 to 135,300 hectares.

The expansion follows earlier decisions enlarging the Nurata and Surkhan reserves and Zarafshan National Natural Park.

These measures could protect important mountain, forest and riverine habitats before roads, settlement or intensive tourism fragment them further. Uzbekistan is also working with UNDP and the Global Environment Facility on landscape restoration in the Western Tian Shan, Nuratau and Kugitang. The programme aims to improve the management of 1.3 million hectares of forests and rangelands.

Yet rapid territorial expansion produces its own challenge. New parks require trained staff, vehicles, fire equipment, ecological inventories, zoning plans, community consultations and reliable budgets. Without them, a park may exist immediately in law but only gradually on the ground.

The distinction between planting trees and restoring ecosystems is equally important. A plantation can increase an official forest indicator while providing less biodiversity than naturally regenerating native woodland. Saxaul planted to stabilise exposed soil has a different purpose from restoring juniper forest, walnut groves or riverine tugai.

The central question is not whether tree planting is valuable. It is what kind of landscape is being created, for whom and for how long.

Fire as the test of protection

Wildfire is perhaps the clearest test of whether a protected area functions beyond paper.

In Tajikistan, more than 430 hectares of forest were reportedly affected by fires across nine regions in 2025. Extreme heat and human carelessness were identified among the causes.

For a heavily forested country, that area might appear limited. In Tajikistan, where woodland is scarce and often protects vulnerable mountain soil, every burned hectare can have wider consequences. The loss of vegetation can accelerate erosion, damage pasture, reduce water retention and expose nearby settlements to landslides and flooding.

Across the region, remoteness complicates fire response. Protected forests may be separated from the nearest equipment by poor roads or mountain terrain. Rangers are expected to monitor tourists, prevent poaching, manage relations with local communities and respond to fire, often across vast areas.

Technology can improve early detection through cameras, satellite monitoring, drones and automated alerts. But an alert only helps when someone has the equipment, personnel and access needed to act on it.

Climate change further narrows the margin for error. Central Asia is already experiencing land degradation, water scarcity and stress on mountain and desert ecosystems. A hotter, drier landscape turns ordinary negligence into a potentially devastating event.

Who is supporting conservation?

Central Asian states are not dealing with these pressures alone.

The World Bank’s RESILAND initiative supports landscape restoration and climate resilience across the region. It also promotes transboundary protected areas and ecological corridors, recognising that watersheds and wildlife do not stop at political borders.

In Tajikistan, a World Bank investment of $45 million supports landscape restoration, sustainable natural-resource management and climate resilience. In Uzbekistan, the Bank has backed a much larger programme for forest and degraded-land restoration. Regional and national projects are also financed through the Global Environment Facility and implemented by UNDP, FAO and government agencies.

IUCN works with members and state partners in all five Central Asian countries, focusing on biodiversity, protected areas and conservation policy. UNESCO supports natural World Heritage sites and biosphere reserves, while the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund has channelled support towards civil-society organisations in the Mountains of Central Asia biodiversity hotspot.

In April 2026, the five Central Asian countries signed a regional declaration on biodiversity conservation in Astana. The declaration is politically important, but its value will ultimately be judged in less ceremonial settings: a ranger station with working equipment, a forest where illegal cutting has stopped, a tourism project relocated away from a fragile habitat, or a village given a meaningful role in managing nearby land.

International projects can provide money, expertise and technology. Their lasting contribution depends on whether they build institutions that continue functioning after a project cycle ends.

Protection with people, not against them

Forests are rarely empty spaces.

People collect walnuts and fruit, graze livestock, gather medicinal plants, work as guides and heat their homes with wood. Restricting access without creating alternatives can turn conservation into a source of conflict. Allowing unrestricted extraction, on the other hand, can gradually destroy the ecosystem on which those livelihoods depend.

This is why the human future of Central Asia’s protected areas matters as much as their legal status.

A family collecting walnuts in southern Kyrgyzstan, a guide leading visitors through the Tian Shan and a ranger watching for smoke may have different immediate interests. But all depend on the forest surviving.

Effective conservation requires communities to receive tangible benefits, participate in decisions and understand why some uses must be restricted. It also requires governments to resist projects that promise quick tourism revenue at the expense of long-term ecological stability.

Central Asia is creating more parks, restoring land and placing biodiversity higher on its regional agenda. Those are real developments. But the coming years will show whether the region is building resilient ecosystems or accumulating protected-area designations.

When smoke rises above a forest, the distinction becomes impossible to ignore.

A boundary drawn on a map cannot stop a fire. A law cannot patrol a mountain trail. A declaration cannot remove rubbish, prevent illegal cutting or persuade a developer to build elsewhere.

For that, a protected area needs people, resources and the political authority to remain protected.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief of Novastan English.

The post Central Asia’s Forests Under Pressure appeared first on Novastan English.

Linguist and court-certified translator Mahabat Sadyrbek recently published an English-language textbook on Kyrgyz grammar, helping make the language more accessible to international learners. Novastan spoke with her about what teaching Kyrgyz reveals about the language itself – from multilingual slang and regional varieties to culturally untranslatable words, artificial intelligence and the enduring power of the mother tongue.

Kyrgyz remains comparatively difficult for English-speaking learners to study, with far fewer teaching materials available than for many more widely taught languages. Mahabat Sadyrbek’s Kyrgyz grammar textbook in English therefore represents not only a practical learning resource, but also an effort to explain the internal logic and cultural richness of the language to a wider international audience.

Building on this work, Novastan asked her how Kyrgyz is changing today, what its words reveal about Kyrgyz society, and what the language needs in order to flourish in the digital age.

Mathieu Lemoine, Novastan: When you hear young people speaking Kyrgyz in Bishkek today, what sounds completely different from the Kyrgyz spoken by their parents or grandparents? Could you give us some concrete examples?

Mahabat Sadyrbek: The most noticeable difference is not necessarily grammar, but rhythm, vocabulary and the degree of code-switching. Many young people in Bishkek move effortlessly between Kyrgyz, Russian and, increasingly, English.

A sentence may have a Kyrgyz grammatical structure while incorporating Russian or English words. One might hear expressions such as мен аны блоктоп салдым – “I blocked him” – or мага скрин кылып жиберчи – “Send me a screenshot.”

What fascinates me as a linguist is how naturally Kyrgyz adapts these borrowed words. A word like “block” becomes the Kyrgyz verb блоктоо, which can then take all the usual Kyrgyz grammatical endings. This illustrates the remarkable flexibility of the language.

Many young speakers also use expressions such as кринж – “cringe”, токсик – “toxic”, вайб – “vibe”, гешталт – “gestalt” – and контент – “content”. Most of these entered Kyrgyz through Russian-language social media, although they ultimately originate in different languages, most commonly English.

The language of my parents and grandparents sounded quite different. Older speakers tended to use more proverbs, indirect expressions and culturally rich vocabulary. When describing a respected person, for example, they might use words and expressions such as даанышман, эки сүйлөбөгөн, элге-журтка жугумдуу or сөзү өтүмдүү.

Эки сүйлөбөгөн literally describes someone who “does not speak twice”: a person who keeps their word. Элге-журтка жугумдуу refers to someone who is well liked and respected within the community, while сөзү өтүмдүү describes a person whose words carry weight. Each expression highlights a different aspect of wisdom, integrity, social respect or moral character.

For me, this is not simply a story of decline. Languages naturally evolve. The important question is whether new linguistic layers enrich Kyrgyz while preserving its own expressive traditions.

Which Kyrgyz words or expressions are becoming less common today, and what is being lost with them?

I would be cautious about saying that words are disappearing completely. Many traditional expressions are still actively used, especially outside the largest cities. However, some are gradually moving from everyday speech into passive vocabulary.

Words such as нарк, ызаат, кут, жөрөлгө, энчи and ашар represent far more than dictionary definitions. They express cultural concepts that have developed over centuries and remain deeply rooted in Kyrgyz culture.

Take нарк, for example. It refers not only to values or norms, but also to inherited standards of dignity, honour, moral worth and proper conduct.

Likewise, ызаат goes beyond simple respect. It encompasses respectful conduct, courtesy, consideration and appropriate behaviour towards others.

Кут can be described as a life-giving blessing associated with harmony, dignity and well-being. Жөрөлгө refers to a custom, traditional observance or ritual. Энчи describes an inherited portion or personal share traditionally assigned to someone, while ашар is the practice of voluntary collective community work.

These concepts reflect cultural values that cannot easily be reduced to single English words.

Kyrgyz kinship terminology provides another example. The language distinguishes relatives with remarkable precision, reflecting social roles and obligations that are often lost when these terms are replaced by broader Russian words.

Traditional proverbs are also becoming less common among younger speakers. Earlier generations often expressed criticism or advice indirectly through proverbial language, allowing sensitive ideas to be communicated tactfully and without confrontation. As this tradition weakens, communication may become more direct, but it also loses some of its subtlety.

The loss, therefore, is not merely lexical. It concerns cultural memory and ways of understanding social relationships that have shaped Kyrgyz society for generations.

Are there new Kyrgyz words, slang expressions or ways of speaking that you particularly like? Where do they come from?

One expression I particularly like is Жашоо керемет – “Life is wonderful.” It has become especially popular among younger generations. I appreciate its simplicity and optimism. To me, it expresses an outlook on life that encourages gratitude and resilience, even in difficult times.

More generally, what I admire most is the linguistic creativity of young Kyrgyz speakers. Rather than simply borrowing international words, they adapt them to Kyrgyz grammar and make them their own.

Kyrgyz is an agglutinative language with a highly productive grammatical system that allows borrowed words to be integrated almost effortlessly into native word formation. For example, лайк becomes лайктоо – “to like” – while блок becomes блоктоо – “to block.”

One can naturally say лайктап койчу – “Please give it a like” – or аны блоктодум – “I blocked him.” Although the vocabulary may be international, the grammatical structure remains unmistakably Kyrgyz.

I also welcome the increasing use of native terminology such as санарип – “digital”, санариптешүү – “digitalisation” – and жасалма интеллект – “artificial intelligence.” These examples show that Kyrgyz is fully capable of creating its own terminology for new technologies and contemporary life.

Borrowing has always been part of the history of Kyrgyz. Over the centuries, the language has absorbed vocabulary from Arabic, Persian, Mongolian and Russian. What matters is not whether words are borrowed, but whether Kyrgyz remains a language in which people can discuss every aspect of modern life with confidence.

How different can Kyrgyz sound from one region to another? Are there words, pronunciations or expressions that immediately reveal where a speaker comes from?

One of the things I find most fascinating about Kyrgyz is its remarkable regional diversity.

Even the name of a simple household item can vary considerably. A washing basin, for example, may be called дагара, тазик, таштек, чылапчын or илеген, depending on the region. Such differences often allow Kyrgyz speakers to identify someone’s regional background almost immediately.

Pronunciation and intonation differ as well. The speech of Naryn is often regarded as particularly clear and conservative, while speakers from Issyk-Kul, Talas and Osh each have characteristic rhythms and local vocabulary that many Kyrgyz immediately recognise.

The broadest distinction is traditionally made between northern and southern varieties. Standard literary Kyrgyz is largely based on northern speech, whereas southern varieties have developed under stronger historical contact with Uzbek and Tajik.

Today, however, regional identity is becoming increasingly fluid. Internal migration, especially to Bishkek, has brought together speakers from every part of the country. As a result, urban Kyrgyz often blends regional features with Russian influence and the language of social media.

A person’s speech may therefore reveal not only where they grew up, but also where they studied, where they worked and the communities with which they identify.

Is there a Kyrgyz word or expression that says something important about Kyrgyz culture but becomes flat or inaccurate when translated into Russian or English?

One of my favourite examples is кут. It is often translated as “blessing”, “good fortune”, “grace”, “luck” or “prosperity”, yet none of these English words fully captures its meaning.

In Kyrgyz culture, кут is far more than luck or material prosperity. It refers to a life-giving force that brings harmony, dignity, abundance and spiritual well-being to a person, a family or even a place.

It cannot be bought, earned through wealth or measured in material terms. Rather, it represents an inner quality that gives life balance, purpose and meaning.

The concept is deeply woven into everyday life and language. Kyrgyz people commonly say кут болсун or куттуу болсун to mark almost every important life event: a birthday, moving into a new home, a wedding, the purchase of a new car, a new job or any significant new beginning.

Although these expressions are often translated simply as “Congratulations”, they convey something much richer. They express the wish that this new stage of life will be accompanied by кут – that it will bring not only success, but also harmony, well-being and lasting fulfilment.

Its deeper significance becomes especially clear in the expression үйдүн куту. Literal translations such as “the blessing of the house” or “the luck of the house” fail to convey what the phrase truly expresses.

It refers to the person whose presence fills a home with warmth, stability and emotional strength. Traditionally, this expression is most often associated with a woman, particularly a mother or grandmother, although it can equally describe anyone whose character, wisdom and care hold a family together.

I find кут especially fascinating because it illustrates how a single word can preserve an entire worldview. Embedded within it are ideas about family, spirituality, human relationships and social harmony that require several sentences to explain in English.

It also reminds us that translation is rarely a matter of replacing one word with another. Sometimes, it means translating an entire culture.

When Kyrgyz speakers mix Kyrgyz and Russian in the same sentence, is this simply natural bilingual speech, or can it gradually change the structure and vocabulary of Kyrgyz itself?

Both are true.

For millions of people in Kyrgyzstan, switching between Kyrgyz and Russian is a natural part of everyday communication. Bilingual speakers often alternate between the two languages depending on the topic, the people they are speaking with or the social setting.

This kind of code-switching is common in multilingual societies and should not automatically be viewed as a problem.

At the same time, long-term bilingualism can gradually reshape a language. Borrowing vocabulary is a normal part of linguistic development, and Kyrgyz has incorporated words from Arabic, Persian, Mongolian and Russian throughout its history.

The more important question is whether Kyrgyz remains capable of expressing every aspect of modern life.

If fields such as law, medicine, science or information technology continue to function primarily in Russian, speakers may gradually lose the habit of discussing these subjects in Kyrgyz. Russian influence may also extend beyond vocabulary, affecting sentence structure, idiomatic usage and habitual ways of expression.

Rather than portraying this as a competition between two languages, I see it as a question of balance. Russian remains an important language of education, science and international communication for many Kyrgyz citizens.

The challenge is to ensure that Kyrgyz develops alongside it rather than beneath it. This requires investment in education, terminology, literature, media and digital technologies, including artificial intelligence.

A confident language is not one that fears outside influence. It is one that can absorb new ideas while preserving its own identity and expressive richness.

Where is the most inventive Kyrgyz being produced today: literature, rap, comedy, cinema, social media, television or everyday conversation?

If I had to choose just one place, I would say social media without hesitation.

It is where Kyrgyz evolves most rapidly and where new words and expressions can spread almost overnight. Young people experiment with humour, irony, memes and wordplay in ways that would have been unimaginable only a generation ago.

Many of these innovations disappear as quickly as they emerge, while others quietly become part of everyday speech. Creativity, however, is by no means confined to social media. Every medium contributes something different to the language.

Contemporary music, especially rap, has introduced new urban vocabulary and fresh ways of talking about identity, migration, relationships and social change.

Comedians capture the richness of spoken Kyrgyz through regional accents, code-switching and everyday situations that audiences instantly recognise.

Literature serves a different purpose. It preserves depth, nuance and stylistic richness, allowing writers to explore the emotional and philosophical possibilities of Kyrgyz in ways that fast-moving digital communication rarely can.

Cinema occupies a unique place because it brings all these layers together. A good film lets us hear authentic conversations, regional varieties, humour, silence and emotion within the same story. In many ways, it reflects how people actually speak more faithfully than formal television or official media.

What excites me most is that Kyrgyz is no longer confined to traditional domains. Today, it thrives in podcasts, YouTube channels, stand-up comedy, rap, independent films and online discussions.

To me, this diversity is one of the clearest signs of a healthy language. A language stays alive when every generation reshapes it while remaining connected to those who came before.

Which contemporary Kyrgyz writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers, comedians or online creators should foreigners discover if they want to hear the language as it is alive today?

Like any living language, Kyrgyz is shaped by many voices, genres and regional traditions. Anyone who wants to experience Kyrgyz as it is spoken today should explore a wide range of cultural forms rather than searching for a single representative figure.

In cinema, I would recommend starting with two filmmakers whose work reflects different dimensions of contemporary Kyrgyz culture.

Read more on Novastan: Cinéma kirghiz : Black Red Yellow, une histoire d’amour contrarié

Aktan Arym Kubat is internationally recognised for his poetic and deeply human films, which capture the rhythm of everyday life, the emotional richness of spoken Kyrgyz and the relationship between people, tradition and landscape.

Ruslan Akun, by contrast, represents a younger generation of filmmakers whose work has reached wide audiences both in Kyrgyzstan and abroad. His films offer an accessible introduction to contemporary Kyrgyz society while presenting the language in a natural, everyday setting.

Anyone interested in contemporary spoken Kyrgyz should also explore today’s music scene, especially rap. Artists such as Begish, Bayastan and Ulukmanapo demonstrate how the language continues to evolve through music.

Their lyrics blend traditional linguistic resources with contemporary vocabulary, global influences and the realities of modern urban life.

At the same time, I would encourage listeners not to overlook Kyrgyz oral traditions. Hearing a skilled manaschy, a performer of the Epic of Manas, reveals another dimension of the language: its rhythm, imagery, formulaic expressions and extraordinary narrative power.

Although this tradition is centuries old, it remains a vibrant part of Kyrgyz culture.

I would also encourage people to explore Kyrgyz-language podcasts, YouTube channels and independent online creators. They often reflect everyday speech more naturally than formal media.

Read more on Novastan: Manas and the Making of Kyrgyzstan

One YouTube channel I would especially recommend is Tilimpoz, as well as Nakta Podcast. They explain the meanings, origins and cultural nuances of Kyrgyz words and expressions in an engaging and accessible way.

To understand a language, it is not enough to read its literature or study its grammar. You also need to hear people telling stories, making jokes, arguing, singing and creating. That is where a living language reveals itself most fully.

Can Kyrgyz currently speak convincingly about artificial intelligence, medicine, law, sexuality, psychology and other modern subjects, or do speakers often have to switch to Russian or English?

The question is less whether Kyrgyz can express modern concepts than whether speakers have access to the linguistic resources needed to use it confidently in specialised domains.

Like many languages that are expanding their role in education, research and technology, Kyrgyz is still developing consistent terminology in fields such as artificial intelligence, medicine, law and psychology.

Legal, medical and technical concepts are not always standardised, and many professionals continue to use Russian terminology because that is the language in which they received their education. Switching to Russian is therefore often a matter of habit rather than necessity.

Artificial intelligence presents both a challenge and an opportunity. What Kyrgyz needs is not only new terminology but also high-quality digital resources: comprehensive dictionaries, terminology databases, language corpora, spell-checkers, speech-recognition tools, machine translation and AI systems trained on reliable Kyrgyz-language data.

Without such infrastructure, the language risks becoming less visible in the digital world.

At the same time, I am optimistic. Kyrgyz has a remarkably productive grammatical system that enables it to create new vocabulary while preserving its own linguistic identity.

Throughout its history, it has successfully adapted to changing cultural, political and technological realities. There is every reason to believe it can do the same in the age of artificial intelligence.

Ultimately, the future of Kyrgyz will not be determined by the number of borrowed words it contains. It will depend on whether its use continues to expand across education, research, technology, public administration and scientific communication.

A language remains strong when it is able to serve every sphere of life, from everyday conversations to academic research and technological innovation.

What is one sentence in Kyrgyz that you find especially beautiful, powerful or revealing about the language? Could you write it in Kyrgyz and explain what it means?

There is one sentence I return to again and again. I often recite it at the end of my public talks because, more than any other, it expresses how I feel about my native language:

«Бул менин өлбөс, өчпөс, көөнөрбөс эне тилим.»

A close English rendering would be:

“This is my immortal, unfading and timeless mother tongue.”

Yet no translation can fully convey the emotional depth of the original. The three adjectives өлбөс, өчпөс and көөнөрбөс are closely related, but each contributes its own shade of meaning.

Together, they express the idea of a language that endures across generations. It does not disappear, it does not lose its vitality, and it never ceases to matter.

For me, these words are far more than a poetic expression. They reflect my relationship with the Kyrgyz language and much of what has shaped my academic work.

As a linguist and a court-certified translator, I have come to see language not simply as a tool of communication, but as a living repository of history, memory, values and ways of understanding the world that cannot always be carried across into another language.

Languages naturally evolve. They borrow words, develop new forms of expression and adapt to changing realities. That is not a sign of weakness, but of vitality.

As long as people continue to speak, learn, create, question and dream in Kyrgyz, the language will continue to grow while remaining true to itself.

That is why I always return to these words:

«Бул менин өлбөс, өчпөс, көөнөрбөс эне тилим.»

Interview conducted and edited by Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief of Novastan English.

The post A Language in Motion: Mahabat Sadyrbek on Teaching Kyrgyz to the English-Speaking World appeared first on Novastan English.

Thousands of kilometres before rusting fishing boats appear in the sands of Muynak, the Amu Darya begins as mountain water.

Its headwaters descend from the Pamirs and northern Hindu Kush through the Panj and Vakhsh river systems. The Panj marks much of the Afghan-Tajik border before meeting the Vakhsh; downstream of their confluence, the river takes the name Amu Darya.

From there, it leaves the mountains and enters an entirely different world of deserts, irrigated plains, ancient cities and modern international frontiers.

For centuries, the Amu Darya – the Oxus of antiquity – has helped determine where people could settle and where political power could flourish. Irrigation drawn from its waters sustained some of Central Asia’s great civilizations. Changes in its channels could nourish one settlement while depriving another of water. In the twentieth century, Soviet planners attempted to engineer the river on a vastly greater scale.

Read more on Novastan: The Caspian Sea Is Retreating. Central Asia Is Not Ready

Following it today from the mountains towards the Aral Sea means travelling through many of the defining questions facing contemporary Central Asia: hydropower and climate resilience, Afghanistan’s growing use of the river, cross-border trade, irrigation, agricultural dependence and the ecological legacy of the Aral disaster.

The river changes character repeatedly along the way.

In the mountains it is born. Along the Panj it becomes a frontier. On the Vakhsh it becomes electricity. At Termez it both divides and connects Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. In Khorezm it becomes the hidden infrastructure of civilization.

And near Muynak, its story ends in a landscape transformed by water that stopped arriving.

Before the Amu Darya: mountain water

There is no single spectacular spring at which the Amu Darya suddenly begins.

Its origins are dispersed across an immense mountain system. The Panj drains highland areas of Afghanistan and Tajikistan and forms a large part of their border. The Vakhsh descends through Tajikistan before joining it. From their confluence, the combined river flows westward as the Amu Darya.

The landscape is almost the inverse of what waits downstream.

Steep valleys, snow and glaciated mountains ultimately feed a river that will later cross some of the driest inhabited territory in Eurasia. Water falling or freezing high in the mountains will eventually irrigate fields hundreds of kilometres away.

That physical connection is one reason climate and water management upstream matter so much farther downstream. The Aral basin itself ultimately depends heavily on river systems fed by mountain snow and glacial melt.

The Vakhsh: turning water into electricity

Before joining the Panj, the Vakhsh has acquired another role: energy.

Tajikistan has built much of its electricity system around hydropower, and the enormous Rogun project now under construction on the Vakhsh sits at the centre of that strategy.

In June 2026, the World Bank approved a further $300 million in financing for Rogun. Once fully operational, the plant is expected to generate around 14,400 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually – equivalent to roughly 60 percent of Tajikistan’s current electricity generation – while also allowing greater electricity exports to neighbouring countries.

This illustrates one of the recurring complexities of Central Asian water politics.

For Tajikistan, mountain rivers represent energy security, winter electricity and potential exports. Downstream, the same waters sustain irrigated agriculture.

These interests are not necessarily incompatible. Reservoirs can regulate flows as well as store water. But they mean that water cannot be understood simply in terms of quantity.

When it is stored and when it is released matter too.

Already, before the name Amu Darya even appears on the map, the river has become economic infrastructure.

Then the mountains recede.

Termez: Afghanistan across the water

At Termez, the geopolitics of the Amu Darya become tangible.

The river marks the boundary between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Beyond the Uzbek bank lies Balkh Province, while near the Friendship Bridge the Afghan border town of Hairatan forms one of Afghanistan’s principal gateways to Central Asia.

Here, Afghanistan is not an abstract subject of regional diplomacy.

It is physically across the water.

The Friendship Bridge carries road and railway connections across the Amu Darya. For decades it has accumulated political symbolism – Soviet troops crossed it during the withdrawal from Afghanistan – but today Uzbekistan increasingly wants Termez to represent something different: commerce, logistics and connectivity.

That shift is visible a short distance away at Airitom.

The Airitom Free Zone began operating in August 2024 near the Afghan border. It was explicitly created to promote international and cross-border trade and includes retail, logistics, hotel, medical and other facilities. Afghan citizens can enter the zone without an Uzbek visa for stays of up to 15 days.

The geography is striking: the zone sits beside the Amu Darya itself.

The same river that functions as a state boundary is therefore increasingly being treated as the edge of an economic corridor between Central and South Asia.

Afghanistan returns to the river

Trade is not the only way Afghanistan is reshaping the politics of the Amu Darya.

For most of the Soviet period, water allocation downstream was managed within a single political system. Afghanistan was never fully integrated into the institutional arrangements inherited by the Central Asian republics after 1991.

That asymmetry is now becoming much harder to ignore.

Afghanistan is constructing the 285-kilometre Qosh Tepa Canal across the country’s northern provinces, with the stated objective of bringing Amu Darya water to drought-prone agricultural areas.

From Afghanistan’s perspective, the argument is straightforward: the country has substantial agricultural needs and an interest in using a river flowing along its northern frontier after decades during which its ability to exploit those waters remained comparatively limited.

From downstream Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the same project looks different.

Every substantial withdrawal upstream potentially reduces what continues towards their irrigated regions. The project has therefore become one of the most consequential new questions in Central Asian water politics.

Yet portraying Qosh Tepa simply as an approaching “water war” would be misleading. The issue is better understood as the emergence of another major water user on an already intensely exploited river.

It reinforces the central fact of the Amu Darya basin:

Everyone has reasons to use more water.

Nobody can manufacture another river.

Turkmenabat: engineering the desert

Farther west, the Amu Darya enters Turkmenistan and passes Turkmenabat.

Here the relationship between water and human settlement becomes even more engineered.

Near the city, Amu Darya water enters the enormous Karakum Canal system, which carries it westwards through Turkmenistan.

The project embodied one of the defining ambitions of Soviet hydraulic planning: rather than accept the constraints imposed by aridity, engineers would move water across the desert.

And physically, they succeeded.

Water could sustain farms, settlements and industries hundreds of kilometres away from the river.

But the same logic was being applied across the basin. Irrigated agriculture expanded dramatically in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, while increasing quantities of water were removed before the Amu Darya reached its delta.

Yet large-scale irrigation itself was hardly a Soviet invention.

Downstream, communities had been redirecting the river for thousands of years.

Khorezm: a civilization built by canals

Few landscapes make that clearer than Khorezm.

Visitors arriving in Khiva encounter one of Central Asia’s most concentrated historic cityscapes: mud-brick walls, turquoise tiles, minarets and courtyards rising from an intensely arid environment.

What they do not encounter is the Amu Darya itself.

Khiva does not stand on the modern riverbank.

That apparent contradiction tells us almost everything about the historical relationship between Khorezm and water.

The city exists because the river was brought to it.

Khiva lies near the edge of cultivated land and historically received Amu Darya water through one of the major canals of the Khorezm oasis.

Long before modern states or Soviet hydraulic projects, inhabitants of Khorezm had learned to transform desert into an oasis through irrigation.

UNESCO’s documentation of the ancient towns and fortresses of the Aral Sea region dates irrigated agriculture in the lower Amu Darya to the end of the second millennium BC and directly links irrigation canals to the emergence of early cities in the region. Novastan has also explored the fortresses and historic landscapes of Khorezm, where the relationship between settlement and water remains visible across the region.

This history is not simply archaeological. The irrigation networks help explain why generations of people could live, farm, trade and build cities in an otherwise extremely arid landscape.

The lower river itself has never been completely stable.

Its channels shifted repeatedly. Canals silted up or were redirected. Settlements prospered and declined as their access to water changed. The Amu Darya still structures movement across Khorezm today, including crossings such as the pontoon bridge near Urgench previously featured by Novastan.

UNESCO’s documentation of ancient Khorezm explicitly notes that changes in the direction of the Amu Darya affected urban centres and that the region’s settlements were closely connected to the river’s shifting courses.

In Khorezm, controlling water meant controlling the geography of civilization itself.

Nukus: downstream of everyone

Approaching Nukus, the Amu Darya has travelled through an extraordinary accumulation of human interventions.

Upstream reservoirs regulate it.

Afghanistan is constructing new irrigation infrastructure from it.

Agricultural regions in Uzbekistan depend upon it.

Turkmenistan diverts part of it westwards.

By the time it reaches Karakalpakstan, the river represents the cumulative result of decisions made across an international basin.

Near Nukus, the Amu Darya spreads through a broad, flat landscape, its channel interrupted by exposed banks and low islands. It looks very different from the mountain water with which the journey began.

Nukus is downstream not simply geographically, but politically.

Communities near the end of a river do not determine their water supply alone. They receive the cumulative result of decisions made everywhere upstream.

That reality remains highly contemporary.

In June 2026, Uzbekistan, UNDP and the Global Environment Facility signed the concept for an Integrated Water Resources Management Plan for the Lower Amu Darya Basin. The initiative is intended to create a more coordinated and science-based framework for managing water resources and ecosystems in the lower river and Aral Sea region.

It represents an attempt to think of the lower Amu Darya increasingly as a connected hydrological system rather than simply as water divided between administrative territories.

But the scale of the historical damage becomes clearer farther north.

Muynak: a port without a sea

At Muynak, one of Central Asia’s most familiar images has almost become too familiar.

Fishing boats sit in sand.

Visitors photograph their rusting hulls. What was once evidence of economic collapse has acquired the strange afterlife of a tourist attraction.

But the boats matter because of what is absent around them.

Water.

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest inland lake. Its hydrological balance depended heavily on the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Massive diversion of river water for irrigation caused inflows to collapse and the sea to shrink and fragment.

For Muynak this was not simply an environmental statistic.

It meant the disappearance of the economic geography around which the town had developed.

Fishing and fish processing depended upon a shoreline that progressively moved away. As Oktyabr Dospanov recalled in Novastan’s interview, “My Childhood Was Spent on the Shore of a Sea That No Longer Exists,” Muynak was once a living port rather than the symbol of ecological catastrophe it has since become.

The rusting boats can be read almost as the final objects in a chain that begins in the mountains.

Reservoirs, canals, irrigation systems and agricultural decisions made hundreds or thousands of kilometres upstream all influence how much water ultimately reaches the lowest part of the basin.

The river’s history can almost be read backwards from Muynak.

The sea that did not entirely disappear

Popular descriptions often say simply that the Aral Sea “disappeared.”

The reality is more complicated.

The sea fragmented into separate bodies of water. Large parts of its former seabed are now exposed, while significant differences have developed between the remaining northern and southern water bodies. The ecological catastrophe has been immense, but the Aral is not literally gone.

That distinction matters.

It prevents the region from being reduced to a single image of irreversible apocalypse. The northern Small Aral has, for example, demonstrated that deliberate water-management interventions can produce at least partial ecological recovery.

On the Uzbek side, however, the landscape around the southern remnants conveys the scale of what has been lost.

One river, competing futures

It would be easy to tell the history of the Amu Darya solely as a story of environmental destruction.

That would also be incomplete.

The river continues to sustain millions of people and several very different development strategies.

Tajikistan wants electricity.

Afghanistan wants irrigated farmland.

Uzbekistan needs water for agriculture while attempting to make irrigation more efficient.

Turkmenistan remains deeply dependent on water transported away from the river through its canal system.

Karakalpakstan needs sufficient flows to sustain communities and ecosystems at the end of the basin.

All of these demands are understandable.

The difficulty is that they exist simultaneously.

Qosh Tepa therefore matters not because competition for the Amu Darya is new, but because the political geography of that competition is changing.

Afghanistan is becoming a far more significant water user in a system whose post-Soviet institutions were largely built without it. Tajikistan’s hydropower development, downstream irrigation, ecological restoration and climate pressures meanwhile have to coexist within the same hydrological system.

There is no single technological solution that eliminates that basic constraint.

More efficient irrigation can help. Better canals can help. Improved regional coordination can help. Basin-level management can help.

But none can make the Amu Darya infinite.

From ice to sand – and water again

The extraordinary thing about following the Amu Darya is how many different worlds can belong to a single river.

In the mountains, its water begins among snow and glaciers.

Along the Panj, it separates Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

On the Vakhsh, it becomes electricity.

At Termez, the river forms Uzbekistan’s frontier with Afghanistan while Airitom attempts to turn that frontier into a commercial gateway.

In Khorezm, canals carried the river towards cities that could never have survived without it.

Near Nukus, the consequences of decisions taken across the basin accumulate.

At Muynak, ships remain stranded where water once stood.

And farther beyond them, parts of the Aral Sea remain.

Central Asia’s cities are usually explained through monuments, rulers and empires – the walls of Khiva, Buddhist Termez, Nukus’s museums.

Another history runs beneath all of them.

It is a history of glaciers, channels, dams and canals.

The Amu Darya has determined where settlement was possible, where agriculture could flourish and where political power could accumulate for thousands of years.

High in the mountains, water still begins its journey towards the plains.

At the other end of that journey, ships stand in the desert while a diminished sea survives beyond them.

Between those two landscapes lies much of Central Asia’s past – and one of the defining questions of its future.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English.

The post From the Pamirs to the Aral Sea: Following the Amu Darya Through Central Asia appeared first on Novastan English.

When Nurzhan Toishy first heard Metallica in the late 1980s, he recognised something unexpected in the riffs: the rhythmic language of the Kazakh dombra. More than two decades later, that intuition gave birth to Aldaspan, a band that replaced electric guitars with electric dombras. What began as a musical experiment also became part of a wider debate over tradition, modernity and the place of Kazakh culture in contemporary music.

In 1988, Nurzhan Toishy was listening to Metallica when the opening of Motorbreath caught his attention.

To many listeners in the late Soviet Union, the aggressive riffs and speed of American thrash metal represented a musical world far removed from traditional Central Asia. To Toishy, however, something about it sounded strangely familiar.

“I recognised in the first riffs a manner of playing characteristic of the dombra,” the founder and producer of the Kazakh band Aldaspan told Novastan.

It was an observation that would stay with him for decades.

Metal and dombra music, he says, had effectively been playing alongside each other in his head since childhood. But it took around twenty years before he had the money, time and musicians capable of turning the idea into something tangible.

The result was Aldaspan: a rock project built not around the electric guitar but around electrified versions of Kazakhstan’s emblematic two-stringed instrument.

Its premise might sound like a novelty. In practice, however, Toishy argues that the musical distance between the Kazakh steppe and heavy metal is considerably shorter than it appears.

How the Kazakh dombra became a metal instrument

To understand his argument, Toishy says listeners should first hear the dombra without distortion, amplifiers or drums.

The dombra is a long-necked, two-stringed plucked instrument at the centre of Kazakh musical culture. One of its most important traditions is the küi: an instrumental composition which can communicate stories, historical memory and emotion without sung lyrics.

UNESCO inscribed the traditional art of dombra küi on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014, describing it as a practice that connects communities to their historical roots and helps transmit Kazakh cultural knowledge between generations.

Within that tradition, two broad performance styles are usually distinguished: tökpe and shertpe. The distinction is more complex than simply “fast” and “slow”, although that is how Toishy initially explains it to an unfamiliar listener.

Tökpe, historically associated particularly with western Kazakhstan, tends towards a more forceful and expansive style, often involving rapid movement across the strings. Shertpe, strongly associated with central and eastern Kazakhstan, places greater emphasis on individual plucking, melodic nuance and lyricism. Ethnomusicological research describes tökpe as characteristically rapid and broad in scope, while shertpe tends towards greater subtlety and expressive variation.

For Toishy, the connection with rock becomes particularly apparent in the faster tökpe küi tradition. He recommends first listening to traditional tökpe küi performances – including the pieces collected in this playlist – and only then returning to Metallica’s Motorbreath.

By contrast, Seken Turysbek’s well-known Köñil Tolqyny is an example of the slower, more lyrical shertpe küi tradition. Toishy mentions it to illustrate the stylistic range of dombra music rather than as a direct comparison with Motorbreath.

“If you listen to what I have mentioned, you will understand how obvious these things are yourself,” he says.

Aldaspan later explored the two traditions in different releases. Toishy points in particular to Elge Qait and Tokpe Light. The band’s own discography describes the 2012 Elge Qait as a collection primarily of slow shertpe küi.

For him, then, putting the dombra into heavy rock was less an attempt to force two incompatible genres together than to amplify a connection he believed was already there.

Six strings, but no guitars

Aldaspan’s crucial decision was not simply to place a traditional instrument over a conventional rock arrangement.

There would be no electric guitar.

The project instead developed around lead, rhythm and bass electric dombras. Its original formation paired three variants of the instrument with drums; the band’s debut album Attila, released in 2011, mixed ethno-rock and thrash metal with throat singing. Aldaspan’s current official history dates the fully formed concept to 2009, when Toishy began pursuing the idea of running the sound of the dombra through overdrive and distortion.

For a musician, electrification presented an obvious problem.

The attraction of the dombra lies precisely in the distinctive character of its sound. If amplification and distortion simply made it imitate an electric guitar, the experiment would lose much of its purpose.

“That was what I feared most – that the sound of the dombra would become the sound of a guitar,” Toishy says.

His conclusion after experimenting was that the distinctive timbre survived.

In his own estimation, around “90 percent” remained recognisably dombra, while perhaps “10 percent” acquired a metal character. The numbers are subjective, of course, but they capture the balance he was seeking: power without erasing identity.

Even Toishy says he did not initially know exactly what kind of ensemble would emerge once overdrive and distortion were applied to the instruments. Only after recording, mixing and listening back to several albums did he feel that Aldaspan had created not simply one sound but several variations of ethno-rock.

Among the works he considers particularly important in that evolution are El Dastan, Uly Kosh, tracks from Attila, and the albums Tokpe Light and Elge Qait.

There is also a striking economy to the band’s basic setup.

“Across our whole group, there are six strings,” Toishy says of the three two-stringed dombras.

The apparent simplicity is precisely what surprises audiences, he says. A small traditional instrument associated by many with acoustic performance can suddenly produce the density and physical impact expected from a rock band.

Toishy believes another quality differentiates the instrument from the guitar.

“The dombra is close to the timbre of a man’s voice,” he says. “When it plays, physiologically its sound is closer to the human voice than a guitar is.”

He is careful to present that as a personal perception rather than a scientific claim.

“How dare you ruin such an instrument?”

If rock audiences were intrigued, some guardians of musical tradition were considerably less enthusiastic.

Toishy remembers the first reactions of Kazakh audiences as a kind of astonishment: how could such a small instrument make so much noise – and so many different kinds of noise?

“Even now at our concerts, people genuinely feel the impact of the live performance and don’t believe their eyes,” he says.

Rock listeners, he recalls, were particularly won over by the band’s first album Attila and the solo in the track Edige.

But some traditional musicians from an older generation saw the experiment very differently.

Their response, Toishy remembers, was essentially: “How dare you ruin such an instrument?”

One conservatory teacher, he says, even suggested that people should be put in prison for what they were doing to the dombra.

The anecdote is humorous in retrospect, but the disagreement underneath it is significant.

Aldaspan touches on a question that extends far beyond one Kazakh rock band: what does it mean to preserve a traditional instrument?

Is preservation primarily about maintaining established forms of performance? Or can radically changing the environment in which an instrument is played also help keep it culturally alive?

The dombra is not a marginal object in Kazakhstan. It is one of the country’s most visible cultural symbols. Since 2018, Kazakhstan has even celebrated National Dombra Day on the first Sunday of July.

That symbolic weight makes experimentation more sensitive. An electric dombra is not merely a new piece of musical equipment: for some listeners it interferes with an object tied to ideas of heritage, history and Kazakh identity.

Yet traditional dombra culture itself is hardly static. Different regions developed different instruments, techniques and schools, while contemporary performers continue to adapt their instruments to new stages and performance environments.

Aldaspan pushes that process considerably further – but Toishy’s concern about preserving the dombra’s timbre shows that the band does not understand modernisation simply as replacing the traditional sound with a Western one.

The point, for him, is to make the dombra capable of entering another musical space without ceasing to sound like itself.

Rediscovering what was already there

Toishy also sees the reception of Aldaspan as part of a broader change in how Kazakhstan relates to its own cultural inheritance.

“What changed was people’s awareness and a reassessment of what we Kazakhs have as an ethnic group,” he says.

The internet played an important role in that process, in his view.

Greater exposure to music and culture from around the world could have weakened interest in local traditions. Toishy believes the opposite happened as well: comparison allowed Kazakhs to hear their own musical heritage differently.

“Kazakhs, through comparison, discovered the beauty of their own instruments and compositions,” he says.

He sees the result as part of a wider cultural revival, accompanied by renewed public interest in Kazakh and Turkic history.

That observation has a visible contemporary context. Traditional instruments now coexist in Kazakhstan with rock, electronic music, world music and other hybrid forms. Almaty’s Spirit of Tengri festival, held since 2013, has developed into a major platform for contemporary ethnic and world music, bringing together performers who combine inherited musical traditions with global genres. Its 2026 edition again presented ethno-fusion and contemporary ethnic music to a large open-air audience.

Aldaspan nevertheless occupies an unusually uncompromising position within this landscape.

Rather than adding a dombra as a marker of local colour to an otherwise familiar rock sound, it asks the instrument itself to do the work normally performed by the guitar.

The resulting music becomes an argument of sorts: modernity does not necessarily require abandoning the traditional instrument.

Warriors, memory and the imagined steppe

History is as important to Aldaspan’s identity as musical technique.

Asked which historical figure most inspires him, Toishy refuses to choose one.

Instead he invokes a collection of personalities and traditions – among them the eighth-century Turkic prince Kül Tegin, Genghis Khan, commanders and warriors – that together form what he describes as a wider Turkic warrior culture.

Some of his broader historical claims go well beyond scholarly consensus, and are best understood as part of his personal interpretation of Eurasian history rather than statements of established fact.

But that worldview helps explain Aldaspan’s artistic universe.

The band is interested not only in how old music can sound through modern equipment, but in whether contemporary Kazakh popular culture can use older histories, heroes and narratives as raw material of its own.

Toishy says the Kazakh language and Kazakh musical traditions remain among the strongest elements shaping the band’s identity.

Actively combining them with contemporary genres, he believes, creates something that cannot simply be replicated elsewhere.

It is a form of cultural confidence that differs from preservation behind glass. The past becomes material to be rearranged, amplified – and distorted.

From an American dream to European festivals

For years, Toishy’s imagined destination for the band lay across the Atlantic.

“As a child I dreamed of stages in the United States,” he says.

He eventually spent six years living there. The experience changed his ambition.

Today, he wants Aldaspan to reach European rock festivals.

Toishy believes European audiences are more receptive to unusual combinations of musical cultures and genres. It is explicitly his own judgement – and one he jokingly acknowledges Americans may dislike – but he now sees Europe rather than the United States as Aldaspan’s most promising international audience.

There is something fitting about that ambition.

Aldaspan is a deeply Kazakh project created partly through encounters with music from elsewhere. Its origin story begins with a teenager in Soviet Kazakhstan hearing an American metal band and unexpectedly recognising the dombra inside it.

Nearly four decades later, Toishy still seems fascinated by the same possibility: that listeners who believe they are hearing two completely separate musical worlds may discover that the boundary between them is less obvious than expected.

For newcomers, he suggests starting with three Aldaspan tracks: Edige from Attila, El Dastan from Uly Kosh, and Turk Kultegin from Balqadisha.

Listen to those, then to an acoustic küi. Then perhaps go back to Motorbreath.

That is the comparison Toishy has been asking people to make since 1988.

And whether or not every listener hears exactly what he hears, Aldaspan has already demonstrated something else: an instrument does not have to remain sonically unchanged to carry a tradition forward.

Sometimes two strings, an amplifier and a distortion pedal are enough to make the steppe sound unexpectedly contemporary.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English, based on an interview with Nurzhan Toishy.

The post From Küi to Metallica: How Aldaspan Electrified the Kazakh Dombra appeared first on Novastan English.

Can Pakistan become the long-promised southern gateway for landlocked Central Asia?

A brightly painted Pakistani truck carrying boxes of kinnow mandarins towards Central Asia looks almost festive. Its cab may be covered with flowers, peacocks, mountain landscapes, fragments of poetry and polished metal ornaments. Chains hanging from its body announce its arrival before the driver reaches the border.

Yet the fruit inside imposes a less decorative reality. Every customs delay shortens its commercial life. Every border closure risks turning a profitable shipment into spoiled cargo.

Read more on Novastan: Violence against foreign students in Bishkek

Pakistan’s kinnow – a sweet, easy-to-peel mandarin hybrid grown mainly in Punjab – can already be found in Central Asian markets. Uzbekistan has become a destination for Pakistani citrus, and Islamabad has introduced measures to facilitate the registration of exporters supplying the country.

A truck carrying kinnow therefore offers a more useful test of regional connectivity than the maps displayed at diplomatic summits. Pakistan and Central Asia can already trade. The question is whether goods can travel between them regularly, predictably and quickly enough for the journey to remain profitable.

Rice can survive a detour. A mandarin cannot wait indefinitely at a closed border.

Central Asia has spent decades searching for reliable access to the sea. Pakistan says it can provide it. Karachi, Port Qasim and Gwadar are increasingly promoted as the southern endpoints of roads and railways that would connect the region to the Arabian Sea.

Some elements of this vision are beginning to move beyond declarations. Pilot consignments have tested routes between Pakistan and Central Asia through China. New transit arrangements have been discussed through Iran. Pakistan has offered space at Gwadar for facilities intended to serve Central Asian trade.

But the most transformative part of the vision – a direct railway through Afghanistan – remains at the feasibility-study stage.

Rather than asking only whether Pakistan could one day become Central Asia’s gateway to the sea, it is therefore more useful to examine what already exists, what goods are actually moving, what remains experimental and what is still largely confined to political speeches.

The drivers behind the corridor

Transport corridors are usually represented as clean lines drawn across maps. On the ground, they are embodied by drivers travelling in some of the most visually distinctive commercial vehicles in the world.

Pakistani trucks are transformed into moving works of art. Their surfaces combine floral patterns, animals, religious imagery, political personalities, landscapes, calligraphy and verses about love, distance and returning home. Painters, metalworkers, woodcarvers and other specialist artisans may spend weeks decorating a single vehicle.

Regional styles can also be recognised. Trucks associated with Peshawar are known for elaborate woodwork, while decorative traditions in Balochistan may incorporate different materials and motifs. The result is not standard commercial branding but an expression of the driver’s identity, memories and aspirations.

Read more on Novastan: Minsk’s Eastern Bet: Why Central Asia Matters More Than Ever

These are the vehicles that must convert the language of international connectivity into an actual journey.

Their drivers encounter customs officials, poor roads, security checkpoints, mountain passes, mechanical failures and borders that may close with little warning. When governments suspend transit, it is the driver who sleeps beside the cargo, the porter who loses a day’s income and the trader who watches the value of a shipment decline.

The decorated truck is therefore more than a colourful detail. It is where the corridor becomes human.

How long does the journey take? Which borders must the driver cross? How many documents are required? How much is spent on fuel, insurance, customs and informal delays? How much of the fruit is still marketable when it arrives?

These questions determine whether a corridor exists in commercial reality, rather than merely in diplomatic language.

A bag of rice and the problem of geography

The same story can be told through something as ordinary as a bag of Pakistani basmati rice on a supermarket shelf in Almaty or Tashkent.

Pakistan is one of the world’s major rice exporters, and its products already reach Central Asian consumers. The presence of Pakistani rice, citrus, pharmaceuticals and textiles in the region shows that trade is not hypothetical.

The difficult question is how these goods arrive.

A Pakistani exporter attempting to reach Central Asia faces several possibilities. Cargo can pass through Afghanistan, travel west through Iran, or move north-east through China. Goods may also be sent by sea to an Iranian port before continuing overland.

Each option carries disadvantages.

Read more on Novastan: Kazakhstan continues to assert itself as the “key link” in the Middle Corridor

Afghanistan offers the most direct geographical connection but also the greatest political and security uncertainty. The Iranian route may provide access to established road and rail networks, but it is longer and vulnerable to sanctions-related complications and wider regional tensions. The Chinese route benefits from comparatively predictable state infrastructure, but requires difficult mountain crossings and substantial additional distance.

The shortest line on the map is not necessarily the cheapest or most dependable commercial route.

For rice, delays reduce margins. For kinnow, mangoes, meat and other refrigerated or perishable products, delays can destroy the shipment.

This is why the most meaningful measure of connectivity is not the number of agreements signed, but whether transport companies can quote predictable prices and delivery dates. A corridor becomes commercially significant when businesses use it repeatedly without requiring exceptional government intervention for each consignment.

From pulao to plov

Rice also reveals that Pakistan and Central Asia are less culturally distant than modern regional labels may suggest.

Pakistani pulao and Central Asian plov belong to a much wider family of rice dishes stretching through South Asia, Iran, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Their names share a Persian linguistic ancestry, although recipes, cooking techniques and cultural meanings differ considerably.

In Pakistan, pulao may be prepared with meat, stock and spices, with regional variations found across the country. In Uzbekistan, plov is a national institution associated with weddings, holidays, neighbourhood gatherings and hospitality. Tajik osh occupies a similarly important place.

Read more on Novastan: L’Ouzbékistan lance un indice Plov

The comparison should not be exaggerated. Pakistani pulao and Uzbek plov are not the same dish. But their familiarity offers a small reminder of the historical movement of tastes, words and people between the regions.

A bag of Pakistani rice arriving in Tashkent is therefore not merely anonymous cargo. It enters a culinary culture in which rice already carries powerful associations with family, celebration and collective identity.

The proposed corridor would connect ports and markets, but it would also reconnect societies that already recognise elements of one another.

Pakistan looks north

Pakistan’s interest in Central Asia is easy to understand.

The five Central Asian states form a market of more than 80 million people. Pakistan offers them access not only to a population exceeding 240 million, but also to the Arabian Sea and onward maritime trade.

Yet actual commerce remains limited compared with the ambitions expressed by regional governments. Pakistan exported goods worth approximately $106 million to Uzbekistan in 2025, but its combined trade with the five Central Asian republics remains small relative to the size of the markets involved.

The gap between geographic proximity and commercial integration is partly historical.

Soviet Central Asia’s transport infrastructure was designed primarily to connect the region northwards through Russia, not southwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan. After independence, China became an increasingly important economic partner, while routes across the Caspian Sea gained prominence as Central Asian governments sought alternative connections to Europe.

Read more on Novastan: The Caspian Sea Is Retreating. Central Asia Is Not Ready

Pakistan was separated from Tajikistan by Afghanistan’s narrow Wakhan Corridor and from the wider region by difficult terrain, insecurity and weak cross-border infrastructure.

The resulting irony is striking: Central Asia and Pakistan are geographically close, but moving goods between them can require enormous detours.

Islamabad now hopes to change that. Pakistani officials increasingly describe their country as a bridge between Central Asia, South Asia, China and the Middle East. Karachi, Port Qasim and Gwadar are promoted as potential maritime outlets for landlocked economies.

But Central Asia does not need access to the sea in the abstract. It needs access that is affordable, dependable and connected to regular shipping services.

Karachi already works

Discussions of Pakistan’s maritime offer often group Karachi and Gwadar together. Commercially, however, they are very different propositions.

Karachi is Pakistan’s established economic and maritime centre. Together with nearby Port Qasim, it handles most of the country’s seaborne commerce. It possesses regular shipping connections, freight-forwarding services, customs infrastructure, warehouses and access to Pakistan’s largest industrial and consumer market.

For a Central Asian trader seeking a southern outlet today, Karachi is therefore the more credible option.

The main obstacle is not the port itself, but the journey required to reach it.

Read more on Novastan: Que vend-on à la frontière tadjiko-afghane ?

A reliable road or railway through Afghanistan could give Uzbekistan and parts of southern Central Asia a comparatively direct connection to Karachi. The port could also serve trade moving in the opposite direction, improving Pakistani access to Central Asian markets.

This two-way traffic is crucial. A truck delivering Pakistani products to Uzbekistan but returning empty is less profitable. A commercially sustainable corridor needs southbound cargo as well as goods moving north.

Uzbek textiles, Kazakh grain and metals, and other Central Asian products could help provide that return traffic. Uzbekistan already exports textiles to Pakistan, demonstrating that the relationship need not consist only of Central Asia importing Pakistani food and consumer goods.

Karachi offers commercial scale. What it lacks is a reliable land bridge to Central Asia.

Gwadar offers something else

Gwadar has become the more powerful symbol.

Situated in Balochistan near the entrance to the Gulf of Oman, the deep-sea port occupies a location that appears strategically ideal. It lies close to Iran and forms the southern centrepiece of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC.

Its significance also derives from China’s role.

Pakistan transferred the operation of Gwadar to China Overseas Ports Holding Company in 2013. The company describes itself as the concession holder and operator of the port and its associated free-zone activities.

The concession is commonly described as lasting 40 years. Gwadar itself remains Pakistani territory and the port remains a Pakistani asset, but its operation and development are closely tied to a Chinese company and to Beijing’s broader Belt and Road Initiative.

Chinese involvement provides investment, political support and a long-term strategic framework. But it also complicates the idea that Gwadar offers Central Asia an alternative independent of the major powers already shaping its trade.

Gwadar promises Central Asia another route to the sea, but not necessarily an alternative to Chinese influence.

For Central Asian governments, this may not be an obstacle. All five countries already maintain substantial economic relationships with China, and several actively seek Chinese infrastructure investment. Beijing’s participation may increase confidence that projects will retain financing and political backing.

Yet Gwadar remains far less commercially mature than Karachi. It has limited regular traffic, lacks Karachi’s dense logistics ecosystem and faces significant security problems in the surrounding province.

A port does not become a regional hub because governments designate it one. Shipping companies, freight forwarders and exporters must decide that it is cheaper, faster or more reliable than the alternatives.

Gwadar and the Balochistan question

Gwadar’s strategic position cannot be separated from the political realities of Balochistan.

The province is Pakistan’s largest by territory and among its poorest and least densely populated. It contains major gas and mineral resources, as well as the port that Islamabad and Beijing present as a future centre of Eurasian commerce.

Yet many Baloch activists argue that local communities have received too little benefit from the extraction of the province’s resources and from the infrastructure projects developed in their name.

These grievances are connected to a decades-long separatist insurgency, allegations of enforced disappearances and abuses by the security forces, and recurring protests over political exclusion and economic marginalisation.

In Gwadar itself, residents and local movements have protested over access to water and electricity, restrictions affecting fishing communities, security controls and the perception that the benefits of port development are flowing primarily to outside actors.

Armed Baloch separatist organisations have also attacked Pakistani security forces, infrastructure and Chinese personnel. China’s involvement has turned Gwadar and other parts of CPEC into symbolic targets, while Pakistan has responded with an extensive security presence intended to protect foreign workers and strategic installations.

Security remains one of the principal concerns surrounding renewed Chinese and Pakistani plans to turn Gwadar into a regional connectivity hub.

This creates a contradiction at the centre of the project.

A port promoted as a gateway of openness and connection is located in a province marked by checkpoints, political distrust and recurring violence.

Security measures may protect ships, roads and foreign personnel, but they also impose costs and reinforce local perceptions that Gwadar is being developed for outsiders. For Central Asian traders, the question is not only whether the port can physically handle cargo. It is whether the surrounding political and security environment permits goods, workers and investment to move predictably.

Gwadar cannot become a convincing gateway for Central Asia without also becoming a more credible economic gateway for the people who already live around it.

What has actually moved?

The strongest evidence for new links between Pakistan and Central Asia does not yet come from the proposed railway. It comes from trucks and limited trial consignments.

In April 2026, Pakistan launched an export consignment from the Karachi Export Processing Zone to Kyrgyzstan through China’s Sost Dry Port under the international TIR customs-transit system.

The route was geographically indirect: goods moved towards the Chinese border before continuing through China to Kyrgyzstan. Yet its apparent inefficiency revealed something important. Businesses may prefer a longer route if it offers more predictable procedures and avoids the volatility of Afghanistan.

This does not yet constitute a high-volume trade corridor. A first or pilot consignment tests customs systems, roads and political agreements; it does not prove that a route is commercially competitive at scale.

Nevertheless, actual shipments matter.

They show that Pakistan is beginning to convert corridor diplomacy into physical cargo movements. They also reveal how far reality remains from the elegant north-south lines usually drawn on official maps.

The corridor has begun to function in fragments, sometimes by going around its presumed centre.

Afghanistan: bridge and bottleneck

Any serious attempt to connect Uzbekistan directly to Pakistan must confront Afghanistan.

The most discussed project is the proposed Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan railway. The line would connect Uzbekistan to Pakistan’s rail network and ports through Afghan territory. Supporters argue that it could reduce transport times, lower costs and create the first direct rail connection between Central and South Asia.

The railway could be transformative. It could also remain unbuilt.

In July 2025, the three countries signed an agreement to conduct a joint feasibility study. Uzbekistan ratified the agreement in February 2026, and officials later announced that the study had entered an active phase.

This represents progress, but the terminology matters.

A feasibility study is not construction. The route, engineering specifications, financing arrangements and security guarantees still require resolution. Afghanistan’s terrain will make the project expensive, while differing railway gauges and connections to existing networks create further technical complications.

The political environment is no less difficult.

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have deteriorated amid disputes over border security and armed groups operating from Afghan territory. Repeated closures of key crossings have disrupted traders and encouraged Afghanistan to divert commerce through Iran and Central Asia. In 2025, Afghan traders increasingly used alternative routes through Chabahar and neighbouring Central Asian states to compensate for disruptions at the Pakistani border.

Such closures affect people far beyond foreign ministries.

Drivers lose income while waiting at the border. Porters and customs workers lose daily wages. Traders watch perishable goods deteriorate. Importers must explain delays to customers who may never have heard of the diplomatic dispute that stopped their order.

For a Central Asian company choosing a trade route, these experiences matter more than the theoretical number of kilometres saved.

Afghanistan is therefore both the bridge and the bottleneck. Without it, the most direct southern route becomes substantially longer. With it, the corridor remains exposed to insecurity and political confrontation.

Routes around the bottleneck

Pakistan is not waiting for the Trans-Afghan railway to be completed.

Routes through Iran and China offer alternatives, although neither recreates the direct north-south connection envisioned by the railway.

The western option can connect Pakistani ports to Iran and then to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and the wider Central Asian network. It avoids the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and may be particularly relevant to western and southern Central Asia.

But it introduces other uncertainties. Iran faces sanctions, financial restrictions and recurrent regional tensions. A corridor that avoids one geopolitical vulnerability may inherit another.

The route through China benefits from close Pakistan-China relations and from Chinese transport connections with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Khunjerab Pass and the Karakoram Highway provide a physical connection, although difficult terrain, weather conditions and distance limit the route’s suitability for some cargo.

China and Pakistan renewed their commitment in May 2026 to improving CPEC, the Karakoram Highway and Gwadar’s role as a regional connectivity hub.

Yet strategic commitment does not automatically produce commercial demand.

The existence of several imperfect alternatives may nevertheless prove more realistic than waiting for one grand railway to solve every problem. Different routes may serve different countries, seasons and products.

Kinnow may require the fastest viable road. Machinery may tolerate a longer journey. Bulk commodities may need rail. A corridor is ultimately not one line but a network of commercial decisions.

Central Asia already has alternatives

Pakistan is also entering a competitive market.

Central Asian governments are developing the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, commonly called the Middle Corridor, across Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Türkiye. The route has gained strategic importance as countries seek to diversify away from Russia and strengthen connections with Europe.

Iran offers access to the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea through ports such as Bandar Abbas and Chabahar. China provides access to eastward markets and global maritime supply chains. Russia remains a major commercial and transit partner despite ongoing efforts to diversify.

Pakistan must therefore offer more than access to the sea as a concept. Central Asia already possesses several maritime options.

Pakistan’s strongest potential advantage is proximity to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and parts of southern Central Asia. A reliable route through Afghanistan could be shorter than many alternatives. Pakistan also provides direct access to South Asian markets rather than functioning merely as a passage to ships bound elsewhere.

Its disadvantages are equally substantial: unstable borders, incomplete infrastructure, difficult terrain, security risks and the absence of established high-volume logistics chains.

The balance also differs from one Central Asian country to another.

Uzbekistan, with its large population, manufacturing ambitions and doubly landlocked geography, has the clearest strategic interest in a southern connection. Tajikistan could benefit from improved north-south trade but lacks direct access to the proposed principal railway. Turkmenistan already borders Iran and the Caspian Sea. Kazakhstan is more closely integrated into routes through Russia, China and the Caspian. Kyrgyzstan’s geography may make connections through China more immediately relevant than a route through Afghanistan.

There is no single Central Asian interest. What works for Tashkent may offer little advantage to Astana or Ashgabat.

From Babur to border paperwork

The north-south connection is not new.

Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur was born in Andijan, in present-day Uzbekistan. After losing his Central Asian possessions, he established himself in Kabul, captured Lahore and founded an empire that included large parts of present-day Pakistan and northern India.

Five centuries before governments began promoting a railway from Uzbekistan to Pakistan, Babur travelled along the same broad axis through the Ferghana Valley, Afghanistan and the Indus basin.

The modern journey is less romantic. It depends on axle-load limits, customs guarantees, insurance contracts, refrigerated trailers and border opening hours.

Yet the historical reference is more than decorative. It reminds us that Central and South Asia were not always treated as separate worlds. Empires, trading networks, migration, language and culture connected the regions long before Soviet infrastructure redirected Central Asia’s economy northwards.

Today’s corridor projects are therefore not creating a relationship from nothing. They are attempting to rebuild connections that modern borders and political systems made increasingly difficult.

A gateway, but not yet a corridor

Pakistan has moved beyond promises, but only partly.

Goods already travel between Pakistan and Central Asia. Initial consignments have tested new routes through China. Karachi provides a major functioning commercial port. Gwadar is operational, supported by China and increasingly presented as a potential destination for Central Asian cargo. The three governments behind the Trans-Afghan railway have moved into the feasibility-study phase.

These are real developments.

But they do not yet amount to a regular, high-volume corridor connecting Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.

The shortest route remains politically fragile. Routes avoiding Afghanistan are longer and face other geopolitical or physical constraints. Gwadar remains less commercially established than Karachi and cannot be separated from the conflict and political grievances surrounding it in Balochistan. Central Asian traders already have competing options through Russia, China, Iran and the Caspian.

Pakistan’s southern offer should therefore be treated neither as an illusion nor as an inevitable geopolitical transformation. It is an emerging network whose commercial value must still be demonstrated shipment by shipment.

The decorated truck carrying kinnow matters because it places a driver, a product and a deadline inside the abstraction of regional connectivity.

The decisive moment will come when another truck follows without a ministerial ceremony, and then another – carrying mandarins and rice north, textiles and other goods south, along a route whose successful completion is no longer considered newsworthy.

That is when a diplomatic corridor becomes an economy.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Gwadar, Karachi and the Central Asian Dream of the Sea appeared first on Novastan English.

After more than a century of migration, repression and adaptation, the Koryo-Saram are building new communities in the United States. Hana Sexton, founder of Koryo Saram Koreans in America, speaks to Novastan about historical memory, cultural survival and the challenge of making a little-known diaspora visible.

The history of the Koryo-Saram extends across several countries and political systems. Their ancestors began settling in the Russian Far East in the nineteenth century, many fleeing poverty, famine and Japanese colonial rule on the Korean Peninsula. In 1937, Stalin’s government deported the entire Korean population of the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, accusing them collectively of potential collaboration with Japan.

The deportees endured a brutal journey in overcrowded railway wagons and were forced to rebuild their lives in unfamiliar conditions. Over subsequent decades, Koryo-Saram communities became deeply rooted in Central Asia. They contributed to agriculture, science, medicine, education, culture and public life, while also experiencing linguistic assimilation and the gradual erosion of some Korean traditions.

See more on Novastan: How Central Asia became home for the Koryo-Saram

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the community became increasingly dispersed. Many moved to South Korea, Russia, Europe and the United States, creating new forms of transnational family and cultural life. Today, an individual Koryo-Saram family may have relatives in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, South Korea, Russia and North America.

Hana Sexton grew up in Central Asia and later settled in the United States. After repeatedly encountering a lack of awareness about Koryo-Saram history, she established Koryo Saram Koreans in America, a nonprofit initiative intended to increase the visibility of the community and strengthen its connections with the wider Korean-American diaspora.

She is a member of the Council of Korean Americans and The Korea Society, and participates in cultural, community and policy events across the United States. In this interview with Novastan, she explains why the Koryo-Saram experience cannot be reduced to labels such as “Soviet Korean” or “Russian Korean,” and why preserving the community’s history matters far beyond the diaspora itself.

Novastan: Could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us what inspired you to establish Koryo Saram Koreans in America?

Hana Sexton: For more than a decade in the United States, my life has involved repeatedly answering one question: who are the Koryo-Saram?

Meeting people across very different social and professional circles taught me something important. My lifetime would simply be too short to explain the history of the Koryo-Saram individually to every new person I encountered. That exhausting realisation is precisely why I founded a nonprofit initiative dedicated to our community.

I am a Koryo-Saram Korean American. It is an identity that I claim proudly, but it is also one that is constantly obscured by misconceptions. We are frequently described as “Soviet Koreans,” “Russian Koreans,” “Central Asian Koreans” or even “North Koreans.” The reality is far more complex.

Many Koryo-Saram migrated to the Russian Far East long before the Soviet Union was established. They moved there during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often fleeing famine, poverty and Japanese colonisation. The Soviet era was only one chapter in our much longer history, just as the Russian Empire before it and the post-Soviet Central Asian states afterwards were also chapters.

Each period and each region shaped our culture, but none of them defines us entirely.

We are ethnic Koreans and today many of us predominantly speak Russian. The broader Russian-speaking Korean world also includes communities such as the Sakhalin Koreans, although their historical experience is distinct in important ways.

For me, Koryo-Saram is a collective identity for a global diaspora united by a shared history of migration, Stalinist forced displacement, trauma, resilience and cultural adaptation. We also developed a distinctive cuisine, including dishes such as morkovcha, the spiced carrot salad that has become famous across the former Soviet Union.

Through this organisation, we are no longer telling our story only one person at a time. We are trying to share our historical legacy with the wider world.

For readers unfamiliar with this history, who are the Koryo-Saram, and how would you describe their journey from the Russian Far East to Central Asia and, more recently, to the United States?

The Koryo-Saram are ethnic Koreans whose ancestors settled in the Russian Far East from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Labour was needed to develop sparsely populated land around Vladivostok and other border regions, and many Koreans settled there as farmers, labourers and traders. Others arrived while fleeing Japanese colonial rule on the Korean Peninsula.

Koryo-mar, the traditional language associated with the community, is now officially considered endangered. The language carries traces of the varieties of Korean spoken by the original migrants, but decades of displacement and assimilation transformed the linguistic life of the community.

In 1937, under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet government forcibly deported the entire ethnic Korean population of the Russian Far East to Central Asia, primarily Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The authorities justified the deportation by invoking fears of Japanese espionage and alleged “anti-Soviet activities.”

Read more on Novastan: From Bukhara to Queens: The Global Journey of the Bukharan Jews

It was the first large-scale Soviet deportation of an entire ethnic community, although it would not be the last.

The journey was brutal. Families were loaded into freight and cattle wagons. Many people died from disease, hunger and exposure during the journey or shortly after their arrival. Survivors found themselves in a completely different climate and environment. They had to farm in the steppe, grow food for their own survival and meet state agricultural demands, while trying to preserve elements of Korean family and cultural life.

For decades, many deportees remained classified as “unreliable people.” Their movements were restricted and they were required to report to local authorities.

A lesser-known part of our history concerns the Korean intellectuals and officials who survived deportation and were later sent to North Korea to help establish the new state. Some were subsequently purged, imprisoned or killed by the North Korean authorities. For them, deportation was followed by another form of displacement and political repression.

Over time, the Koryo-Saram became Soviet citizens. Many entered professional life and became scientists, doctors, teachers, engineers, artists and administrators. At the same time, Soviet assimilation policies, the closure of Korean-language schools and the dominance of Russian contributed to the decline of Korean-language transmission.

Read more on Novastan: Diasporas et diversité : brève histoire des peuples au Kazakhstan

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many Koryo-Saram began seeking opportunities abroad. South Korea became a major destination, but the United States also attracted a growing number of migrants.

I was personally surprised to discover how many Koryo-Saram live in different American states. Today it is common to meet a Koryo-Saram American citizen with relatives in both South Korea and Central Asia.

Unlike some other communities deported under Stalin, including many ethnic Germans or Poles, the Koryo-Saram were never collectively repatriated. As a result, the diaspora is now scattered across Central Asia, Russia, South Korea, Europe and the United States.

In America, Koryo-Saram often settle in cities with established Korean communities, including New York and Los Angeles. They become part of a broader Korean diaspora while maintaining cultural and family ties to Central Asia and the post-Soviet world.

There are estimated to be around 500,000 Koryo-Saram worldwide, with growing populations in South Korea and the United States. The community’s journey is one of displacement, resilience and cultural adaptation: from early migration to the Russian Far East, through forced deportation to Central Asia, and later to the rebuilding of lives in South Korea, America and elsewhere.

Much has been written about Koryo-Saram communities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but far less about those living in the United States. What distinguishes the American experience, and how has the community evolved there?

The Koryo-Saram population in the United States is extremely diverse. Some people came directly from post-Soviet countries. Others were born in South Korea or another country and later moved to America for education, employment or family reunification.

Even Koryo-Saram living in the United States are not always aware of the full diversity of the community here.

Unlike the Soviet deportations, migration to the United States is generally voluntary. This allows Koryo-Saram to integrate into American society under completely different circumstances.

In my own case, I entered the American diplomatic and policy world relatively easily as the spouse of a former US diplomat. Other people make different choices. Some surround themselves primarily with Americans. Others remain within Russian-speaking social circles. Some identify strongly as Korean American and build their networks among ethnic Koreans.

Read more on Novastan: Qu’est-ce qu’être un Coréen au Kazakhstan aujourd’hui ?

One characteristic that many Koryo-Saram communities share is a tendency towards insularity. I believe this is partly a legacy of our complicated history and the experience of living for generations as a distrusted or misunderstood minority.

At the same time, many families successfully preserve Koryo-Saram traditions. These include hansik, Korean food culture, hwangap, the traditional celebration of a person’s sixtieth birthday, family rituals and distinctive forms of Koryo-Saram cuisine.

In the United States, Koryo-Saram may identify simultaneously with the broader Korean diaspora and with Russian-speaking immigrant communities. This creates opportunities for networking and cultural exchange, but it also means navigating several identities, languages and national backgrounds.

The American Koryo-Saram experience is shaped by voluntary migration, economic opportunity and comparatively successful integration into US society. It shares historical roots with Central Asia but is also influenced by post-Cold War migration and the blending of Korean heritage with American life.

I hope that, as Korean Americans, we will become a more confident, outward-facing and globally connected diaspora.

What are the main objectives of Koryo Saram Koreans in America? What kinds of activities do you organise, and what needs within the community are you hoping to address?

At present, my main priority is raising awareness and increasing the visibility of the Koryo-Saram community. This work is vital, and it requires thinking beyond one’s own experience in order to advocate for people who often remain unseen.

I believe that South Korea, the United States and wider society all benefit from greater cross-cultural understanding and from recognising the diversity that exists within the Korean diaspora.

Read more on Novastan: The Lexicon of Kazakh Decolonisation

The needs within the Koryo-Saram community are broad and can be difficult to address.

Many people face cultural barriers when asking for help. Some find it extremely difficult to admit that they are low-income or vulnerable. They may come from backgrounds in which revealing weakness historically invited exploitation rather than support.

One of my goals is to bridge that gap and help create an environment in which people feel safer asking for assistance.

I take great pride in fostering cross-cultural understanding through grassroots advocacy.

On Samiljeol, Korea’s March First Independence Movement Day, in 2025, I became the first Koryo-Saram in America to participate in a joint commemoration with Korean Americans in the state of Florida. I built on that milestone by taking part in a larger Korean-American commemoration in Georgia in 2026.

In autumn 2025, I represented South Korea at FusionFest in Orlando, one of Florida’s largest multicultural festivals. I organized a cultural display featuring reproductions of national treasures from the National Museum of Korea, traditional hanbok, heritage skincare and other elements of Korean culture.

I also modelled a traditional hanbok during the FusionFest fashion show, accompanied by music from KPop Demon Hunters. In addition, I have carried the South Korean flag at several major cultural events in Florida.

Alongside grassroots events, I invest in leadership and institutional engagement by participating in major Korean-American and US policy forums. I attend these events at my own expense because I believe that the Koryo-Saram diaspora needs a visible voice in such spaces.

I have attended the Van Fleet Policy Forum, the flagship policy event of The Korea Society.

I have also participated in the Council of Korean Americans’ annual Envision Gala and Summit, the Federation of Korean Associations US’s national leadership convention for presidents of Korean associations, and the World Korean Business Convention in Duluth, Georgia.

Ultimately, I believe that South Korea, the United States and the Koryo-Saram community all benefit from mutual collaboration, deeper cultural understanding and a shared appreciation of our Korean heritage.

Many Koryo-Saram families remain connected across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, South Korea, Russia and beyond. How transnational is the community today, and what kinds of links exist between these different diasporas?

The Koryo-Saram diaspora is deeply transnational. Strong family, cultural and economic ties connect communities across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Russia, South Korea and other countries.

As I mentioned earlier, the Koryo-Saram were never collectively repatriated. For that reason, they can now be found across the world.

Koryo-Saram in America often have relatives working or living in South Korea, Central Asia, Russia or Europe. This creates expanded social networks and a broader sense of identity and belonging, but it also produces challenges.

These include identity tension, legal and political complexity, social isolation and the practical difficulty of maintaining family life across borders.

Our history spans more than a century of migration, repression and cultural survival. As a result, Koryo-Saram identity is often a living negotiation between contrasting political, social and cultural frameworks.

One example concerns children born and raised in South Korea to parents who are not South Korean citizens. In many cases, those children do not automatically acquire South Korean citizenship. They may later be required to return to Russia or Central Asia, where they face additional questions about identity, belonging and integration.

I am not afraid to enter uncomfortable rooms or spaces, because that is often where change must be made.

It is not uncommon for people to ask whether the Koryo-Saram are “communists”. This is insulting, but such questions usually reflect genuine ignorance rather than deliberate hostility.

The diaspora lived for decades under the Soviet label of an “unreliable people” after the 1937 deportation. After surviving that history and eventually reaching the United States, the last thing many people want is to prove repeatedly that they should not be distrusted because of where they come from.

This is one reason why many Koryo-Saram do not identify publicly as Koryo-Saram. It can be exhausting to remain permanently on the defensive.

Being part of a transnational diaspora offers cultural richness, economic opportunity and global connections. But it also brings identity challenges, risks of cultural loss and substantial emotional and logistical demands.

Success often depends on how well individuals and families manage these multiple worlds, using technology and community networks to sustain connections without becoming overwhelmed by distance or isolation.

You are also active in organisations such as the Council of Korean Americans and The Korea Society. How has this broader engagement shaped your work, and do you think awareness of the Koryo-Saram experience is growing within Korean-American and US policy circles?

I see myself as trailblazing by becoming the first Koryo-Saram American to join both the Council of Korean Americans and The Korea Society.

These are among the most prominent Korean-American organisations in the United States.

Because I have an American MBA and practical experience of foreign-service life, I am able to engage with policy, academic and business environments. I understand the language used in those circles and can find a sense of belonging there.

This is a significant step forward. Awareness of the Koryo-Saram experience is gradually growing, but much more work remains to be done.

Korean-American organisations are increasingly aware that the Korean diaspora is not limited to migration directly from the Korean Peninsula. It also includes communities shaped by life in China, Japan, Central Asia, Russia and other parts of the world.

The Koryo-Saram experience adds an important dimension to that wider history. It shows how Korean identity survived and changed under Russian imperial rule, Soviet repression, Central Asian integration and post-Soviet migration.

Uzbekistan has qualified for its first FIFA World Cup, and Central Asia is receiving increasing international attention. Do you think this growing visibility is also creating greater interest in the region’s Korean communities, or do the Koryo-Saram remain largely overlooked?

Uzbekistan’s World Cup qualification has undoubtedly increased Central Asia’s international profile. However, its effect on the visibility of the Koryo-Saram is likely to remain indirect and relatively limited.

The community is still underrepresented in Western media. Without deliberate cultural, journalistic or diplomatic outreach, Koryo-Saram history can easily remain overlooked, even as international interest in Central Asia increases.

Nevertheless, any positive attention given to Central Asia helps us in the broader sense. When more people become curious about Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the wider region, there is a greater opportunity to introduce them to the communities that have contributed to its social and cultural development.

Read more on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

Several internationally known figures have Koryo-Saram heritage or partial Koryo-Saram ancestry.

They include Lomon, also known as Park Solomon, the Uzbekistan-born South Korean actor; Nellie Kim, the Olympic gymnastics champion; and Gennadiy Golovkin, the world boxing champion.

Figures such as these undoubtedly contribute to the visibility of the diaspora. Yet the wider history of the Koryo-Saram remains much less well known than their individual achievements.

How are younger generations engaging with their multiple identities – Korean, Central Asian, Russian-speaking and American? Are there particular challenges in preserving language, culture and historical memory?

America seems to me to be an ideal place in which to preserve culture.

Because many of our organisation’s activities revolve around culture and heritage, I have met Korean Americans who immigrated to the United States more than 40 years ago. This includes both Koreans from the Korean Peninsula and Koryo-Saram Koreans.

Some have preserved as “heritage” cultural practices and social norms that are no longer common in contemporary South Korea or in post-Soviet countries. Diaspora communities sometimes preserve a version of culture that reflects the period in which people emigrated.

I did not grow up in the Soviet Union, and I always felt that I had a strong sense of American individualism. I was never afraid to be different, even though I grew up without Americans around me.

Ironically, it was in America that I encountered what I considered a Soviet mentality most clearly. That experience helped me recognize how different I was from what I understood as a stereotypically Soviet mentality.

In a similar way, one may encounter patriarchal South Korean social norms in some Korean-American communities even when those norms no longer exist in exactly the same form in contemporary South Korea.

There is no single model for younger Koryo-Saram.

Some are not merely preserving their multiple identities. They are reinventing them in ways that reflect both their heritage and the globalised world in which they live.

Others in the United States currently show little interest in their background or in what their ancestors experienced. It can be very comfortable to become a fully integrated American.

Many Koryo-Saram already possess a global outlook and have relatively little difficulty integrating into American society.

At the same time, I believe the community carries shared generational trauma. When you work with Koryo-Saram for long enough, you may notice certain behavioural patterns even among people who do not speak Russian or who do not publicly identify as Koryo-Saram.

Language loss remains one of the greatest challenges. Many younger people no longer speak Koryo-mar or Korean. Some do not speak Russian either. In such cases, identity is transmitted through food, family stories, names, photographs, celebrations and memories rather than language.

Historical memory can also become fragmented. A young person may know that a grandparent was deported but may not know the details. Another may know the family’s migration route but feel little emotional connection to it.

Preservation therefore requires more than nostalgia. It requires education, documentation, community spaces and opportunities for younger generations to interpret the history in their own way.

Looking ahead, what projects are you currently working on, and where do you see the greatest opportunities for cooperation between Koryo-Saram communities in the United States, Central Asia and South Korea?

We are preparing to participate in a Korea Liberation Day event, and I hope we will make history by participating for the first time in the upcoming Council of Korean Americans Summit in Los Angeles.

Koryo-Saram communities in the United States, Central Asia and South Korea share a common heritage. They can build on this to develop cultural, economic and educational cooperation.

Cultural preservation and exchange

Koryo-Saram communities in Kazakhstan and South Korea have worked for years to revive Korean traditions, language and cuisine.

In the United States, where the Koryo-Saram population is growing, there is also increasing interest in Korean heritage.

Cooperation could include joint cultural festivals and language-immersion programmes connecting communities in America, Central Asia and South Korea.

Youth-led initiatives in Kazakhstan, including Korean Sunday schools, could inspire similar programmes in the United States and South Korea. Such initiatives would help younger generations build a stronger sense of identity and shared history.

Economic and business cooperation

Projects such as K-Park in Alatau City, Kazakhstan, demonstrate how Koryo-Saram entrepreneurs can strengthen economic links between Kazakhstan and South Korea.

Koryo-Saram in the United States could act as an additional bridge, connecting Central Asian and South Korean businesses with American markets.

Promising sectors include Korean culture, Korean food, technology and creative industries.

Cooperation could take the form of co-branded products, joint ventures, professional networks and investment platforms linking the three regions.

Education and research

Koryo-Saram descendants in the United States, Central Asia and South Korea possess increasingly strong academic and professional networks.

Cooperation could include joint research on Korean history, diaspora studies, migration and cultural adaptation, as well as student and scholar exchanges.

Universities in South Korea, Central Asia and US cities with significant Korean populations, including New York and Los Angeles, could establish partnerships focused on heritage, language and diaspora studies.

There is still a great deal of Koryo-Saram history that remains insufficiently documented, especially at the family and community levels.

Tourism and heritage tourism

K-Park in Kazakhstan is intended to serve as both a cultural landmark and an economic hub.

Similar initiatives could be developed in the United States and South Korea. Heritage tourism routes could connect significant Koryo-Saram locations and communities across several countries.

Visitors could learn about Korean culture as it developed in the Russian Far East, Central Asia, South Korea and the United States.

Such projects could contribute to cultural diplomacy and deepen mutual understanding.

Policy and diaspora engagement

Given the strong diplomatic ties between South Korea and the Central Asian states, Koryo-Saram communities could advocate for policy frameworks that support diaspora engagement.

This could include cultural grants, support for research and education, diaspora investment incentives, easier routes to legal status or naturalisation and greater recognition of Koryo-Saram heritage in national historical narratives.

The greatest opportunities lie in cultural revitalisation, cross-border business networks, educational partnerships, heritage tourism and policy advocacy.

By pooling resources and networks across the United States, Central Asia and South Korea, Koryo-Saram communities can strengthen their shared identity while contributing to sustainable cultural and economic development.

Finally, if there is one message you would like Novastan’s readers to take away about the Koryo-Saram experience, what would it be?

The Koryo-Saram story is not simply a footnote in Korean history.

It is a living testament to resilience, cultural endurance and the quiet power of identity in the face of displacement and erasure.

For more than a century, the Koryo-Saram have navigated migration, forced deportation, language loss and assimilation. Yet they preserved elements of Korean culture through food, theatre, newspapers, music, family celebrations and community gatherings.

Our journey demonstrates that identity is not static. It evolves, adapts and endures.

History is not preserved only in official documents. It also survives through everyday acts of remembrance: cooking morkovcha, preparing family dishes, maintaining traditions, telling children about their grandparents or performing traditional dances at family celebrations.

The Koryo-Saram story is one of endurance with dignity, adaptation with pride and the belief that heritage can remain alive even when the ancestral homeland is far away.

It is also a call to recognise and honour such histories, not as isolated curiosities, but as vital threads in the global story of human resilience.

Interview conducted and edited by Mathieu Lemoine.

Photographs courtesy of Hana Sexton.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post From Central Asia to America: The Koryo-Saram Diaspora Finds a New Voice appeared first on Novastan English.

Archaeologist and museum specialist Oktyabr Dospanov on the lost world of Muynak, the memory of the Aral Sea and the cultural heritage of Karakalpakstan.

For much of the outside world, Muynak is represented by a single image: rusting ships stranded in a desert. For Oktyabr Dospanov, however, the town was once an island, a busy port and the setting of a childhood filled with ship bells, gulls, music and the smell of freshly caught fish. In this interview, the Karakalpak archaeologist and museum specialist recalls the human world that disappeared with the Aral Sea, explains why the region’s cultural history reaches far beyond the ecological catastrophe, and reflects on what should be preserved for future generations.

This interview was conducted in Russian and translated into English.

See more on Novastan: Souvenirs éphémères

The story of the Aral Sea is usually told through statistics: falling water levels, rising salinity, abandoned ports and millions of tonnes of salt and dust lifted from the exposed seabed. Those figures describe the scale of the disaster, but they cannot fully convey what it meant to lose a sea that organised the economy, culture and daily rhythms of an entire region. Dospanov belongs to the last generation that remembers the Aral as an ordinary presence rather than a vanished world. Born in Muynak, he later became an archaeologist and museum specialist. His professional path began in 1979, when Igor Savitsky invited him to join an expedition at Janpyk Kala, an ancient Khorezmian settlement near the Sultan Uvays mountains. He subsequently worked at the museum in Nukus that now bears Savitsky’s name, devoting decades to the archaeology, ethnography, art and environmental history of Karakalpakstan.

Novastan: You grew up in Muynak when it was still a living port. What kind of town was it?

Oktyabr Dospanov: My childhood was spent in Muynak, which at that time was a real island in the Aral Sea. For me, it is not simply my birthplace. It was an entire world, filled with sounds, smells and the feeling of continuous life. It is difficult today to imagine that Muynak was once one of the region’s largest fishing centres.

The town’s life was inseparable from the sea. There were five large fishing collectives, twelve fish reception points and two cargo ports. One was in Muynak itself, on the shore, and the other was around twenty kilometres away at Usay, on the opposite side of the island. The fishing industry set the rhythm of the whole town.

Muynak seemed never to sleep. Even late at night, people were always walking through the streets: some going to work, others returning after their shift. Work continued around the clock. I can still hear the ship bells, the grinding of the port cranes, and the hum of fishing vessels and engines. These sounds were a natural part of everyday life.

The city was also remarkably diverse. Engineers, sailors, fishermen, teachers, doctors, scientists and artists came from across the Soviet Union. Karakalpaks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Russians, Tatars, Koreans, Ukrainians and many others lived side by side. In the mahallas, neighbours helped one another build houses, celebrated holidays together and supported families in difficult times. That sense of community was one of Muynak’s greatest riches.

What do you remember most vividly about the sea itself?

For my generation, the Aral was not a symbol of tragedy. It was the symbol of a happy childhood, filled with the sound of waves and the cries of gulls. Hundreds of vessels stood at Muynak’s quays: cargo ships, fishing schooners, tankers, barges and tugboats. The port operated day and night. It seemed impossible that the sea could ever disappear.

The coast was rich in life. There were reed beds, lakes and wetlands, and an extraordinary number of birds: pheasants, wild ducks, flamingos, pelicans and, above all, gulls. The silver gulls that local people affectionately called ‘laughing gulls’ accompanied us from morning until evening. Fishermen watched them because they could reveal the position of shoals of fish.

I also remember the clean, fresh air. The sea did not have the harsh salty smell that people often imagine. A constant wind made even the hottest summer days easier to bear. In winter, the sea froze and the cold was severe. We swam, fished and played football on the shore. Children came to the nearby pioneer camp from many parts of the Soviet Union, and the coast had holiday homes, sanatoriums and tourist facilities.

See more on Novastan: A sécher

What remains most powerfully in my memory is not a landscape but a smell. When I was five or six, my father and his friend Ibadulla took me out in a small wooden boat. Far from the shore, we met a large fishing seiner commanded by a man named Tazhibay-aga. He showed me the bridge, the cabins and the engine room. The hold was filled with fish. I pointed to the largest one, a huge catfish, and insisted that it was a shark. Everyone laughed.

We stayed on the vessel for almost two days. I saw how the fishermen worked and lived. The engine room smelled of diesel fuel, motor oil, metal, sea moisture, fresh fish, wooden decks and salt-soaked ropes. It was sharp, but warm and alive. To me, that was the smell of the real Aral Sea. Sometimes I close my eyes and I am back there, hearing the engine and the waves against the hull.

Muynak also had a social and cultural life that is rarely mentioned. Where did young people meet?

Muynak did not live by work alone. It had two cinemas. The best known was Sputnik, just a few steps from the shore and beside the market. After an evening screening in summer, people would walk along the waterfront, listen to the waves and stay outside talking for a long time. Later, in the second half of the 1980s, the Berdakh cinema opened in another part of the city. It was a modern cultural centre for films, concerts and public events.

The cultural centre of the fish-canning plant was another important place. It had a library and hosted theatre, amateur performances, concerts and celebrations. Young people especially loved the weekend dances. Many people met their future partners there.

There were also several cafes. The most famous was Tolqyn, which means ‘wave’ in Karakalpak. It was not simply somewhere to eat or drink tea. Families celebrated birthdays and weddings there, friends met, music played, and people exchanged news and made plans.

Music was everywhere. On warm evenings, young people gathered spontaneously in courtyards, on squares or near the sea. Someone would bring a guitar, accordion or bayan, and people would sing together. There were no mobile phones or social networks. People listened to one another and spent long evenings in company. At weddings and major family celebrations, bakhshi – traditional storytellers and musicians – performed epics and legends to the accompaniment of instruments such as the dutar. Ancient oral tradition and modern youth culture existed naturally alongside each other.

When did people understand that the retreat of the sea was irreversible?

The process was gradual. The first alarming signs became visible in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At first, people hoped it was temporary and that the sea would return. A special canal was dug from the port towards the receding water so that vessels could continue to sail. But the water withdrew faster than people could adapt.

Fishermen noticed the change first. Their catches became smaller. Fewer schooners went out. Ships that had entered the port freely began to run aground, surrounded by sand and salt blown from the exposed seabed.

Read more on Novastan: Football de rue

I remember how the sound of the city changed. Muynak had always lived through the noise of its port: bells, cranes, engines, fishermen’s voices, metal cables and waves at the quays. Then came silence. It arrived almost imperceptibly, but that silence was the most frightening thing. When the ships stop sounding, when the sea can no longer be heard and the port ceases to live, you understand that more than water is disappearing. An entire world is going.

The marine painter Rafael Matevosyan, who devoted more than half a century to the Aral Sea, described an early morning when he woke to voices and crying. Residents had gathered on the shore. Overnight, the water had retreated by dozens of metres. Boats that had been moored at the pier were lying on dry sand. Some people prayed, some cried and others simply stared at the departing water. Matevosyan later captured that moment in a painting called The Sea Has Gone.

The human consequences came quickly. Enterprises closed, fishing declined and families lost their livelihoods. Many people left Muynak for other cities or republics. The city lost not only employment and population, but also confidence in its future.

“Then came silence. It arrived almost imperceptibly, but that silence was the most frightening thing.”

What disappeared with the sea beyond the fishing industry?

Fishing was not just a source of income. It was one of the oldest forms of economic life in the Aral region and had shaped people’s identity for centuries. Archaeological excavations reveal fish represented on ceramics, bronze objects, wall paintings and household items. Fish also appeared in carpets, embroidery, jewellery, woodcarving and textiles. It symbolised water, life and prosperity in an arid region.

For many families, fishing and factory work passed from parents to children. To work at the fish-canning plant was considered respectable. People were proud that their labour mattered to the whole country. When the sea disappeared, traditions that had formed over generations also weakened: techniques and practical knowledge, recipes and fish cuisine, songs, stories and the everyday vocabulary of life by the water.

The psychological loss was equally important. Many residents came to feel that they had been left at the edge of a lifeless desert, far from the world’s attention, with the best part of their lives behind them. When former residents meet today, they often cry. Those tears express joy at seeing one another, but also nostalgia for a world that cannot be restored.

That is why the memories of the last witnesses matter so much. There are still people who remember the port cranes, the crowded waterfront, the smell of fresh fish and the horizon of open water, but their number decreases every year. Their oral histories, family photographs, songs and personal objects are part of the region’s heritage. The Aral Sea is not merely an environmental problem. It is the fate of millions of people.

Tourists now come to photograph the ship cemetery. What do you wish they understood about Muynak?

I am glad that people are interested in our region, but I would like them to see more than an unusual tourist attraction. Behind every ship is a human life. Behind every photograph are thousands of families who lost the world they knew. Every metre of exposed seabed contains the memories of people who sailed from this port, caught fish, built homes, raised children and believed the sea would last forever.

Visitors should try to imagine another picture: an expanse of water reaching the horizon, fishing vessels returning to port, gulls overhead, children laughing on the shore and a town full of movement. Only then can they understand what was lost.

At the same time, Karakalpakstan should not be reduced to catastrophe. This region has been a crossroads of nomadic and settled civilisations for thousands of years. The art of the Aral region carries images of animals, birds, plants, water and steppe. Its carpets, textiles, jewellery, embroidery, carved wood and yurt interiors preserve symbols that connect people to the natural world. Muynak was one part of a much wider cultural landscape.

Your own career began with archaeology. How did Igor Savitsky influence you?

My path into science began in 1979, when I met Igor Vitalyevich Savitsky. He invited me to join an archaeological expedition at Janpyk Kala, one of the great monuments of ancient Khorezm on the right bank of the Amu Darya. That expedition became my school of archaeology. It showed me how rich and insufficiently studied the history of Karakalpakstan was.

Savitsky later invited me to work at the museum in Nukus. He was not only a remarkable artist, collector and museum builder. He taught a whole generation to see culture as an interconnected whole. Through him, I understood that archaeology is not simply excavation. It is a way of understanding people, their worldview and their relationship with nature, history and art.

Karakalpakstan is an open-air museum. It has hundreds of archaeological sites, from antiquity to the late medieval period. Ancient Khorezm stood at the meeting point of major Eurasian trade and cultural routes. Nomadic and settled worlds interacted here, alongside influences from Iran, the Mediterranean, the steppe, Turkic states, the Arab world and Central Asia. Irrigation systems created from at least the first millennium BCE made possible cities, fortresses, palaces and settlements in desert landscapes.

The region’s spiritual history is equally layered. Zoroastrian, Buddhist, early Christian and Islamic traditions all left traces in monuments, rituals, ornament and symbolism. Archaeology records those processes in layers of soil and objects, while oral tradition preserves them in images and stories. Both are necessary.

Savitsky’s importance also lies in the way he built the museum. When he founded it in 1966, he created departments of archaeology and ethnography alongside the art collection. He had first come to Karakalpakstan through the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition, and during fieldwork he produced hundreds of paintings and drawings of archaeological sites, village life, plants, animals and the region’s changing light. He was interested in the smallest details of traditional culture – a ceramic ornament, carved wood, a textile pattern or a piece of metalwork – because he saw each of them as a language through which a people expressed its worldview.

His study of Karakalpak traditional woodcarving remains especially important to me. He showed how the decorative culture of the region emerged from the meeting of settled agricultural traditions and the nomadic culture of the steppe. At the same time, he understood that many Russian artists of the 1920s and 1930s had been erased from public life by repression and ideological pressure. He largely gave up his own artistic career to find, protect and collect their work. That devotion created one of the world’s most important collections of Russian avant-garde and early Soviet art.

He was equally committed to the emerging Karakalpak school of painting. Kydyrbay Saipov, then the region’s only professionally trained artist, became his close friend and ally. Together they encouraged younger artists, organised exhibitions and helped create an artistic environment in which remarkable talents could develop. Among the painters associated with this generation were Zhollybay Izentaev, Zholdasbek Kutymuratov, Abdulla Erimbetov, Bazarbay Serekeev, Aman Atabaev, Murat Khudaybergenov, Daribay Tazhimuratov and Amangeldy Utegenov.

My strongest memory of Savitsky is still from the expeditions. He was modest and extraordinarily hardworking. He could spend hours examining a ceramic vessel, an ornament or a fragment of cloth, explaining its symbols and the techniques used to make it. Every find and every meeting with a traditional craftsperson delighted him. He did not merely study culture; he lived through it.

Which landscapes or historical places best reveal the depth of Karakalpakstan?

The Ustyurt Plateau is unlike anywhere else. Its chinks, cliffs and canyons are magnificent, but the landscape also contains ancient and medieval burial mounds, necropolises, caravanserais, wells and signal towers. They recall the routes that connected East and West across an extremely demanding environment. The saiga is a symbol of Ustyurt, and images of these animals appear in rock art thousands of years old.

The former seabed is also becoming a new and extraordinary landscape. It attracts ecologists, geologists, archaeologists and palaeontologists. Along former shorelines, people find fossil shells, marine remains and, according to local accounts, even the teeth of ancient sharks – reminders that the geological history of this territory reaches back to seas far older than the Aral.

Karakalpakstan is therefore much more than a disaster zone. It is a place where one can read the history of the Earth and the history of human civilisation in the same landscape. Natural and cultural heritage are inseparable here.

Can the region recover environmentally, and what has changed through the planting of saxaul?

When the sea dried, its exposed bottom became a saline desert. Dust and salt storms carried sand, salt and chemical residues over enormous distances. Planting saxaul, kandym and other desert shrubs was one of the most effective ways to stabilise the soil. After decades of work, vegetation now covers significant areas of the former seabed, reducing the intensity of dust and salt storms and creating conditions for new ecosystems. Some animals and birds are returning.

This does not mean the crisis is solved. Safe drinking water, efficient water management, public health, education, transport and sustainable employment remain fundamental. Climate change adds pressure by altering rainfall, accelerating glacier loss in the Pamirs and Tien Shan, and changing the flow of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. The full restoration of the former sea is an extremely difficult question and cannot depend on one country alone. It requires regional cooperation and rational water use.

The most important lesson is that economic development must not again be built on the assumption that nature is inexhaustible. Any new investment should create dignified local employment, use water responsibly and meet high environmental standards. The people who live here must benefit directly.

Whose work should people read or see if they want to understand Karakalpakstan beyond the Aral Sea disaster?

First, I would name Berdakh, the great Karakalpak poet. His work became one of the spiritual foundations of the national culture. It speaks about the history of the people, moral values, love of the native land and the search for justice and freedom. No less important is Ajiniyaz, one of Central Asia’s major poets and thinkers, whose writing celebrated solidarity between peoples, humanism and respect for human dignity.

In the visual arts, one must of course return to Igor Savitsky and to the artists whose work he helped preserve. Rafael Matevosyan is also indispensable to the memory of the Aral Sea. For more than half a century he painted its water, boats, fishermen and everyday life. Gulls appear repeatedly in his work. After the sea had largely disappeared, he would visit the exposed seabed and say: ‘I believe my gulls will return.’ Those words were later inscribed on his grave.

There is also a deeply personal figure I do not want to omit: my uncle, the Karakalpak writer and translator Shaniyaz Mambetmuratov. He died when he was only 43, but he left an important mark on the literature and culture of Karakalpakstan. The Aral Sea was at the centre of his writing – its open waters, the Amu Darya, fishermen, the landscape and the lives, labour and hopes of ordinary people.

He was extraordinarily well read. It seemed that there was hardly a book in Muynak’s municipal library that he had not opened. He translated foreign authors into Karakalpak, hoping both to introduce local readers to world literature and to show outsiders the richness of his own culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, he used to say that one day Europeans would come to Muynak and the Aral Sea to discover the beauty, history and culture of this region. At the time, that sounded almost impossible.

Part of his work was translated into German and a collection was published in Germany, although he did not live to see it. In a sense, his prediction has now come true: people arrive from across the world, not only to witness an ecological catastrophe but also to learn about Karakalpakstan’s literature, culture, history and inhabitants. As long as his books are read, his voice continues to speak.

Dospanov shared two of his uncle’s poems, translated here, especially for Novastan, from Karakalpak via Russian.

The Seagull

1959

— Seagull, soaring high across the sky,
You seem a messenger of my love.
Why do you circle anxiously above me,
Calling me once more towards the seashore?

— Seagull, flying through the blue of heaven,
Why do you fill my heart with restless thoughts?
Had I not caressed the waves of the sea,
Would spring ever have returned to these shores?

The Blue Sea

1958

Do not judge me harshly when I praise the sea;
Simply look towards the blue edge of the earth.
Like a festive salute marking a great victory,
The blue sea laughs before my eyes.

This blue sea is my native Aral;
With all my soul, I breathe its fresh wind.
And should you wish to know what makes it so majestic,
Know this: within it live both my destiny and my age.

Who else should journalists speak to while the memory of the old Muynak is still alive?

They should begin with the remaining members of the older generation: former fishermen, ship captains, workers from the fish-canning plant and residents of the coastal settlements. They remember the cranes, boats, factory, crowded waterfront, fresh fish and uninterrupted horizon. Such memories cannot be reconstructed from official archives once the witnesses are gone.

It is equally important to record artists, musicians, traditional craftspeople and guardians of oral culture. Young ecologists, archaeologists, museum professionals, historians and civic activists should also be heard, because they connect the past with the region’s future. And journalists should not overlook teachers, farmers, doctors, students and women raising families. The real history of Karakalpakstan is made from many ordinary lives, not only from famous names.

We are among the last living witnesses of the full Aral Sea. That creates a duty to preserve oral testimony, family photographs, private archives, household objects, songs and stories. These materials are as important to the region’s heritage as archaeological monuments and museum collections.

What gives you hope when you think about the future of Muynak and Karakalpakstan?

Above all, people give me hope. Despite everything this region has experienced, its inhabitants have not lost their love for their land or their willingness to work for its future. Human resilience has always been the main strength of the Aral region.

I see a younger generation studying foreign languages, ecology, archaeology, art, museum work, science and information technology. Many of them do not want to turn away from their history. They want to preserve it and show the world that Karakalpakstan is a region of extraordinary cultural heritage and future possibilities.

The world’s growing interest also matters. Archaeologists, artists, scientists, photographers, travellers and students come not only because of the Aral Sea, but also for ancient Khorezm, Ustyurt, the Savitsky Museum and Karakalpak culture.

If I had unlimited resources, I would set three priorities. The first would be human welfare: drinking water, health care, education, infrastructure and good jobs, particularly so that young people can imagine a future here. The second would be ecological restoration and responsible use of natural resources, including water-saving technologies and continued planting on the former seabed. The third would be culture, science and international cooperation. I would like Karakalpakstan to become a major centre for archaeology, museum partnerships, artistic residencies, environmental education and cultural tourism.

The future cannot rest only on natural resources or only on economic growth. It must bring people, nature and culture into balance.

Is there one story you would most like European readers to carry with them?

I would tell them the story of the Camel Trail. Elders said that long before modern roads, caravan routes crossed Ustyurt and the shores of the Aral Sea. Camels connected Khorezm with the Volga region, Kazakhstan and lands farther east and west. They sensed the route better than people and could find wells and caravanserais even at night, in sandstorms or fog.

One trail, used by generations of caravans, led towards the Aral Sea. It was not merely a road. It carried trade, encounters, knowledge and culture. Merchants, craftsmen, poets and pilgrims travelled along it. Goods moved with songs, legends, ideas and traditions.

As the sea retreated, harbours vanished and routes were covered by sand. Yet people say the Camel Trail did not disappear. It survived in memory. You may no longer see it on a map, but you can feel it when travelling through the region. It is an invisible thread between past and present.

For me, the legend means that the most important roads do not cross only deserts and steppes. They pass through human memory. Today, the trail can acquire a new meaning. Where caravans once carried goods, it can now carry research, cultural projects, art and friendship between peoples. It can become a symbol of dialogue between Central Asia and Europe.

Perhaps the trail no longer exists on the ground. But while memory remains alive, the road never ends.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post “My Childhood Was Spent on the Shore of a Sea That No Longer Exists” appeared first on Novastan English.

The world’s largest inland body of water is shrinking. From disappearing sturgeon and stranded ports to an unreliable trans-Caspian ferry and borders drawn around a moving shoreline, the consequences extend far beyond the environment.

For travellers hoping to cross the Caspian Sea between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, the journey has never resembled an ordinary international ferry connection.

Read more on Novastan: Hundreds of lifeless Caspian seals washed ashore in Turkmenistan

There is generally no dependable passenger timetable. The vessels are primarily designed to transport freight, railway wagons and vehicles, accepting individual passengers when operational conditions permit. Travellers may be told to wait in Aktau or Kuryk until sufficient cargo has accumulated, or to make their way to Alat, approximately 70 kilometres south of Baku, without knowing exactly when their ship will depart. Recent travel accounts continue to describe waits lasting several days.

This unreliability predates the current environmental crisis. It reflects freight-centred operations, poor passenger information and limited coordination between ports. But the difficulties now facing Caspian navigation are no longer only organisational.

The water itself is retreating.

At Aktau and Kuryk, the Kazakh ports that connect Central Asia to Azerbaijan, the Caucasus and Europe, falling water levels are making navigation channels shallower and increasing the need for dredging – the removal of mud, sand and sediment from the seabed to maintain sufficient depth for ships. Vessels designed for deeper water may have to carry lighter loads. Infrastructure built for an earlier shoreline risks becoming progressively less effective.

The contrast is striking. Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, the European Union and international financial institutions increasingly promote the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, better known as the Middle Corridor, as a strategic bridge between Asia and Europe. Yet the sea at the centre of that corridor is becoming physically less navigable.

The Caspian has fluctuated throughout recorded history, rising and falling in response to changes in river flow, precipitation, temperature and evaporation. But since the mid-1990s, its level has followed a predominantly downward trajectory. Satellite-based research has estimated a decline of nearly seven centimetres annually between 1996 and 2015, accelerating to approximately ten centimetres annually between 2006 and 2021.

The eventual scale remains uncertain. Scientific projections differ according to future greenhouse-gas emissions, river inflows and the models used. But even a decline of five metres would transform the northern and eastern Caspian, where the water is exceptionally shallow. A fall of five to ten metres could critically disrupt ecosystems, remove most of the effective coverage of existing protected areas and leave billions of dollars of industrial and civil infrastructure obsolete.

The Caspian is not about to disappear entirely. Its southern basin reaches depths of more than 1,000 metres. But a body of water does not need to vanish to cease performing the functions on which surrounding societies depend. Ports can become inaccessible. Wetlands and fishing grounds can disappear. Ships can lose carrying capacity. Settlements built around the coast can find themselves kilometres from the water.

For Central Asia, the retreating Caspian is becoming an environmental crisis, an economic constraint and a test of whether regional governments can cooperate before physical change overtakes political planning.

A sea dependent on distant rivers

The Caspian has no natural outlet to the ocean. Water enters through rivers and precipitation and leaves primarily through evaporation. Its level is therefore determined by the balance between inflow and water lost from its surface.

The system is also highly unequal. Although more than one hundred rivers flow into the Caspian, the Volga provides the overwhelming majority of its river water. The Ural, Kura and several smaller rivers supply much of the remainder.

This means that the fate of the Caspian is affected by decisions taken far from its shores. Reservoir management, hydropower, irrigation, industrial consumption and urban water use throughout the Volga basin can influence the quantity and timing of water reaching the sea.

It would nevertheless be misleading to attribute the present decline solely to dams or Russian water management. Rising temperatures increase evaporation from the Caspian’s vast surface, while changing precipitation and runoff affect its drainage basin. The water balance of a closed inland sea is especially sensitive to sustained warming.

The northern basin is the most immediately exposed. Much of it is only a few metres deep, meaning that a relatively modest vertical fall can produce a dramatic horizontal retreat. In Kazakhstan, new stretches of exposed seabed are already emerging around the northeastern coast and the Ural River delta.

Read more on Novastan: Mer Caspienne : sommet décisif au Kazakhstan

These areas are not empty margins. They contain wetlands, bird habitats, fish nurseries and communities whose economic life developed around access to the water.

As the seabed dries, another problem may emerge. Salt, industrial contaminants and other pollutants accumulated in coastal sediments can be exposed to the wind. The experience of the Aral Sea has shown how a disappearing shoreline can become a source of dust carrying salt and toxic residues across large distances.

The comparison between the Aral and Caspian seas must be used carefully. The destruction of the Aral Sea was driven principally by the massive diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for irrigated agriculture. The Caspian is vastly larger, and climate-driven evaporation plays a much more significant role in its decline.

But the political lesson is relevant. Environmental catastrophe does not begin when the last water disappears. It begins when ecological and economic systems become unable to adapt to cumulative damage.

When the Soviet Union tried to close the Caspian’s “black throat”

The idea that the Caspian’s water level could be controlled through a decisive engineering intervention is not new.

On the Turkmen coast, a narrow strait connects the Caspian to Garabogazköl, also known by its Russian name, Kara-Bogaz-Gol. The vast, shallow lagoon is exceptionally saline. Caspian water flows into it and then evaporates, leaving behind concentrated salts and minerals.

During the Soviet period, planners came to see Garabogazköl as a leak through which the Caspian was losing valuable water. As the sea declined during the 1970s, the lagoon’s intense evaporation appeared to offer a straightforward explanation and an equally straightforward solution: close the channel.

A dam completed in 1980 blocked the connection between the Caspian and the lagoon. Without a continuous inflow, Garabogazköl rapidly contracted. By the middle of the decade, much of it had become an exposed salt basin. The ecological consequences extended beyond the lagoon itself, as winds carried salt from the dry surface across the surrounding territory.

Read more on Novastan: Agreement between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan paves the way for Trans-Caspian Pipeline

In 1992, shortly after Turkmenistan became independent, the barrier was demolished and Caspian water was allowed to return.

The episode is more than an environmental curiosity. It shows the danger of approaching the Caspian as a hydraulic machine whose individual components can be blocked or redirected without wider consequences.

Closing Garabogazköl did not provide a durable solution to the Caspian’s fluctuations. Instead, it transferred the crisis from one body of water to another. By the time the lagoon was reconnected, the Caspian itself had begun rising again, illustrating how poorly its changing water balance had been understood.

The history matters today because falling levels may once again generate proposals for major engineering responses. Some ideas envisage regulating river flows, diverting water between basins or restricting the movement of water into highly evaporative areas. Others concentrate on dredging, artificial channels and the relocation of ports.

Some adaptation will be unavoidable. But Garabogazköl offers a warning against solutions that treat one symptom in isolation. The Caspian is an interconnected ecological system, not merely a reservoir to be managed for maximum economic utility.

The disappearance of the sturgeon

No species is more closely associated with the Caspian than the sturgeon.

For centuries, sturgeon fisheries supported communities around the sea and supplied the caviar trade for which the region became internationally famous. The fish migrate between the Caspian and its rivers, depending on access to spawning grounds in waterways such as the Volga and Ural.

Their decline began long before the present acceleration in falling water levels. Dams restricted access to spawning grounds, while pollution, overfishing and the illegal caviar trade placed enormous pressure on populations. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the weakening of fisheries management and expansion of poaching further devastated stocks.

Official sturgeon landings across the Caspian fell from approximately 28,500 tonnes in 1985 to around 1,345 tonnes in 2005. More recent assessments describe Caspian sturgeon populations as being in critical condition.

Read more on Novastan: La mer Caspienne en état d’urgence

Hatcheries have released millions of young sturgeon in an attempt to compensate for the loss of natural reproduction. But stocking programmes cannot fully replace functioning rivers, wetlands and coastal habitats.

The shrinking sea adds another layer of pressure. The northern Caspian and its river deltas provide shallow feeding and nursery environments. As these areas retreat, salinity changes and habitats fragment, populations already damaged by decades of exploitation lose more of the conditions they need to recover.

The decline of the sturgeon therefore captures the cumulative character of the Caspian crisis. Climate change is not acting on an untouched ecosystem. It is amplifying damage created by dams, hydrocarbons, industrial pollution, illegal fishing and weak regional governance.

The loss is also cultural and economic. The sturgeon is not merely a biodiversity indicator. It represents a way of life that once connected fishing communities from Kazakhstan and Russia to Azerbaijan and Iran. Its disappearance would mark the collapse of one of the Caspian’s most distinctive shared traditions.

The Middle Corridor meets a shallower sea

The economic consequences of declining water levels are becoming particularly important as the Caspian assumes a larger place in Eurasian transport policy.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine increased European and Asian interest in routes that avoid Russian territory. The Middle Corridor carries goods from China and Central Asia across Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Türkiye toward European markets.

Its maritime section depends primarily on the ports of Aktau and Kuryk in Kazakhstan and Baku’s port facilities at Alat in Azerbaijan. Turkmenbashi also has the potential to connect Turkmenistan and neighbouring countries to trans-Caspian trade.

International assessments have warned that falling Caspian levels may require continued dredging, vessels with shallower draughts and improved navigation systems.

Read more on Novastan: By the Caspian Sea

These are not marginal technical adjustments. Ships unable to enter fully loaded carry less cargo at a higher unit cost. Repeated dredging requires sustained expenditure and can create further environmental disruption. Port infrastructure may have to be extended or relocated as the shoreline changes.

There is also a risk that investment decisions will be based on a static understanding of the sea. A terminal planned according to today’s water level may be poorly adapted to conditions two or three decades from now. Infrastructure with an expected operational life of fifty years must now be assessed against several possible Caspian futures.

The unreliable passenger connection between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan exposes another weakness in official corridor narratives. For governments and financial institutions, the Caspian is often represented as a segment on a trade map: containers arrive at one port, cross the water and continue westward.

For travellers, the experience is far less seamless. The absence of a regular passenger timetable, uncertain departures and long waits demonstrate that the Caspian has not yet become an integrated regional transport space.

Falling water levels did not cause these organisational failures. But they can compound them by making navigation and port operations more expensive and less predictable.

If the Middle Corridor is intended to become a durable alternative between Europe and Asia, its planners must prepare not only for greater freight volumes but for the transformation of the sea itself.

Legal boundaries around a moving shoreline

For much of the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, diplomatic arguments about the Caspian concentrated on whether it should legally be treated as a sea or a lake.

The distinction mattered because it could affect how the surface, seabed, fisheries and hydrocarbon resources were divided. Russia and Iran were joined after 1991 by three newly independent coastal states – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – each seeking access to offshore resources and control over maritime space.

The five countries eventually avoided choosing between the conventional categories. The Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea, signed in Aktau in 2018, created a special regime designed specifically for the basin.

It allows each state to establish territorial waters extending up to 15 nautical miles, followed by a ten-nautical-mile fishing zone. The remaining surface is intended for common use, while neighbouring states negotiate the division of sectors of the seabed. The Convention also excludes the military forces of non-Caspian states.

Read more on Novastan: Kazakhstan continues to assert itself as the “key link” in the Middle Corridor

The agreement was a major diplomatic achievement, but it was developed primarily around security, navigation, fisheries and hydrocarbons. It assumed that the sea’s basic physical geography would remain broadly recognisable.

A retreating shoreline complicates that assumption.

Territorial waters are measured from coastal baselines. As the water withdraws, islands may become connected to the mainland, bays may disappear and newly exposed land may alter the practical geography of coastal access. Fishing grounds and ecologically important habitats can shift away from the zones intended to regulate or protect them.

Existing bilateral seabed agreements are unlikely to be automatically overturned each time the shoreline moves. Yet practical questions will multiply. Who is responsible for newly exposed seabed? How should states manage wetlands that migrate across administrative or protected-area boundaries? What happens when navigation channels must be repeatedly dredged or moved?

The Convention has also not yet entered into force. As of the latest publicly confirmed position, Iran remained the only littoral state that had not completed ratification, with the issue expected to feature ahead of the Caspian summit planned in Tehran in August 2026.

The Caspian states spent more than two decades negotiating how to divide and use the sea. They are now confronting a different problem: how to apply those rules when the physical sea retreats from the lines drawn around it.

Cooperation without sufficient urgency

The main regional framework for environmental cooperation is the Tehran Convention, signed in 2003 by Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan.

At COP29 in Baku, representatives of the five states formally recognised the serious ecological, economic and social consequences of declining water levels. Work has since continued on a regional action plan, including meetings during 2025 and a high-level dialogue in Astana in April 2026.

This recognition is important, but it does not yet amount to a sufficiently ambitious adaptation strategy.

The region needs comparable hydrological data, shared climate scenarios and infrastructure planning based on different possible levels of decline. Coastal protected areas must be capable of moving with habitats rather than remaining fixed around today’s shoreline. Ports require coordinated investment, while fishing communities need support as traditional livelihoods become less viable.

The Volga’s importance makes Russian participation indispensable. Yet cooperation is constrained by sanctions, the war against Ukraine and distrust between the Caspian states. Governments also have competing interests in oil and gas production, transport corridors, fisheries and territorial control.

Environmental cooperation cannot avoid these political realities. Nor can engineering adaptation replace efforts to reduce pollution, protect river ecosystems and limit global warming.

The European Union also has a direct interest. It is promoting the Middle Corridor, closer economic links with Central Asia, renewable-energy connections and partnerships concerning critical raw materials.

Those policies cannot treat the Caspian merely as a neutral transport surface. European support for ports and logistics should incorporate long-term water-level projections, environmental monitoring and biodiversity protection. Otherwise, international institutions risk financing infrastructure built for a Caspian that no longer exists.

A sea does not have to disappear

The retreat of the Caspian is already visible, but its political consequences remain easier to postpone than its physical ones.

Governments can commission another study, organise another regional meeting or dredge another shipping channel. Each action may be useful. None resolves the fundamental mismatch between a rapidly changing environment and institutions designed around stability.

Garabogazköl demonstrated the danger of attempting to correct the Caspian through a single dramatic intervention. The collapse of sturgeon populations shows what happens when cumulative ecological damage is allowed to continue for decades. The Aktau-Alat ferry reveals how distant the region remains from the seamless connectivity presented in official strategies. The unfinished legal Convention illustrates how slowly political structures move compared with the shoreline.

The Caspian will not vanish like the Aral Sea. But its northern and eastern coasts could be transformed beyond recognition. Wetlands may disappear, ports may be stranded and communities may lose access to the water that shaped their economies and identities.

What remains uncertain is the eventual magnitude of the decline. Its direction is no longer seriously in doubt.

Central Asia already knows that a disappearing inland sea can be treated as an economic sacrifice until the damage becomes irreversible. The Caspian offers the region another warning – this time while there is still enough water, infrastructure and ecological life left to protect.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post The Caspian Sea Is Retreating. Central Asia Is Not Ready appeared first on Novastan English.

As Kazakhstan prepares to elect its new Kurultai, women are becoming increasingly visible in political institutions across Central Asia. Their presence, however, still falls sharply as offices acquire greater executive, territorial and economic authority.

Kazakhstan’s political parties have selected their candidates for the country’s first election to the new unicameral Kurultai, scheduled for 23 August. Seven parties submitted lists before nominations closed on 13 July, and the Central Election Commission has begun registering them ahead of the formal campaign.

Read more on Novastan: Kazakhstan’s Next Elections: Between Reform and Managed Competition

The election will help determine the shape of Kazakhstan’s new political system following the entry into force of its new constitution. It also raises a more specific question: what place will women occupy in the redesigned parliament?

Kazakhstan requires at least 30 percent of candidates on each party list to belong collectively to three categories: women, people aged 35 or under, and persons with disabilities. The same combined threshold applies when seats are distributed. The quota therefore guarantees representation for the three categories together, but no fixed proportion specifically for women.

All seven parties say their submitted lists meet the legal requirement. But the combined nature of the quota makes the number of women selected – and their position within the lists – particularly important.

The question reaches beyond Kazakhstan. Across Central Asia, women are more visible in politics than they were a generation ago. Quotas and electoral reforms have increased their representation in parliament, while women now lead legislative chambers and hold prominent positions in governments and presidential administrations.

Yet the closer one moves towards executive command, territorial authority and control over strategic areas of government, the more rapidly women disappear.

Women may occupy a substantial share of parliamentary seats, work throughout public administrations and sit on local councils while remaining much rarer among governors, mayors, district heads, party leaders and the ministers responsible for finance, energy and security.

Central Asia has therefore made more progress in bringing women inside political institutions than in placing them at the head of those institutions.

Parliament is the easiest place to count

Parliamentary representation provides the clearest evidence of change.

Women currently hold 58 of the 148 filled seats in the lower house of Uzbekistan’s parliament, or 39.2 percent. In Kyrgyzstan, women occupy 30 of the 90 seats in the Jogorku Kenesh, exactly one third of the chamber. Tajikistan’s lower house includes 18 women among its 62 members, or 29 percent, while women hold 31 of the 122 currently filled seats in Turkmenistan’s Assembly, equivalent to 25.4 percent.

These figures compare favourably with the global average of 27.5 percent recorded at the beginning of 2026.

Kyrgyzstan offers the most striking recent example of how electoral rules can transform representation. Its November 2025 parliamentary election introduced a system under which each three-member constituency had to return at least one woman and at least one man. Women’s share of seats rose by 12.9 percentage points – the largest increase recorded in any country holding parliamentary elections in 2025.

The change is significant. It created a much larger group of female MPs and could eventually expand the pool of women with the experience and public profile required for ministerial, party and executive positions.

Read more on Novastan: The Vocabulary of Reform: Why Central Asia Is Reimagining Its Political Traditions

But the Kyrgyz election also illustrates the limits of using gender statistics in isolation. The vote took place amid restrictions on political competition and pressure on opposition figures and independent media. A parliament can become more gender-balanced without necessarily becoming more politically pluralistic.

The same caution applies elsewhere in the region. A large share of female parliamentarians is an important measure of inclusion, but it does not by itself reveal how independently MPs can operate, how candidates are selected or how effectively the legislature can scrutinise the executive.

Representation remains meaningful. It is simply not the same thing as power.

What quotas can – and cannot – change

Quotas matter because political recruitment rarely corrects its own inequalities.

Parties tend to select candidates from familiar professional, business and administrative networks. Across Central Asia, these networks remain heavily male, particularly at the senior levels from which candidates for powerful positions are drawn.

Women may also face unequal access to campaign financing, fewer opportunities to develop relationships with party leaders and local officials, and social expectations that continue to place a greater share of family responsibilities on them. Political life can expose women to forms of scrutiny and harassment that their male colleagues are less likely to encounter.

Well-designed quotas can interrupt this cycle. Kyrgyzstan’s experience shows that rules affecting actual election outcomes can produce rapid change. Candidate quotas alone are less reliable: parties may formally include women while placing them in weaker positions or giving them little influence over party decisions.

Read more on Novastan: Women’s Day in Kazakhstan: hundreds gather for rally in Almaty

Kazakhstan’s current system raises a different problem. By grouping women, young people and persons with disabilities within one 30 percent threshold, the law allows parties considerable flexibility in deciding how that quota is filled. A list can comply with the rule without allocating any predetermined share to women.

The first party list registered in the current campaign illustrates the limitation of the available statistics. Respublica’s list contains 75 candidates, of whom 38 – 50.7 percent – collectively belong to the three quota categories. The official figure does not say how many of those 38 candidates are women.

Quotas can open doors. They do not determine what happens after women enter the institution.

They cannot guarantee committee leadership, influence over legislation or access to senior party structures. Nor can they ensure that parliamentary experience becomes a route towards executive authority.

Women ministers – but in which ministries?

The number of women in government matters, but the portfolios they receive often reveal more than the total.

Across Central Asia, female ministers and senior officials are regularly associated with education, healthcare, culture, labour, social protection, family policy and women’s affairs. These are substantial fields of government, frequently involving large budgets and responsibilities that directly affect millions of citizens.

Yet women remain much less visible in defence, interior affairs, energy, finance, infrastructure and the institutions closest to presidential decision-making.

Read more on Novastan: Hitting the road: the first female bus drivers in Uzbekistan

This reflects a wider division in political life. Women are frequently considered appropriate leaders in sectors connected to education, care, families and social welfare, while coercive power, natural resources and macroeconomic management remain overwhelmingly associated with men.

The distinction should not be used to dismiss social-policy portfolios as unimportant. Education, healthcare and social protection are central functions of the state. The question is why women’s access to government so often remains concentrated within them.

Counting ministers without examining their responsibilities can therefore produce a flattering but incomplete picture. Five women managing social portfolios do not represent the same distribution of authority as women heading finance, energy, the interior ministry or a presidential administration.

The issue is not simply how many women sit around the cabinet table. It is which parts of the state they have been entrusted to direct.

Inside local government, but rarely at its head

The divide becomes even clearer at the local level.

International comparisons usually focus on women elected to local councils. But “local government” can describe several very different positions: councillors, municipal employees, deputy mayors, village leaders, district chiefs and regional governors.

Combining them under a single percentage obscures the difference between working within an administration and controlling it.

National and Russian-language sources across Central Asia show that women are far from absent from local political life. They serve in representative councils, work throughout municipal administrations and occupy deputy positions. In some countries, women are institutionally assigned responsibility for family or gender policy within local government.

But women’s representation falls substantially at the top of the territorial hierarchy.

Read more on Novastan: In Tajikistan, daughters-in-law face a hidden system of control

In Kazakhstan, women form a large part of the public administration and are represented in local maslikhats. Yet regional akim posts and the leadership of the country’s largest cities have remained overwhelmingly male. The gap between women’s presence inside local government and their access to the post of akim is much wider than parliamentary figures alone would suggest.

The distinction is particularly important because akims are not merely local administrators. They oversee budgets, land use, development projects, public services and the implementation of presidential policy across their territories.

Kazakhstan’s gradual introduction of direct elections for rural and some district-level akims may create new routes into executive office. The Central Election Commission publishes information on elections for villages, settlements, rural districts and district-level cities, making it possible to trace the number of female candidates and winners over time.

In Uzbekistan, women hold a significant proportion of seats in local Kengashes and are systematically represented within local executives through deputy hokim positions dealing with family and women’s affairs.

This arrangement guarantees women a place within regional, district and city administrations. But it also places them in a specifically gendered field of responsibility. A female deputy hokim dealing with family policy does not exercise the same authority as the hokim responsible for the administration as a whole.

The system therefore combines inclusion with occupational segregation: women are present, but their institutional role is often defined in advance.

Kyrgyzstan presents another striking contrast. Women now occupy one third of the national parliament, but they remain considerably less visible among mayors, district akims and the heads of rural administrations. Its parliamentary success has not yet been reproduced across the territorial executive.

Tajikistan also maintains substantial female participation within public institutions and local representative bodies, while women frequently serve as deputy chairs in regional, city and district administrations. Far fewer reach the post of chair, where general executive authority is concentrated.

In Turkmenistan, women hold around one quarter of parliamentary seats and the Assembly itself is chaired by a woman. But the leadership of the country’s regions, districts and principal cities remains heavily male. Official appointments can be traced through presidential decrees and reports of government meetings, although the information is rarely consolidated into a single accessible gender breakdown.

The regional pattern is therefore not that women are simply excluded from local government.

It is that they often enter as councillors, administrators or deputies while men continue to dominate the offices that command entire territories.

How political parties imagine women

Statistics reveal where women are. Political language can reveal what parties and governments expect them to do.

Across Central Asia, official programmes regularly discuss women in connection with maternal health, family welfare, employment, small businesses, poverty reduction and protection from violence. Female entrepreneurship has become an especially common theme, combining economic participation with an image of individual responsibility that rarely challenges the wider distribution of political power.

Women appear less frequently as a political constituency whose access to decision-making should be expanded across all policy areas.

The distinction is visible in the way political documents frame women. They may be presented as:

• mothers and carers;
• entrepreneurs and workers;
• vulnerable citizens requiring protection;
• guardians of family and national values;
• beneficiaries of social programmes;
• political leaders and autonomous decision-makers.

These categories are not mutually exclusive. Family policy, childcare and social protection directly influence women’s ability to enter politics and remain in public life.

The problem arises when women’s political legitimacy is explained primarily through their family role. A programme may speak extensively about “supporting women” while saying little about candidate recruitment, party leadership, campaign finance or access to executive office.

A genuine gender-mainstreaming approach would not confine women to a dedicated section on family or social affairs. It would examine how taxation, transport, regional development, agriculture, employment policy and state budgets affect women and men differently.

The manifestos submitted for Kazakhstan’s Kurultai election will offer an immediate test. Will parties discuss women primarily as families, workers and beneficiaries, or will they set out concrete proposals concerning women’s political careers and access to decision-making?

Prominent women – and different paths to influence

Central Asia has produced several highly visible female political figures, but their careers illustrate different forms of authority.

Roza Otunbayeva remains the region’s only woman to have served as head of state. She became Kyrgyzstan’s interim president following the 2010 uprising and oversaw a constitutional transition during an exceptionally turbulent period. Her career demonstrated that a woman could reach the highest office, but it did not establish a lasting regional pattern.

Tanzila Narbaeva, chair of Uzbekistan’s Senate, represents a different route to prominence. She has held senior state positions and has become closely associated with labour, social policy and women’s rights. Her role makes her one of the region’s most institutionally prominent female politicians.

Dunyagozel Gulmanova, the speaker of Turkmenistan’s Assembly, similarly occupies one of the country’s highest formal offices. Yet the limited autonomy of Turkmenistan’s parliament makes it difficult to equate formal rank with independent political influence.

Saida Mirziyoyeva has emerged as one of Uzbekistan’s most prominent public officials through senior roles connected to the presidential administration and her visibility in areas including communications, education, culture and social policy. As the daughter of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, she also holds a distinctive position within Uzbekistan’s highly centralised presidential system. Her profile reflects both the senior institutional responsibilities she has assumed and her proximity to the executive centre.

Read more on Novastan: Kirghizie : Des émirs féminins à la présidente

Her case should not be reduced either to a celebratory story of female advancement or to family ties alone. It instead illustrates how access to the highest levels of political influence in Central Asia can depend on a combination of official position, presidential confidence and proximity to the centre of power.

The region’s most visible women have reached prominence through very different paths: elections, administrative careers, parliamentary leadership, political upheaval and close association with presidential institutions.

A list of “famous women” therefore tells readers little unless it also asks where their authority comes from, what they control and whether their careers create opportunities for other women.

Beyond counting seats

Sustainable Development Goal 5 calls for women’s “full and effective participation” and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making. The wording is useful because “effective” participation cannot be measured by presence alone.

A fuller assessment must ask whether women:

• lead political parties;
• influence candidate selection;
• chair powerful parliamentary committees;
• control economic and security portfolios;
• govern regions, districts and cities;
• have access to campaign financing;
• can criticise executive policy;
• receive serious rather than gendered media coverage;
• can participate without harassment or intimidation.

It must also take account of the political environment itself.

A tightly controlled state can appoint women to senior offices while limiting the autonomy of all political actors. A more competitive system can still expose female candidates to discrimination, abuse and unequal access to resources.

Gender representation is therefore neither meaningless symbolism nor a complete measure of political openness. It is one important part of a larger political picture.

Read more on Novastan: Saïda Mirzioïeva, la fille du président à l’ascension politique fulgurante

Across Central Asia, the progress is real. Women occupy more parliamentary seats, electoral rules are beginning to alter candidate selection, and female officials have reached positions that would have been exceptional a generation ago.

But the gains are distributed unevenly.

Women are more likely to sit in a legislature than to govern a region. They are more likely to work inside a city administration than to serve as mayor. They are more likely to manage education or social policy than finance, energy or security. They are frequently praised as mothers, carers and community figures, but less often treated as unrestricted contenders for executive power.

Kazakhstan’s new Kurultai election offers a timely opportunity to observe this distinction.

The proportion of women elected on 23 August will provide one visible measure of change. The more consequential test will come later: which committees they lead, how much influence they exercise within their parties, and whether parliamentary representation becomes a route towards the institutions that command budgets, territories and strategic areas of government.

Across Central Asia, women have increasingly entered political institutions. The next question is whether those institutions are prepared to share power with them.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post More Women in Central Asian Politics – But Where Is the Power? appeared first on Novastan English.

In Queens, a few words can contain the history of an entire community. A guest may be welcomed with xush omaded, an expression immediately recognisable to Tajik speakers. At the table may be osh, the regional rice dish better known internationally as plov, while grandparents move between Bukhori and Russian and their grandchildren answer in English.

The scene belongs unmistakably to New York. Its vocabulary, food and social rhythms, however, lead back to Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Dushanbe.

Read more on Novastan: How Central Asia became home for the Koryo-Saram

Over the final decades of the Soviet Union and the turbulent years that followed its collapse, most Bukharan Jews left Central Asia. Large communities developed abroad, most visibly in the New York neighbourhoods of Forest Hills and Rego Park. Others took root in Vienna, Toronto and a number of smaller centres. The result is an unusual geographical reversal: a culture bearing the name of Bukhara now has some of its most dynamic institutions thousands of kilometres away from the city itself.

Novastan has previously explored the debated origins of the Jewish presence in Central Asia and the historical importance of Bukhara and Khwarezm. The contemporary story begins where those histories leave off. How does a community remain Bukharan after leaving Bukhara? And what links do Bukharan Jews still maintain with the Central Asian societies from which they emerged?

A community whose centre moved

Despite their name, Bukharan Jews did not come exclusively from Bukhara. Communities developed across the territories that today constitute Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with important centres in Samarkand, Tashkent, Kokand, the Ferghana Valley and Dushanbe. “Bukharan” gradually became a collective designation for a wider Central Asian Jewish civilisation shaped by Persian-speaking urban culture, Jewish religious traditions and long interaction with Uzbek, Tajik and other neighbouring populations.

Migration began well before the Soviet collapse, but accelerated dramatically from the 1970s onwards. By the 1990s, the economic uncertainty accompanying independence, the weakening of Soviet-era professional and social structures, and the opportunity to reunite with relatives abroad encouraged much of the remaining population to depart.

The community did not simply disperse. In several cities, Bukharan Jews recreated dense networks of synagogues, schools, businesses, newspapers, restaurants, cultural organisations and family associations. Queens became the most visible North American example: a place where Central Asian food, music and communal life remained present not only inside private homes, but in streets, shops, banquet halls and religious institutions.

Bukhara had not been reproduced exactly. The new community was increasingly American, urban and outward-looking. Yet it retained practices and relationships that distinguished it from both the surrounding population and other Jewish communities.

Bukhori: a Central Asian language abroad

Perhaps no element expresses this complicated identity better than Bukhori, also called Bukharian or Judeo-Tajik.

Bukhori belongs to the Iranian family of languages. It is closely related to Tajik and, more distantly, to modern Persian. It developed among the Jewish communities of Central Asia, incorporating Hebrew and Aramaic terms associated with religion and communal life, while also absorbing vocabulary and influences from Uzbek and, during the Soviet period, Russian.

To a Tajik speaker, much of Bukhori may sound familiar. Words connected with everyday life, hospitality and family reflect a shared Persian linguistic environment. But religious vocabulary, pronunciation, expressions and the historical experience carried by the language make it distinct.

Read more on Novastan: Les Juifs de Boukhara : comment sont-ils arrivés en Asie centrale ?

Everyday Bukhori contains many words immediately recognisable to Tajik and Persian speakers. A guest may hear xush omaded, “welcome,” while osh evokes both the wider Central Asian rice tradition and specifically Bukharan Jewish dishes such as oshi sabo. Such vocabulary reflects the community’s roots in a Persian-speaking Central Asian environment. Its specifically Jewish dimension is more apparent in religious terminology derived from Hebrew and Aramaic, although the precise vocabulary and pronunciation vary between speakers and communities.

Bukhori’s alphabets tell another story. It was traditionally written in Hebrew characters. Soviet language reforms subsequently introduced Latin and then Cyrillic scripts. Today, the language may appear in Hebrew, Cyrillic or adapted Latin spelling, depending on the speaker, country and intended readership.

Each script points towards a different cultural horizon: Hebrew towards Jewish religious and literary life, Cyrillic towards the Soviet experience, and Latin increasingly towards younger generations living in English-speaking countries. The lack of a single universally accepted contemporary spelling system also complicates efforts to teach the language.

Bukhori remains spoken, particularly among older and middle-aged members of the community. But it is considered endangered. Migration has strengthened Bukharan communal identity in some respects while weakening the transmission of its traditional language. In Queens, children may grow up surrounded by Bukharan food, weddings, religious institutions and family networks without becoming fluent Bukhori speakers. Russian may remain the language used with parents and grandparents, while English dominates education, work and friendships.

This produces one of the central paradoxes of the modern diaspora: Bukharan identity may be surviving more successfully than Bukhori.

Language loss does not automatically mean the disappearance of the community. A person can identify strongly as Bukharan through family, religion, food, music and social relationships. Yet language carries forms of humour, intimacy and memory that are difficult to reproduce through translation. When grandparents speak Bukhori but grandchildren understand only fragments, more than vocabulary is lost. A particular way of describing Central Asian Jewish life begins to recede.

The question is therefore not simply whether Bukhori will survive. It is also what being Bukharan will mean if it does not.

Queens: a new Bukhara?

Forest Hills and Rego Park are sometimes described as a “new Bukhara.” The expression is evocative, but incomplete.

Queens did not preserve Bukharan culture in a frozen form. It transformed it. Religious practices changed in contact with other Jewish traditions. Businesses adapted to the opportunities and demands of New York. Young people combined family expectations with American education and professional life. Community institutions became more formalised, visible and politically engaged.

Nevertheless, the density of Bukharan life remains remarkable. Synagogues and schools coexist with restaurants, food shops, newspapers, wedding halls and social organisations. Weddings and religious celebrations bring together extended families and reinforce connections that can also support professional advancement, philanthropy and mutual assistance.

The community’s economic visibility has sometimes encouraged outsiders to describe Bukharan Jews principally through wealth or influence. Such language requires caution. It can reproduce old stereotypes about Jews, money and hidden power while obscuring the ordinary work through which immigrant communities build stability.

The more interesting story is institutional. Bukharan Jews in Queens developed strong family and community networks, created businesses, funded religious and cultural organisations and became active in local civic life. Their prominence is less a mystery than the result of geographic concentration, entrepreneurship, mutual support and sustained investment in communal institutions.

Elements of Central Asian social organisation also travelled with them. Family reputation, obligations between relatives, elaborate hospitality and neighbourhood-based mutual assistance recall aspects of the mahalla, the local community structure found across Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. These practices have inevitably changed in New York, but they have not disappeared.

Queens is therefore not a replica of Bukhara. It is a new diaspora city in which selected elements of Central Asian life have been reorganised to meet American conditions.

Vienna: a Central Asian Jewish crossroads

Vienna offers a different version of the Bukharan Jewish journey.

The Austrian capital became an important transit point for Jews leaving the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Many continued towards other destinations, but some Bukharan Jewish families remained. Over time, they created one of the most substantial and active Bukharan communities in Europe.

The city now contains Bukharan synagogues, religious and social organisations, businesses and cultural initiatives. Bukhori and Russian continue to be used among parts of the community, while German increasingly dominates among younger generations. Research on Bukharan Jews in Vienna describes a community shaped simultaneously by Central Asian origins, Soviet migration, Jewish religious life and integration into a German-speaking European city.

Vienna’s experience resembles Queens in some respects, but differs in scale and urban setting. Its community is smaller and exists within a European Jewish landscape marked by its own historical sensitivities. It also remains geographically closer to the former Soviet world, potentially facilitating travel and continued personal connections.

Here too, language is an indicator of generational change. Older residents may move between Bukhori and Russian. Their children and grandchildren increasingly use German. The community remains visible, but the balance between religious affiliation, family heritage and specifically Central Asian culture is continually renegotiated.

Toronto: preserving culture through organisation

Toronto represents a third model.

Its Bukharan Jewish population is smaller and less geographically concentrated than that of Queens. The Jewish Bukharian Community of Toronto was formally established in 2003, building on earlier efforts to bring together families dispersed across the Greater Toronto Area. Cultural preservation was explicitly presented as part of its mission.

A smaller community cannot rely on neighbourhood concentration alone. Maintaining cultural life requires deliberate organisation: religious services, family gatherings, youth programmes, celebrations and spaces in which people can meet others with the same background.

This may make cultural preservation simultaneously more fragile and more conscious. In Queens, Bukharan identity can be reinforced through daily proximity. In Toronto, it may depend more heavily on people choosing to participate.

This is not a contradiction. It is the normal result of a history marked by migration, coercion and adaptation.

Vienna and Toronto therefore broaden the story beyond a simple journey from Uzbekistan to New York. They show that there is no single Bukharan diaspora experience. The survival of language and culture depends on community size, urban geography, religious institutions, migration history and the language of the surrounding society.

Is Central Asia still a homeland?

For the first generation of migrants, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan may remain associated with childhood, education, neighbours and professional life. For their descendants, Central Asia is more likely to be encountered through family stories, food, music, photographs and occasional journeys.

Diaspora visits to Bukhara and Samarkand often include former homes, synagogues, schools and cemeteries. These are not always journeys towards a place of possible return. They are journeys towards evidence: proof that the family history described by parents and grandparents belonged to real streets and neighbourhoods.

Read more on Novastan: Khwarezm et Boukhara, deux foyers anciens des Juifs d’Asie centrale

This raises a subtle distinction. Central Asia can remain emotionally important without functioning as a contemporary homeland. Bukhara may be remembered as a place of coexistence, hospitality and belonging, even when the family’s departure was driven by uncertainty or the conviction that its future lay elsewhere.

The process can also idealise the past. Nostalgic accounts may emphasise close relationships with Muslim neighbours and minimise discrimination, political restrictions or the difficulties of late Soviet and post-Soviet life. Other families may remember exclusion and see departure as liberation rather than loss.

There is no single Bukharan Jewish memory of Central Asia. The diaspora contains different generations, migration routes and political experiences.

A living community or a heritage landscape?

Jewish life has not completely disappeared from Uzbekistan. Synagogues and small communities remain, including in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. But the demographic contrast is striking: the historic centres now contain only a fraction of the population found in diaspora cities.

This creates a risk that Jewish life in Central Asia becomes treated principally as heritage.

The old Jewish quarter of Bukhara, its synagogues, cemeteries and traditional houses attract visitors and preservation initiatives. The city’s Jewish houses form part of Bukhara’s distinctive architectural landscape, although many have changed ownership or function. Some have become guesthouses, workshops or tourism businesses.

Preservation is necessary, but it raises difficult questions. Who determines how the history of a departed community is presented? Do restored buildings communicate the complexity of Jewish life, or merely provide an attractive setting for tourism? What remains of a neighbourhood when its architecture survives but most of its former inhabitants live abroad?

The remaining Jewish residents should not be reduced to guardians of monuments. Their lives, concerns and choices are part of the contemporary story. Their relationship with the diaspora may include family contacts, religious support, philanthropy and visitors, but it may also contain differences of perspective. Those who stayed did not experience the same transformation as those who rebuilt their lives abroad.

Uzbekistan rediscovers its diaspora

The relationship is not maintained only through private memory. Uzbekistan has increasingly engaged Bukharan Jewish communities abroad as part of its cultural diplomacy.

Official and academic initiatives have highlighted the historical contribution of Jews to Central Asian society. A major conference on Bukharan Jewish heritage was held at Samarkand State University in September 2025. In February 2026, another conference examined the role of Bukharan Jews in the region’s socioeconomic and cultural life, including diaspora investment, tourism and educational exchange.

For Uzbekistan, the diaspora offers several potential advantages. Bukharan Jews can promote the country as a tourist destination, support heritage projects, facilitate business contacts and reinforce an international narrative of religious coexistence.

For the diaspora, official recognition may validate a history that was sometimes marginalised. It may also create opportunities to protect cemeteries, synagogues and family heritage.

But the relationship should not be romanticised. State-sponsored celebration of Jewish history can serve contemporary political objectives. It allows Uzbekistan to present itself internationally as tolerant, open and connected to a successful global diaspora. The decisive question is whether this engagement also supports the remaining local community and permits complex discussion of the past.

Bukharan Jews may be approached as former citizens, cultural ambassadors, investors, tourists or intermediaries. They may see themselves in all of these roles – or reject some of them.

Can Bukhara survive outside Bukhara?

The Bukharan Jews remain a meaningful community. Their institutions are active, their family and religious networks are visible, and their cultural traditions continue to distinguish them across several countries.

But what is being preserved is changing.

Bukhori is weakening even where Bukharan identity remains strong. Central Asia is becoming, for many younger members of the diaspora, an inherited landscape rather than a lived one. Cuisine, weddings and family solidarity may survive more easily than language. Religious identity may grow stronger even as specifically Central Asian knowledge recedes.

The Bukharan Jewish story is therefore not simply one of disappearance or successful preservation. It is a story of selection. Every generation decides, consciously or otherwise, which elements of Bukhara to carry forward.

In Queens, Vienna and Toronto, the answer is still being negotiated – between Bukhori and English, Russian and German, memory and modernity, inherited obligations and individual choices.

Most Bukharan Jews no longer live in Central Asia. Yet they remain one of Central Asia’s most distinctive communities abroad. Their global journey has not ended their relationship with the region. It has transformed Bukhara from a place into a language, a family memory, a social world – and a question passed from one generation to the next.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post From Bukhara to Queens: The Global Journey of the Bukharan Jews appeared first on Novastan English.

In Tashkent’s Seoul Garden, a train marked “1937” runs across the background of a bronze memorial. In the foreground, a Korean family arrives with children and bundles. An Uzbek elder extends a hand of welcome.

The monument, erected for the 80th anniversary of the resettlement of Koreans to Uzbekistan, carries inscriptions in Uzbek, Korean and Russian. It thanks the Uzbek people for their warmth and kindness toward the Korean diaspora. The scene compresses the Koryo-Saram story into a single image: forced movement, uncertainty, survival and the later memory of Central Asia as both a place of exile and a place of refuge.

Read more on Novastan: « Nous sommes plus Russes que Coréens » : biographie d’une Coréenne au Kazakhstan

The Koryo-Saram are often described as the Korean diaspora of Central Asia. The phrase is accurate, but incomplete. Their history begins in Korea, passes through the Russian Far East, is violently reshaped by Stalinist deportation, and continues in the cities, collective farms, theaters, newspapers, kitchens and families of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

For many Koryo-Saram, Central Asia is not only the place to which their ancestors were sent. It has become home.

From Korea to the Russian Far East

The ancestors of the Koryo-Saram began moving from Korea to the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Some were fleeing poverty, famine or social instability. Others crossed into the Russian Far East in search of land and security. Later, Japanese colonial domination of Korea added another layer to this movement.

In the Russian Far East, Korean communities took root. They farmed, built villages, created schools and organized cultural life. After the 1917 revolution, they became part of the Soviet Union’s complex nationality system, developing a distinct Soviet Korean identity.

The name Koryo-Saram can be roughly understood as “Korean people,” with “Koryo” referring to an older name associated with Korea. By the 1930s, Soviet Koreans had become a visible community in the Far East. But their position near the border with Korea and Manchuria, at a time of growing tension with imperial Japan, made them vulnerable to suspicion. Soviet authorities increasingly viewed them through a security lens, despite the fact that most had no connection to Japanese power.

In 1937, that suspicion became mass punishment.

The train to Central Asia

In the autumn of 1937, Soviet Koreans were forcibly deported from the Russian Far East to Central Asia. Around 172,000 people were moved, mainly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Families were loaded onto trains and sent thousands of kilometers away from the region where many had lived for generations.

The deportation was not an orderly transfer of population. For those who lived through it, it began not with policy language, but with a knock at the door. Families were told to gather what they could carry and leave. Most had no clear idea where the trains were going.

The journey across the Soviet Union could last weeks, in crowded wagons where people slept, cooked and relieved themselves in the same confined space. Children, elderly people and the sick were the first to die. Others arrived in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan weakened by hunger, cold and disease, only to be placed in barracks, warehouses or unfinished settlements.

Read more on Novastan: Qu’est-ce qu’être un Coréen au Kazakhstan aujourd’hui ?

In official documents, this was “resettlement.” In family memory, it was something else: the moment an entire people was torn from one landscape and forced to begin again in another.

The deportation of the Koreans was one of the earliest Soviet deportations of an entire ethnic group. It prefigured later mass deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, Volga Germans and others under Stalin. But unlike some of those cases, the Korean deportation remains less widely known outside specialist circles.

The official justification was security. In practice, it meant the removal of an entire population from a borderland because of their ethnicity and because of the geopolitical anxieties of the Soviet state.

Yet the deportation did not erase them. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram rebuilt.

Survival in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Central Asia was not an empty stage on which the Koryo-Saram simply appeared. It was already a complex region of Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Russian, Tatar, Ukrainian, Jewish, German and other communities. The arrival of deported Koreans added another layer to the Soviet remaking of the region.

Koryo-Saram families adapted quickly, often under harsh conditions. Many became associated with agriculture, including rice cultivation and vegetable production. Korean collective farms became known in parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Over time, Koryo-Saram also entered education, science, engineering, medicine, administration, culture and trade.

Their integration was shaped by Soviet structures. Russian became the main language of public life and, increasingly, of many Korean families. Soviet education opened pathways into professional careers. At the same time, the trauma of deportation and the pressure of assimilation weakened the transmission of Korean language and customs.

The result was not simple disappearance. Instead, a new identity emerged: Korean by ancestry, Soviet by experience, Russian-speaking in daily life, and Central Asian by geography, memory and belonging.

This hybridity is central to the Koryo-Saram story. They did not remain a sealed diaspora, separate from the societies around them. Nor did they fully dissolve into the Soviet majority. They became one of the many communities through which Central Asia’s multiethnic reality was lived.

A culture of adaptation

The most visible traces of Koryo-Saram culture are often everyday ones: food, family names, markets, holiday tables, memories of grandparents, and stories told about deportation.

Food is especially important because it shows how identity can survive through adaptation. In the Russian Far East, Korean cuisine had already been shaped by migration. In Central Asia, ingredients and conditions changed again. Dishes were adjusted to what was available.

The most famous example is morkovcha, the carrot salad now known across the former Soviet Union as “Korean carrot.” Made with carrots, garlic, coriander, vinegar and oil, it is not traditional Korean food in the narrow sense. It is a Soviet Korean invention, born from displacement and improvisation. Like the Koryo-Saram themselves, it belongs to more than one world.

Other dishes, such as kuksi and pigodi, also carry family memories. Yet for many younger Koryo-Saram, food may be one of the few remaining links to an older cultural world. A person may no longer speak Korean or Koryo-mar, but still recognize certain dishes as part of home.

This partial inheritance can be intimate and painful. It reminds younger generations that something was preserved, but also that much was broken by deportation, Soviet assimilation and decades of linguistic change.

Language, memory and silence

Language is one of the most sensitive parts of the Koryo-Saram story. Older generations preserved varieties of Korean, often referred to as Koryo-mar. But over the Soviet decades, Russian became dominant for many families. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, younger Koryo-Saram often grew up speaking Russian as their first language, while also navigating Kazakh, Uzbek or other local languages depending on their environment.

For some, this language shift is experienced as loss. For others, it is simply part of the reality of being Koryo-Saram. Identity is not always carried through fluent language. It may be carried through food, surnames, family stories, photographs, rituals, or the memory of an old village in the Russian Far East that descendants have never seen.

The Soviet period also shaped what could be said publicly. Like many deported peoples, Koryo-Saram families often lived with memories that were painful, fragmented or only partly transmitted. Grandparents might speak of the train journey, the first winters, the hunger, or the difficulty of beginning again. But the political meaning of deportation could remain difficult to discuss openly.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became easier to revisit these histories. Yet memory remains uneven. Some younger Koryo-Saram know the story of 1937 in detail. Others know only fragments. Some feel a strong desire to reconnect with Korean language and culture. Others feel that their identity is primarily Central Asian or post-Soviet.

This is not a contradiction. It is the normal result of a history marked by migration, coercion and adaptation.

For younger Koryo-Saram, reconnecting with Korean roots is often a search through fragments. In many families, the language has faded. What remains may be a surname, old photographs, a family story about deportation, or a few dishes prepared at home.

This makes contemporary reconnection with Korea both meaningful and complicated. South Korea may represent ancestry, opportunity and cultural pride, but also distance. The Korean Wave, language classes or migration to Seoul do not simply restore a lost identity. They reveal how much that identity was transformed in Central Asia.

For many Koryo-Saram, the question is not whether they are Korean or Central Asian, but how to live with an inheritance made of both memory and absence.

Institutions of memory

Koryo-Saram culture was never only domestic. Institutions mattered too.

One of the most important is the Korean Theater of Kazakhstan. Founded in Vladivostok in 1932, it was relocated after the deportation and eventually became a major cultural institution in Kazakhstan. Its survival tells a larger story: a community uprooted by force continued to produce art, performance and collective memory in a new land.

The newspaper Koryo Ilbo also became a key institution for Soviet Koreans in Kazakhstan. Together with theaters, associations and cultural circles, it helped maintain a public Koryo-Saram identity even as language use shifted and generations became increasingly Russian-speaking.

These institutions complicate any simplistic narrative of loss. Deportation was devastating, but it also generated new forms of cultural production. Koryo-Saram identity did not remain frozen in the past. It was remade in Almaty, Tashkent, Kyzylorda and other Central Asian spaces.

The Koryo-Saram story also reaches far beyond the communities usually associated with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Viktor Tsoi, the legendary frontman of Kino and one of the defining voices of late Soviet rock, had Koryo-Saram roots through his father, whose family came from Kyzylorda in Kazakhstan after the 1937 deportation. Tsoi himself was born in Leningrad, and his public image was shaped above all by the Soviet rock scene of the 1980s. Yet his family history also linked him to the deported Korean communities of Central Asia.

Read more on Novastan: « Igla » : plongée dans le Kazakhstan sombre de la perestroïka avec le mythique Viktor Tsoï

Others left their mark in sport, art, scholarship and popular culture: Olympic gymnast Nellie Kim, historian German Kim, playwright and filmmaker Lavrenti Son, designer Jenia Kim, singer Anita Tsoy and Uzbekistani painter Nikolai Shin all point, in different ways, to the breadth of Soviet Korean experience.

Their lives show that the Koryo-Saram story is not only one of victimhood or preservation, but also of cultural production, mobility and influence across the post-Soviet world.

Tashkent’s Korean traces

In Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram story is not only preserved in official histories or family memories. It also appears in the quieter figures of urban life.

In 2023, our media partner Gazeta.uz profiled Yuri Kim, a second-hand bookseller in Tashkent known to customers and fellow sellers as “Uncle Yura.” The article presented him as a guardian of printed heritage, the owner of a large book collection and a familiar presence in the city’s book culture.

His story offers another way of seeing the Koryo-Saram place in Uzbekistan. Beyond the collective farms, deportation records and demographic categories, there are individual lives woven into the everyday fabric of Tashkent: booksellers, teachers, engineers, doctors, artists and neighbors. Through figures like Kim, the history of a deported community becomes part of the city’s cultural memory.

That memory is also visible in Seoul Garden. Its gate, pavilion, bell and memorial create a deliberately Korean space in the Uzbek capital. Yet the story they tell is not simply one of return to Korean tradition. It is a story of transplantation, rupture and reconstruction.

The memorial’s inscription thanking the Uzbek people reflects a common way in which the history is remembered in Uzbekistan: the deportation itself was a Soviet act of violence, but the local population is remembered as having helped the deportees survive and rebuild.

This narrative of gratitude should not obscure the brutality of 1937. But it helps explain why many Koryo-Saram families came to see Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan not only as places of exile, but also as places where life became possible again.

After 1991: new borders, old identities

The end of the Soviet Union changed the Koryo-Saram world again. Communities that had once lived within a single Soviet space suddenly found themselves divided between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine and other newly independent states. New national languages, citizenship regimes and economic realities reshaped daily life.

For some Koryo-Saram, the post-Soviet period brought emigration. Russia, South Korea, Europe and North America became destinations. South Korea, in particular, acquired new importance. It was no longer only an ancestral reference point, but also a place of study, work, migration and cultural imagination.

Yet the relationship with South Korea can be complicated. Koryo-Saram may be ethnically Korean, but many do not speak standard Korean. Their food, history and family memories were shaped in the Soviet Union and Central Asia, not on the Korean Peninsula. In South Korea, some discover that they are seen as foreigners despite their Korean ancestry.

This creates one of the central paradoxes of Koryo-Saram identity: the ancestral homeland can feel foreign, while Central Asia, the land of deportation, can feel like home.

The global popularity of Korean culture has added another layer. K-pop, Korean dramas and South Korean soft power have made Korea more visible among young people across Central Asia. But Koryo-Saram history is not the same as the Korean Wave. It is older, more painful and more deeply embedded in the Soviet and Central Asian past.

For younger Koryo-Saram, this can produce a complex self-understanding. They may be proud of Korean ancestry, attached to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, Russian-speaking in daily life, curious about Seoul, and conscious of a deportation history that does not fit neatly into national narratives.

From deportation to partnership

Today’s relationship between South Korea and Central Asia is visible far beyond monuments. Korean universities recruit students from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Korean dramas and pop culture circulate widely. South Korean companies are present in energy, automobiles, technology and infrastructure. In Tashkent, even a sign for KOGAS, the Korea Gas Corporation, outside Seoul Garden hints at a larger transformation.

In 1937, Koreans arrived in Central Asia in forced trains, uncertain whether they would survive the journey. Nearly 90 years later, South Korea has become one of Uzbekistan’s important Asian partners. Between those two moments lies the story of the Koryo-Saram: a community transformed from victims of forced displacement into an integral part of Central Asian society and, increasingly, a bridge between two regions that history once separated.

This bridge should not be romanticized. The Koryo-Saram are not simply intermediaries between Seoul and Tashkent, or between Korean capital and Central Asian markets. They are a community with their own history, losses and forms of belonging. Their experience cannot be reduced to diplomacy, business or soft power.

But their story does reveal something important about Central Asia itself.

The region is too often described through empires, borders, energy routes or great power competition. It is also a region made by movement: voluntary migration, forced deportation, labor mobility, exile and return.

Koryo-Saram history belongs to this larger story. It reminds us that Central Asia was not only the homeland of Turkic and Persian-speaking peoples, nor only the destination of Russian settlers. It was also a place where deported communities were forced to rebuild their lives, sometimes under terrible conditions, and where new forms of belonging emerged over time.

In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram are not simply a remnant of Soviet nationality policy. They are part of the social and cultural fabric of the region. Their story can be found in theaters, newspapers, apartment blocks, family kitchens, markets and cemeteries. It is present in the popularity of Korean salads, but also in quieter memories of trains, collective farms and grandparents who started again in a land they had not chosen.

To call Central Asia home after deportation is not to erase the violence of 1937. It is to recognize the strength of those who survived it, and the generations who turned exile into belonging.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post How Central Asia became home for the Koryo-Saram appeared first on Novastan English.

For most citizens, the state is not first encountered through laws, strategies or official speeches. It is encountered in practical moments of need: registering a birth, obtaining a passport, opening a business, receiving a certificate, applying for social support, connecting to utilities or correcting an administrative error. These ordinary interactions shape whether people see the administration as predictable or arbitrary, helpful or humiliating, accessible or distant.

In Uzbekistan, this everyday relationship between citizens and the state has changed significantly since 2017. Public service reform has been one of the most visible parts of the country’s broader modernization agenda. Public Service Centers, online portals, digitized records and simplified procedures have made many interactions faster and less burdensome. According to the Ministry of Justice data used in a recent UNDP-supported analysis, Uzbekistan now has 1,040 public services in its Unified Register, of which 780 are delivered through the Unified Interactive Public Services Portal, 507 through Public Service Centers, and more than 150 licenses and permits through the “License” information system. The number of services available through Public Service Centers has increased almost fourteen-fold since 2017, while more than 60 million civil registry records have been digitized.

These are not marginal changes. They reflect a real shift away from the older model in which citizens often had to move from one office to another, carrying documents between agencies, seeking information from officials and navigating unclear procedures. In the Uzbek context, where bureaucratic discretion has long affected both citizens and entrepreneurs, public service reform has an importance that goes beyond administrative convenience. It touches trust in institutions, the business climate, corruption risks and the state’s ability to use digital transformation for public benefit.

Read more on Novastan: Uzbekistan to invest in its digital infrastructure

Yet Uzbekistan’s reform story is now entering a more difficult phase. The country has already modernized much of the visible “front office” of the state: the counters, portals, kiosks and service centers through which people interact with public administration. The harder challenge lies behind the counter. It concerns the digital, legal and institutional infrastructure that allows agencies to exchange data securely, recognize electronic decisions, reduce unnecessary paperwork, protect personal information and make administrative action accountable.

In other words, the next stage of Uzbekistan’s public service reform will be decided less by the number of services available online than by the quality of the digital state behind them.

From paperwork to platforms

The first phase of reform focused on access. Public Service Centers created a recognizable front door to the state, while the national portal offered citizens and businesses a way to access services online. Requirements to submit many types of certificates and documents have been abolished. Some services have been simplified under the “three-step” principle. Birth-related procedures have been bundled, while some utility-related services have become proactive, meaning that citizens no longer need to initiate every administrative step themselves.

This matters because public services are among the few areas where state reform becomes immediately tangible. A citizen may not read a public administration strategy, but he or she will notice whether a birth certificate can be obtained more quickly, whether a passport can be delivered, whether a license can be requested online or whether a business can be registered without visiting multiple offices.

For businesses, the same logic applies. The quality of the business climate is not determined only by tax rates or investment laws. It is also shaped by routine interactions with the administration: permits, licenses, inspections, utility connections, property registration, tax administration and access to official information. The old World Bank Doing Business ranking may no longer exist in its previous form, but the underlying question remains central: can entrepreneurs rely on predictable, transparent and timely administrative procedures?

In this sense, public service reform is also business-climate reform. When licensing procedures are digital, deadlines are clear and documents are not repeatedly requested, businesses face fewer informal costs. When application status is traceable, officials have less room to delay or bargain. When data can be verified directly between agencies, citizens and entrepreneurs no longer have to act as messengers inside the state.

But digitalization alone does not solve the problem. It can also reproduce old bureaucracy in a new form. A paper form can become an online form without the procedure itself becoming simpler. A citizen may still be asked for information that another agency already holds. A business may still face delays if the back-office systems of the responsible institutions are not connected. The real reform, therefore, is not simply to put services online. It is to redesign the relationship between citizens, data, agencies and responsibility.

The invisible infrastructure of reform

One of the most important ideas in modern public service reform is the “once-only” principle: citizens and businesses should not be required to provide information that the state already possesses. In practical terms, this means that if a person’s identity, residence, family status, property record or business registration data already exist in a public registry, another agency should be able to verify that information lawfully and securely.

This sounds simple. In reality, it is one of the most difficult parts of digital government. It requires reliable registries, shared technical standards, secure data exchange, legal rules for data reuse, clear institutional mandates and staff who trust digital verification. It also requires cybersecurity. The more the state relies on digital identity, automated services and inter-agency data exchange, the more public service delivery becomes part of national digital resilience.

In the old bureaucracy, citizens carried paper between agencies. In the digital bureaucracy, data must move instead – securely, lawfully and with accountability.

This is where Uzbekistan’s reform agenda becomes more complex and more interesting. The country has already built many of the visible elements of a modern service system, including Public Service Centers, an expanding online portal, digitized civil registry data and early proactive services. But the next phase, as the UNDP-supported report argues, is about consolidation and depth: clarifying legal and institutional foundations, deepening interoperability and lawful data reuse, simplifying high-volume services, embedding accountability and ensuring that digital progress does not widen gaps for people with limited connectivity, digital skills or documentation.

That is a very different reform agenda from simply launching another platform. It is about who controls data, who is responsible when data are wrong, who can access which records, whether electronic decisions are legally valid, how citizens can appeal mistakes and whether agencies are obliged to rely on shared systems rather than maintaining their own isolated channels.

Why comparison matters

Uzbekistan is not alone in facing this transition. Estonia and Denmark show that digital public services only become transformative when the state treats digital identity, secure data exchange and authoritative registries as core public infrastructure. Georgia and Kazakhstan, closer to Uzbekistan in administrative heritage, demonstrate the political value of one-stop service centers: they make reform visible, reduce face-to-face discretion and create a clearer front door to the state. France offers a different lesson: digitalization must be balanced with physical access points and assisted services, especially for rural areas and citizens who cannot easily navigate online procedures. Singapore and South Korea, meanwhile, show how mature digital states use service data, feedback systems and cross-agency platforms not only to deliver services, but to manage performance and detect bottlenecks.

These examples matter not because they offer models to copy, but because they clarify the choices Uzbekistan now faces. The countries that have modernized public services most successfully did not do so only by introducing new technologies. They also rethought the rules, institutions and incentives behind every counter and every online form. Their reforms became sustainable when they combined digital access with service standards, feedback channels, legal recognition of electronic decisions and visible mechanisms for redress.

For Uzbekistan, the comparison is especially useful because the country is not starting from zero. It has already built public-facing infrastructure and achieved meaningful simplification. The more difficult question is whether it can now create the institutional discipline needed for genuine interoperability. Agencies must be willing, or required, to share data through common systems. Ministries must accept common service standards. Digital and legal reform must move together. Cybersecurity, data protection and administrative accountability must be treated as part of the same reform ecosystem.

Corruption moves, it does not disappear

Public service reform also has a direct anti-corruption dimension. In paper-heavy systems, corruption often thrives at the point of contact between citizen and official: unclear fees, unpredictable deadlines, unnecessary certificates, repeated visits and discretionary refusals. One-stop shops and online procedures can reduce these risks by standardizing processes, limiting face-to-face interactions and making cases easier to track.

This is one reason why Public Service Centers have been politically powerful in several post-Soviet states. They offer a visible break with the image of the fragmented, discretionary administration. Clear counters, queue management, published fees and predictable timelines send a message: the citizen should not have to know someone inside the system to obtain a routine service.

But digitalization does not automatically eliminate corruption. It can change where discretion sits. Instead of the desk officer, discretion may move to the database, the algorithm, the access right, the procurement contract or the agency that controls the platform. If digital systems are opaque, poorly audited or controlled by institutions with weak oversight, new forms of manipulation become possible.

This is why cybersecurity, data privacy and anti-corruption cannot be treated as separate agendas. A service platform that is not secure can be manipulated. A database without audit trails can be abused. A system that allows officials to access personal data without clear justification can undermine trust. An automated decision without explanation can reproduce arbitrariness under a digital label.

For citizens, the promise of digital government is not simply speed. It is predictability, traceability and the ability to challenge mistakes. For businesses, the promise is not only convenience. It is a more reliable operating environment in which permits, licenses and registrations do not depend on informal negotiation. For the state, the promise is a more efficient administration that can detect bottlenecks, reduce duplication and allocate resources more intelligently.

The remaining bottlenecks

Uzbekistan’s progress is significant, but the system remains uneven. Ninety-seven agencies and organizations still provide public services, often under their own procedures and information systems. More than 220 services remain paper-based, and more than 180 are delivered through isolated internal platforms. Many processes still require excessive documents and multiple steps, while only around 100 services have been fully simplified under the “three-step” principle.

These figures are important because they show that the problem is no longer only access to a front office. It is the fragmentation of the back office. If agencies maintain parallel systems, citizens will continue to face repeated documentation requests. If registries are incomplete or not treated as authoritative, officials will continue to rely on paper. If legal deadlines are unrealistic, digital platforms will not prevent delays. If staff lack digital skills or fear responsibility for electronic verification, they may continue to reproduce old procedures.

Monitoring data cited in the report also show persistent performance problems in several sectors. Uzsuvta’minot alone registered more than 175,000 violations, mainly related to delays in connecting customers to water networks or replacing meters. The Cadastre Agency recorded more than 50,000 violations, while other agencies reported tens of thousands of cases, many linked to delays and, in some cases, unjustified refusals.

This does not mean that reform has failed. It means that public service delivery is entering the stage where the easy improvements have already been made and the harder institutional problems are becoming more visible. The first wave could reduce queues and digitize records. The next wave must address mandates, data quality, staff capacity, cybersecurity, appeal mechanisms and the incentives that shape agency behavior.

Data privacy and the citizen

The same interoperability that makes services faster also creates new risks. When agencies exchange more data, the state can reduce paperwork and improve service quality. But it also gains a more complete picture of citizens’ lives. Civil status, property, residence, business activity, education, benefits, utilities and health-related administrative data can become increasingly connected.

This is not a reason to reject digital government. It is a reason to govern it carefully.

A trustworthy service state needs privacy safeguards, access controls, audit trails, correction rights and clear rules on who can use which data for which purpose. Citizens should know when data are being reused, how decisions are made and what they can do when information is incorrect. The more services become proactive or automated, the more important it becomes to ensure that people can challenge errors and that vulnerable groups are not excluded by inaccurate records or inaccessible digital channels.

This is also where inclusion matters. “Digital by default” should not become “digital only.” Rural residents, elderly people, persons with disabilities, low-income households and people with limited digital skills may benefit greatly from simplified services, but only if assisted channels remain available. Public Service Centers, kiosks, mobile units, postal delivery and community-based support are not leftovers from the pre-digital era. They are part of an inclusive digital state.

France’s experience is useful here: even a highly centralized and digitally advanced administration has had to invest in physical access points and assisted services to address territorial inequality and digital exclusion. For Uzbekistan, with its regional disparities and uneven administrative capacity, this lesson is particularly relevant.

A Law on Public Services as a test

Uzbekistan’s forthcoming Law on Public Services could become the cornerstone of the next reform phase. Its importance will depend on whether it is conceived narrowly or strategically.

A narrow law would simply list existing services and formalize current arrangements. A more ambitious law would define what citizens and businesses can expect from the administration: clear deadlines, transparent fees, valid electronic decisions, fewer unnecessary documents, access through several channels, secure data reuse, protection of personal information, and meaningful remedies when the system fails.

The law could also clarify who does what. The Ministry of Justice already plays a central role in legal reform, service standards and Public Service Centers. The Ministry of Digital Technologies leads on digital infrastructure, interoperability and cybersecurity. Line ministries remain responsible for the substance of decisions in their sectors. The challenge is to align these roles so that public service delivery becomes a coherent system rather than a collection of institutional islands.

This is not only a legal issue. It is a governance issue. If Uzbekistan wants citizens to stop carrying paper between agencies, then agencies must be required to trust shared data. If the state wants businesses to rely on digital licensing, then electronic procedures must be legally valid and technically resilient. If public services are to reduce corruption, then deadlines, refusals, complaints and appeals must be traceable. If digital government is to build trust, then cybersecurity and data privacy must be visible parts of the reform, not hidden technical details.

From administrative simplification to a service state

Uzbekistan’s public service reforms are therefore more than an administrative modernization story. They are a window into the country’s broader transformation: how the state organizes information, manages discretion, interacts with citizens and creates conditions for economic activity.

The next test will not be whether Uzbekistan can launch more portals or add more services to existing platforms. It will be whether the state can connect its institutions in a secure and accountable way, so that public services become faster without becoming opaque, more digital without becoming exclusionary, and more efficient without weakening rights.

The most important reform may be the least visible one. It will take place not at the counter, but in the connections between agencies; not in the app, but in the rules governing data; not in the number of services online, but in whether citizens and businesses can trust the digital state behind them.

If Uzbekistan succeeds, public service delivery could become one of the clearest indicators of a new phase in the country’s modernization: a move from paperwork to platforms, and from administrative simplification to a more predictable, secure and citizen-centered service state.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Beyond the Counter: Uzbekistan’s Public Service Reforms and the Hidden Infrastructure of the Digital State appeared first on Novastan English.

As Uzbekistani President Shavkat Mirziyoyev prepares to travel to Minsk on 8-9 July, the visit is expected to produce another series of agreements on trade, industry and regional cooperation. At first glance, it may appear to be just another bilateral meeting between two post-Soviet states. In reality, it illustrates one of the most overlooked geopolitical developments in Eurasia.

Read more on Novastan: Kazakhstan’s gradual divorce from Russia

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Belarus has become increasingly isolated from Europe. Political dialogue with the European Union has largely frozen, Western sanctions have multiplied, and Minsk’s dependence on Moscow has deepened. Yet while much of Europe has turned away from Belarus, Central Asia has not. On the contrary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and especially Uzbekistan have continued to strengthen political dialogue, industrial cooperation, educational exchanges and trade with Minsk.

This apparent paradox reveals much about both Belarus and Central Asia. For Brussels, Belarus has become primarily a sanctions problem and Russia’s closest ally. For Tashkent, Astana or Dushanbe, however, Belarus remains something rather different: a producer of tractors, buses and mining equipment, an engineering partner, an educational destination and a familiar interlocutor with decades of technical expertise. That difference in perception lies at the heart of Belarus’s enduring relevance across the region.

The war that changed everything – but not everything

The war in Ukraine undoubtedly transformed Belarusian foreign policy.

Before 2022, Minsk balanced relations between Russia and the West while simultaneously cultivating long-standing ties across the former Soviet space. Afterwards, its room for manoeuvre narrowed dramatically. Unable to restore normal political relations with Europe in the foreseeable future, Belarus increasingly looked east.

If the first phase after 2022 was one of survival, the second has become one of adaptation.

Read more on Novastan: The Vocabulary of Reform: Why Central Asia Is Reimagining Its Political Traditions

Central Asia has emerged as one of the principal beneficiaries of this strategic reorientation. Unlike Europe, the five Central Asian republics never sought to isolate Belarus politically. None endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and several – particularly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – carefully defended the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Yet they also chose not to sever relations with Minsk.

Instead, they compartmentalised them.

Political disagreements over Ukraine did not prevent cooperation in agriculture, heavy industry, transport, education or food security. This pragmatic approach reflects the increasingly confident multi-vector diplomacy that has characterised Central Asia over the past decade.

Belarus’s comparative advantage

Unlike China, Belarus cannot finance billion-dollar infrastructure projects.

Unlike Russia, it does not provide security guarantees.

Unlike the European Union, it does not offer grants, regulatory convergence or accession prospects.

Its comparative advantage lies elsewhere.

Belarus remains one of the few post-Soviet states that preserved much of its industrial base after 1991. Companies such as MTZ, MAZ, BelAZ, Gomselmash, Bobruiskagromash and Amkodor continue to manufacture tractors, buses, heavy trucks, harvesters, mining equipment and construction machinery that remain highly competitive across Eurasia.

For Central Asian governments seeking to modernise agriculture, develop mining industries or improve municipal transport, Belarus offers something few other partners can provide: reliable industrial technologies adapted to post-Soviet realities and available at competitive prices.

In that sense, Belarus has become Eurasia’s overlooked industrial power.

Uzbekistan: from friendly relations to strategic partnership

Nowhere has Belarus’s eastern strategy been more successful than in Uzbekistan.

The relationship began to accelerate after Shavkat Mirziyoyev came to power in 2016 and launched sweeping economic reforms. Successive presidential visits – including Alexander Lukashenko’s trips to Tashkent and Mirziyoyev’s visits to Minsk – have transformed bilateral relations from cordial political dialogue into an increasingly comprehensive economic partnership.

Trade has expanded dramatically, approaching one billion US dollars annually, while both governments openly discuss reaching two billion dollars over the coming years.

Read more on Novastan: What lies beneath Central Asia? Rare earths, critical minerals and the new race for resources

More importantly, cooperation has moved beyond exports.

Belarusian and Uzbek partners are developing industrial projects valued at around 800 million dollars, spanning agricultural machinery, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and food processing. Hundreds of enterprises involving Belarusian capital now operate in Uzbekistan, making the country Belarus’s fastest-growing economic partner in Central Asia.

Preparations for Mirziyoyev’s current visit have themselves demonstrated the depth of the relationship. Belarusian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Shuleiko and Uzbekistan’s Minister of Investment, Industry and Trade Laziz Kudratov have spent recent weeks coordinating the agenda, with discussions focusing not only on bilateral trade but also on investment projects and preparations for the next Forum of Regions.

Beyond presidential diplomacy

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Belarus-Uzbekistan relations is that they are no longer centred exclusively on presidents.

The Forum of Regions, launched in 2019, has become an institutional mechanism linking provinces, municipalities, universities, chambers of commerce and businesses. Belarusian regions now cooperate directly with counterparts in Samarkand, Bukhara, Fergana and Tashkent, creating relationships that continue independently of high-level political visits.

This gradual institutionalisation distinguishes Belarus from many other external partners in Central Asia. Rather than relying solely on summit diplomacy, Minsk has invested in long-term cooperation between local authorities, universities and companies.

Kazakhstan: industrial integration

Kazakhstan remains Belarus’s largest economic partner in Central Asia.

Bilateral trade reached approximately 1.1 billion dollars in 2024, while industrial integration has become increasingly sophisticated. Rather than merely exporting machinery, Belarus has helped establish fourteen joint industrial projects worth nearly 280 million dollars, eleven of which are already operational.

Assembly plants now manufacture MTZ tractors, MAZ trucks and Gomselmash agricultural equipment within Kazakhstan itself. More than one thousand enterprises involving Belarusian participation operate across the country, supported by around 170 official Belarusian dealers.

These figures illustrate an important evolution. Belarus is no longer simply exporting products to Central Asia. Increasingly, it is participating directly in local manufacturing and industrial development.

Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan: smaller economies, growing ambitions

Belarus’s engagement is no less significant in the region’s smaller economies.

In Tajikistan, cooperation has progressively shifted from trade towards manufacturing. In the Hisor district near Dushanbe, Belarusian companies assemble MTZ tractors, Gomselmash harvesters and Bobruiskagromash agricultural equipment, allowing Tajik farmers to access machinery adapted to local conditions while supporting domestic production. More than thirty Belarusian distribution companies now operate in the country, reflecting Minsk’s long-term commitment to the Tajik market.

Kyrgyzstan has likewise sought to deepen economic ties. Both governments have adopted ambitious roadmaps to increase bilateral trade, focusing on agriculture, food processing, machinery and logistics. As fellow members of the Eurasian Economic Union, Minsk and Bishkek also benefit from institutional frameworks that facilitate commercial cooperation.

Turkmenistan presents a somewhat different picture. While economic relations remain constrained by Ashgabat’s relatively closed economy, education has emerged as one of the strongest pillars of the bilateral relationship. Around 4,000 Turkmen students are estimated to study in Belarus, particularly in engineering, medicine and technical disciplines. These graduates often return home with professional networks that strengthen long-term cooperation between the two countries.

Soft power without ideology: Tradition as State Legitimacy

Unlike Russia, Türkiye or China, Belarus has never projected influence through grand geopolitical narratives.

Its soft power is considerably quieter.

It is found in universities rather than television channels, engineering schools rather than cultural institutes, and technical cooperation rather than ideological messaging.

Belarusian State University, Belarusian National Technical University and Belarusian State Medical University continue to attract students from across Central Asia, offering Russian-language education, recognised technical qualifications and comparatively affordable tuition.

For many Central Asian families, Belarus represents a practical alternative. It offers a familiar academic environment outside Russia, while maintaining close links with industries that remain highly relevant to Central Asian development.

Education therefore performs several functions simultaneously. It generates revenue for Belarusian universities, strengthens professional networks and creates generations of engineers, doctors and public officials familiar with Belarusian institutions and technologies.

This represents a distinctly Belarusian model of soft power: practical, technocratic and long-term.

Beyond tractors: exporting institutions

Tajikistan follows a different path.

Belarus is also seeking to export institutions alongside industrial products.

One telling example is the growing role of the Belarusian Universal Commodity Exchange (BUCE). In 2025, BUCE signed a cooperation agreement with Kazakhstan’s Caspiy Commodity Exchange, aiming to improve commodity trading, develop electronic trading platforms and facilitate commercial exchanges between Belarus and Central Asia.

While less visible than presidential summits, such initiatives illustrate Minsk’s efforts to integrate itself into the region’s economic architecture.

Belarus has also promoted specialised business forums, including the Belarus-Central Asia Economic Forum held in Brest in 2026, bringing together companies interested in expanding into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Such initiatives demonstrate that Belarus’s eastern engagement is becoming increasingly institutionalised rather than remaining dependent upon political goodwill alone.

A different understanding of Eurasia

Ultimately, however, this story is not simply about Belarus.

It is about Central Asia.

For more than three decades, the region has refined what is often described as a multi-vector foreign policy. Rather than aligning exclusively with one geopolitical centre, Central Asian governments seek productive relations with multiple partners simultaneously.

Russia remains indispensable in security matters.

Read more on Novastan: “I only needed a passport” : In Ukraine, Central Asian prisoners of wars caught between loyalty and regret

China has become the region’s principal economic partner and infrastructure investor.

Türkiye has significantly expanded its cultural, educational and political presence.

The European Union offers investment, regulatory cooperation and connectivity through initiatives such as the Global Gateway.

Japan and South Korea remain valued partners in technology and industrial development.

Belarus occupies a different niche.

It neither competes with these actors nor seeks to replace them. Instead, it provides industrial expertise, engineering education, agricultural technology and manufacturing partnerships that complement rather than challenge Central Asia’s broader foreign policy strategy.

This helps explain why relations have continued to deepen despite the war in Ukraine.

Central Asian governments have not ignored Belarus’s international isolation. They have simply concluded that practical cooperation remains in their national interest.

Looking east

As Shavkat Mirziyoyev arrives in Minsk, observers will understandably focus on the agreements signed, the trade figures announced and the diplomatic symbolism of the visit.

Yet its broader significance lies elsewhere.

The visit reflects the emergence of a Eurasia whose political geography no longer corresponds neatly to the map of sanctions.

While Europe has largely distanced itself from Belarus, Central Asia has continued to engage it through industry, education, agriculture, regional diplomacy and technical cooperation.

This does not mean that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or their neighbours have chosen Belarus over Europe, or Russia over the West. Quite the opposite. Their continued engagement with Minsk illustrates the essence of multi-vector diplomacy: the refusal to view international relations as a zero-sum choice between competing blocs.

Read more on Novastan: Money, boxes and absent men: the hidden economy reshaping Central Asia

For Belarus, Central Asia has become an increasingly important diplomatic and economic outlet at a time when options elsewhere have narrowed. For Central Asia, Belarus remains a useful partner whose industrial capabilities, educational institutions and technical expertise continue to meet concrete national needs.

The geography of sanctions, it turns out, is not the geography of diplomacy.

Belarus did not escape isolation after 2022. But it has worked to avoid irrelevance. By looking east, Minsk has found not a substitute for Europe, but a region willing to judge it less by geopolitical alignment than by practical cooperation. And in an increasingly fragmented international order, that may prove to be one of the most consequential shifts in Eurasian diplomacy that few outside the region have noticed.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Minsk’s Eastern Bet: Why Central Asia Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Novastan English.

From Kazakhstan’s Kurultai to Uzbekistan’s Mahalla, governments across Central Asia are increasingly framing political reform through institutions rooted in local history rather than imported political models.

For much of the three decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, discussions about political reform in Central Asia were conducted using a familiar international vocabulary. Elections, constitutions, political parties, decentralisation, civil society and good governance became the dominant language through which both governments and international organisations described political development.

Also read on Novastan: Kazakhstan’s Next Elections: Between Reform and Managed Competition

Increasingly, however, another vocabulary is emerging.

Across the region, governments are reviving concepts such as the Kurultai, the Mahalla, the Halk Maslahaty and councils of elders. These institutions are rarely presented as alternatives to constitutional government. Rather, they are increasingly portrayed as ways of making governance more legitimate, more participatory and more deeply rooted in national history.

This raises an important question. Are Central Asian governments simply giving traditional names to modern institutions? Or are they gradually developing a distinct political vocabulary through which reform itself is imagined?

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Political reform is not only about changing institutions. It is also about changing the language through which those institutions are understood and legitimised.

Beyond Imported Models

All political systems derive legitimacy from history as much as from law. France invokes the Revolution and the Republic. Britain draws upon Parliament and Magna Carta. The United States continues to frame politics through the language of its Founding Fathers.

Central Asia is increasingly doing the same.

Rather than presenting reform exclusively through concepts inherited from the Soviet period or borrowed from international governance discourse, governments across the region increasingly anchor their legitimacy in historical narratives that resonate more directly with domestic political traditions.

This does not necessarily represent a rejection of constitutionalism or modern statehood. Instead, it reflects an attempt to reconcile contemporary governance with locally meaningful historical references.

Also read on Novastan: “Alaqan”: Aida Adilbek’s decolonial documentary cinema

Kazakhstan: The Kurultai and the Listening State

Kazakhstan perhaps best illustrates this evolution.

Since the January 2022 events, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has promoted the idea of a “Listening State”, constitutional reform and the National Kurultai as central elements of the “New Kazakhstan”. Alongside referendums, electoral reform and strengthened consultative mechanisms, the Kurultai has become part of a broader effort to redefine how political authority is presented.

The Kurultai is neither a parliament nor an opposition forum. Rather, it functions as a consultative platform bringing together selected representatives of public life, academics, experts and civil society to deliberate on questions of national identity, reform and long-term development.

Whether viewed as meaningful consultation or carefully managed participation, the Kurultai illustrates an important point. It seeks legitimacy not only through elections or representative institutions, but also through an institution whose historical roots reach back to the political culture of the Eurasian steppe.

Also read on Novastan: Manas and the Making of Kyrgyzstan

Uzbekistan: The Mahalla Between Community and State

Uzbekistan offers a different but equally important example through the Mahalla.

Often translated simply as a neighbourhood community, the Mahalla is in practice much more than a local tradition. It plays a role in social assistance to families in need, neighbourhood mediation, community mobilisation, welfare delivery and the administrative interface between citizens and the state, including in sensitive areas such as the registration and monitoring of religious communities.

It also intervenes in family life, including disputes concerning marriage, divorce and domestic violence. In many cases, Mahalla-level mediation provides rapid community support. Yet it has also been criticised for encouraging reconciliation in situations of gender-based violence, discouraging divorce or prioritising family cohesion over the protection and autonomy of women experiencing abuse.

Under the banner of the “New Uzbekistan”, the Mahalla has been presented not as a relic of the past but as a cornerstone of modern governance. Its strength lies precisely in this dual nature: deeply embedded in everyday community life while simultaneously serving as an important interface between society and the state.

Kyrgyzstan: Contesting the Meaning of the Kurultai

If Kazakhstan presents the Kurultai as a consultative institution, Kyrgyzstan illustrates how the same historical concept can become an object of democratic contestation.

Successive debates over the People’s Kurultai have revolved around fundamental constitutional questions. Should it merely advise elected institutions? Should it exercise oversight? Does it strengthen democratic participation or risk creating a parallel source of political legitimacy?

Rather than providing definitive answers, Kyrgyzstan demonstrates that historical institutions themselves become arenas of political debate when adapted to modern constitutional systems.

Turkmenistan: Tradition as State Legitimacy

Turkmenistan represents perhaps the most institutionalised version of this regional tendency.

The Halk Maslahaty, together with councils of elders and the symbolic authority of aksakals, presents political authority through the language of continuity, wisdom and national consensus. These institutions are not designed as arenas of political competition. Instead, they frame presidential authority within narratives of collective consultation and historical legitimacy.

Their significance therefore lies less in electoral politics than in the symbolic vocabulary through which political authority is justified.

Tajikistan: Statehood, Unity and the Persianate Legacy

Tajikistan follows a different path.

Its political vocabulary is less centred on Turkic or nomadic traditions than on national unity, statehood and the Persianate cultural heritage. References to the Samanid dynasty, the Tajik language and the country’s civil war increasingly serve to anchor contemporary political authority within a narrative of historical continuity and national resilience.

At the local level, elders and community mediation continue to play important social roles. While these traditions are not usually presented as formal instruments of political reform, they nevertheless perform a similar function: linking governance to ideas of continuity, cohesion and collective identity.

A Region Reimagining Its Past

Taken together, these examples suggest a broader regional phenomenon.

Central Asia is not abandoning elections, constitutions or representative institutions. Nor is it simply returning to pre-modern forms of governance.

Instead, governments are increasingly combining modern constitutional structures with institutions, concepts and symbols drawn from selectively reinterpreted historical traditions. The result is neither a rejection of international governance norms nor a simple revival of the past. It is a process of institutional hybridisation.

Also read on Novastan: Dead in the Water: Has the Common Turkic Alphabet Failed to Boost Turkish Influence in Central Asia?

This trend also intersects with a wider romanticisation of Turkic, steppe and nomadic heritage. Institutions such as the Kurultai or the authority of aksakals are often presented as evidence of an ancient political culture rooted in consultation, consensus and collective wisdom. Such narratives can offer valuable alternatives to the assumption that political modernity must always be expressed through imported institutional models. Yet they also carry risks. Complex historical realities can be simplified into reassuring myths, while diverse and sometimes hierarchical political traditions become reimagined as timeless expressions of participatory governance.

Türkiye’s recent decision to replace “Central Asia” with “Turkestan” in parts of its school curriculum reflects this wider intellectual shift. Increasingly, the region is being described through historical and cultural concepts associated with the Turkic world rather than Soviet-era geography or externally imposed terminology. Whether one views this as decolonisation, cultural revival or geopolitical symbolism, it illustrates the growing importance of historical narratives in shaping contemporary political identities.

More Than Words

The emergence of this vocabulary reflects deeper transformations.

A generation with little or no memory of the Soviet Union has reached adulthood. Nation-building has entered a more mature phase. Governments increasingly seek legitimacy not only through economic development or institutional reform but also through narratives that resonate with national history and collective identity.

This does not mean these institutions necessarily produce more accountable governance. Traditional concepts can broaden participation, but they may also reinforce hierarchy, exclude dissenting voices or provide new symbolic foundations for existing power structures.

The question facing Central Asia is therefore not whether it is returning to its past. It is not. Nor is it simply reproducing Western constitutional models. Increasingly, the region appears to be constructing something in between: modern states that seek legitimacy through institutions inspired as much by their own historical narratives as by international governance norms.

Whether these hybrid models ultimately strengthen accountability, broaden participation or merely repackage existing political authority remains an open question. What is already clear, however, is that Central Asia is no longer only reforming its institutions. It is also reinventing the language through which political legitimacy itself is imagined.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post The Vocabulary of Reform: Why Central Asia Is Reimagining Its Political Traditions appeared first on Novastan English.

Kazakhstan’s next parliamentary elections are unlikely to determine who governs the country. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s political dominance is not seriously in question. Yet the vote matters because it will test something arguably more significant: whether the “New Kazakhstan” launched after the January 2022 crisis is gradually producing a more representative political system, or merely refining the mechanisms through which political participation is organised and managed.

The elections should therefore not be viewed in isolation. They are the latest stage in a broader political sequence that has included the 2022 constitutional referendum, early presidential and parliamentary elections, the institutionalisation of the National Kurultai, the expansion of direct local elections, and the 2024 referendum on the construction of Kazakhstan’s first nuclear power plant.

Taken together, these developments illustrate Tokayev’s attempt to redefine the political rules of the “New Kazakhstan”: more consultation, broader participation and renewed institutional legitimacy, but without embracing unconstrained political competition. Rather than dismantling the existing political model, the reforms seek to recalibrate it.

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The constitutional referendum of June 2022 marked the beginning of this new political cycle. It reduced elements of the institutional legacy associated with former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, restored the Constitutional Court, modified the electoral system for the Mazhilis and reintroduced a mixed electoral model combining proportional representation with single-member constituencies. The electoral threshold for parliamentary representation was lowered from seven to five percent, while party lists became subject to quotas requiring the inclusion of women, young people and persons with disabilities.

These reforms gave the 2023 parliamentary elections a more pluralistic appearance than previous contests. Six parties entered the Mazhilis: Amanat, Auyl, Respublica, Aq Jol, the People’s Party of Kazakhstan and the National Social Democratic Party. Baytaq, a newly registered environmental party, also participated but failed to cross the electoral threshold. The return of single-member constituencies enabled independent candidates and locally known figures to compete, reintroducing a territorial and personal dimension that had largely disappeared under the previous fully proportional system.

Each of these parties also illustrates a different facet of Kazakhstan’s evolving political landscape. Amanat remains the country’s dominant political force, while Aq Jol continues to position itself as a business-oriented party. Auyl focuses primarily on rural development and agricultural interests, Respublica has sought to appeal to younger entrepreneurs and business circles, and the National Social Democratic Party remains the closest actor to a traditional parliamentary opposition. Baytaq’s participation, despite failing to enter parliament, reflected the growing visibility of environmental issues within Kazakhstan’s public debate.

Also read on Novastan: Kazakhstan: The Blurred Record of the January 2022 Unrest

Yet the political playing field remained highly asymmetrical. Amanat retained a commanding majority, while newer and smaller parties continued to operate within an institutional environment shaped by presidential authority, administrative resources and limited opposition capacity. The central question was therefore not whether Kazakhstan had become a fully competitive democracy, but whether the reforms had genuinely widened the space for political representation.

The National Kurultai is perhaps the clearest illustration of Tokayev’s broader political philosophy. Neither a parliament, nor an opposition forum, nor a conventional civil society assembly, it serves as a consultative platform bringing together selected public figures, academics, experts and representatives of society to discuss questions of national identity, reform, social cohesion and long-term development.

Supporters view the Kurultai as an attempt to broaden consultation and strengthen dialogue between state and society. Critics argue that its participants, agenda and political boundaries remain largely determined from above. Yet its significance lies less in the decisions it produces than in what it reveals about the model of governance that is emerging. Rather than encouraging adversarial politics, the Kurultai reflects a preference for structured consultation within institutions designed and convened by the presidency itself.

Political participation has also expanded below the national level. The gradual introduction of direct elections for district and rural akims, alongside efforts to strengthen local representative bodies, has created new arenas of political competition and accountability. Although these reforms remain limited and continue to operate within a highly centralised political system, they nevertheless provide opportunities for greater citizen engagement and have contributed to a more diverse local political landscape.

The October 2024 referendum on the construction of Kazakhstan’s first nuclear power plant reinforced many of these dynamics. Formally, citizens were asked to decide whether the world’s largest producer of uranium should embark upon a new stage in its energy strategy. The official result – a clear majority in favour – strengthened the government’s mandate for the project. At the same time, the campaign revived familiar debates concerning unequal access to media, pressure on critics and the limited capacity of organised opposition to compete on equal terms. The referendum illustrated Tokayev’s willingness to seek public legitimacy for major strategic decisions while maintaining firm control over the broader political environment.

Civil society has also evolved since 2022. Although important restrictions remain, Kazakhstan today possesses a more diverse ecosystem of public councils, expert communities, civic initiatives and domestic election observers than a decade ago. Online debate has become more visible, and specialised organisations increasingly contribute to discussions on public policy, governance and social issues. The extent to which these actors can influence decision-making remains contested, but they form part of the broader institutional landscape that will shape the forthcoming elections.

Also read on Novastan: What lies beneath Central Asia? Rare earths, critical minerals and the new race for resources

These domestic reforms also have an international dimension. As Kazakhstan continues to pursue its multi-vector foreign policy while deepening cooperation with partners including the European Union, China, Türkiye and the Gulf states, demonstrating gradual political modernisation has become part of the country’s diplomatic positioning. Electoral reform is therefore not only a domestic governance issue, but also an element of Kazakhstan’s international image as a stable, reform-oriented middle power.

This is the central paradox of Kazakhstan’s current political evolution. The state has undeniably expanded the repertoire of participation through constitutional reform, referendums, direct local elections, single-member constituencies, public consultation mechanisms and the National Kurultai. Yet participation remains carefully channelled, institutionally managed and politically bounded.

That is why the next parliamentary elections matter. Not because they are likely to produce a dramatic alternation of power, but because they will provide another indication of how this evolving political model functions in practice. Will single-member constituencies produce genuinely accountable local representatives? Can parties such as Respublica, Aq Jol, Auyl or the National Social Democratic Party develop into authentic vehicles for social interests rather than primarily institutional actors? Will new political movements, including those focused on environmental, regional or generational concerns, establish a more durable presence within Kazakhstan’s political system?

Equally important will be the quality of the electoral process itself: candidate registration, campaign conditions, access to the media, the work of election commissions, complaints and appeals procedures, domestic election observation and the ability of civil society to participate freely in public debate.

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Kazakhstan has undoubtedly changed since January 2022. The political system inherited from the Nazarbayev era has evolved, introducing new institutions and expanding opportunities for participation. Yet the “New Kazakhstan” remains an unfinished political project, balancing reform with continuity, consultation with control, stability with accountability.

Whether this trajectory ultimately produces a genuinely more competitive political system remains uncertain. What is already clear, however, is that Kazakhstan is no longer seeking legitimacy solely through promises of stability and economic development. Increasingly, it also seeks legitimacy through institutional reform, managed political participation and structured consultation. The next parliamentary elections will therefore be less a verdict on the government than another measure of how far the “New Kazakhstan” can evolve while preserving the political model on which it continues to rest.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Kazakhstan’s Next Elections: Between Reform and Managed Competition appeared first on Novastan English.

At Central Asian airports, remittances do not always look like money. They can look like taped cardboard boxes arriving from Istanbul, oversized suitcases from Moscow, bags of clothes bought in Turkish markets, phones, cosmetics, fabrics, spare parts, children’s shoes or household appliances carried across borders as luggage. In a village in southern Tajikistan, they can look like a half-finished house paid for by a son working in Russia. In Kyrgyzstan, they can arrive as a notification on a banking app. In Uzbekistan, they can help pay for a wedding, medical treatment, a sibling’s education or the first stock for a small shop.

Remittances are often described as a financial flow. In Central Asia, they are closer to an invisible welfare state. They pay for food, debt, construction, school fees, ceremonies, medicine and daily consumption. They keep families afloat, sustain rural economies and reduce pressure on governments that cannot create enough jobs at home. But they also reveal one of the region’s deepest vulnerabilities: millions of households depend on wages earned elsewhere.

The dependence is most visible in Tajikistan. For years, Tajikistan has ranked among the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Money sent home by workers abroad has represented more than a third of GDP in recent years, and in some estimates even more. The numbers matter, but they do not fully capture the social reality. In parts of the country, especially poorer and rural regions, migration is not an exception but a stage of life. Young men leave after school, before marriage, after marriage, or when family debts accumulate. They go to Moscow, St Petersburg, regional Russian cities, construction sites, markets, warehouses and service jobs. Some return seasonally. Others stay away for years.

This absence has reshaped village life. In some Tajik communities, working-age men are missing for long stretches of the year. Women, grandparents and children manage daily routines, land, livestock, school, family ceremonies and household budgets. The money sent from Russia gives women responsibility, but not always authority. A wife may manage the household, but major decisions can still be made by an absent husband, his parents or the wider family. Migration can strengthen families by giving them income, but it can also strain marriages, delay return, create second households abroad or leave women carrying both economic and social burdens.

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Kyrgyzstan tells a related but slightly different story. Labour migration, especially to Russia and Kazakhstan, has long supported households across the south and in rural areas. Remittances once represented close to a third of GDP; more recently the share has fallen, partly because of economic diversification and changing migration patterns. Yet the money remains crucial. It pays for homes in Osh, Jalal-Abad and Batken, supports families in villages, and helps households survive when local wages are low. Unlike Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan also benefits from membership in the Eurasian Economic Union, which gives its citizens easier access to the Russian labour market than Tajik or Uzbek migrants. But this advantage does not remove the underlying dependence on external work.

Uzbekistan is different again. Its economy is larger and more diversified, so remittances make up a lower share of GDP than in Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan. But in absolute terms, Uzbekistan is one of the region’s major remittance recipients because of its population size and the large number of citizens working abroad. Uzbek migrants work in Russia, Kazakhstan, Türkiye, South Korea, the Gulf and increasingly other destinations. The state has tried to regulate labour migration more actively, including through organised recruitment and agreements with foreign employers. Still, much of the system remains family-driven: someone leaves, sends money, returns, leaves again, or helps another relative migrate.

Kazakhstan occupies another position in this regional economy. It sends migrants abroad too, but it is also a destination. Workers from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan come to Kazakhstan for construction, agriculture, services, markets and domestic work. In this sense, Kazakhstan is not only part of the remittance map as a country of origin, but also as a regional labour hub. Turkmenistan, by contrast, is harder to include with precision. Migration exists, but reliable data is limited and the country’s closed political environment makes the scale of remittances more difficult to assess.

Also read on Novastan: The paradoxes of migration from Tajikistan to Russia: an interview with Dr Elena Borisova

How the money is sent has changed dramatically. In the 1990s and 2000s, many families associated remittances with money-transfer offices and familiar brands such as Western Union, MoneyGram, Zolotaya Korona, Unistream or Contact. A migrant would queue, send cash, and relatives would collect it in a bank branch or transfer office. That world has not disappeared, but it has been transformed by sanctions, banking restrictions, digitalisation and the spread of smartphones.

Today, remittances often move through mobile banking apps, card-to-card transfers, e-wallets, national payment systems and fintech platforms. A migrant in Moscow can send money from a Russian bank account to a relative’s card in Dushanbe, Osh, Samarkand or Namangan. In Tajikistan, fintech and banking services such as Alif, Dushanbe City, Eskhata or other local platforms have become part of everyday financial life. In Uzbekistan, digital payment ecosystems such as Click, Payme, Uzum Bank and bank apps allow money to move quickly into household budgets. In Kyrgyzstan, mobile banking and card systems have made transfers faster and more routine.

This technical shift matters. When remittances arrive instantly, migration becomes part of daily household management. Money is no longer only a monthly transfer collected in cash. It can pay for groceries, utilities, school supplies, medicine or construction materials almost in real time. The migrant is physically absent but financially present. A father in Russia can still pay a bill in Tajikistan. A brother in South Korea can send money for a wedding. A son in Kazakhstan can support his mother’s medical treatment. Digital transfers make separation easier to manage, but they also normalise it.

Yet not everything moves through banking apps. Central Asia also has a “box economy”. Shuttle traders, relatives and small entrepreneurs carry goods across borders, especially through routes linking the region with Türkiye, Russia, Dubai and China. Istanbul is particularly important. Flights between Istanbul and Tashkent, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Almaty and other cities carry not only tourists and business travellers, but also small traders moving textiles, clothes, shoes, cosmetics and household goods. Some items are gifts. Others are for resale. Many fall somewhere in between. The result is a blurred line between migration, remittances and trade.

This matters because goods sent or carried home can function like remittances. A migrant may not send cash, but may bring phones, clothes or equipment that can be sold. A woman may travel to Istanbul, buy merchandise, and return to sell it in a bazaar or through Instagram and Telegram. A relative abroad may send goods through cargo services rather than money through a bank. In household economies where cash is scarce and small trade is common, goods are another way of transferring value.

The comparison with elite mobility is revealing. Central Asian governments also promote a very different kind of movement: students, civil servants and professionals sent abroad through state-backed scholarship schemes. Kazakhstan’s Bolashak and Uzbekistan’s El-Yurt Umidi belong to this world. They are designed to bring skills, networks and prestige back home. But they highlight the contrast at the heart of Central Asian mobility. Some citizens leave as future administrators, engineers or specialists. Many more leave as builders, drivers, cleaners, carers, traders or seasonal workers whose earnings keep households afloat.

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Russia remains the centre of this system, but it has become a more uncertain centre. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has needed migrant labour more than ever, especially in construction, manufacturing, logistics and services. Labour shortages have increased the demand for Central Asian workers. At the same time, migrants face a harsher environment: police checks, nationalist rhetoric, bureaucratic uncertainty, military recruitment pressure and social hostility. After the Crocus City Hall attack near Moscow in March 2024, Tajik migrants in particular reported more raids, deportations and difficulties entering Russia. Tajikistan even summoned the Russian ambassador over the treatment of its citizens.

This has exposed the fragility of a model built on migration. For Russia, Central Asian workers are necessary but politically vulnerable. For Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, migration reduces unemployment and brings in money, but it also exports social problems rather than solving them. If Russia tightens rules, deports workers or becomes less attractive, households across Central Asia feel the shock. If the rouble weakens, remittances lose value. If migrants face discrimination, the cost is borne not only by them, but by families waiting at home.

Destinations are diversifying. South Korea attracts workers through more regulated labour schemes. Türkiye combines labour, trade and cultural proximity. The Gulf has become more visible. Kazakhstan remains a regional magnet. Europe is still more difficult to access, but increasingly present in aspirations and small migration networks. But diversification is uneven and often expensive. For many families, Russia remains the most accessible option because of language, networks, transport links and relatively low entry costs.

The central question is therefore not whether remittances are good or bad. For many families, they are indispensable. They reduce poverty, finance education, build homes and open small businesses. Without them, social hardship would be much deeper. But dependence on remittances also allows states to postpone harder questions: how to create jobs at home, how to raise rural incomes, how to protect migrants abroad, how to support women left in charge of households, and how to turn money sent home into productive investment rather than only consumption.

Also read on Novastan: In Kyrgyzstan, one in four families lives below the poverty line

Remittances are Central Asia’s invisible welfare state, but they are also a warning. They show the strength of family solidarity across borders, and the weakness of domestic labour markets. They connect Tajik villages, Kyrgyz towns and Uzbek neighbourhoods to Moscow, Istanbul, Almaty, Seoul and Dubai. They arrive as bank notifications, cash transfers, cargo parcels and taped cardboard boxes. They build houses and empty villages. They pay for weddings and prolong absence. They keep economies moving, but they also reveal how much of Central Asia’s future is still being financed by people who had to leave.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Money, boxes and absent men: the hidden economy reshaping Central Asia appeared first on Novastan English.

Uzbekistan’s first World Cup appearance is often told through the players who carried the national team there: Eldor Shomurodov, Abbosbek Fayzullaev, Abdukodir Khusanov, Oston Urunov and the rest of a generation that made Uzbek football visible far beyond Central Asia. But national teams do not emerge from nowhere. They are built from clubs, cities, stadiums, academies, rivalries and local football cultures.

Over the past three decades, Uzbekistan’s domestic game has developed through several different models. There are old Soviet-era institutions, post-independence regional powers, prestige projects, industrial clubs, state-company teams, academy-driven structures and smaller provincial sides that rarely dominate the headlines but help give the league its geography. Together, they form the football map behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream.

The most famous point on that map is still Pakhtakor Tashkent. No club carries more symbolic weight in Uzbek football. Its name evokes cotton, Soviet Uzbekistan, the capital and one of the deepest tragedies in the country’s sporting memory: the 1979 air disaster that killed the team. Pakhtakor is not only a club with trophies. It is a national institution, a vessel of memory and the historic reference point against which other Uzbek clubs have often measured themselves.

If Pakhtakor is memory, Nasaf Qarshi is one of the clearest examples of regional achievement. Based in Kashkadarya, away from the capital and the Fergana Valley, Nasaf showed that a club outside Tashkent could build patiently, compete seriously and win internationally. Its 2011 AFC Cup victory remains one of the most important achievements in Uzbek club football. Nasaf’s story matters because it is not built around glamour. It is built around structure, continuity and the idea that a regional club can become more than a local project.

Navbahor Namangan represents something different again: popular passion. In the Fergana Valley, football is not only a sport but a form of civic identity. Navbahor’s name, meaning “spring”, gives the club a softer and more poetic image than many of its rivals, but its supporter culture is intense. Namangan’s Markaziy Stadium has become one of the emotional centres of Uzbek football, and Navbahor’s fan base has helped make the club a symbol of regional pride. If Uzbek football has a popular heartland, much of it beats in the Valley.

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Neftchi Fergana adds another layer to that same geography. Where Navbahor expresses Namangan’s football passion, Neftchi represents Fergana’s industrial memory. Founded as Neftyanik and linked to the oil-refining world of Fergana, the club dominated the early years after independence. It shared the first Uzbek league title with Pakhtakor in 1992, then won the championship outright in 1993, 1994 and 1995. Under Yuriy Sarkisyan, who coached the club from the late Soviet period into the post-Soviet era, Neftchi became the first great provincial power of independent Uzbek football.

Bunyodkor Tashkent belongs to another category entirely. Founded in 2005 and rapidly transformed into a prestige project, it tried to make Uzbek football visible through money, infrastructure and global names. Rivaldo came. Zico coached. Luiz Felipe Scolari followed. Samuel Eto’o did not sign, but even the rumour was enough to make international media look at Tashkent. Bunyodkor’s story is brilliant and excessive, but also fragile. It showed both the attraction and the limits of football spectacle in late Karimov-era Uzbekistan.

These five clubs explain much of Uzbek football’s recent history. Pakhtakor is memory. Nasaf is regional achievement. Navbahor is passion. Neftchi is early independence power. Bunyodkor is ambition. But the map does not end there.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

Lokomotiv Tashkent is the most obvious next point. Founded in 2002, the club is closely associated with Uzbekistan Railways, and its nickname, the Railroaders, gives it one of the clearest institutional identities in the country. Lokomotiv became especially important in the mid-2010s, when it broke through as a serious domestic force. After several seasons as runner-up, it won the Uzbek league in 2016, 2017 and 2018, turning a railway-backed club into one of the strongest teams of the period. If Bunyodkor was the glamour project, Lokomotiv was the state-company model in a more disciplined form: less spectacular, but highly effective for several years.

AGMK, from Almalyk, shows another version of the industrial club. Its name comes from the Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Combine, the company that has been central to the club’s identity and sponsorship. Almalyk itself is one of Uzbekistan’s major industrial towns, associated with mining, metallurgy and copper. AGMK therefore belongs to the same broad family as Neftchi and Lokomotiv: clubs whose football identity is inseparable from a major economic institution. Its importance is not only sporting. It shows how Uzbek football has often developed through the relationship between local industry, company patronage and regional visibility.

Sogdiana Jizzakh gives the map a historical and regional dimension. Founded in 1970, the club takes its name from Sogdia, the ancient region that once connected Central Asia to wider Eurasian trade, culture and empire. In football terms, Sogdiana has rarely dominated Uzbekistan, but it has mattered as a durable provincial club. Its 1992 bronze medal in the first season of the independent Uzbek league and its 2021 runner-up finish show that Jizzakh has periodically produced teams capable of challenging the established hierarchy. Sogdiana is not a giant, but it gives Uzbek football one of its strongest historical names.

Mash’al Mubarek represents yet another kind of provincial football. Based in Mubarek, a town located in Kashkadarya associated with the gas industry, the club’s name means “torch”. That symbolism matters: in a football landscape full of cotton, oil, railways, metallurgy and construction, Mash’al carries the image of gas, flame and energy. Its greatest domestic achievement came in 2005, when it finished second in the Uzbek league behind Pakhtakor and qualified for the AFC Champions League. Mash’al has not become a permanent national power, but it remains a reminder that even smaller industrial towns have produced important chapters in Uzbek football.

Andijan brings the map back to the Fergana Valley. The club has not had the same national success as Navbahor or Neftchi, but it gives the Valley another emotional football centre. In many countries, football geography is not only shaped by champions. It is also shaped by cities whose clubs carry local loyalty through difficult seasons, relegations and returns. Andijan belongs to that category: a club whose importance is regional, social and emotional more than trophy-based. In the wider story of Uzbek football, it helps show why the Fergana Valley is not one football identity, but several competing city identities.

Surkhon Termez pushes the map south. Termez, on the Afghan border, occupies a very different place in Uzbekistan’s geography and imagination from Tashkent, Namangan or Qarshi. Surkhon’s role in Uzbek football is not primarily about trophies. It is about representation. A league that includes Termez is a league that reaches the country’s southern frontier, connecting football to a borderland city shaped by trade, military routes, religion, archaeology and proximity to Afghanistan. Surkhon gives Uzbek football a southern edge.

Also read on Novastan: Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map

There are others too. Metallurg Bekabad (Tashkent region) reflects another industrial city and another metallurgy-linked identity. Kokand 1912 carries one of the oldest and most evocative city names in Uzbek football, rooted in the history of the Kokand Khanate and the Fergana Valley’s cultural geography. Qizilqum Zarafshon adds the mining landscape of the Kyzylkum desert and the gold-producing world of Navoi Region. Turon Yaypan (Fergana region) and other smaller clubs show how the football map continues to expand and contract as money, promotion, relegation and local support shift from season to season.

This diversity matters because Uzbek football is sometimes reduced to a national-team story or to a few famous names abroad. Shomurodov in Italy, Khusanov in England, Fayzullaev in Russia and other players in foreign leagues are now the most visible symbols of the country’s rise. But behind them stands a domestic structure that is more complicated than a simple talent pipeline. It includes Soviet legacies, regional pride, industrial sponsorship, state-company backing, academy projects, local administrations and fan cultures that vary sharply from city to city.

That structure has not always been stable. Uzbek clubs have often depended on powerful sponsors, state-linked companies or regional authorities. Budgets can rise and fall. Ownership can be opaque. Teams can surge quickly and decline just as quickly. Bunyodkor’s rise and fall showed the risks of spectacle. Neftchi’s long decline after its golden age showed how difficult it is to maintain dominance. Lokomotiv’s mid-2010s success showed how quickly a well-supported club can become a domestic force, but also how hard it is to turn a strong cycle into permanent mythology.

Yet this instability is also part of the story. Uzbek football has been built through experimentation. Some clubs have relied on memory. Some on fans. Some on factories. Some on railways. Some on academies. Some on local government. Some on the charisma of a coach or the ambition of a sponsor. The result is uneven, but it is not empty. It has produced institutions, rivalries and football environments that helped prepare the ground for the current generation.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

The World Cup moment gives this domestic map new meaning. For years, Uzbekistan was one of Asian football’s nearly teams: technically strong, competitive, respected, but repeatedly falling short of the final step. Qualification changes the story. It allows the country to look back and ask not only which players made history, but which clubs, cities and football cultures helped make those players possible.

In that sense, the road to the World Cup did not begin only in national-team camps. It passed through Pakhtakor’s memory, Nasaf’s discipline, Navbahor’s crowds, Neftchi’s industrial Fergana, Bunyodkor’s academy fields, Lokomotiv’s railway-backed structure, AGMK’s metallurgical city, Sogdiana’s Jizzakh, Mash’al’s gas-town football, Andijan’s Valley loyalty and Surkhon’s southern frontier.

Uzbekistan’s football map is therefore not a straight line from Tashkent to the World Cup. It is a network. It runs through cotton, oil, gas, railways, mining towns, ancient cities, border regions and stadiums where local pride is turned into football identity. That is what makes the country’s first World Cup appearance more than a national-team success. It is the result of a football culture built across many Uzbekistans: capital and province, industry and academy, memory and ambition, spectacle and patience.

The next question is whether this moment can strengthen the clubs themselves. World Cup qualification can inspire young players, attract more attention to the domestic league, and make football more attractive to sponsors and families. But it can also widen the gap between the national team’s global visibility and the domestic league’s everyday realities. The challenge for Uzbekistan will be to use the World Cup not only as a celebration, but as a catalyst: better academies, better coaching, stronger governance, more transparent club structures and stadium cultures that can grow beyond occasional big matches.

If that happens, the clubs behind the World Cup dream will not remain only background stories. They will become part of Uzbekistan’s next football chapter. The country has reached the World Cup. Now its domestic game has to decide what kind of football nation it wants to become.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Beyond the big clubs: the football map behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream appeared first on Novastan English.

Special series – The Clubs Behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup Dream

As Uzbekistan plays in its first-ever FIFA World Cup after a historic qualification campaign, Novastan looks at the clubs that shaped the country’s football identity. From Soviet-era Pakhtakor Tashkent to regional powerhouses such as Nasaf Qarshi, Navbahor Namangan and Neftchi Fergana, this series explores how club football helped build the foundations of the White Wolves’ rise.

In 2008, Uzbek football briefly became one of the strangest stories in the global game. A young Tashkent club, only three years old, claimed it was close to signing Samuel Eto’o from Barcelona, actually signed Rivaldo, hired Zico, and then brought in Luiz Felipe Scolari, Brazil’s 2002 World Cup-winning coach. Its name was Bunyodkor, meaning “creator” or “builder”, and for a few years it seemed to offer a new idea: that Uzbek football could force its way into international visibility through money, infrastructure and famous names.

Bunyodkor is unlike the other clubs in this series. Pakhtakor Tashkent carries Soviet memory and national tragedy. Nasaf Qarshi represents regional achievement and Asian success. Navbahor Namangan embodies popular passion in the Fergana Valley. Neftchi Fergana recalls the early years of independent Uzbek football. Bunyodkor belongs to a different category. It was not an old community club or a regional football institution. It was a project: fast, ambitious, spectacular and deeply tied to the political economy of late Karimov-era Uzbekistan.

The club was founded on 6 July 2005 as Neftgazmontaj-Quruvchi, usually shortened to Kuruvchi, meaning “builder”. The name reflected its origins in construction and energy-linked structures. In 2008, after rapid sporting success, the club was renamed Bunyodkor. The new name, often translated as “creator” or “builder”, suited its self-image. This was a club built quickly, with the aim of doing quickly what most football institutions take decades to achieve.

Its rise was immediate. After starting in the lower divisions, Bunyodkor moved rapidly through Uzbek football. It finished second in the 2007 Uzbek League, then won the championship in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013. It also won the Uzbek Cup four times, in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, and the Uzbek Super Cup in 2014. In less than a decade, it became one of the most decorated clubs of independent Uzbek football.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

But domestic success alone was not what made Bunyodkor famous. The turning point came in 2008, when the club tried to place itself in the global football conversation. The first episode was Samuel Eto’o. Kuruvchi publicly claimed that it had signed the Barcelona striker on a short-term contract. Eto’o travelled to Tashkent and gave a skills session, but the transfer never happened. Barcelona denied that a completed deal existed, and Eto’o remained in Europe. The episode mattered less because Eto’o played for the club – he did not – than because it showed Bunyodkor’s new method: using global football names to make the world look at Tashkent.

Rivaldo was different. He actually came. In August 2008, the Brazilian World Cup winner and former Ballon d’Or winner left AEK Athens for Bunyodkor. Reports described the contract as one of the most lucrative ever offered by a Central Asian club. For an Uzbek club, this was extraordinary. Rivaldo’s arrival gave Bunyodkor instant global recognition. For the first time, a club from Uzbekistan was not being discussed only in Asian football circles, but in the international sports press.

His presence was more than symbolic. Rivaldo played for Bunyodkor between 2008 and 2010, scored regularly and became the club’s international face. He brought glamour, but also credibility. The idea of an Uzbek club employing a player who had won the World Cup with Brazil and starred for Barcelona would have sounded impossible only a few years earlier. Bunyodkor made it real.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

The club then added another Brazilian legend, this time on the bench. Zico arrived as head coach in September 2008. His stay was brief, but successful. Under him, Bunyodkor won the Uzbek league and cup double and reached the semi-finals of the AFC Champions League. That continental run was important because it showed that the project was not only spectacle. Bunyodkor could also compete seriously in Asia.

In 2009, the club went further by appointing Luiz Felipe Scolari. Scolari had led Brazil to the 2002 World Cup and had recently left Chelsea. In Tashkent, he was reunited with Rivaldo, one of the stars of his World Cup-winning Brazil side. His contract was reported to make him one of the world’s best-paid football managers at the time. Bunyodkor’s domestic dominance continued, but the experiment did not last. Scolari left in 2010, less than a year into his contract, and Rivaldo also departed that year.

The money behind this period remains central to the story. Officially, Bunyodkor’s early sponsors were linked to construction and oil-gas structures, and later to state-linked companies such as Uztransgaz. During the Rivaldo and Scolari years, international reporting connected the club’s big-spending model to the opaque political economy of Karimov-era Uzbekistan, including companies and elite networks close to the presidential family. The precise ownership and financing arrangements were never fully transparent, and that opacity is part of the club’s history. Bunyodkor was not only a football club with rich sponsors; it was a product of a specific political moment, when energy money, elite business networks, international branding and football spectacle briefly came together.

When the money became less reliable, the illusion of unlimited ambition faded quickly. Rivaldo later pursued unpaid wages. Scolari left. Zeromax ran into serious trouble. Bunyodkor remained an important Uzbek club, but the era when it could plausibly attract Brazil’s biggest football names was over.

The club’s stadium tells a parallel story. Bunyodkor initially played at smaller Tashkent venues, including the MHSK and JAR stadiums. In 2012, the new Bunyodkor Stadium opened in Tashkent with a capacity of around 34,000 spectators. Later renamed Milliy Stadium, although the Bunyodkor name has remained closely associated with the venue, it became one of Uzbekistan’s main football arenas and an important home for the national team. The stadium gave the club a physical monument to its ambitions: modern, large and clearly designed to project national football confidence.

Bunyodkor’s nicknames also reveal how it wanted to be seen. The club is commonly known as Qaldirg‘ochlar, “the Swallows”, a nickname that gives it a more elegant and modern identity than the industrial or regional names of many older Uzbek clubs. It has also been called the “Asian Barcelona”, a label linked to the club’s attempted relationship with Barcelona, its Brazilian stars and its dream of becoming a stylish continental power. These labels matter because Bunyodkor was always more than a team on the pitch. It was also a brand, a projection of ambition and a claim that Uzbek football could belong in a wider global conversation.

Also read on Novastan: Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map

Yet Bunyodkor’s fan identity is more complicated than that of clubs such as Navbahor or Neftchi. Navbahor has the emotional weight of Namangan. Neftchi has Fergana’s industrial memory and early independence dominance. Pakhtakor has generations of Soviet and post-Soviet supporters. Bunyodkor is younger and more constructed. Its fans are mostly Tashkent-based and linked to a newer football culture: urban, stadium-centred, and associated with the club’s years of success rather than with decades of inherited loyalty.

This does not mean the club lacks supporters. Bunyodkor’s rise, stars, stadium and trophies gave it visibility, especially among younger fans in Tashkent. But its supporter culture has never carried the same mythology as Pakhtakor’s tragedy, Navbahor’s packed stands in Namangan or Neftchi’s Sarkisyan-era memory. Bunyodkor’s fan base is a product of modern Uzbek football: newer, more media-driven, and shaped by success, branding and academy football.

The club’s place in popular culture is also different. Pakhtakor has been celebrated in songs and public memory. Navbahor’s culture lives strongly through supporters, fan pages and stadium chants. For Bunyodkor, there does not appear to be a clearly documented famous pop song comparable to Pakhtakor’s songs by well-known Uzbek performers. Its pop-cultural footprint comes instead from spectacle: the astonishing arrival of Rivaldo, the Eto’o episode, Scolari in Tashkent, the “Asian Barcelona” label, and the image of a club that briefly made Uzbekistan visible in global football gossip.

That may be Bunyodkor’s most distinctive cultural role. It did not enter Uzbek popular culture mainly through music or folklore. It entered it through headlines. For a few years, the club made people ask: how could Rivaldo be in Tashkent? Could Eto’o really come? Why was Scolari coaching in Uzbekistan? Bunyodkor became a football story that sounded almost unreal, and that unreality was part of its appeal.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

There were also real footballers behind the spectacle. Mirjalol Qosimov, one of Uzbekistan’s great football figures, coached the club before and after the Brazilian era and helped give it a domestic football identity. Server Djeparov, one of the best Uzbek players of his generation and a two-time Asian Footballer of the Year, played for Bunyodkor. Rivaldo brought global fame, but players like Qosimov and Djeparov connected the club to Uzbek football’s own hierarchy of talent and authority.

Bunyodkor also became part of the careers of players who now define Uzbekistan’s World Cup generation. Eldor Shomurodov played for Bunyodkor from 2015 to 2017 before moving to Rostov in Russia, the transfer that opened the path to Serie A and later to his role as Uzbekistan’s captain. Abdukodir Khusanov, now one of the most internationally visible Uzbek players after his move to Manchester City, also passed through Bunyodkor’s academy before leaving for Belarus and then moving through Lens to English football. In this sense, Bunyodkor’s future may be more important than its past glamour: not as a club that buys stars, but as a club that helps produce them.

This is where the hope for the future lies. Bunyodkor is unlikely to repeat the Rivaldo-Scolari moment. That period belonged to a specific political and financial environment that no longer exists in the same form. But the club still has assets that matter: a recognised name, a major stadium environment, an academy tradition, experience in Asian competitions and a place in the capital’s football ecosystem. If it builds from youth development rather than spectacle, Bunyodkor can remain important to Uzbek football in a more sustainable way.

The club’s recent position suggests a more modest but potentially healthier phase. It is no longer the overwhelming force of 2008-2013, and it no longer looks like a club trying to buy global attention. But that may not be a weakness. Bunyodkor’s next chapter could be less glamorous and more useful: developing young players, competing domestically, returning to Asian relevance and contributing to the national team’s talent pipeline.

That would also change the meaning of its name. “Bunyodkor” means builder. In the late 2000s, the club tried to build international prestige from the top down, with money, names and spectacle. In the future, it may have to build differently: from academy fields, coaching structures, scouting and patience.

This is why Bunyodkor belongs in a series about the clubs behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream. Not because it is the deepest-rooted club in the country, and not because its big-money years offer a model to copy. It matters because it shows one of the boldest and most contradictory experiments in Uzbek football history. It brought global attention to Tashkent. It produced real trophies. It reached the AFC Champions League semi-finals. It revealed the risks of opaque money and prestige politics. And, through players such as Shomurodov and Khusanov, it still connects to the generation carrying Uzbekistan onto the World Cup stage.

Pakhtakor is memory. Nasaf is regional achievement. Navbahor is passion. Neftchi is early independence power. Bunyodkor is ambition – brilliant, excessive, fragile, and still unfinished.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Bunyodkor Tashkent: the prestige project that tried to put Uzbek football on the world map appeared first on Novastan English.