In her unsettling feature film Crickets, It’s Your Turn, Kazakh filmmaker Olga Korotko explores gender-based violence, complicity and the structures of power that allow abuse to flourish. Ahead of the film’s screening at the Asian Film Festival Barcelona, she speaks to Novastan about the strength of creativity, the disturbing absurdity of violence, and why her story extends far beyond Kazakhstan.

A young photographer, Merey, accepts an invitation to a gathering at a secluded house in the mountains outside Almaty. What begins as an ordinary social encounter gradually descends into a disturbing confrontation with male aggression, conformity and violence. As the night unfolds, the boundaries between reality and Merey’s imagination become increasingly blurred.

Written and directed by Kazakh filmmaker Olga Korotko, Crickets, It’s Your Turn (2024) combines psychological tension, absurdist humour and theatrical imagery to examine not only those who perpetrate violence, but also those who enable it through silence, conformity or indifference.

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At the centre of the film is Merey, played by Inzhu Abeu, whose creativity and perception of the world stand in sharp contrast to the hierarchies of power that govern the men around her. Rather than offering a conventional story of victimhood or revenge, Korotko challenges audiences to reconsider what constitutes strength, how violence becomes normalised and why punishing individual perpetrators does not necessarily dismantle the systems that sustain them.

Based in the United Arab Emirates since 2019, Korotko continues to engage with Kazakh society through her filmmaking while drawing inspiration from experiences beyond national borders.

Ahead of the film’s Spanish premiere at the Asian Film Festival Barcelona on 30 October, Novastan spoke with Korotko about the ideas behind the film, the significance of its striking visual language and the questions she hopes audiences will continue asking long after the credits roll.

Novastan: Crickets, It’s Your Turn is deeply disturbing, not only because of the violence itself, but because of how the different characters react – or fail to react – to it. Some participate, others remain passive, and almost nobody intervenes. Was this collective indifference something you particularly wanted to explore? What interested you about the responsibility of those who witness violence but choose not to act?

Olga Korotko: I wanted to show not simply the aggressors, but the system they stand on. An aggressor does not emerge or act in a vacuum. There has to be a certain ground on which his worldview can develop, his values can be reinforced and his actions can become acceptable. That ground is not always part of the conversation.

I think society sets a very high threshold for what it is prepared to recognise as unacceptable violence. Below that threshold, a great deal is treated as insignificant: nothing serious, he was only joking, he was just being persistent in his courtship. But even once that threshold has been crossed, accountability is far from guaranteed.

Moreover, society often takes sides before it even begins to examine what happened. What matters is who is standing before us: a man or a woman, from what background and class, with what education and reputation. A white man from a privileged background may be given the benefit of the doubt in advance, while a woman has to prove that she deserves to be heard at all. Judging the person takes the place of examining what they did.

The image of the pyramid of violence is useful to me here. At the top are its most extreme forms, including femicide. But that visible peak rests on a broad foundation of things considered harmless: sexist jokes, stereotypes, degrading comments, the habit of not taking women seriously. Then come control, harassment and coercion. This does not mean that every joke inevitably leads to a crime. It is about an environment in which disrespect and domination gradually become normal.

I tried to make different levels of this system visible. Even the taxi driver, who sees Merey taking photographs and immediately starts teaching her how to do it, exists within this system. He knows nothing about her professional experience, but never questions his own right to instruct her. The system is already present in the most ordinary situations, long before the viewer encounters brutality. It is also there in the cinema scene, where the film being screened presents harassment as romantic courtship.

So for me, the question of why people do not intervene begins before the act of violence itself. When boundaries are constantly blurred, when so much has already been justified and normalised, people struggle to acknowledge the point at which something must be stopped. And sometimes acknowledging it would mean questioning their own behaviour too. Everyone occupies a place in this system and contributes to sustaining it: through open aggression, silence, conformity or a willingness to excuse one of their own.

Crimes must be punished. But it also matters to me that we become less tolerant of things dismissed as trivial that create the ground for those crimes. We cannot keep dealing only with the top of the pyramid of violence while leaving the foundation from which it grows untouched.

Read more on Novastan: The Wife: the short film highlighting domestic violence in Kazakhstan

One of the most unsettling aspects of the film is Merey’s absolute isolation. Even those who initially appear sympathetic or trustworthy ultimately offer her little protection. Did you deliberately construct a world in which she has nobody to rely on? What does this absence of solidarity tell us about the society you wanted to portray?

I would first clarify something: I do not see Merey as absolutely alone. There is a difference between a lack of support and the way a person builds their relationship with the world. People have different inner architectures. Merey has a very rich inner life, and she does not feel a particular need to build a large social circle around herself.

I think the most alive moment of connection in the whole film is between her and the women at the party, when she photographs them. She sees what is alive and real in them, and through her photographs they have the opportunity to see themselves through different eyes. Not through the male gaze they are subjected to at this party, but through the gaze of someone who is interested in them as people in their own right.

Merey is an artist, and much of her communication with the world happens through what she creates. She photographs these women, and later they look at the photographs. That is communication. It does not end the moment people are no longer in the same place.

This is very personal for me. I do not have a large crowd around me either, and communicating through what I create is, for me, a full and meaningful way of communicating with the world. Creativity does not necessarily happen instead of relationships. It is itself a form of relationship. In fact, I consider it one of the strongest forms of relationship, one that exists beyond the limits of time and space.

What interested me in the film was a clash between two ways of existing. The men in the film build their world through force, domination and hierarchy. For Merey, life is grounded in beauty, play and creativity. She is not an outcast who has failed to find a place in their group. She is not a weak person among strong people. She has an entirely different understanding of what strength is.

One of the men explains the world through his own version of Darwinism: the strong defeat the weak. Merey speaks about beauty. This is where the image of the peacock comes in. For me, it stands against that primitive formula of life reduced to the ability to attack, dominate or hide. There is also creativity, creation and the continuation of life. Merey does not need to subjugate someone else for her presence in the world to matter.

I do not see her as a naive idealist. I think she is the freest and most inwardly strong figure in the film. The very idea that beauty, play and creativity are weak, unimportant or dispensable is bound up with gender assumptions. These things are assigned to the feminine and then devalued. For me, real strength lies precisely in creativity, rather than in domination and physical force.

To judge Merey by her ability to dominate is already to accept the criteria of the men in the film. If a viewer recognises strength only where someone can subjugate another person or defeat them physically, they risk reproducing the very logic the film examines.

Her strength is therefore shown through a concrete action: through her gaze, other women see themselves differently. Beauty here is neither decoration nor a comforting refuge. It has an effect on another person. And I did not make her a photographer by accident. A camera can turn a woman into an object to be judged and enjoyed by others. Merey uses that instrument to see a woman. To give her presence and individuality.

The absence of protection is part of the society depicted. But I did not build the character around the question of why nobody comes to her aid.

The house in the mountains almost feels like a society in miniature, cut off from the outside world and governed by its own rules. As the night progresses, it becomes increasingly nightmarish. What inspired this setting, and did you intend the house to represent something larger than the immediate situation of the characters?

Yes, the house is a society in miniature. But to my mind, any social situation is already a society in miniature. A bus journey, a school lesson, an ordinary encounter. Ideas about what is acceptable, about power, about one’s own place and that of others, emerge everywhere. People bring society with them.

The isolation mattered to me for a different reason. Merey is acutely sensitive to injustice. But at the beginning of the film, she does not directly confront the men she encounters. She has her own way of dealing with what happens: the white room, her inner theatre. There, she transforms situations, mocks them and works through the sense of injustice they provoke. This is an action on her part too; it simply takes place in another space.

Once she is in the mountain house, she initially continues to use this approach. But gradually it becomes insufficient. It is one thing to privately mock a taxi driver who tells you how to use a camera, and then get out of the car. It is another to encounter violence while isolated with the people who pose the threat. Here, she cannot simply end an unpleasant conversation and carry on with her day.

In other circumstances, she would still have at least some outside options: leaving, seeking help, going to the police. I do not want to pretend that these guarantee a woman’s protection. But in the house she is deprived even of those fragile possibilities. She has to intervene directly in what is happening. This does not mean that outside the house she would walk past violence, merely mocking it to herself. Isolation sharply restricts the ways she can act.

The space creates conditions in which her usual way of engaging with reality reaches its limit. Her ability to create images remains; what changes is the relationship between those images and the outside world.

This change takes place in the form of the film itself. The white room ceases to be a separate space she can enter inwardly. Her fantasies seep into the external action, and the boundary between them and reality becomes increasingly unstable.

What matters to me is that these fantasies never existed apart from reality in the first place. From the beginning, they grow out of particular encounters, conversations and humiliations, out of what Merey notices and experiences. At first, the film allows us to perceive these spaces separately, and then makes their inseparability visible. I do not see this as a story in which the protagonist simply loses touch with reality.

The men in the film are not all equally aggressive, yet they seem to reinforce one another’s behaviour. Nurlan, in particular, appears concerned with being accepted by the group. How important was it for you to explore male conformity, peer pressure and the fear of challenging other men?

I would distinguish between fear of the group and the desire to belong to it. Nurlan does not simply need to avoid punishment from the men. Being accepted by the powerful is a reward for him, confirmation of his place in the world. He is afraid of ending up among those who can be oppressed, because he himself accepts this arrangement of the world.

Within this worldview, a person can seek to subjugate someone less protected while willingly submitting to someone whose authority over them they recognise. There is no contradiction here. These are two sides of the same hierarchy.

You can see this in the most ordinary situations. A man is being loud and aggressive, ignoring a woman’s requests to stop. But as soon as another man intervenes, someone he perceives as stronger or more influential, his ability to control himself suddenly appears. So it is not necessarily a question of being unable to control himself, but of whose demand he considers binding. Even such simple actions sustain the larger system.

Nurlan does not have to want to dominate everyone: it is enough to want to belong to those who dominate. If he sees no possibility of reaching the top himself, he seeks safety through proximity to those already there. To gain their recognition, to be on their side. He can only imagine the other side as the place of those who will be oppressed.

This is why such characters matter to me. An openly aggressive person is easier to recognise, although recognising his cruelty does not mean being able to stop him. But someone who appears decent and says reasonable things inspires trust. We want to see in him the possibility of a different response.

Yet outward civility is no guarantee of moral resistance. The person who speaks more gently than the others may be the one through whom the system successfully continues to operate.

Moreover, I do not think Nurlan understands his own betrayal. His idea of what is normal has already been shaped by this hierarchy. I do not see him as someone who has understood everything, identified what is happening as evil and consciously chosen to support it. What disturbs me more is that someone can think of himself as perfectly decent while continuing to participate in cruelty.

Control is often explained as care: a woman must be restricted because she is supposedly being protected; decisions must be made for her because she does not understand what is best for her. Someone can sincerely consider this position reasonable and caring without recognising that it justifies control. He does not have to be pretending. He believes he is right and never questions his right to decide for another person.

For me, this raises the distinction between decency as a social image and decency as an action. You can use the right words and be pleasant company. But what remains of that decency when you have to give up the approval of people whose recognition matters so much to you?

I see a connection between patriarchy, capitalist relations and political power in precisely this logic: the strong are granted the right to determine another person’s life, and safety is sought through proximity to power. This is the lens I bring to the film as its author. The scale may vary: relationships within a group, economic dependence, political alliances. But the same way of thinking recurs: to avoid being oppressed, you need to be close to those who oppress. Nurlan sustains this system without even considering himself one of its cruel participants.

The film combines moments of absurdity and dark humour with deeply disturbing events. At times, the characters’ almost casual behaviour makes the violence even more unsettling. How did you approach this balance, and what can black humour communicate about violence that a more conventional drama might not?

Humour was one of the film’s central artistic choices. Freud’s essay “Humour” had a strong effect on me when I read it, particularly his discussion of the ego’s refusal to submit to the suffering imposed by reality. I am drawn to an understanding of humour as an inner, spiritual victory over a situation. For me, the ability to make a joke is connected to being able to rise a little above what is happening, to see connections and contradictions that may be invisible from within the experience. A position outside it becomes possible.

It was not enough for me to evoke sadness and sympathy about violence against women and the impunity surrounding it. I value emotions very much: they are often how we first notice injustice. But I wanted to go further and examine how it works. That violence is terrible and wrong is, for me, the starting point of the conversation. If someone does not understand that, I have bad news for them. I wanted to go further, to create an analytical lens. Humour gave me the distance I needed.

I also wanted to strip aggressors of their grandeur. In cinema, violence is often surrounded by mythology: the person committing it turns out to be extraordinarily intelligent, powerful, almost superhuman. This fascination with the aggressor irritates me. He is credited with depth and exceptional qualities that he does not necessarily possess. Very superficial reasoning begins to look like complex philosophy simply because a dangerous person is speaking.

By creating this mythology, we ourselves give him additional power over our imagination. I wanted to tear off that mask of grandeur. But humour does not make the men in my film harmless.

We are used to expecting that once a claim to greatness has been exposed, it will lose its power. Here, however, a person can be ridiculous, superficial, pathetic, and still dangerous. There is a terrifying gap between how little he amounts to and how much harm he can cause.

So black humour does not release the tension here. On the contrary, it makes what is happening even more disturbing. You see how absurd these people are, but their power over the situation remains. The ability to cause harm requires neither depth nor intelligence nor any exceptional qualities.

The film is a comedy in its construction and a tragedy in its outcome. Even the title refers to the silence after a joke that turns out not to be funny: nobody laughs, all you hear is crickets. The film itself is built like that kind of joke. You see caricature and absurdity, you recognise what is funny, but behind it all is a tragedy. And at a certain point, there is absolutely nothing to laugh at.

Although the film is fictional, its portrayal of violence, silence and impunity inevitably raises questions about contemporary Kazakhstan. To what extent were the characters and their reactions inspired by attitudes or situations you have observed in Kazakh society? Kazakhstan strengthened its legislation against domestic violence in 2024, but implementing legal protections is another matter. From your perspective, have attitudes and institutional responses genuinely begun to change?

I always find it a little funny when my film is read as something that happens only in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the setting, but I never intended to confine what I was saying to a single country. I am speaking about something that exists all over the world: openly in some places, elsewhere in forms that are easier to overlook or consider acceptable.

I think reading it as a story about a “distant society” sometimes allows the viewer to maintain a comfortable distance. We watch how terribly life is organised somewhere over there and can fail to notice familiar relationships in our own surroundings. But I would like people to see their own world in the film too. The geography of these relationships extends far beyond Kazakhstan.

Right now, we are following the case of Jane Doe, who reported being gang-raped at a Cornell University fraternity house. The investigation is ongoing. But the history of the response to her report already raises serious questions. Initially, no criminal charges were brought. The university measures reported included assignments to write essays; there were also expulsions and suspensions. Simply listing disciplinary measures does not answer the question of whether the woman received protection or whether there was proportionate accountability. The criminal investigation was reopened only after a civil lawsuit and widespread public outcry.

A prestigious institution, education and existing rules do not in themselves rule out either violence or a failure to respond to it.

Changes in the law matter, of course. But the environment in which a law is meant to operate must allow it to function. The existence of legal protection does not in itself guarantee that someone can access it; the law is applied within the very social relationships I am examining.

A formal prohibition on violence can coexist with distrust of the victim, excuses for the aggressor and the protection of a group’s or institution’s reputation. Someone has to decide whether a woman is credible, whether what happened to her is serious enough, whether it is worth disrupting the established order for her. Those decisions reveal assumptions about whose life and whose future matter more.

So I would not want to turn this conversation into an assessment of how particular legislative changes are being implemented in Kazakhstan. That is a separate task for people who work professionally on these issues. As a filmmaker, I am interested in what lies beneath the formal prohibition: why violence continues to be justified and whose interests take precedence over protecting a person. I want to make visible the relationships that can prevent even existing mechanisms of protection from working.

Without revealing the ending, the film raises uncomfortable questions about justice, revenge and whether it is possible to escape cycles of violence. What did you want audiences to feel or question when leaving the cinema?

For me, it is important to distinguish between justice and the satisfaction of a story settling the score with the abusers. Taking revenge on particular aggressors can bring a story to an end without changing what made their actions possible.

I consciously rejected an ending in which Merey takes justice into her own hands and seeks revenge. These people must be held accountable. But if the environment itself remains unchanged, punishing individuals does not resolve the problem. It continues to produce new aggressors. I think of the image of the hydra: a severed head grows back because the source of its existence has not been destroyed. The environment must change too, so that it shapes different relationships and different people.

Revenge in cinema can also give the viewer a powerful sense of release. The abusers have been punished, we have experienced retribution alongside the heroine, the story has symbolically restored order. We can breathe out: it is over, the situation has been resolved. I did not want the viewer’s relief to be the film’s final word.

I have a background and professional experience in psychology, and this also informs how I think about cinema. I am interested in what happens to the viewer’s experience after the final frame. Here, I wanted to leave a sense of something unresolved, so that people could argue, think, talk and return to what they had seen.

Punishment does not undo what happened or bring back what was destroyed. It matters to me to preserve that sense of irreparable loss. In reality, many victims are denied even the symbolic restoration of order that cinema can so readily offer. I can bring the plot to an end, but I do not want to present that ending as a resolution of the conflict itself.

And Merey’s choice is essential here. If her strength ultimately has to be expressed only through her ability to destroy her opponents, we return to their definition of strength. She lives within a different system of values. What she creates, what she changes in other people, has a life of its own in the world. But I do not want to turn that into a convenient compensation, as though beauty could cancel out the harm inflicted on someone. It cannot. The significance of what has been created and the injustice can exist simultaneously, and one does not resolve the other.

So I refuse to fulfil cinema’s familiar promise of symbolically restoring order. I wanted to create an artistic situation that viewers could enter into conflict with for themselves. For the story to end and the question to remain open.

You have been based in the UAE since 2019 while maintaining close connections with Kazakhstan. How has living there influenced your perspective on Kazakh society and your filmmaking? Has the UAE also played a role in the film’s production or creative development, and do you see opportunities for stronger cinematic cooperation between the UAE and Central Asia?

It is difficult for me to trace every influence on my own work from within my own experience. But I cannot identify a specific influence of living in the Emirates on the artistic conception of Crickets. The UAE was not involved in producing the film either.

I tend to start with my own inner processes, with how I experience what is happening. A story grows out of an emotional response. So I sometimes find it difficult to answer questions about creativity through the borders between countries: they do not quite correspond to how I experience my life and work.

Sometimes I feel as though I live in every country at once. In Kazakhstan, in the Emirates, all over the world. I can be deeply affected by what is happening in France, Kazakhstan or Ukraine. You only have to open your phone and you are already inside events taking place far away, but provoking very real pain and anxiety.

Of course, watching through a screen and living through events directly are different experiences. But my attention and emotional life are not confined to the country where I am physically present. So I find it difficult to describe distance from Kazakhstan simply as either a creative advantage or a loss. I do not feel that I have left one world and now exist exclusively in another.

At the same time, I want to shoot my next film right here, in the Emirates. And in that case, I can say very specifically how a place influenced its conception.

Read more on Novastan: Rinat Bekchintaev: “Almaty has an authentic cinematic image that cannot be repeated anywhere else”

About two years ago, I went to Fujairah for the first time. I had already been living in the UAE for several years, but had never been there. That trip literally turned my world upside down. The nature, the landscape, the beauty of the emirate made such a strong impression on me that I immediately thought of the spaces in Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. I looked around and thought: how have I never seen this before? This has to be in cinema.

It was a very immediate feeling of inner exhilaration, a desire to create something out of what I was feeling at that moment. That experience gave rise to the idea for the screenplay I am working on. I think it will be very different from my first two films.

Read more on Novastan: Almira Saifullina: “The steppe is an archive of violence, memory and silence”

Simply living in a country does not yet give me a subject. But encountering a particular space can provoke a response from which an entire film grows.

As for cooperation between the UAE and Central Asia, I would not venture to assess its production and financial conditions at this point. But I do feel a certain cultural affinity and closeness in outlook. I feel that people could find a common language, that there is ground here for mutual understanding. I would be interested to see what films might emerge from such an encounter.

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

The post Olga Korotko: “The film is a comedy in its construction and a tragedy in its outcome” appeared first on Novastan English.

Central Asia is attracting unprecedented international attention, but can new investment and infrastructure translate into more productive economies and better jobs? World Bank Division Director for Central Asia Najy Benhassine discusses reform, private-sector development, regional connectivity and the challenges facing the region through 2035.

Central Asia has become a focal point for investment, trade and connectivity initiatives involving partners from Europe, Asia and the Gulf. Yet strong growth and major infrastructure projects do not automatically deliver a more diversified economy or higher-quality employment.

In this interview with Novastan, Najy Benhassine, the World Bank’s Division Director for Central Asia, discusses the opportunities and structural constraints facing the five Central Asian economies, from access to finance and skills development to the Middle Corridor and climate resilience.

Central Asia is receiving unprecedented attention from major economic partners, including the EU, China, the Gulf states, South Korea and others. To what extent is this greater geopolitical and investment interest already translating into deeper economic transformation within the region?

The interest is real and, in some respects, historic. Central Asia has moved from the margins to the centre of multiple strategic agendas simultaneously, and that creates genuine opportunities – more infrastructure financing, greater trade flows along economic corridors, and more diversified economic partnerships than at any point since independence.

But I would make a distinction between interest and actual transformation. Global attention generates visits, pledges, and headlines, but these are just the start. Translating this interest into actual investments takes more. Economic transformation requires institutional reforms, competitive markets, and an environment where domestic and foreign firms can grow, become more productive, and generate more and better-paid jobs.

So far, we are seeing expanding trade volumes and transit activity, along with some increase in foreign direct investment (FDI) in extractive industries and connectivity and logistics-related infrastructure. For a landlocked region, that is very welcome, but it does not yet amount to structural transformation in terms of diversified productive capacity, rising total factor productivity, or significant movement up export value chains.

When I look for genuine reform momentum, I see encouraging signs across Central Asia, although the nature and pace of reform differ. Uzbekistan, for example, has sustained a significant economic transformation since 2017, including exchange rate liberalisation, opening of state-dominated sectors to private participation, significant progress towards WTO accession, improvements in tax and customs administration, and the removal of deep distortions such as mandatory crop placement and the propiska system. Together, these reforms have created a more dynamic investment environment, with significant impacts on growth, job creation, and poverty reduction.

Read more on Novastan: When reform reaches everyday life: Lessons from Uzbekistan and Mongolia

Kazakhstan, as the region’s largest economy and an upper-middle-income country, is at an equally important stage. Its reform agenda focuses on reducing the dominance of state-owned enterprises, deepening capital markets, and advancing the transition to a more knowledge-intensive and private-sector-driven growth model.

In Tajikistan, recent reforms have advanced greater competition in backbone sectors such as telecommunications and aviation, a stronger legal framework for foreign investment, and a more transparent environment for private investors. On the inclusion side, a new Benefits Sharing Program has been adopted that would direct part of the revenue from electricity sales from the Rogun Hydropower Plant towards pro-poor spending, alongside measures to make basic education services more inclusive.

In the Kyrgyz Republic, the government is reforming utilities to allow private participation, establishing the framework for public-private partnerships (PPPs) and a more competitive and streamlined business environment, while digitising public services and financial systems to expand access and efficiency. These reforms are laying the foundations for large-scale investments, such as the Kambarata-1 Hydropower Plant and the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, to translate into jobs and inclusive growth.

Growth rates across Central Asia have remained relatively strong, but headline growth does not always translate into productivity gains or better-quality employment. Where do you see the biggest gap between economic growth and structural transformation?

The biggest gap is in productivity and skilled job creation. Growth has been driven primarily by favourable commodity prices, public investment, and remittance inflows. These are real contributions to GDP, but they are not the same as an economy becoming more productive or competitive.

When you look at firm-level data, labour productivity in manufacturing has stagnated or grown only modestly across most of the five countries. The private sector remains dominated by small firms that struggle to access finance, skilled labour, and markets at scale. State-owned enterprises continue to absorb capital and crowd out private investment in sectors where they should not dominate. The quality of jobs – measured by formality, wages, and skills content – has not improved commensurately with headline growth figures.

Access to finance remains a major constraint. Banking sectors remain relatively shallow, and credit allocation is often distorted by state-owned banks and directed lending practices. Small and medium-sized enterprises face collateral requirements they cannot meet and interest rates that make investment difficult to justify. The regulatory environment compounds this: compliance burdens, uneven application of rules, weak contract enforcement, and governance deficiencies all raise the cost of doing business and disproportionately disadvantage smaller, domestically oriented firms.

This is exactly the kind of challenge that our FINGROW, or the Access to Finance for Jobs and Growth Program, is designed to address at scale. It brings together the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) in a One World Bank Group approach, with $2 billion in IBRD financing and $1 billion each from IFC and MIGA, aiming to mobilise up to $6 billion in private capital.

By addressing financing gaps for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises and scaling digital financial solutions, it has the potential to support up to 18 million more or better jobs across participating countries over time. In Central Asia, Phase 1 is already underway in Uzbekistan, with the programme designed to be flexible enough to address each country’s specific structural and institutional context.

FINGROW is also a model for how we think about our work more broadly: focusing on outcomes at scale, with the World Bank, IFC, and MIGA defining shared goals from the outset rather than working in parallel.

The most important structural gap, however, is the disconnect between education systems and labour market needs. All five countries have relatively high school enrolment rates, but graduates’ skills do not always match what a more diversified, productivity-driven economy requires. Closing that gap requires sustained investment in the quality of education, not just its quantity.

The five Central Asian economies are often discussed as a single region, yet their economic structures and reform trajectories differ considerably. Which differences matter most when assessing their development prospects?

Central Asia is a genuine region – not simply a geographic label. The five countries share a common history, a cultural heritage shaped by the Silk Road civilisations, and a Soviet institutional legacy that continues to influence how states and public institutions function. That shared foundation matters for how regional cooperation can be built.

What is striking today is that regional identity is being consciously strengthened. The Consultative Meetings of Central Asian leaders reflect a deliberate collective effort by all five heads of state to build a cooperative regional agenda on key issues affecting the sub-region, including trade, water, energy, and connectivity.

It is also worth noting that all five countries are, in different ways, resource-rich – though the nature of those resources varies considerably. Kazakhstan has vast land and hydrocarbon reserves. Turkmenistan holds some of the world’s largest natural gas deposits. Uzbekistan has gold, and a large and growing population that is itself a demographic asset.

Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have what the region urgently needs and will need more of: hydropower potential that could be transformative not just nationally but regionally. These differences shape their individual development paths, but also create opportunities for much deeper economic complementarity across the region.

Many Central Asian governments want to attract more foreign direct investment. What distinguishes investment that contributes to long-term domestic productive capacity from investment that has relatively limited spillover effects?

This is one of the most important questions for the region, and governments are increasingly asking it themselves rather than simply pursuing FDI volume.

The constraint in Central Asia is not a global shortage of capital. Banks and institutional investors manage roughly $280 trillion globally. The question is whether capital can reach viable opportunities at an acceptable risk and return, and that is precisely where development institutions like the World Bank Group have a critical role.

Through our Private Sector Investment Lab, we identified five recurring barriers to quality private investment in developing economies: policy and regulatory uncertainty, gaps in political risk coverage, foreign exchange risk, insufficient junior equity, and limited mechanisms to originate and distribute assets at scale. These five barriers are as relevant in Central Asia as anywhere.

The World Bank Group’s response has been concrete. We have brought our guarantee instruments under one platform, delivering more than $25 billion in guarantees globally in FY2026. Roughly one-third of IFC’s investments are now in local currency, reducing the foreign exchange risk that deters long-term investors.

We have launched the Frontier Opportunities Fund to provide junior equity in markets where promising businesses cannot yet reach commercial scale. We are also bringing the World Bank, IFC and MIGA closer together so that policy reform and investment work in tandem.

Investment in extractive industries has historically generated strong revenues for Central Asian governments but relatively limited spillovers. By contrast, investment in agro-processing, light manufacturing, tourism, or business services is more likely to generate the supply chain linkages, employment, and knowledge spillovers that build domestic productive capacity.

Attracting more of this investment requires governments to reduce policy uncertainty, strengthen contract enforcement, and address the risks that prevent global capital from entering these markets.

Regional connectivity has become a central policy priority, particularly around the Middle Corridor and other east-west transport routes. How much economic value can improved connectivity generate if border procedures, logistics, customs and regulatory coordination do not improve at the same pace?

Read more on Novastan: The Middle Corridor is growing, but can it deliver? A logistics operator’s perspective

This is exactly the right question to ask. Physical infrastructure is necessary but not sufficient. The bottlenecks on the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor (TCTC) are not primarily about the absence of roads or railways – they are about border-crossing procedures, transshipment coordination, documentation requirements, and the fragmentation of logistics services across multiple jurisdictions. Since 2022, shifts in regional trade patterns have exposed these constraints more clearly.

The economic value of connectivity therefore depends critically on the “soft” dimension keeping pace with the “hard” infrastructure.

Our new report, Integration: World-Class Trade Logistics Along the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor, estimates that strategic investments in the corridor – covering nine countries and nearly 200 million people – could more than triple trade volumes and halve travel times, creating 2 million additional jobs by 2040 by a conservative estimate. Combined with reforms that improve trade and transport efficiency, volumes could quadruple and travel times could fall by two-thirds.

The report estimates that more than $25 billion in physical infrastructure investment – in rail, ports, and feeder roads – is needed through 2040, alongside potentially significant enabling investments in logistics hubs, digital systems, and rolling stock.

It identifies four concrete priorities: a single digital corridor system; integrated rail and maritime services; corridor-wide mechanisms to monitor performance and resolve bottlenecks; and governance reforms to help state-owned rail, port, and shipping companies operate more commercially.

The World Bank Group is contributing through analytical work, customs and trade-facilitation reforms, infrastructure financing, and risk mitigation. MIGA recently issued a $785 million guarantee supporting Kazakhstan’s national road rehabilitation programme, including strategic sections of the corridor, while the World Bank is supporting Kazakhstan’s Transport Resilience and Connectivity Enhancement Project.

The central point is simple: without sustained progress on the soft dimension, the economic returns to infrastructure investment will be significantly below potential. The gains will be real but incremental rather than transformative.

Read more on Novastan: Can Afghanistan Become Central Asia’s Bridge to the South?

What kinds of jobs will Central Asia need to create as its young and increasingly urban populations enter the labour market, and which sectors are most likely to generate them?

The demographic situation across Central Asia is notably different from much of the rest of the world. While Eastern Europe and Russia face shrinking working-age populations, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan have young and rapidly growing populations.

To put the global context around this: over the next 10 to 15 years, 1.2 billion young people are expected to reach working age worldwide, while only around 420 million jobs are projected to be created. The private sector creates nine out of ten jobs in developing economies – which means the answer to Central Asia’s employment challenge cannot come from governments alone. It requires an environment where private firms can grow, invest, and hire at scale.

Several sectors have potential to generate productive employment: agro-processing and food manufacturing; modern services, including tourism, logistics, retail finance, and digital services; and light manufacturing oriented towards regional markets.

The challenge is both the supply of skills and the quality of opportunities.

In the Kyrgyz Republic, our analytical work found that roughly half of young people entering the labour market lacked the competencies employers need. In Uzbekistan, more than half of employers cite an inadequately skilled workforce as a binding constraint to growth, even as the country’s working-age population is projected to expand significantly.

Digital services illustrate the opportunity. Several Central Asian cities have a critical mass of technically educated young people and improving connectivity. There is genuine potential for the region to participate in global markets to generate employment.

But realising that potential requires education systems to shift from delivering credentials to delivering competencies. That will be one of Central Asia’s central human-capital challenges over the next decade.

Looking ahead to 2035, what would successful economic transformation in Central Asia actually look like? Which indicators would convince you that the region had moved beyond strong growth towards a more resilient and productive economic model?

The question I always ask is: what is driving growth, and who is participating in it? Strong headline growth can coexist with a very narrow base of beneficiaries and a very narrow range of drivers. Successful transformation by 2035 would look different in several concrete respects.

On economic structure, one would want to see the share of non-resource tradable sectors – manufacturing, agro-processing, tourism, modern services, etc. – growing as a share of GDP and employment, driven by private firms rather than state-owned enterprises. Export diversification, measured not just by the number of products but by their complexity and value-added content, would be a key signal.

On productivity, I would look for sustained total factor productivity growth – evidence that the economy is not just accumulating inputs but using them more efficiently.

On inclusion, one would look at the income of the bottom 40 percent growing faster than the average, declining spatial disparities between capitals and secondary cities, and improving labour force participation rates – particularly for women and youth, where gaps remain large across the region.

On resilience, a critical indicator would be reduced fiscal and external sensitivity to commodity price cycles. But the climate-related risks are perhaps the most structurally consequential. Central Asia faces the most acute water stress, and glacial retreat in the Tien Shan and Pamir ranges threatens long-term water availability across the region.

Governments are investing in irrigation efficiency, rural water supply, and renewable energy, and we support these efforts through the Central Asia Water and Energy Program (CAWEP), with generous contributions from the EU, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

Launched in 2009 and now in its fourth phase, CAWEP is the only multi-donor programme in the region working simultaneously on water and energy security at the regional level. The fourth phase alone has supported $3.3 billion in World Bank investments and helped mobilise more than $7 billion in private and public investments in Central Asian economies – a signal of how critical this agenda is to our long-term engagement in Central Asia.

Finally, on governance and institutions – which underpin everything else – one would look for measurable improvements in the rule of law, contract enforcement, and the quality and independence of regulatory institutions. Ultimately, transformation depends on the institutions that govern markets, allocate capital, and enforce rules.

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

The post World Bank’s Najy Benhassine on Economic Growth and Transformation in Central Asia appeared first on Novastan English.

A man returns home, only to be murdered. Then it happens again. And again. In Zero Point Action, Mongolian director Aldar Enkhbayar turns this unsettling premise into a 131-minute science-fiction thriller that combines the tension of a video game with reflections on family, justice and personal responsibility. Selected for the 2026 Asian Film Festival Barcelona, the film also addresses contemporary concerns in Mongolia, from Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution to the consequences of individual choices. Speaking to Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, Enkhbayar discusses the origins of his film, his ambitions for Mongolian cinema and a planned sequel that will take the story back to the 13th century.

Novastan: Zero Point Action begins with a fascinating premise: a man finds himself trapped in a time loop in which he is repeatedly murdered. Where did the original idea come from? What attracted you to the concept of repetition, death and the possibility of changing one’s fate?

Aldar Enkhbayar: First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mathieu and the team at Novastan for interviewing me.

Let me begin by explaining why I chose this title for the film.

Everything begins from a “zero point.” For instance, human life starts from a single cell in the womb. If we think of the womb as a zero point, the chromosome represents a starting point.

When we write on a blank sheet of paper, the first mark appears the moment the pen touches the page, and we decide which letters to write next. The universe itself originated from a void, a space from which worlds emerged.

Sometimes, people reach the end of a chapter in their lives, draw a line under what they have been doing and decide to start again from scratch.

These ideas inspired me to name the film Zero Point. “Action” is the subtitle of this particular instalment, as the planned sequel will be called Zero Point: Origin.

The film was inspired by a 200-word short story called “Seven Days Spent with Him,” from the book The Night Visitor by Mongolian author Tsogtbaatar Uuganbayar.

In the original story, a couple meets at an airport. On their way back, they are involved in a tragic accident in which the young man loses his life.

As I reflected on the story, I began to wonder: what if we turned this narrative into a time loop?

That creative spark prompted me to start writing the screenplay.

One of the things that impressed us most was how the film maintained our attention throughout its 131 minutes. At times, we almost felt as though we were inside a video game, navigating different scenarios and challenges alongside the protagonist. Was that resemblance intentional? Were you influenced by particular games or films?

Naturally, great films and video games from around the world have had a profound influence on me.

I grew up playing video games, and I particularly enjoy puzzle-solving, adventure, strategy and detective games.

I wanted to translate that intense, suspenseful feeling directly to the audience.

Even though some viewers might not play or care much about video games, I thought bringing that interactive, high-stakes sense of momentum to the big screen would be a very exciting challenge.

Read more on Novastan: Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir: “Housing is the Mongolian dream – and nightmare”

Beyond its science-fiction premise, the film addresses several issues affecting contemporary Mongolian society. We were particularly struck by the references to air pollution and smog in Ulaanbaatar, as well as the broader social context. Why was it important to incorporate these elements? Do you see science fiction as a particularly effective way to address social problems?

Cinema is one of the most powerful tools available to us. It directly affects our vision, hearing, emotions and psychology, while also shaping social values.

Here in Ulaanbaatar, we have been struggling with severe winter air pollution for many years, and it is a crisis we have not managed to overcome.

What deeply disturbs me is that various illnesses, including cancers, affect people of all ages, from children and young people to the elderly. The smog also poses risks to unborn children.

I wanted audiences to see these elements in the film and take a moment to reflect.

Above all, I wanted to convey to the younger generation that we must take responsibility for our lives, appreciate human nature and cherish the people around us.

At the same time, I wanted to encourage greater curiosity and enthusiasm for science among young Mongolians.

Read more on Novastan: Keeping the heat in: Mongolia’s overlooked answer to Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution

Questions of justice, responsibility and the consequences of individual decisions run throughout the film. Without revealing too much of the plot, how did you approach these themes? Were you interested in exploring the tensions between personal morality, institutional justice and taking matters into one’s own hands?

It was a fascinating theme to explore.

Every single action a person takes matters immensely. A harsh word, a look or a careless gesture can completely alter the course of a relationship.

We must learn to look beyond ourselves and care for others, because our choices are connected to the lives of thousands of people we may never even meet.

It is truly like a chain reaction.

Despite its action-driven narrative, Zero Point Action also has a strong emotional dimension, particularly through Tengis’s relationship with his wife, Khuslen. Redemption seems to be one of the film’s underlying themes. How important were family relationships and the possibility of personal transformation to the story? Do you believe people can genuinely change when given another chance?

Everyone chooses their own path, and everyone makes mistakes. After all, we are all experiencing life in this world for the very first time.

When you watch this film, imagine coming home after an exhausting day. Instead of carrying all your unresolved stress and negativity through the door, imagine leaving them outside and entering with a smile.

Think how wonderful that would be for the children and partner waiting for you, who would be greeted with warmth and happiness rather than anger.

In my view, a family home is a sacred space. It should be filled with happiness and goodness.

To maintain that atmosphere, you have to make conscious decisions, choose your words carefully and act with kindness.

If someone makes a mistake and truly recognises it, they will do everything in their power to change. That is why I believe people can genuinely change.

Above all, family upbringing is vital. What parents teach and instil in their children from an early age ultimately shapes who they become.

You mentioned that Zero Point Action is the first Mongolian feature film to be mixed in Dolby Atmos, and that you used ARRI cameras with Cooke and anamorphic lenses to achieve its distinctive visual style. What motivated these technical choices, and how did they contribute to the immersive experience you wanted to create? How accessible are such technologies to filmmakers in Mongolia today?

Mongolian cinema is developing at a rapid pace.

ARRI cameras, for example, have been available in Mongolia for more than a decade, and high-quality cinema lenses have become much more accessible.

However, no full-length feature film had previously been mixed in Dolby Atmos in Mongolia. That was precisely why I wanted to take this pioneering step.

I wanted to appeal to the audience’s senses and make sure that every scene, every line of dialogue, every sound effect and every action helped draw viewers into a truly immersive experience.

Zero Point Action was selected for the 2026 Asian Film Festival Barcelona, giving European audiences an opportunity to discover a different side of Mongolian cinema. What does this international screening mean to you? How have Mongolian audiences responded to the film, and what challenges do filmmakers face when trying to reach audiences beyond Mongolia?

Mongolian audiences had mixed reactions to the film. Some praised it warmly, while others found it a little difficult to understand at first.

Everything has two sides, doesn’t it? (Laughs.)

As for the festival in Barcelona, we did not approach it with grand expectations or dreams of instant glory.

We simply wanted to submit the film and see what happened.

My hope was that international audiences and festival-goers would notice it and think, “Oh, Mongolian filmmakers are exploring science fiction too,” and become interested.

Whether you win or lose, you have to take the leap and try.

Read more on Novastan: Rinat Bekchintaev: “Almaty has an authentic cinematic image that cannot be repeated anywhere else”

Finally, looking ahead, what kinds of stories would you like to explore in your future projects? Are there particular genres or aspects of Mongolian history and society that you would like to bring to the screen?

As I mentioned earlier, one of my main goals is to continue the Zero Point project.

We have not yet fully revealed how or why the temporal anomaly came into existence.

And let me share a little secret: Zero Point: Origin is actually set in the 13th century…

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

The post Trapped in a time loop: How Zero Point Action is pushing Mongolian cinema into science fiction appeared first on Novastan English.

In Kazakhstan, autumn marks the return of military conscription. While some young men consider military service a duty to their country, others go to great lengths to avoid it. In Astana, accounts of forced recruitment in public places and violence in military barracks continue to fuel widespread distrust of the army.

Soutien à Novastan

Kazakhstan launched its autumn conscription campaign in September, with the government planning to call up approximately 23,000 men aged 18 to 27 by the end of December.

A legacy of the Soviet era, compulsory military service remains a significant social issue in Kazakhstan, affecting young men across the country. In principle, eligible men are required to serve for one year, undergoing physical and theoretical training designed to familiarise them with military life and discipline. In practice, however, many seek to avoid conscription, employing various strategies to obtain exemptions or deferments.

Despite conscription being compulsory, the army struggles to attract recruits, partly because of its troubled reputation. In recent years, increasingly aggressive recruitment practices have emerged, including reports of young men being forcibly taken away by police officers in public places.

Violence and controversy in the army

Novastan spoke to residents of Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, to better understand their perceptions and experiences of military service. Among those interviewed, compulsory service was generally viewed negatively, with concerns about violence and safety frequently raised.

“I personally wouldn’t go. Every year, hundreds of young men come back injured. Some die, others commit suicide. There’s so much violence. Our country isn’t even at war, so it makes no sense,” says Jordan, a 23-year-old IT worker.

Conscription is indeed a source of anxiety for many Kazakhstanis. Reports of deaths, injuries, bullying and suicides have contributed to a widespread perception of military service as dangerous.

Read more on Novastan: “Inside Kazakhstan’s Army: A Harrowing Account of Violence” (in French).

One of the most widely discussed cases in recent years involved Mukhtar Yerebatan, an 18-year-old conscript who suffered a serious head injury during his service. After spending two years in a coma, he died on 23 June 2026, reigniting public controversy over violence within the military. According to the official account, he sustained the injury after accidentally falling in a toilet. His family disputes this explanation and suspects that he was deliberately assaulted.

More recently, the reported deaths of around ten young conscripts in an accident in the Caspian Sea intensified parents’ anger and concerns about military service, raising further questions about the army’s ability to protect those under its responsibility.

“The news is terrifying. If I had a son, I would never let him join the army,” says Samal, a flight attendant and mother living in Astana.

Faced with these concerns, many young men devise strategies to avoid conscription, often with the support of their families and personal networks. Some rely on legal provisions, while others resort to connections or potentially corrupt practices.

Those declared medically unfit are exempt from military service, while university enrolment can provide grounds for a deferment.

Timur, 22, a former economics and business student, says that many young men enrol at university primarily to avoid the army. He explains his own reluctance to serve:

“I don’t think it’s really for me. I don’t want to waste a year of my life. It’s not the right time. I have personal plans, I want to buy an apartment, travel…”

Ruslan, 26, a content creator who holds a PhD in anthropology, pursued higher education both out of an interest in his subject and because studying allowed him to postpone compulsory military service.

“After 25, if you haven’t served yet, you can avoid the one-year service by completing a 40-day military training course. You have to pay for it, but the conditions are much less harsh, and you’re treated better than during the regular one-year service,” he explains.

‘Abductions’ and forced conscription

With the authorities struggling to meet annual recruitment targets, the Ministry of Defence has increasingly relied on forceful recruitment methods, according to local residents.

Some describe these practices as “abductions” or “kidnappings”, referring to cases in which police officers and military personnel reportedly take young men from public places and bring them to military recruitment offices, sometimes without a clear legal justification.

Timur explains that during conscription campaigns, many young men avoid public spaces for fear of being forcibly taken away.

“The police go to places like the botanical garden, where lots of young people hang out, including potentially those who haven’t served yet. They might also go to clubs, billiard halls or video game arcades, the kinds of places where young men usually spend time.”

An informal warning network has even emerged on 2GIS, a popular mapping and navigation application in Kazakhstan, allowing users to alert one another to the presence of recruitment officers.

Users can leave comments about public locations and warn others about areas where police are reportedly carrying out conscription operations. In one message shown to Novastan by Timur, an anonymous user warns about a public garden in Astana: “Police present for conscription. They have trucks.”

Unlike some of his friends, who limit their outings during recruitment campaigns, Timur has decided not to change his daily routine.

“It would be practically impossible to keep track of every place where they might find me. A friend of mine went to a shop near his home. When he came out, they grabbed him, put him in a car and took him straight to the military recruitment office. You can get caught anywhere, but I don’t want to spend my life locked inside my house. Maybe I’ve just been lucky,” he says with a smile.

Yet Timur has himself been picked up by police officers several times over the past two years, since leaving university.

To avoid being conscripted, he has relied primarily on his personal connections.

“I have friends, including some who work in government institutions. Let’s just say they have administrative resources. Whenever I called them, I was released immediately,” he explains.

He also recounts how a friend narrowly avoided military service after being taken away by the police. His father reportedly helped him enrol at a university at the last minute, allowing him to obtain a deferment.

Others are less fortunate and lack the financial or social resources needed to escape similar situations. Although merit-based scholarships are available for higher education, competition is fierce, and enrolling at university can be an expensive strategy for avoiding conscription.

‘I improved in every way’

Despite the controversies surrounding military service, some former conscripts defend its benefits and consider it an important institution for the country.

Alikhan, a 31-year-old company director who served approximately a decade ago, remembers his experience fondly.

“If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. I became a better person. It taught me a lot in terms of mental and physical discipline. Before the army, I was really skinny. I could only do three pull-ups, but when I came back, I could do twenty. I was a better runner too. I improved in every way,” he recalls nostalgically.

He also praises the sense of solidarity he experienced during his service.

“What’s interesting about the army is that you don’t know who’s who or what kind of family someone comes from. We all wear the same uniform, and there’s no hierarchy between us. If someone is struggling, you help them straight away. Everything encourages solidarity. There are no girls, no alcohol, just an all-male environment. It’s great. Some people arrive in the army without knowing why they’re there, expecting to do nothing.”

For Alikhan, military service also plays an important role in shaping young men’s understanding of masculinity.

“Men are weak nowadays. It’s a shame you don’t have something like this in France. Military service is like another year of school, another year of education. School and high school turn you into a teenager, but the army turns you into a man.”

Although Timur has avoided military service himself, he acknowledges that the experience can sometimes have positive consequences.

He recalls a friend who was forcibly taken away and immediately conscripted but ultimately found the experience beneficial.

“The army really did him some good. He started thinking about work and what he wanted to do with his life. He had time to reflect. He told me that, yes, he got into fights sometimes, but overall, he felt he hadn’t wasted his time.”

When confronted with reports of violence and the army’s reputation, both Timur and Alikhan tend to downplay the risks. They argue that violence is not unique to military life.

“It’s a matter of chance. Accidents happen on the streets too,” says Timur.

Alikhan goes further, questioning parents who help their sons avoid conscription.

“Parents think they’re protecting their children by helping them stay out of the army. But they don’t realise that everyday life is much harder. They’re raising boys who aren’t capable of doing anything.”

Financial hardship and extortion during military service

In contrast to Alikhan’s positive recollections, Ruslan offers a more troubling account of military life, drawing on his older brother’s experience.

His brother spent a year serving in the National Guard and, according to Ruslan, endured particularly harsh conditions.

“I remember that during the first six months, he asked me to send him money almost every day. I didn’t even know why he needed it so often.”

In the unit where his brother served, extortion and violence appear to have been common practices.

Ruslan describes an informal hierarchy among conscripts based on how long they had been serving. Seniority gave certain soldiers status and authority, which could be used to justify abusive behaviour towards newer recruits.

“One time, he came home with a broken rib. He’d also lost one or two teeth. He never really went into detail, but I think the experience was quite traumatic for him. In any case, he always tried to spare me from having to serve. He said it was pointless and boring.”

Like several other Astana residents interviewed by Novastan, Ruslan and Timur favour reforming military service and moving towards a more professional army.

For them, serving one’s country should be a personal choice rather than an obligation.

“In our culture, serving your country, dying for your faith, your homeland or your family are important values in their own right. But that commitment should come from the individual, not from someone forcing them to do it.”

Alikhan, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of patriotism and the responsibility to defend one’s homeland.

Read more on Novastan: “I only needed a passport” : In Ukraine, Central Asian prisoners of wars caught between loyalty and regret

“If we go to war, I have to go. We must be ready to defend our country. I consider it my duty to my homeland. My country isn’t just the government. It’s the place where my sisters, my parents and the people I love live. Even if I don’t want to, I have to be ready to defend it.”

The contrasting experiences of these young men illustrate the tensions surrounding compulsory military service in Kazakhstan. While some view it as an opportunity to develop discipline, solidarity and a sense of national duty, others associate it with violence, arbitrary recruitment practices and the loss of personal freedom.

Eléa Muresan,
Author for Novastan.

Thank you for reading this article! If you have time, we would appreciate your feedback, either through this anonymous form or by email at editorial@novastan.org. Thank you very much!

The post In Kazakhstan, Military Service Continues to Worry Young Men appeared first on Novastan English.

Just kilometres from Karakorum, the former capital of the Mongol Empire, archaeologists are uncovering evidence of thousands of years of human activity. Italian archaeologist Roberta Menegazzi speaks to Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine about discoveries in Mongolia’s Bayangolyn Valley, the technologies transforming archaeological research, and the importance of working with local communities to preserve the country’s cultural heritage.

The ancient city of Karakorum, established under Genghis Khan in the 13th century, remains one of Mongolia’s most celebrated archaeological sites. Yet the surrounding Orkhon Valley holds traces of a much longer history, extending well beyond the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire.

Around 14 kilometres northwest of modern Kharkhorin, the Bayangolyn Valley contains archaeological remains dating from the Bronze Age to more recent periods. These include funerary and ritual monuments, possible settlements and other structures that offer insights into how successive communities inhabited and shaped the landscape.

Since 2018, the Italian Archaeological Mission in Kharkhorin, led by Roberta Menegazzi of the Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino per il Medio Oriente e l’Asia (CRAST), has worked with Mongolian institutions to research and promote the region’s archaeological heritage. The mission is funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

Read more on Novastan: “Heritage is something alive”: Ganzorig Miimaa reimagines Mongolia through photography

Initially focused on heritage education and museum cooperation, the partnership expanded into field research in 2023. Working alongside the National University of Mongolia and the Kharakhorum Museum, the team has documented dozens of archaeological structures, employed advanced surveying technologies and begun excavations in the Bayangolyn Valley.

In an interview with Novastan, Menegazzi discusses the mission’s findings, the importance of Italian-Mongolian scientific cooperation, and why archaeology should involve not only researchers but also the communities living alongside ancient sites.

To begin with, how did the Italian Archaeological Mission in Kharkhorin come about? What initially attracted your team to this part of Mongolia, and how have the project’s objectives evolved since its launch in 2018?

Our work in Mongolia actually began as a result of an agreement signed in 2016 between the cities of Turin and Kharkhorin, which recognised our institution (the Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino per il Medio Oriente e l’Asia – CRAST) as particularly well-placed to contribute to cultural and scientific cooperation.

This agreement gave us the opportunity to establish a collaboration with Mongolian institutions, which officially started in 2018, when we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Kharakhorum Museum and the National University of Mongolia. Our initial goal was to help promote awareness and appreciation of the rich historical and archaeological heritage of the Kharkhorin area.

In the beginning, our work focused mainly on educational programmes for school groups visiting the Kharakhorum Museum. We developed and tested educational activities and tools through training sessions involving museum staff, teachers, and people working in local cultural and social institutions.

Over the years, this collaboration has grown stronger, and the mutual trust we have built with our Mongolian colleagues has opened up new opportunities. Professor Erdenebat Ulambayar of the National University of Mongolia and Bayaraa Terbish, Director of the Kharakhorum Museum, invited us to join their archaeological research in the region.

This marked an important new stage in our collaboration, and in 2023 we began working together in the Bayangolyn Valley, about 14 kilometres northwest of modern Kharkhorin and the site of Karakorum, the first capital of the Mongol Empire.

The Kharkhorin area is best known for Karakorum, the former capital of the Mongol Empire. What makes the Bayangolyn Valley particularly interesting for archaeologists, and what can studying this area tell us beyond the history of the imperial capital?

The Bayangolyn Valley is characterised by a concentration of archaeological remains dating from the Bronze Age to modern times. Its archaeological potential has been recognised for almost a century, and over the past thirty years, it has attracted increasing scholarly attention.

The valley is located close to two major historical sites: Karakorum, the capital of the Mongol Empire, and Karabalgasun, the capital of the Uyghur Empire. Studying this area can therefore help us better understand not only the long-term history of human occupation in the region, but also the relationship between these major political centres and their surrounding landscape.

During your 2024 fieldwork, your team documented 39 archaeological structures in the Bayangolyn Valley. What kinds of structures did you identify, and were there any findings that particularly surprised you?

Over the years, the Bayangolyn Valley has been investigated by several archaeological expeditions, including a Mongolian-German team that carried out extensive surveys across the wider Orkhon Valley. Previous research has focused on different areas and periods of occupation within the Bayangolyn Valley, providing an important foundation for our own work.

Among the 39 archaeological structures we documented in the 2024 campaign, 29 are khirigsuurs – Bronze Age stone burial and ritual monuments found across Mongolia- , mostly located along the valley slopes and on the natural terraces overlooking it.

These ritual monuments – generally consisting of a central stone mound surrounded by a square or circular enclosure of stones, often accompanied by multiple smaller satellite features – are among the most distinctive markers of the Bronze Age landscape in Mongolia.

One aspect that particularly caught our attention was their concentration in the valley, a feature that had not emerged from previous reports.

Your mission has employed drone surveys, multispectral imaging and digital terrain modelling to investigate archaeological remains. How have these technologies changed your understanding of the landscape?

These technologies are particularly useful for studying archaeological landscapes, as they allow us to collect accurate, georeferenced data across large areas in a relatively short time. This is particularly true of fixed-wing drones, such as the one we used in our investigations in the Bayangolyn Valley.

These tools are especially valuable in a country like Mongolia, where some archaeological remains are visible on the surface, as in the case of the khirigsuurs, while others lie just below ground level.

Our survey – carried out in collaboration with the Department of Architecture and Design of the Politecnico di Torino – has provided us with detailed documentation of the archaeological features across the area under investigation, including both visible remains and traces of buried structures.

This has given us a more comprehensive picture of the archaeological landscape in the Bayangolyn Valley and provided a solid basis for planning further investigations. Such documentation is valuable not only for archaeological research, but also for the protection and management of the cultural heritage of the area.

Your research has progressed from preliminary surveys and mapping to excavations. What have the most recent fieldwork campaigns revealed, and which questions remain unanswered?

In 2025, we carried out our first excavation campaign in the Bayangolyn Valley, focusing on an enclosure located at the mouth of the valley, where a series of small mounds suggests the presence of a Mongol-period settlement.

Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the nature and function of this settlement. As this was our first excavation campaign, the results are still preliminary and require further study before we can draw reliable conclusions.

Several aspects of the valley’s archaeological landscape still need to be clarified, particularly the chronology and function of two large enclosures located in the lower part of the valley, south of the settlement.

We hope that our work, together with other research in the area, will help shed new light on the role of the Bayangolyn Valley throughout history.

The mission works closely with the National University of Mongolia and the Kharakhorum Museum. How does this collaboration function in practice, and how have your Mongolian partners influenced the research?

Our collaboration with Mongolian institutions is a genuine partnership at every stage of the research.

As I mentioned earlier, our fieldwork in Mongolia began following an invitation from our Mongolian partners. Together, we selected the Bayangolyn Valley as the focus of our investigations and identified the location where we started our excavation, jointly directed by Professor Erdenebat of the National University of Mongolia and myself.

At every stage of the fieldwork, Italian archaeologists and specialists from CRAST and the University of Turin work alongside colleagues from the National University of Mongolia and the Kharakhorum Museum.

Read more on Novastan: Bolor Lkhaajav: “Mongolia does not need to choose between Russia and China”

This close collaboration encourages the exchange of knowledge, experience and good practices, while also providing opportunities for hands-on training for museum staff.

Beyond archaeological research, your mission is involved in heritage education and activities with local communities. Why is this important, and how have residents, particularly younger generations, responded?

This is a key aspect of our work, as we strongly believe in the public dimension of archaeology and in the responsibility of archaeologists to share the aims and results of their research with the wider public.

Archaeological excavations, in particular, can have a significant impact on the surrounding area, especially in a country like Mongolia, where local communities maintain a strong connection to the land.

For this reason, since the beginning of our survey work in the Bayangolyn Valley in 2023, we have worked to establish a dialogue with local residents.

At the end of each field season, we organise meetings and excavation open days to explain the aims of our research and present its results.

We have also conducted a series of interviews with people living in the valley, which have given us the opportunity to listen to their concerns, answer questions about specific aspects of our work, and learn more about the valley through their own knowledge and memories.

As for younger generations, educational activities developed in previous years have helped the Kharakhorum Museum expand its educational programmes for local schools.

To strengthen this connection further, we are planning a series of meetings with secondary school students in Kharkhorin in the coming months to introduce them to our work in the Bayangolyn Valley.

Finally, what do you hope the next stages of the mission will achieve? And which aspects of Mongolia’s archaeological heritage deserve greater international attention?

Beyond the scientific results of our research, I hope that our work will also contribute to making Mongolia’s rich archaeological and cultural heritage better known in Italy, where it is still relatively unfamiliar to the wider public.

Just as we believe it is important to share our research with local communities in Mongolia, we would like to extend this commitment to the Italian public as well.

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

The post Beyond Karakorum: How Italian and Mongolian archaeologists are uncovering the past appeared first on Novastan English.

As Kazakhstan confronts increasingly severe droughts, floods and extreme temperatures, farmers and environmental organisations are turning to relatively inexpensive methods of retaining water and restoring ecosystems. Their field experience calls into question the country’s exclusive reliance on mega hydro-engineering projects.

Kazakhstan is increasingly exposed to drought, flooding and extreme heat. A severe drought hit its southern and western regions in 2021, while widespread flooding in 2024 affected much of the country. These events have intensified the debate over how Kazakhstan should adapt to a changing climate.

While major water infrastructure projects form a central part of the government’s response, some farmers and conservationists argue that simpler techniques – including snow retention and soil-moisture management – also deserve attention. Their effectiveness depends on local conditions, but their relatively modest costs make them attractive in water-stressed areas.

Projects in the Aqtöbe Region and efforts to restore Lake Zhumay in the Aqmola Region illustrate the potential of locally led adaptation. They also raise a broader question: how can Kazakhstan combine major infrastructure investment with approaches that retain water within landscapes?

Read more on Novastan: Kazakhstan: Residents suffer from lack of water

Agro-Technical Adaptation in the Aqtöbe Region

Local farmers practice autumn cultivation to retain moisture in the fields, a technique also recommended as a flood-prevention measure. Marina Tsygankova, director of the “ElitAgro” public foundation in the Aqtöbe Region, considers field preparation for these purposes economically justified. According to her, combating floods by directing precipitation straight into deep soil layers at the site of snowfall is a rational strategy.

The alternative would be building special moisture storage reservoirs, but such technology is significantly more expensive and complex from an engineering standpoint. In the current economic climate – where state budgets face constraints and big business is hesitant to invest – emphasis must be placed on practices accessible to the population.

Mechanical snow retention remains a budget-friendly and effective solution for the dry steppe zone of Western Kazakhstan. Here, spring floods often turn into micro-disasters as rapidly melting snow rushes off fields in torrents, washing away fertile topsoil. Using tractors with snowplows and ridgers allows farmers to keep snow where it falls, protecting it from strong winds that typically blow winter precipitation into ravines and roadside ditches.

According to observations cited by local practitioners in the Aqtöbe Region, combining snow retention with autumn cultivation can help meltwater penetrate deeper into the soil. They report moisture reaching depths of up to 110 cm, compared with 45-60 cm on untreated sloping fields, and yield gains of up to 400 kg per hectare in some drought years. These site-specific figures should not be taken as typical results across the region. Practitioners also argue that keeping snow on fields can reduce topsoil erosion and limit snowdrifts on nearby roads.

Read more on Novastan: A disappearing river: the fate of the Ural

Asyl Baitleuov has been farming in the Martuk District of the Aqtöbe Region for 26 years, growing barley, sorghum, wheat, and sunflower across 3,000 hectares.

“We do not receive subsidies for snow retention,” Baitleuov explains. “If the snow cover is 50 to 70 centimeters, we leave it alone. Spring snowmelt plays a huge role: if it freezes at night and melts during the day, the earth absorbs the water. But if it melts around the clock, moisture washes off with the humus. We usually have a lot of snow, so we only do snow retention where accumulation is low – treating up to 500 sown hectares annually. Although costly, it generally pays off.”

Snow retention has also been used to help restore a dried-up lake. Ruslan Urazaliyev, a researcher at the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan (ACBK), describes the effort at Lake Zhumay in the Aqmola Region:

“For the first time, we carried out snow retention in the Qorgalzhyn District of the Aqmola Region at Lake Zhumay,” Urazaliyev recalls. “The reservoir is a key ornithological territory attracting rare birds, including the Dalmatian pelican, white-headed duck, Pallas’s gull, and greater flamingo – all listed in Kazakhstan’s Red Book. Lake Zhumay also serves as a watering hole for livestock and poultry. In 2010-2011, due to a lack of moisture and high temperatures, the lake dried up completely.”

At the time, ACBK was implementing a project supported by the Global Environment Facility Small Grants Programme. Local resident Timur Iskakov helped initiate a snow-retention project, working with residents during the winter of 2012-2013 to build snow barriers around the lake. ACBK’s 2013 annual report records snow depths of 80 cm in treated areas, compared with 30-40 cm on open steppe. Urazaliyev says water returned in spring 2013 and the lake’s recovery continued into 2014. He stresses that the intervention accelerated a natural process: neighbouring lakes recovered without such measures approximately two years later.

Urazaliyev estimates that the work cost slightly less than 1.7 million tenge. The precise project cost and the lake-area figures cited in his account were not independently established from the historical reports reviewed for this article.

“Through our actions, we accelerated the natural restoration of an 885-hectare lake,” Urazaliyev summarizes. “Later, we successfully stocked it with crucian carp to support the food chain for fish-eating birds. In 2015-2016, residents of Arykty village in the Aqmola Region used our experience to refill a dried-up reservoir of their own.”

ACBK’s experience extends to other regions. In the Jambyl Region, the organization fostered ecotourism at Lake Qyzylkol through the local community, where visitors with cameras deterred poachers. Meanwhile, staff at the Buyratau National Park in the Karaganda Region used wooden snow shields to restore two drying watering holes for wild animals.

Nature-Based Solutions vs. Technocratic Megaprojects

Kazakhstan’s locally developed water-retention techniques reflect wider interest in nature-based approaches to climate adaptation. Bulat Esekin, an environmental policy expert, argues that restoring soils and natural water cycles should receive greater emphasis in public policy.

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

“Instead of artificially altering riverbeds and building expensive structures, it is far more efficient to restore natural small water cycles and soils,” Esekin says. “What our farmers are talking about is proven worldwide: the Potapenko paradigm in Chuvashia or the methods of Slovak expert Michal Kravčík, who has spent over 20 years implementing simple water-retention techniques. Forests and healthy soils are the main drivers of the water cycle. Natural ecosystems can absorb and regulate flood peaks for free – and far more effectively than concrete – if we simply do not interfere.”

The government, meanwhile, is investing heavily in water infrastructure. Under its water-management strategy through 2030, Kazakhstan plans to build 42 reservoirs with combined capacity of approximately 2.6 billion cubic metres, reconstruct existing reservoirs and modernise more than 14,000 km of irrigation canals. The government says this investment is intended to strengthen water security, support irrigation and reduce flood risks.

Kazakhstan’s Comprehensive Plan for the Development of the Water Sector for 2024-2028 sets out 160 measures with planned funding of approximately 3.153 trillion tenge. Importantly, this total combines republican and local government budgets with extrabudgetary financing, including funds from international financial institutions and private investment. It should therefore not be interpreted as an allocation entirely from the state budget.

The high cost of reservoir construction is striking. For instance, to reduce flood peaks by up to 50% in the Esil and Jarkain districts of the Aqmola Region – and ensure the stable operation of the Sergeyevka and Petropavlovsk reservoirs – a counter-regulator on the Esil River is scheduled for construction in 2027. This single project costs 103 billion tenge. According to Dias Orazbekov, head of the Kazvodkhoz project office, an ADB memorandum is signed, financing negotiations continue, and the facility opens in 2028.

Could some of the goals of major water infrastructure projects also be achieved through smaller-scale local measures? Esekin argues that institutional incentives and the emphasis on large construction projects make nature-based alternatives less prominent in planning.

Researcher Ruslan Urazaliyev highlights a fundamental disconnect: “Water is treated purely as a resource. The Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation plans to build reservoirs based on a simple logic: take water and move it. But water is an element. The 2024 floods demonstrated human powerlessness before nature. All our infrastructure aims at collecting water, not keeping it in the ecosystem. Rivers are the planet’s blood vessels; disrupting their pathways brings us closer to water bankruptcy.”

“Building new reservoirs and encasing rivers in concrete is a strategic error,” Esekin adds. “These ‘grey’ strategies create an illusion of control but worsen the water and climate crisis by increasing moisture evaporation. In the US and Western Europe, there is a massive rollback, marked by demolishing hundreds of dams and abandoning small hydropower plants. Yet our ministry remains hostage to criteria from forty years ago. Over the past 30 years, business has subverted environmental filters.”

Institutional Barriers and the Path Forward

Reliable water monitoring remains a concern. The experts point to the decline in hydrological monitoring sites as a challenge for water management. Without consistent monitoring, forecasting water-level fluctuations becomes more difficult.

Farmers also point to the cost of fuel and machinery as a barrier to wider use of autumn cultivation and snow retention. Support mechanisms could make these techniques more accessible, although their benefits would need to be assessed under different local conditions.

For the experience of Aqtöbe farmers and conservation groups to inform national policy, experts interviewed for this article call for stronger evaluation of proposed water-management measures and closer engagement with local communities.

Esekin advocates mandatory assessments of the water implications of major public programmes, alongside greater consideration of water-saving technologies and nature-based alternatives. Landscape planning, digital tools and satellite monitoring could help decision-makers evaluate which combinations of interventions are best suited to individual watersheds.

Read more on Novastan: Talas and its people: life by a Central Asian river affected by climate change

Kazakhstan’s climate-adaptation challenge is not simply a choice between reservoirs and natural systems. It is how to assess the costs, benefits and ecological trade-offs of each approach, while giving local practitioners and affected communities a meaningful voice in the decisions that shape their landscapes.

Edited by Mathieu Lemoine.

Written by Helena Garkava.

The post How Kazakh NGOs and Farmers Are Adapting to Climate Change appeared first on Novastan English.

As trade routes between Europe and Asia undergo profound changes, the Middle Corridor is attracting growing attention as an alternative to transit through Russia. Yet infrastructure bottlenecks, limited shipping capacity across the Caspian Sea and coordination problems continue to undermine its reliability. Christian Hirschmann of Azurite Logistics discusses the challenges facing the route, Kazakhstan’s growing importance and what would make the corridor commercially sustainable.

The Middle Corridor, also known as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, connects China and Europe through Central Asia, the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus. Its strategic importance has increased considerably since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as businesses seek to diversify their supply chains and reduce exposure to geopolitical risks.

The route’s potential is substantial. In a report published in September 2026, the World Bank estimated that targeted investments could more than triple trade volumes along the corridor and halve travel times by 2040. Further regulatory and operational reforms could produce even greater gains.

However, translating that potential into reliable commercial services remains a major challenge. Limited vessel capacity across the Caspian Sea, overloaded rail networks and fragmented coordination between national operators continue to affect transit times and costs.

To better understand these challenges from an industry perspective, Novastan spoke with Christian Hirschmann of Azurite Logistics, a European logistics company active in transport between Europe and Central Asia.

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

Novastan: How much has the Middle Corridor changed over the past three or four years? Are we seeing a structural shift in freight flows, or is demand still largely dependent on geopolitical disruptions?

Christian Hirschmann: The Middle Corridor has become one of the most important routes for Eurasian trade, and also one of the most volatile. Geopolitical developments affect it immediately, from the Iran conflict to the Russia-Ukraine war spreading into the Black Sea region. With alternative Eurasian routes increasingly restricted, freight volumes are shifting to the Middle Corridor at a growing rate.

Infrastructure has not kept up. Capacity on the Caspian crossing is limited, rail capacity in Turkey is constrained, and extensive track maintenance across Europe causes further disruption. Together these create bottlenecks along the corridor, and shippers should expect longer and less predictable lead times.

For Azurite, these challenges are part of day-to-day operations. With in-depth knowledge of the corridor and a close watch on every critical node, Azurite anticipates disruptions early and adjusts routings before delays reach its customers.

The company is currently developing new block train services connecting Antwerp with Halkalı (Istanbul) and Halkalı with Alat (Baku). It is also building its own railway operations, making it independent of market capacity and giving customers dependable access to the Middle Corridor.

What are the main bottlenecks today? Which parts of a journey between Europe and Central Asia create the greatest uncertainty?

The biggest single source of uncertainty is still the Caspian crossing. Ferry and vessel capacity between Alat/Baku and Aktau/Kuryk is limited, departures are irregular, and weather can stop operations for days. Once a backlog builds at the ports, it spreads quickly along the whole corridor. Containers wait, storage and demurrage costs rise, and planned connections are missed.

The second factor is rail capacity on the approach routes. Turkey’s rail network is under heavy pressure, and extensive track maintenance across Europe keeps reducing available train paths. Together these cause delays before cargo even reaches the Caspian.

What is often underestimated is coordination between the many parties involved. A single shipment passes through several national railways, port operators, ferry lines and customs authorities. Each has its own schedules, tariffs and priorities. Changes in rail gauge and transloading points add more handovers. Every interface is a possible point of delay, and when information isn’t shared in real time, small problems turn into big ones.

Border crossings and customs have improved noticeably thanks to digital transit documents and closer cooperation between the corridor countries. They remain a risk when paperwork is incomplete or regulations change at short notice.

Finally, the corridor reacts to geopolitics, often within days. When other Eurasian routes are restricted, volumes shift to the Middle Corridor and put even more strain on existing bottlenecks.

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

The World Bank has highlighted the corridor’s potential for significant growth. Does it currently have the capacity to absorb a major increase in traffic? Where is investment most urgently needed?

Not yet, at least not without longer and less predictable transit times. The corridor has grown significantly in recent years, but infrastructure hasn’t kept up. It already runs close to its limits at several points. A further sharp rise in traffic, for example from new geopolitical disruptions on other Eurasian routes, would mostly mean more congestion rather than more throughput.

Investment is most urgently needed in four areas.

First, the Caspian crossing. This is the corridor’s biggest bottleneck. It needs more and larger vessels, regular scheduled departures, and expanded berth and terminal capacity in Alat, Aktau and Kuryk. As long as the sea leg stays the weakest link, improvements elsewhere along the route have limited effect.

Second, rail infrastructure and rolling stock. In Türkiye and the Caucasus, extra track capacity, modernised lines and efficient transloading points are essential. Equally important is enough wagons and locomotives to run more trains on a reliable schedule.

Third, digitalisation and harmonisation. Many delays are caused by processes, not infrastructure. Shared digital transit documents, real-time information exchange between railways, ports and customs, and harmonised tariffs would raise capacity noticeably, with comparatively little investment.

Fourth, terminals and hubs. Inland terminals with storage, consolidation and handling capacity help absorb peaks and keep cargo moving when one section of the corridor is disrupted.

How commercially competitive is the Middle Corridor today? For which types of cargo does it make economic sense, and where does it still struggle?

The Middle Corridor makes most economic sense where sanctions and risk exposure narrow the alternatives, and that applies in both directions.

Eastbound, many European shippers can no longer use the northern route through Russia, or no longer want to. Sanctions, compliance rules and reputational risk rule out Russian transit for a large share of exports to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the wider region.

For machinery, industrial equipment, automotive parts, chemicals and project cargo for the energy and infrastructure sectors, the Middle Corridor is often the only practical land option. For landlocked Central Asian destinations, it is usually also faster than a long sea route followed by an expensive inland leg.

Westbound, the drivers are similar, plus a second factor: missing insurance coverage for sea freight. Because of conflicts along key maritime routes, war-risk cover is in some cases unavailable or only available at very high premiums. Shippers who can’t insure their cargo at sea are moving it to land routes.

Exporters from Central Asia and China who want to avoid Russian transit choose the Middle Corridor for the same reason. As a result, westbound volumes have risen noticeably.

The corridor is particularly competitive for medium- to high-value goods where capital tied up in transit and speed matter, time-sensitive supply chains, customers with strict compliance requirements, and project and energy cargo bound for Central Asia.

It still struggles in three areas.

Price: for low-value bulk and commodity cargo, sea freight stays clearly cheaper wherever it is available and insurable.

Speed: transit times are competitive in theory, but in practice they are held back by bottlenecks at the Caspian crossing, in Turkey and on European rail sections.

Predictability: this is the biggest weakness. Many handovers between operators, irregular sailings on the Caspian, and fast reactions to geopolitical events lead to fluctuating transit times. For shippers running just-in-time production, that is often more critical than price.

For shippers who aren’t restricted by sanctions, the northern route still has an advantage in price and transit time. The Middle Corridor’s strength is that it is the reliable, compliant alternative when that option isn’t available. Its long-term success depends on making transit times more predictable.

Read more on Novastan: Gwadar, Karachi and the Central Asian Dream of the Sea

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are emerging as important logistics markets. How evenly are the benefits of the Middle Corridor spreading across Central Asia?

The benefits are not spread evenly yet. Kazakhstan is clearly becoming the main logistics hub for Central Asia. It is the only country in the region that links China, the Caspian Sea and the rest of Central Asia within its own borders.

With the Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk, the border crossings to China at Khorgos and Dostyk, and the largest rail network in the region, most Middle Corridor flows pass through Kazakhstan.

Investment in port capacity, dry ports, terminals and rail lines is reinforcing that position, and more consolidation, warehousing and distribution for the whole region is moving there.

Uzbekistan is developing into the second centre, but with a different profile. With the largest population in the region and a growing industrial base, it is above all a strong origin and destination market rather than a transit hub. Being double landlocked, it depends on its neighbours for transit, especially Kazakhstan. That makes Kazakhstan’s hub role even stronger.

New opportunities are emerging elsewhere too.

Kyrgyzstan could gain considerably from the planned China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, which would create a direct southern link between China and Central Asia.

Turkmenistan, with the port of Turkmenbashi, offers an additional Caspian crossing and could ease pressure on the bottlenecks in the future.

Tajikistan is still mostly a destination market, but needs better connections for its growing trade with China and Europe.

For logistics providers, this means Kazakhstan is the strategic anchor point for Central Asia. Anyone who wants to serve the region reliably needs a strong operational presence there. From that base, the neighbouring markets can be reached efficiently.

Read more on Novastan: Can Afghanistan Become Central Asia’s Bridge to the South?

How important is sanctions compliance in customers’ decisions? Has this permanently changed how European businesses approach supply-chain risks?

Sanctions compliance is now one of the deciding factors in route choice, and for many customers it is the first filter. Before price or transit time are even discussed, they want to know whether a route is fully compliant and legally secure.

For European companies, the risks of breaching sanctions are simply too high: fines, personal liability for management, blocked payments, losing access to banks and insurers, and lasting reputational damage.

On top of the sanctions themselves, there is the economic risk of doing business in Russia. Many European companies have seen how quickly assets can be frozen, payments blocked or businesses placed under state control. As a result, they have not only rerouted their transport flows, they have also rethought their entire regional set-up.

Moscow used to be the natural hub for Central Asia and the wider CIS region. Today, European companies are moving regional distribution, warehousing and in many cases regional management to Kazakhstan. It offers political stability, an investor-friendly environment, a central location and direct access to the Middle Corridor.

This shift is a major reason why Kazakhstan is developing into the leading logistics hub for Central Asia, serving as the base from which European companies supply Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and neighbouring markets.

The change is lasting. European companies have learned that relying on one corridor or one transit country is a strategic risk. Supply-chain risk is now part of board-level decisions. Route diversification, alternative scenarios and full transparency along the transport chain have become standard. Even if the political situation changes, few companies will go back to their old dependencies.

That’s why sanctions-compliant routing is one of Azurite’s core Middle Corridor services. We plan routes that avoid sanctioned territories completely. We screen goods, parties and end users, and we provide full documentation for every shipment.

Looking five years ahead, what would make the Middle Corridor a genuinely mature and reliable trade route? What is the biggest obstacle to achieving this?

In five years, I would call the Middle Corridor mature when shippers no longer treat it as an emergency alternative but as a fixed part of their supply-chain strategy. The key is this: the corridor will only be reliable if shippers secure transport capacity in advance.

Today, many shippers still book on a spot basis, when other routes are blocked or when rates look attractive. That behaviour creates the very volatility everyone complains about. Railways, port and ferry operators and logistics providers can only invest in rolling stock, vessels and terminals if they can count on stable, plannable volumes. Without long-term commitments, there is no long-term capacity.

A mature corridor would therefore show these features:

• Shippers sign long-term capacity agreements and plan the corridor into their supply chains as a fixed route.
• Scheduled block trains and regular sailings across the Caspian run to fixed timetables.
• Transit times are predictable, with limited variation.
• Operators along the route share data and work together as one integrated chain.

The decisive shift is in mindset: reliability and available capacity matter more than price. A slightly cheaper rate is worth little if the container waits two weeks in Aktau or misses its production slot.

The companies that succeed on this corridor will be the ones that see secured capacity as an investment in supply-chain security, not as a cost factor.

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

The post The Middle Corridor is growing, but can it deliver? A logistics operator’s perspective appeared first on Novastan English.

Mongolian filmmaker Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir speaks to Novastan about filming Ulaanbaatar, the country’s apartment obsession, masculinity and spirituality, and why contemporary Mongolia needs to be seen as more than folklore.

International images of Mongolia are still dominated by the steppe: horses, yurts, nomadic herders and vast landscapes. The films of Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir look somewhere else.

Her characters inhabit apartment blocks, bedrooms, cars, schools and the sprawling neighbourhoods of Ulaanbaatar. They worry about housing and money, negotiate sex and relationships, struggle with expectations placed on young men and women, and move between a rapidly changing urban Mongolia and older cultural and spiritual reference points.

Read more on Novastan: “Mongolia cannot be understood through one lens”: Dr. Mendee Jargalsaikhan on democracy, China and Central Asia

Purev-Ochir has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Mongolian cinema. After studying film direction and screenwriting, she attracted international attention with the shorts Mountain Cat, Snow in September and A South-Facing Window. Her first feature, City of Wind, continued her exploration of young Mongolians navigating the tensions between modern urban life, family, desire and spirituality.

Yet her films are not simply portraits of Ulaanbaatar. Purev-Ochir describes the city itself as something difficult to capture: a place that, on screen, repeatedly becomes an “inner landscape”. Her interest lies in transitions – between adolescence and adulthood, intimacy and isolation, the physical and spiritual worlds, and different ways of imagining what it means to be Mongolian.

These tensions are also playing out on a much larger scale. Mongolia has experienced extraordinarily rapid transformations across successive generations: communism, democratisation, globalisation and now the internet and artificial intelligence. Ulaanbaatar’s relentless expansion has made housing both an aspiration and a source of frustration, while the country’s international image remains closely associated with a nomadic culture from which many urban Mongolians have become physically removed.

Read more on Novastan: “The idea of having choices was so new”: Oyungerel Tsedevdamba on Mongolia’s democracy 36 years later

For Purev-Ochir, cinema offers a way to explore these contradictions without resolving them. Speaking to Novastan, she discusses why apartment ownership has become the Mongolian “dream and nightmare”, why she worries that Mongolians themselves are orientalising their culture, what shamanism means in contemporary urban life, and why she hopes a new generation might eventually imagine a different relationship between Mongolia’s cities and countryside.

Novastan: Before we talk about the films themselves, could you tell us a little about your own path into filmmaking? What was your background, when did cinema become something you wanted to pursue seriously, and were there particular filmmakers, writers, artists or experiences that shaped you early on?

Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir: Apart from the initial decision to study filmmaking, which was full of psychological drama because I was cutting ties with what my parents had envisioned for my future, I had a pretty straightforward and traditional path in filmmaking.

I studied for my bachelor’s in film direction and master’s in screenwriting, and subsequently, upon graduating from my master’s, I made two short films which did very well at festivals. My first feature film, City of Wind, came out exactly five years after my graduation. I had written the script during my master’s in screenwriting.

I made the decision to go into filmmaking and not pursue medicine like my mother because watching films and thinking about them was one of the only true pleasures in my life. I couldn’t imagine my early adulthood doing anything else and made the “bold” – or lazy – decision to go into filmmaking.

When I made this decision, I was purely a film watcher. I had no knowledge about how films were made, no idea about montage, and no previous idea of what a film set was like.

How would you describe yourself as a filmmaker today? What kinds of stories, characters or tensions do you find yourself returning to, and what do you think you are still trying to understand through cinema?

I’ve noticed so far through my films that I wish to capture transitions and states of movement with cinema – specifically in the inner worlds and impressions of people. People who are more at war with themselves and their feelings than with external characters. Or people whose inner states are conflicting with exterior states, and the transition between these states.

I like these transitory situations and feelings and contradictions. I prefer autumn and spring to summer and winter, for example. Autumn and spring are seasons that fight with themselves; there is tension and vast change from day to day and even between day and night.

In Mongolia in autumn, it can feel like summer in the day and winter at night. There is conflict in temperatures, in expression and in affect. These seasons feel more reflective and reflexive. I think with cinema, I wish to capture something seasonal like this.

Across the three shorts, Ulaanbaatar seems to change with the age and situation of your characters. In Mountain Cat it is a place of adolescence and possibility, in Snow in September it feels more enclosed and unsettling, and in A South-Facing Window adulthood seems almost physically trapped by apartments, traffic and financial pressure. Do you see these films as capturing different stages of growing up in the same city?

I think it could be said like that. It’s true that the characters in my films are growing up – my next film is about a man in his mid-30s.

On a different note, I find Ulaanbaatar strangely difficult to “capture” on camera. It’s a wide, steppe city spread out across a large valley. Even neighbourhoods which are more enclosed feel open and exposed.

I feel that on the screen Ulaanbaatar is not very geometric and more landscape-like. And it gives a feeling of something more timeless and affective rather than something specific and geographic.

I tried to depict Ulaanbaatar this way – to make it very characteristic and to connect its different spaces to different plot points and characters. But try as I might, the city always feels more like an inner landscape than an active location.

In A South-Facing Window, the couple seem to be searching for a better life through real estate – visiting empty apartments and imagining another home. You have also described an apartment in central Ulaanbaatar as part of a kind of “Mongolian dream”. What interested you about housing as a symbol of aspiration, and do you think that dream still captures what younger Mongolians want today?

Housing is the Mongolian Dream/Nightmare par excellence.

Because of our nomadic background, the idea of real estate as individual wealth is relatively new. I think my grandparents’ generation was the first generation that slowly started to pursue living in apartments because it was more “civilised” and meant that you were part of the state – only state workers got apartments then.

At the moment, all Mongolians are attempting to buy apartments because it’s an absolute “must” of modern life. And somehow it is thought of as the solution to all modern problems, as a status symbol, and a sign that everything is “alright”.

When, on the contrary, the cause of all of Ulaanbaatar’s problems is this inflated housing sector and rampant construction fever.

Read more on Novastan: Keeping the heat in: Mongolia’s overlooked answer to Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution

I think only when this “greed” for apartments finishes will a new “dream” for Mongolians appear. And hopefully our New Mongolian Dream will be a dream that focuses on the countryside and our nomadic core.

I don’t think we will ever be alright as a country and as a people unless we are nomadic in some form or another. This new form has to be dreamt of and created. The traditional nomadic way of living is too far outside the new generations’ reality.

But I know of many under-30 Mongolians who want to live in the countryside, outside of the fever that is Ulaanbaatar, myself included. So this “dream” is slowly changing.

Your films pay enormous attention to physical space: Soviet apartment blocks, ger districts, cars, bedrooms, unfinished or empty apartments. How consciously do you use architecture and urban space to reveal class, intimacy or power between people?

I think space is connected to the inner lives of my characters. How my characters relate to the spaces they find themselves in is part of how they feel about themselves and how they position themselves in the world.

The spaces are not just a place where the stories are set. They’re part of the characters and their truths.

In Snow in September, the intimate encounter between Davka and the older woman is deeply uncomfortable because the imbalance of power is obvious, yet the film never over-explains it. You have spoken about realising that “the camera was a weapon” when deciding how to film that scene. Has making that film changed how you think about the ethics of showing intimacy, particularly when working with young actors?

This film helped me understand the relationship between the camera and me as the filmmaker – to understand some things about my presence and my voice. About film as a responsibility, but also as a language.

Images are part of the grammar of what I am “saying” with the film, so I must be precise with them. And be aware of what I am saying, when I am saying it, how I am saying it, and why I am saying it.

Hopefully as I age and mature, this relationship between me and the camera becomes clearer to me and my films become more “precise”.

Male vulnerability appears in striking ways in your films. Davka in Snow in September is inexperienced and manipulated, while Shagai in A South-Facing Window seems frustrated, insecure and unable to articulate what is happening to his marriage. Are you particularly interested in forms of masculinity that do not fit more conventional images of Mongolian men?

I think because I am a female filmmaker, I will always depict masculinity from a non-orthodox angle. I don’t think I am overtly interested in unconventional depictions of masculinity.

I think that my personal relationship to masculinity is quite flawed and filled with insecurity. And naturally it is felt in my films.

Interestingly, my next film includes the theme of masculinity. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the men in my life and my relationship to my son. And so let’s see how my next film turns out.

In Mountain Cat, shamanism is brought into a very ordinary contemporary setting rather than being presented as something exotic or separate from modern life. How does spirituality actually coexist with urban, educated and globally connected Mongolia in your own experience?

I heard some time ago that we are not physical beings that sometimes become interested in shamanism or spirituality or religion. On the contrary, we are spiritual beings dealing with a physical world. I quite agree with this.

I think before anything we are spiritual beings. Humans are innately spiritual. And to be connected to spirituality is a matter of “perspective” or “angle” or “choosing a timeline”, as the kids say.

Not just in Mongolia but throughout the world, living a spiritual life is a matter of closing your eyes and opening your eyes and choosing what you will experience and how you see things. It sounds overly simplistic, but profound things are actually quite simple.

I think Mongolians are very lucky in that we still have access to ancient practices that allow us to experience our spirituality. Modern Mongolians have this access and can turn to shamanism – comprised of spirit worship and nature worship – when the physical world is overwhelming or empty.

It’s not a choose-one-way-or-the-other kind of situation. We have access to the physical and the spiritual.

You have mentioned that your parents speak Russian while you and your sisters speak English, and that Korean has become increasingly attractive to younger Mongolians. What do these changing linguistic and cultural reference points tell us about generational change in Mongolia? Do they affect how generations understand one another?

Since my grandparents’ generation, major socio-political and cultural changes have happened – communism in my grandparents’ time, democracy during my parents’ time, globalism during my time, and now, in the newer generations, the internet and AI.

These are major shifts in the human experience and social order. Since the 1980s, each decade has been so different from the previous one that there is certainly a gap between the generations that ultimately translates into the question of identity.

My films are, in a way, an attempt at understanding and expressing our identity through our lived experiences and relationships.

Mongolia is still often represented internationally through the steppe, nomadism, horses and spectacular landscapes. Your films are much more interested in apartments, traffic, schools, bedrooms and the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar. Do you ever feel that simply showing ordinary urban Mongolia is itself a way of pushing back against how the country is imagined abroad?

I actually have a problem with how Mongolia is portrayed, not necessarily by foreigners, but by how we Mongolians portray ourselves.

We have started to glamorise and orientalise our own culture because that is what foreigners value. Our relationship to our culture is becoming a “simulation” because we are relating more with signs and symbols of what being a Mongolian means rather than actually having a lived relationship to our own culture.

I do push back against this idea and against the simplistic image that Mongolia has in the collective consciousness.

I wish Mongolia had a more humane and more literal presence in the collective consciousness – not like folklore. With my films, I aim to put Mongolia in the modern collective consciousness – as a real people, with a real country, and a real presence.

You have said that being away from Mongolia sometimes allows you to see the country more clearly. What changes in your relationship with Mongolia when you leave it – and what do you notice first when you come back?

I feel that my relationship to Mongolia is actually strengthened when I am away because I miss it and yearn for my family in Mongolia.

When I am away, I am able to think more deeply and in a more concentrated manner about the core ideas I have in my films. When I am in Mongolia, I am more distracted and de-centred. I am more inspired by the characters, the specific scenes, conversations, colours and smells.

So I feel that my relationship to my script and my film is enriched by the nomadic relationship I have with my country.

When I first go back, I am always transported back to when I was 10 years old – the first time I left the country. I feel that whenever I return, I return to the feelings of that girl – a girl who had never left Mongolia yet and who felt like no other place in the world existed or mattered.

Which Mongolian cultural work – a film, book, album, artist or even a place – do you wish more people outside Mongolia knew about, and why?

I wish that more people knew of the particular existence of the Gobi Desert. It’s a very fragile and harsh geography that produces the best singers of Mongolia.

Through song, the people survive and they soften the landscape and their lives.

I think many people have heard of the film The Story of the Weeping Camel. I think that this land has to be protected more, especially now with mining and uranium.

Read more on Novastan: Bolor Lkhaajav: “Mongolia does not need to choose between Russia and China”

It’s a vulnerable land, sparsely populated, so more care and attention must be given due to its fragility and exploitability.

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

The post Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir: “Housing is the Mongolian dream – and nightmare” appeared first on Novastan English.

Born in Latvia and raised in Kazakhstan, Lena Wolf grew up with fragments of a history that Soviet society rarely discussed openly. In her graphic memoir, she retraces the deportation of her German family to Kazakhstan, their struggle to preserve language and identity, and her own journey from Aktobe to Germany.

For our readers in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan:

Lena Wolf’s e-book is now available at reduced regional prices on Google Play Books in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Available in English and Russian.

For much of her childhood, Lena Wolf believed that all Germans came from Kazakhstan.

Aktobe was home. Her grandmother cooked German dishes alongside baursaki and manti, organised clandestine religious gatherings and spoke German to her grandchildren, even when they answered her in Russian. Around them lived families whose own histories had been shaped by deportation, repression and displacement.

Yet Wolf also learned early that being German could set her apart.

“I don’t think I really understood what being German meant to other people until I was called a fascist for the first time,” she recalls. “I was probably about six.”

Decades later, Wolf began piecing together the family history that had reached her in fragments behind closed doors. The result was a graphic memoir illustrated by Christoph Heuer, tracing almost two centuries of migration, persecution and repeated attempts to build a home.

Her grandmother Emilia was 25 when she was deported to Kazakhstan in 1941 with two young children. Like many Soviet Germans, the family initially believed the displacement might be temporary.

“They left behind their houses, land, animals – everything – still hoping they would return,” Wolf says.

They never did.

Even after Stalin-era special-settlement restrictions were lifted in 1955, Soviet Germans were not allowed to return to the areas from which they had been deported. Emilia eventually built a new life in Aktobe.

“Kazakhstan did become home for her, partly because she knew she could never return to her village in Ukraine,” Wolf says. “She found her people there and had her family around her.”

The contradiction would become central to Wolf’s understanding of her family history: Kazakhstan was both a place of forced exile and the country in which several generations of the family made their lives.

“Somewhere along the way, she too became a German from Kazakhstan.”

Growing up German in Soviet Kazakhstan

For Wolf herself, Kazakhstan carried no such ambiguity during childhood.

“For me, Kazakhstan was simply home. I didn’t know anything else,” she says. “In fact, when I was very little, I thought all Germans came from Kazakhstan.”

Read more on Novastan: Beyond any borders: a new multicultural generation in Kazakhstan

Her family’s German identity nevertheless remained clearly marked in Soviet society.

Official documents continued to identify Soviet Germans as nemets or nemka, even as German-language education, religious life and much of the community’s institutional culture had been suppressed.

“You were expected to stop being German, but you were never allowed to forget that you were German,” Wolf says.

In her family, survival meant avoiding attention. Her father’s advice was encapsulated in the Russian expression тише воды, ниже травы – “quieter than water, lower than grass.”

“Don’t attract attention. Don’t stand out. That was how you survived.”

Wolf remembers the word “German” being routinely associated with “fascist”, decades after the Second World War. Soviet Germans’ own experience of deportation and repression was largely absent from the history taught in schools.

“When you don’t know the history, you fill the gaps with your own explanations,” she says. “So people assumed that because we had been deported, we must have been guilty. The deportation itself became proof of our guilt.”

As a child, she even changed her surname when helping an elderly Soviet woman whose husband and son had died during the war.

“I invented another name for myself: Volkova instead of Wolf.”

The Russian name, she says, became a form of protection.

When Russian became the common language

Language is another thread running through Wolf’s memoir.

Her grandmother spoke German to her; Wolf usually answered in Russian. She later recognised almost exactly the same pattern among Kazakh families: grandparents speaking Kazakh while younger generations responded in Russian.

“When that happens, it isn’t only language that gets lost,” Wolf says. “Stories, traditions and knowledge can no longer be passed on in the same way.”

She remembers receiving some Kazakh-language teaching at school but says it was far too limited for children to become proficient.

Russian, meanwhile, dominated education, television and popular culture.

“You didn’t necessarily have to force children to speak Russian,” she says. “Education, television, culture and opportunities were in Russian, while Kazakh was often seen as old-fashioned or backward. Of course children were going to choose Russian.”

Read more on Novastan: The Lexicon of Kazakh Decolonisation

Looking back, she says she is glad to see the Kazakh language gaining greater prominence today.

A garden as survival – and as home

One image reappears throughout Wolf’s family history: the garden.

Her ancestors had originally migrated eastward to work the land. After deportation, a garden helped her grandmother and a neighbour survive wartime shortages. Decades later, during Wolf’s own childhood in Kazakhstan, home-grown food helped sustain the family when Soviet shops were empty.

But the garden came to represent more than food.

Wolf recounts the story of her father, whose mother was sentenced to the Gulag after attempting to leave the deportation zone and return to Ukraine. He was sent to an orphanage in Zaporizhzhia shortly after the war.

One teacher once invited him to her home for dinner. While she cooked, he played in the garden with her son.

“He remembers standing there among the flowers and plants and realising, for the first time, that the world was beautiful,” Wolf says.

The memory remained with him throughout his life.

Now 91, he can no longer maintain a large garden but still cares for flowers on his balcony in Offenbach, Germany.

“Perhaps that is what a garden means in our family,” Wolf says. “It feeds you when there is nothing to eat, but it also gives you beauty when there isn’t much beauty around you. And wherever you end up, you can plant something and make that place your own.”

A ‘return’ to a country they did not know

In 1989, Wolf and her family left Kazakhstan for Germany.

Officially, such migration was often presented as a return to an ancestral homeland. In practice, Wolf discovered that Germany was another unfamiliar country.

“What surprised me most was that in Germany I wasn’t seen as German,” she says.

“After everything our families had gone through in the Soviet Union because they were German – persecution, discrimination and sometimes literally fighting for survival – we arrived in Germany and suddenly we were foreigners.”

At 17, Wolf initially tried to assimilate as completely as possible. She stopped speaking Russian, avoided food associated with her Soviet childhood and even began using the name Helene.

Inside the family home, however, the opposite transformation was taking place.

“In Kazakhstan my parents had tried to preserve what was German,” she recalls. “In Germany, suddenly they started cooking the food they missed from Kazakhstan – plov, beshbarmak, baursaki.”

Read more on Novastan: Between integration and inheritance: How Armenians in Uzbekistan are redefining community

Wolf eventually realised that Kazakhstan could not simply be removed from her identity.

“I am a German from Kazakhstan.”

It is a formulation she prefers to the widely used German term Russlanddeutsche, or “Russian Germans”.

Wolf points out that neither she nor her parents lived in Russia. Her family had lived in Ukraine before deportation to Kazakhstan, while earlier generations had been Germans of the Russian Empire.

“The term also hides how diverse these German communities actually were,” she says. Germans deported to Kazakhstan came from Ukraine, the Volga region, Crimea, the Caucasus and elsewhere.

“For myself, I simply say: I am a German from Kazakhstan.”

Turning fragments into a history

Wolf’s decision to tell the story as a graphic memoir was partly motivated by younger generations of her own family.

Her nieces and nephews had grown up in Germany knowing little about the experiences of their grandparents and great-grandparents. She wanted to make the history accessible without reducing its complexity.

Works such as Maus and Persepolis showed her that graphic narrative could make difficult histories accessible across generations.

Some experiences, she says, were also easier to communicate visually.

“I could describe in a few sentences how people were transported for weeks in overcrowded trains, cold and hungry, and how people died along the way. But I wanted readers to see their faces, the exhaustion, the desperation and the conditions in which they were deported.”

Illustrator Christoph Heuer eventually drew more than 1,200 panels by hand, reconstructing historical environments from photographs and other archival material.

For Wolf, the research also transformed her understanding of the stories her grandmother had told her.

As a child, she had regarded them almost as dangerous family secrets: accounts of famine, deportation and death that contradicted what was being taught publicly.

“Who do you believe – your grandmother or your country and your teachers?” Wolf asks. “That’s quite a big decision for a child to make.”

Researching the memoir made her realise not only how much her grandmother had told her, but how much she had withheld in an attempt to protect her.

It also changed Wolf’s understanding of resistance.

Her grandmother’s defiance was not dramatic. It meant continuing to practise religion in secret, speaking German to her grandchildren, preparing traditional food and preserving family memories despite decades of pressure to assimilate.

“Her resistance wasn’t loud,” Wolf says. “It was quiet and persistent.”

Writing the book ultimately turned inherited fragments into a coherent family history.

“I think I had to write this book to understand who I am,” she says.

The answer to the question that once troubled her – “Where are you from?” – now comes easily.

“My answer is very simple: I am a German from Kazakhstan. And now I know what came before me.”

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

The post ‘I am a German from Kazakhstan’: Lena Wolf on deportation, memory and finding home appeared first on Novastan English.

Formed in Ulaanbaatar in 2023, Dotor Khuree blends Mongolian musical traditions with avant-pop, jazz, rock and other contemporary influences. In this interview with Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, the band discusses its latest EP, the independent music scene in Ulaanbaatar and what it means to make distinctly Mongolian music today.

Mongolian music has gained growing international visibility in recent years, but outside the country it is still often associated primarily with the morin khuur, throat singing and other immediately recognisable traditional forms.

Ulaanbaatar-based band Dotor Khuree is exploring another path.

Formed in April 2023 by musicians who met at the Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture, the group describes its sound as avant-pop, post-ethno and poly-genre. Its members draw on Mongolian long song, regional folk traditions and the musical vocabulary of instruments such as the morin khuur, while largely expressing those influences through contemporary instrumentation.

The band released its debut LP, Zarimdaa Zuils, in September 2025, followed by the self-titled Dotor Khuree EP in May 2026. The latter pushed the musicians further towards what they describe as a distinctly Mongolian sound achieved without directly using traditional instruments.

Novastan spoke with the members of Dotor Khuree about Mongolian musical identity, experimentation, Ulaanbaatar’s independent scene and their ambitions beyond Mongolia.

Novastan: Could you introduce Dotor Khuree to readers who may be discovering you for the first time? How did the band come together, and what brought you to the kind of music you make today?

Dotor Khuree: Mandaa: Dotor Khuree was formed on 12 April 2023 and consists of six musicians and two crew members – our band manager and sound engineer – making eight members in total. We are an avant-pop, post-ethno, poly-genre band.

The band was first founded by our bassist Gombojav and me, Narmandakh, the keyboardist. We then started adding our other bandmates: vocalist Tsetsen, guitarist Orgil, sound engineer Enkhdalai, pianist Batzaya and drummer Chultemjamts. Our last addition was our band manager, Oyuntulkhuur, or Roxy.

The band members all met at the Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture and were already friends.

The main calling to start making the music we aim to make today began with my childhood and my deep love for Mongolian long songs and the morin khuur while growing up in the countryside. The older I got, the more that love grew, and I aspired to incorporate traditional musical elements into my own music.

After forming the band, I told the others about the kind of Mongolian music I wanted to make, and all our members received the idea with real enthusiasm. That was how the basis of Dotor Khuree’s present sound came to be.

Another important factor was definitely our university mentors and teachers, who inspired and encouraged us to stay close to our Mongolian musical roots and stressed the importance of contributing to their development. That was something that really stayed with us.

One of the things that immediately stood out to me was that your music can sound distinctly Mongolian even when you are using primarily contemporary instruments. How consciously do you think about creating a “Mongolian” sound?

Mandaa: It is definitely a very conscious decision. Because we all love Mongolian music so much, we strongly believe that it is entirely possible to make our sound distinctly Mongolian without using traditional instruments.

That is why we spend so much of our rehearsal time coming up with new ideas about how to achieve that. The song ideas usually come from me, and from there we collaborate as a team, discussing arrangements and musical timbres with the shared goal of creating a distinctly Mongolian sound using contemporary instruments.

We feel that this goal is now gradually coming to life. We are really happy that you noticed it.

What musical traditions, older songs or sounds from Mongolia have influenced Dotor Khuree most strongly? When you reinterpret traditional or older material, how do you decide what to preserve and what to transform?

Gomboo: So many Mongolian musical traditions influence us. Long songs, or urtiin duu, and the morin khuur have so many different varieties. The techniques and sounds vary from region to region: the far western regions of Mongolia have very distinctive sounds, while the Gobi provinces have something different again. That is always very inspiring.

Several of our songs reflect those nuances of Mongolian folk music and long song.

For example, when reinterpreting and rearranging the folk song Shiree Nuur, we made it sound nothing like the original. We shortened the lyrics, using only the first two lines and leaving more room for the listener’s interpretation. The song’s vocal accent in particular blended exceptionally well with our female vocalist’s tone.

Rather than directly copying tradition, we wanted to express it through our own unique musical language.

Could you tell us about your latest EP? What ideas connect the tracks, and how does it differ from your earlier work?

Gomboo: It is always interesting for us to make music using traditional vocal styles and a Mongolian feel, while adding our own modern elements. While making this kind of music, it almost feels as though something awakens within us.

In fact, the Dotor Khuree EP can be described as “our awakened spirit”. Through this EP, compared with our Zarimdaa Zuils LP, we express even more strongly our connection to our national culture and heritage – something that is always close to our hearts.

Roxy: On our debut LP, Zarimdaa Zuils, the band explored a wider range of genres, even dipping into jazz fusion and bossa nova, so the record is more poly-genre.

On the Dotor Khuree EP, the band continued exploring the original idea that began with songs such as Shiree Nuur and Ertnii Saikhan on the first LP. At its core, that has always been about creating a distinct Mongolian sound with a Dotor Khuree feel.

Is there a particular song on the EP that you feel best represents what Dotor Khuree is trying to do musically? Could you take us through how that track developed?

Mandaa: Every song on the EP expresses the direction we want to take with our future sound, but especially Ergen Dervene, the album intro.

The song includes many elements of Mongolian musical traditions, such as folk-song elements, ritual chants, biyelgee – traditional Mongolian dance rhythms – and circular dancing motifs.

The lyrics were co-written by singer Tsetsen and keyboardist Narmandakh, who also finalised the composition, while the entire band collaborated on the production.

The composition is vocal-oriented, with the voice playing the main role and the other musical instruments supporting the central melody.

Roxy: We also recently finished a very creative and interesting project translating the song’s lyrics into English, with help from our friend Unurjargal, who is a book and film translator – a big shout-out to her.

Her interpretation might give listeners even more insight into the song. She translated the title as Spreading Wings.

Another of our favourites is Nariin Saihan Heer. The lyrics come from a Mongolian folk song of the same name, but the music is an entirely new Dotor Khuree composition. The title translates as The Fine Bay Horse, but the meaning of the song goes much deeper.

There is often an expectation outside Mongolia that “Mongolian music” should involve instruments such as the morin khuur or techniques such as throat singing. Do you ever feel that international audiences have a narrow idea of what Mongolian music is supposed to sound like?

Roxy: I wouldn’t call it narrow, maybe just a little outdated, because the morin khuur and throat singing can themselves be used in so many different experimental ways, which sadly is not being done that much.

It is always important for artists to give listeners something they never expected.

What is the independent music scene in Ulaanbaatar like today? Are there particular venues, festivals, labels or communities that have been especially important in allowing alternative music to develop?

Mandaa: Ulaanbaatar has a small but active independent music scene.

There are live music venues such as NarBar Live House, Fat Cat Jazz Club and 78 MusicBar, festivals such as Playtime, music communities such as Sonsloo, and labels like Aydu Records, all contributing to the spread of contemporary sounds.

Do you feel that a recognisable contemporary Ulaanbaatar sound or musical identity is emerging, or is the scene too diverse to describe in those terms?

Mandaa: The scene has become more diverse in recent years, so it is definitely difficult to describe the sound in those terms because the artists are all so different.

I think the lyrics, regardless of the sound, will always remain distinctly unique, because it is very difficult to translate Mongolian poetry and phrasing into English or other languages while preserving their original depth.

How easy is it to sustain an independent band in Mongolia? What are the main practical challenges – recording, rehearsal spaces, venues, financing, reaching audiences?

Orgil: Of course, it is not easy to be an independent band in Mongolia. The biggest challenge is financial sustainability.

Some of our band members have full-time jobs alongside playing in the band. Even if our music gains more recognition and reaches more listeners, that does not guarantee us stable sponsorship.

Finding rehearsal spaces with good acoustics and monitoring setups is also a constant struggle, so we do our absolute best with what we have at the moment.

Maybe if we had enough funding, we could deliver higher-quality productions, record in professional studios and reach a much wider audience much faster.

Mongolia’s younger musicians have much greater access to music from around the world than previous generations did. How do international influences interact with local musical traditions in your own work and in the wider scene?

Orgil : Yes, that’s right. We also have many international musical influences, and we especially love listening to and studying different styles.

Most of our members have formal degrees in music composition and other music-related fields, which is probably one of our strengths. We also have a strong influence from academic and classical music.

However, we strive to master those techniques while remaining true to our core value, which is honouring and evolving our native heritage. That shared purpose is why I believe our sound is continually growing and refining its distinct identity.

To us, Mongolian music feels peaceful, open and expansive, whereas Western music often feels sharper, highly kinetic and harmonically complex.

Because traditional Mongolian music is pentatonic, it blends seamlessly with genres such as blues and rock. Meanwhile, fusing it with jazz, Latin and other contemporary styles produces truly distinctive, unconventional textures.

Moving forward, we will keep striving to spread our unique cultural heritage while making music that genuinely resonates with us and brings us joy.

Has the growth of international interest in Mongolian music changed the way musicians in Mongolia think about presenting themselves abroad? Is there a tension between what foreign audiences expect from Mongolia and what younger Mongolian artists actually want to create?

Tsetsen: Yes, I believe it has.

When our culture and emotions are expressed through music, I believe they carry a rich complexity of emotions as vast as the steppes. We are deeply grateful to all the artists who are sharing this sensibility with international audiences and reshaping the way people hear Mongolian music.

What artists create and envision does not always align with audience expectations – sometimes it matches, and sometimes it diverges. It has always been like that. This is probably because every work emerges from a different perspective and carries its own unique story.

For us, creating music that we want to create and want to listen to also happens to align with what we aim to do: preserve our cultural heritage by infusing and blending it with our new contemporary senses and emotions.

Which other contemporary or independent Mongolian artists would you recommend to someone who wants to understand what is happening musically in Ulaanbaatar today?

Mongolian artists are definitely growing, evolving and diversifying alongside global musical trends.

Here are a few artists we highly recommend checking out:

• Bodikhuu
• Khusugtun
• B.L.M.D
• Magnolian
• Enji
• Even Tide
• Celine Dessberg

Finally, what is next for Dotor Khuree?

Chukana: We are really excited and looking forward to the release of our very first vinyl record for our debut LP Zarimdaa Zuils, featuring specially remastered audio.

We are also yet to organise our first solo concert.

Fuelled by this milestone, we are looking outward – driven by a passion to step onto international festival stages and bring our music to global audiences.

Dotor Khuree’s music is available on Bandcamp and other streaming platforms. The band can also be followed through its official Linktree.

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

The post Dotor Khuree: “We want to make Mongolian music with contemporary instruments” appeared first on Novastan English.

Kazakhstan has begun building a major data centre cluster in the industrial city of Ekibastuz. Its first phase will require around 50 MW of power, but the government’s longer-term ambition is to expand the site to as much as 1 GW. As the country seeks to position itself as a regional hub for artificial intelligence and computing, questions remain over whether its electricity and water infrastructure can keep pace

In early 2026, Kazakhstan launched construction of its Data Center Valley project in Ekibastuz, in the northern Pavlodar region, following instructions from President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

The first facility in the planned cluster is expected to have an energy capacity of around 50 MW. Depending on investor demand, however, the campus could eventually expand to as much as 1 GW and occupy up to 1,300 hectares.

Ekibastuz was not chosen by accident. The city is one of Kazakhstan’s main energy centres and is home to the Ekibastuz GRES-1 and GRES-2 coal-fired power stations.

Yet the scale of the project raises questions over whether Kazakhstan can generate enough electricity for such a large new consumer, how the data centres will be supplied with water, and what environmental pressures the development could create.

What is Kazakhstan planning to build?

According to the Pavlodar regional administration, the precise distribution of land between individual data centres, energy facilities and other infrastructure will be determined as project documentation is developed.

The first stage includes data centre facilities, energy and engineering infrastructure, administrative buildings and AI computing infrastructure. Work is currently under way on site preparation, foundations, administrative facilities, checkpoints and the necessary engineering infrastructure.

The authorities say the initial stage will require around 50 MW, with capacity subsequently increasing in phases. Additional land has been reserved to allow the campus to expand if demand from investors and technology companies materialises.

Kazakhtelecom, one of the operators involved in the Data Center Valley project, told Novastan that the project envisages a hybrid cooling system combining precision air conditioning with closed liquid-cooling circuits using non-freezing liquid solutions.

Construction has already begun, but public hearings with local residents have not yet taken place.

The Pavlodar regional administration said hearings would be held after the necessary project documentation had been completed and the procedures required for environmental assessment had been carried out.

The biggest question: electricity

Connecting a new consumer with an eventual capacity of 1 GW would be unrealistic under Kazakhstan’s current energy conditions if such capacity were required all at once, according to Yerkebulan Kozhmambet, a member of the Public Council on Fuel and Energy Issues under Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Energy.

“If we are being honest, today this looks unrealistic, particularly given that the average age of our generating capacity is more than 65 years,” Kozhmambet said.

A phased project would be possible, he added, provided new generation and grid infrastructure were developed at the same time.

The first launch complex is expected to require 50 MW and is scheduled to enter operation in June 2027, while 1 GW represents a longer-term target rather than capacity the power system is expected to provide immediately.

The scale is nevertheless considerable.

According to Kozhmambet, a continuous 1 GW load would consume around 8.76 billion kWh of electricity annually. Kazakhstan’s total annual electricity consumption is approximately 110-115 billion kWh, meaning the completed Data Center Valley could theoretically account for around 7-8 percent of current national consumption.

“No region today has a free reserve of this scale,” he said.

The project also comes as Kazakhstan’s electricity system has faced shortages and imports, particularly from Russia during peak periods.

Kozhmambet warned that if the full 1 GW capacity were introduced before Kazakhstan achieves a sustainable electricity surplus, the new data centres could absorb that additional generation and push the system back into deficit.

Energy expert Asset Nauryzbayev takes a less pessimistic view.

He argues that 1 GW would not necessarily pose a major problem for Ekibastuz if the development of the data centres is synchronised with new generating capacity.

“If I understand the government’s intention correctly, it is based on the Soviet project to build four 4 GW power stations in Ekibastuz,” Nauryzbayev said. “In today’s conditions, the units would be 660 MW rather than 500 MW. An eight-unit station would therefore generate 5.8 GW. In those circumstances, 1 GW of consumption is absolutely not a large amount.”

He also pointed to planned new gas generation in southern Kazakhstan, which he expects to reduce the country’s electricity deficit.

But there is an environmental price.

“This will undoubtedly create an enormous carbon footprint,” Nauryzbayev said, although he believes the price of carbon offsets is unlikely to fundamentally affect the economics of the project.

Read more on Novastan: Carbon neutral by 2060? Kazakhstan’s green pledge faces a reality check

There is another potential risk if data centres are completed before the generation intended to supply them.

“Data centres will undoubtedly be able to pay more than ordinary consumers,” he said. “That could strongly affect the market if there is no direct link to newly built power stations. Data centres built quickly will take electricity away from ordinary consumers.”

Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Energy says the government plans to add more than 26.3 GW of generating capacity by 2035 through modernisation, new conventional generation, renewable energy projects and nuclear power.

Of this, 13.3 GW is planned through 2029.

The ministry expects the country to be able to cover domestic electricity demand from 2027 onwards and subsequently develop a surplus sufficient to accommodate energy-intensive AI infrastructure and large data centres.

Whether those projects are delivered on schedule will therefore be crucial to Data Center Valley’s longer-term expansion.

Could water become the bigger constraint?

Electricity may not be the only – or even the most difficult – resource question facing the project.

Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation told Novastan that it has not yet received an application to establish a water-use limit for Data Center Valley. No specific limit has therefore been set.

The ministry said that the appropriate volume would be assessed once an application and supporting documents were submitted.

Citing information from the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, it also said planned AI data centres in Kazakhstan would use immersion cooling with specialised liquids, which should not require large volumes of water or restrict supplies to existing users.

This description differs from Kazakhtelecom’s statement that Data Center Valley will use a hybrid system combining precision air conditioning and closed liquid-cooling circuits.

The exact volume of water that the Ekibastuz facilities will require – and how liquids used during maintenance will be handled – has not yet been specified in the information provided to Novastan.

For environmentalists, this lack of detail is significant.

Svetlana Mogilyuk, chair of the ECOM public association, the Civil Alliance of Pavlodar Region and coordinator of the Aarhus Centre in Pavlodar, considers water consumption one of the project’s main environmental risks.

“The Ekibastuz area has significant limitations in terms of natural water resources,” she said.

These constraints have historically been addressed through the Satpayev Canal, which draws water from the Irtysh River.

“But the canal also has limited capacity, and the Irtysh, from which the water is taken, is not unlimited either,” Mogilyuk said. “That is precisely why water is one of the main issues that concerns us as environmentalists when assessing the planned data centre project.”

Nauryzbayev similarly believes the project’s weakest point may lie outside the electricity sector.

“The main risk of the project is not electricity,” he said. “The weakest point is the Irtysh-Karaganda Canal.”

The canal was originally designed in part to support large-scale industrial and power development around Ekibastuz, he explained, but it was not designed for the subsequent growth of Astana.

Read more on Novastan: Kazakhstan: Residents suffer from lack of water

“Power stations and Astana will now compete for water,” he said, adding that the situation could be exacerbated by an expected reduction in water entering the Irtysh from China.

One possible solution would be to use dry cooling towers, Nauryzbayev said, although this would increase costs.

Vadim Ni, founder of the Save the Caspian Sea civic movement and director of a social and environmental foundation, said any meaningful assessment would require clear information about water consumption, water sources and the cooling technology being used.

“The main environmental and social costs associated with data centre projects are their large consumption of electricity and water,” he said.

While electricity consumption can be significant at national level, he added, water use creates a particularly important local impact.

“For local populations, the sensitive issue is first and foremost increased competition for clean drinking water, which is already scarce in many regions of Kazakhstan.”

Environmental assessment is still pending

Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Ecology told Novastan that it had not yet received project materials for an environmental impact assessment of the Ekibastuz data centre development.

An environmental assessment would need to consider the project’s location, technical characteristics, technology, timetable, resource requirements, emissions, waste and potential direct and indirect environmental effects.

Vadim Ni argues that Kazakhstan’s existing environmental assessment framework is not yet well adapted to large data centre projects.

Data centres are not currently explicitly included among the categories of projects automatically requiring an environmental impact assessment or screening under the relevant sections of Kazakhstan’s Environmental Code, he said.

He believes Kazakhstan should develop mechanisms allowing the environmental and social effects of individual data centres to be assessed, while strategic environmental assessments could examine the cumulative impact of data-centre development across a region or the country.

At regional level, preliminary figures may eventually emerge through the IKI Nexus project supported by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, he added.

Meanwhile, public hearings on Data Center Valley have yet to take place.

Mogilyuk said environmental groups hoped the authorities would soon begin a genuine dialogue with local residents.

“So far, as often happens, the authorities have not entered into dialogue with the public and have simply communicated the idea of implementing the project through the media,” she said. “There have been no hearings yet, but we hope they will take place in the near future.”

For Ni, the quality of public consultation depends not simply on holding a meeting but on whether affected communities receive information early enough, whether documentation is accessible, and whether comments can genuinely influence the final project.

“The most important thing is that the people who are genuinely concerned about the project’s risks should participate in the discussions,” he said.

Consultation loses much of its purpose, he argued, if participants are selected primarily because they are already inclined to support the development.

Why does Kazakhstan want data centres?

Despite the questions surrounding resources and environmental impact, there are strong economic and technological arguments behind Kazakhstan’s data-centre ambitions.

IT analyst and large language model researcher Timur Bektur describes data centres as the physical foundation of the digital economy.

Cloud services, government information systems, banking services and AI models all depend on computing infrastructure, while Kazakhstan also has legal requirements governing the domestic storage of its citizens’ data.

“If you want to create your own AI product and need a GPU server to run an LLM model, you need a data centre and a server,” Bektur said.

Global demand for computing power is rising rapidly, and Kazakhstan could potentially supply not only its domestic market but neighbouring Central Asian countries as well.

The development of a major computing cluster could also attract cloud services, AI infrastructure, telecommunications and cybersecurity companies, as well as engineers, developers and specialised service providers.

For Kazakhstan, Bektur argues, this creates the possibility of selling something beyond its traditional commodities and energy exports: computing power.

Read more on Novastan: In Kazakhstan, the futuristic city of “Alatau” reaches a new milestone with special status

But he also remembers Ekibastuz’s own recent infrastructure problems.

The city suffered a major heating crisis in 2022, leaving residents without adequate heating during extremely cold weather.

“People were literally freezing,” Bektur said. “So the question has to be asked: who guarantees that something like this will not happen again?”

He remains optimistic about Data Center Valley but argues that the economics of the project must be demonstrated, particularly if the state is expected to carry a significant share of infrastructure costs.

“It is important to me that this project does not become an additional burden placed on the state or the population,” he said. “If it is economically justified, backed by demand and can bring real benefits to the country, then I am fully in favour. And I very much hope it creates no problems for the residents of Ekibastuz.”

Who benefits – and who bears the costs?

For Yevgeny Khabarov, director of the TAUAN public foundation in Pavlodar, Data Center Valley should ultimately be judged not simply by the amount of investment it attracts, but by what Ekibastuz itself gains from hosting it.

“I am interested not only in the question of how many billions of dollars will be invested,” he said.

The more important questions, he argues, concern how many resources the project will consume, who will pay for the necessary infrastructure, what tax and social benefits will remain in Ekibastuz, and what obligations investors will assume towards the local area.

“Investment in itself does not automatically constitute a public good,” Khabarov said.

“If most of the economic benefit remains with companies and investors, while the environmental burden and the use of water, land, electricity and infrastructure remain with the territory, then a perfectly legitimate question arises: are we privatising the benefits while socialising the costs?”

From a human-rights perspective, he added, development should ultimately improve people’s lives rather than simply increase asset values and investment volumes.

For Kazakhstan, Data Center Valley therefore represents more than an infrastructure project. It is a test of whether the country can convert its abundant energy resources and strategic location into a new digital industry – without shifting the costs of that ambition onto the people and environment of Ekibastuz.

By Daniyar Sadvakasov.

The post Kazakhstan’s AI Ambitions Face an Energy and Water Test in Ekibastuz appeared first on Novastan English.

Disability-rights expert Janina Arsenjeva discusses how activism is changing across Central Asia, why progress cannot be measured by legislation alone, and what governments, international organisations and the EU still get wrong about inclusion.

Disability rights have gained greater prominence across Central Asia over the past fifteen years. Governments have adopted new legislation and policies, disability-rights organisations have become more visible, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has provided activists with a common framework for pushing for change. Yet progress across the region remains highly uneven – and laws on paper do not necessarily translate into greater autonomy, accessibility or inclusion in everyday life.

For Janina Arsenjeva, who has worked with disability-rights actors across all five Central Asian countries for many years, some of the most significant changes are taking place beyond legislation. A new generation of activists increasingly approaches disability as a question of equality and rights rather than charity, while grassroots organisations led by persons with disabilities themselves are becoming more diverse and assertive. At the same time, people with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities, those living in rural areas and other groups remain particularly underrepresented.

In an interview with Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, Arsenjeva discusses why there is no single Central Asian trajectory on disability rights, what meaningful participation should look like, and why international organisations need to rethink the way they work with local disability organisations. She also examines how the European Union can prevent its growing investments in Central Asia from creating new barriers, and argues that greater visibility of problems should not necessarily be interpreted as evidence of failure. Sometimes, she says, it can be the first sign that genuine reform has begun.

Novastan: You have worked with disability-rights actors across all five Central Asian countries over many years. Looking back, what has genuinely changed?

Janina Arsenjeva: One of the biggest changes for me is the disability movement itself. There are more grassroots organisations genuinely led by persons with disabilities, including younger people and women. There are also more organisations representing groups that previously had very little voice. And I see a new generation of activists who really understand disability as an issue of equality and rights, rather than charity or “curing” people. They may not always know or use the international human-rights vocabulary, but the values are there. That feels very different from fifteen years ago.

Where is the biggest gap today between what exists on paper and what a person with a disability actually experiences in everyday life? What tells you that reform is working?

I don’t think legislation is the alpha and omega of reform. You can do a lot even with imperfect laws. You can change attitudes, challenge prejudice and make persons with disabilities more visible in public life. Interestingly, one sign of progress is when we start hearing more about problems. It may look as if things are getting worse, but often it simply means somebody has finally started monitoring and talking openly about what is happening. Ultimately, though, the test is very practical. Can someone leave their home? Get support in education or employment? Find the services they need in their community? Uzbekistan, for example, has spent the last few years developing its social workforce and community-based support. That may be less glamorous than passing a big new law, but this is where reform starts changing people’s lives.

Read more on Novastan: When reform reaches everyday life: Lessons from Uzbekistan and Mongolia

How misleading is it to talk about Central Asia as though the five countries were moving along the same trajectory?

Very misleading. These are five different countries, with different politics, priorities, capacities and disability movements. Kyrgyzstan, for example, has done interesting practical work on accessibility, accessible communication and culture, and disability-inclusive emergency preparedness. In Kazakhstan, activists have done excellent work using the courts to restore the legal capacity of persons with disabilities, and there is also a growing social entrepreneurship movement. Organisations of women with disabilities are particularly strong in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. And Tajikistan has only just ratified the CRPD. So yes, there is a shared history and there are common challenges. But there is definitely no single Central Asian trajectory.

How can we tell whether participation of persons with disabilities has actually been meaningful rather than symbolic?

By now, simply saying “we consulted persons with disabilities” isn’t enough. The first question is: who did you consult? One established organisation cannot represent everybody. You need women, younger people and people with different disabilities around the table. And organisations need to be strong and independent enough to say things the government may not want to hear. Their expertise also has value, and we should stop expecting them to provide it for free. The process matters too. Was it accessible? Did people get enough information and enough time? And was this a one-off meeting, or is there a real mechanism for participation? I do see progress. Activists in several countries tell me that government doors are more open than they used to be, and governments increasingly understand that they actually need persons with disabilities if they want reforms to work.

How much has the shift from a medicalised understanding of disability towards a rights-based model actually happened?

It is uneven, but I think the shift is real. Uzbekistan is an interesting example. The creation of the National Agency for Social Protection has helped move the discussion away from a very paternalistic and medicalised approach and towards support, inclusion and living in the community. I also see the change among activists themselves. More and more people are talking about equality, autonomy and rights rather than charity. Of course, there is frustration that change is too slow, and I understand that. These are huge systems and they don’t transform overnight. But the direction matters, and so does continuing to push so that this direction is not lost.

Read more on Novastan: “Disability is a Mirror for the Development of Societies” – A Conversation with Dilmurad Yusupov

What do international organisations still get wrong in promoting disability inclusion in Central Asia?

The way international funding reaches grassroots organisations! Some of the people who know their communities best would never get through a fifty-page funding application in English with all the technical language and complicated budgets. Yet they may know exactly what women with disabilities in their community need, or what is happening to families in a remote village. They may also understand how to navigate a difficult political environment much better than an outsider does. Of course, public money needs accountability. But surely we can design funding processes that don’t exclude the very people whose expertise we need. I would also like to see much fairer partnerships between big international organisations and local groups, where local organisations are not simply there to implement somebody else’s project.

What would it mean in practical terms to make the EU’s growing investment in Central Asia disability-inclusive from the outset?

The basic principle is very simple: EU money should not be used to build new barriers. The EU already has rules and standards around accessibility, procurement, human rights and responsible business, although applying them consistently to international cooperation and investment is more complicated. But accessibility has to be considered from the beginning. If you build a railway station, public building or digital platform that people with disabilities cannot use, fixing it afterwards will be much harder and more expensive. You also need monitoring and real consequences when accessibility requirements are ignored. We haven’t solved all of this inside the EU either.

Which people are still least visible in disability policy in Central Asia? Are there issues governments and international organisations remain reluctant to confront?

People with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities are still particularly invisible, including within the disability movement itself. People living in rural and remote areas are also much less likely to be heard. And then there are issues that are simply much harder to talk about. Disability can look like a relatively easy development issue if we talk about wheelchairs, social benefits or accessibility. But then you get to legal capacity, political rights, abuse and torture in institutions, or punitive psychiatry. Those are much more difficult conversations. Local activists should guide how these issues are raised, but we also shouldn’t expect them to carry all the risk. Sometimes international organisations can say things that local activists simply cannot safely say themselves. The important thing is to do that with them, not on their behalf or without understanding the consequences.

Is a genuinely regional disability-rights movement emerging in Central Asia?

Not yet, in my view. Organisations across the region know one another and there are good examples of cooperation, particularly among organisations of women with disabilities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But I don’t yet see a strong, regular regional movement built around common priorities. Central Asia also falls between different international regions. Sometimes it is grouped with Europe, sometimes with Asia, so disability organisations don’t necessarily have an obvious regional home. I do think a stronger Central Asian network could be very valuable. These countries share borders, experiences and many challenges. But I would want it to be built around where the region wants to go next, rather than simply around the fact that all five countries share a Soviet past.

What makes you optimistic about disability rights in Central Asia today, and what change would you most like to see over the next decade?

What makes me optimistic is the people. I have just come back from Uzbekistan, where I met activists and persons with disabilities who are building support in their communities and pushing for alternatives to institutions. They are incredibly persistent and creative. Over the next decade, I would really like to see a more diverse disability movement, with much stronger voices from younger people and from groups that are still underrepresented: women and girls, Deaf people, persons with intellectual disabilities and others. I would also like to see better data, stronger monitoring and human-rights institutions that really play their role. And perhaps most importantly, I want us to become much more comfortable talking honestly about what isn’t working. Finding a problem doesn’t mean reform has failed. Sometimes it is the first sign that real reform has begun.

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

The post Janina Arsenjeva: “Finding a problem doesn’t mean reform has failed” appeared first on Novastan English.

In the very center of Almaty, a short walk from two epicenters of Kazakhstan’s theatrical scene, the Abay Kazakh State Opera and Ballet Theater and the Mikhail Lermontov State Russian Academic Theater, stands the State Academic Uyghur Theater of Musical Comedy, the first and only professional Uyghur theater in the world.

Inside the theater, a modest café named Ghérip-Senem serves tea and snacks to audiences between performances. Its name recalls one of the institution’s most iconic productions: the Uyghur opera adaptation of Ghérip-Senem, which has been part of the theater’s repertoire since the Stalinist period and is still performed regularly today.

Ghérip-Senem is not only a theatrical classic and a musical romance but also a transregional poetic reference shared across Central Eurasia. The heart-wrenching love story at its center belongs to a widespread Persianate, Islamicate, and Turkic dastan (tale) tradition whose vernacular variants had circulated across the Caucasus and Central Asia long before its modern Uyghur adaptations first appeared on stage.

The epic cycle to which Ghérip-Senem belongs developed through the interaction of oral performance, manuscript transmission, printed editions, and later theatrical, operatic, and cinematic adaptations. Across its various vernacular forms, the story follows the structure of a Persianate romance: two lovers are bound by destiny or promise, separated by social rank, parental or aristocratic opposition, rival suitors, exile, false accusations, and extended periods of separation (hijran/juda), before fidelity is vindicated through return and reunion. Its persistence across various linguistic and literary traditions points to a shared poetic repository in which oral narrations, lyrical verses, moral testing, and the symbolism of Persianate love poetry could be repeatedly vernacularized without compromising the recognizable narrative structure or figurative repertoire.

Notable variants and their Soviet revivals

Some of the best-known variants of this epic cycle developed across the Caucasus – Central Asia divide, especially among Turkmen and Azerbaijani communities.

The Turkmen variant, Şasenem-Garyp, represents one of the most prominent vernacular forms of the story. Centered on the same cast of lovers, rulers, viziers, and rivals, the tale preserves the familiar structure of prenatal promise, broken covenant, separation, exile, imposed marriage, and eventual reunion. Its continued prominence in Turkmen literary and theatrical life also prepared the ground for later operatic and cinematic adaptations.

The Turkmen branch received one of its major Soviet rebirths in the 1963 film Şasenem-Garyp (Shakhsenem i Garib), based on literary adaptations of the dastan published in the 1940s. The film drew on the dastan’s natural affinity with musical melodrama: prose narration supplies the sequence of events, while singing, accompanied by the dutar (a traditional two-stringed instrument), gives voice to longing, suffering, and reunion. The film adaptation also translated the tale’s lyrical inheritance into visual form through costume, bazaar scenes, decorative settings, and the rose-and-nightingale (gül we bilbil) imagery, a recurrent trope in the poetry of the early modern Turkmen poet Magtymguly Pyragy.

The Azeri variant, Ashyg-Garib (Aşıq-Qərib), developed around the figure of the wandering ashyg (minstrel), whose love, exile, and return are inseparable from singing. In this version, the protagonist’s identity is shaped by the saz: lyrical poetry becomes the medium through which he declares longing, gains recognition, and demonstrates his fidelity. The tale retains the familiar narrative pattern but endows it with a distinctly Azeri musicality through the figure of Garib as a troubadour-lover. Its recurrent geographic references also place the story in a South Caucasian setting, with Tabriz and Tiflis forming the principal loci of origin, dream, encounter, and desire.

The same Azeri branch entered Russian and Soviet artistic circulation through Mikhail Lermontov’s literary retelling, Ashik Kerib, and later through Sergey Parajanov’s 1988 film under the same title. Lermontov compressed the dastan into a novella, while Parajanov’s film, based on Lermontov’s retelling, presented the story in a richly stylized Caucasian setting, combining ashyg/ashugh music, Azeri lyrics, elaborate ornament, pomegranate imagery, and ritualized gestures.

Ghérip-Senem in Uyghur adaptations

By the early twentieth century, the same epic cycle had become widespread among Uyghurs, particularly in the Ili Valley, where the Taranchis, a subgroup of Uyghurs, had sustained intensive cultural contact with Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Tatars for centuries. The love story entered modern Uyghur literary and theatrical form in the 1930s. The renowned Uyghur writer Ziya Semed (Samadi), himself a native of the Ili Valley, produced an operatic adaptation of Ghérip-Senem in 1937. Another adaptation by Zunun Qadiri, also completed in 1937, later formed the basis for the 1981 film Ghérip-Senem, produced by the Ürümchi-based Tien-Shan Film Studio (Tengritagh kino studiisi), which would become a modern Uyghur cultural icon.

The 1981 film opens with recollections of two parallel hunting expeditions by Shah Abbas and his vizier Hesen, during which they each encounter a pregnant gazelle and spare it after recalling that their wives are also expecting children concurrently. Abbas then pledges that, if one household has a son and the other a daughter, the two children will be joined in marriage. Abbas’s wife gives birth to Senem, while Hesen’s wife gives birth to Ghérip. Years later, the two study together in a madrasa, where companionship eventually transforms into love. Their promised union is disrupted by Shawaz, who plots the assassination of Hesen, subsequently succeeds him as vizier, and seeks to make his son, Abdulla, heir to the throne by marrying him to Senem. Through conspiracy and false accusations, Shawaz turns Abbas against Ghérip, who is condemned as a rebel and expelled alongside his family. In exile, Ghérip’s fidelity moves Dilarem, a female serder (ruler), whose mountain community helps him return. Shawaz and Abdulla’s conspiracy is eventually exposed, Abbas recognizes the injustice committed against Hesen’s family, and the lovers are reunited in matrimony after lengthy separation.

Persianate poetic tropes on the silver screen

The 1981 film draws extensively upon the repertoire of Persianate poetic symbolism and reproduces those literary tropes through visual imagery, songs, and dialogue.

The names of the main characters represent some of the clearest uses of poetic symbolism. The name Ghérip recalls the Perso-Arabic word gharib, meaning a stranger, exile, or wanderer. Senem derives from Persian sanam, meaning an idealized image or beloved, a word whose secular poetic use often intersects with Sufi-inflected language of beauty, devotion, and forbidden adoration. The ruler’s designation as Shah Abbas likewise places the court within Persianate political traditions. These names give the story an implied register of estrangement and devotion from the outset.

The film’s most explicit literary frame is Perhat-Shérin (Farhad and Shirin), a love story popularized by Nizami Ganjavi in Persian and later elaborated by Alisher Navoiy in Chaghatay. Senem’s reading of the story in Charbagh (“quadripartite garden”) leads to a scene she fantasizes, where Perhat and Shérin appear in the likeness of Ghérip and Senem. In Senem’s vision, Perhat splits the mountain with his pickaxe, which turns the classic metaphor of impossible labor into a visual prefiguration of Ghérip’s own ordeal. When the lovers later invoke Perhat-Shérin and Leyli-Mejnun in their vows, they place their bond within a poetic lineage of trials and tribulations, separation, longing, and self-consuming devotion, motifs that also acquired strong Sufi resonance in other Persianate texts.

The triangular structure of the romance recalls the rivalry embedded in the literary trope of Khosrow, Shirin, and Farhad, where the beloved becomes the object of competing claims between devoted labor and the desire of the powerful. In the film, Abdulla’s desire for Senem is coercive and jealous rather than devotional or genuine, reinforced by his father Shawaz’s political ambitions and by Abdulla’s own penchant for weapons and violence. Against Ghérip’s patience, exile, and fidelity, Abdulla represents a rival love emptied of adab (etiquette, decency, and refinement) and transformed into an instrument of power struggles.

The pregnant gazelle at the beginning of the film symbolizes vulnerability, maternity, and compassion. As Shah Abbas and Hesen spare the animal while recalling their own pregnant wives, the scene transforms a hunting expedition into a moral test of compassion. In Persianate love stories, especially in Nizami’s Sufi-inflected narrative arc of Leyla and Majnun, wild animals often congregate near the suffering lover as creatures, protected by his mercy, as his love and compassion extend even to animals.

The symbolism of violence takes a darker turn in the film. The arrow – the weapon initially restrained before the pregnant gazelle – returns in corrupted form when Hesen is murdered by a poisoned arrow. Meanwhile, explicit accusations of slander and calumny throughout the film are expressed through the word zeher (“poison”). Persianate ethical literature, from Sa‘di’s Gulistan to later Turkic didactic verses in The Book of Dede Korkut, often treats slander as a moral injury. The film connects emotional damage to literal poison.

The royal garden, Charbagh, functions as the film’s central site of love and confinement. The term itself evokes the quadripartite garden associated with Persianate ideas of nourishment and paradise, while the scene of Senem reading Perhat-Shérin by an aywan (veranda) situates poetry and imagination in a setting for genuine love. As Abbas later turns the same space into a place of confinement for Senem, the garden’s meaning changes from emotional awakening to the enclosure of the beloved under patriarchal and autocratic authority.

The recurrent pair-of-roses imagery functions as the film’s most intimate visual emblem. Senem sews Ghérip a handkerchief bearing her name and two roses. Later, at the wedding festivities arranged for her and Abdulla, she recognizes Ghérip’s nearby presence through a bouquet with two roses at its center, sent to her by an intermediary. The rose, already central to Persianate poetry, becomes both an image of beauty and a code of recognition in the film. Furthermore, the handkerchief further condenses innocence and sorrow. Its white color and silky fabric evoke purity and tenderness, while its very function as an object for wiping tears turns it into a keepsake of separation.

The madrasa scenes place Ghérip and Senem’s love within the discipline of adab. The mullah, Jamalidin, whose name means “beauty of faith,” is the source of knowledge and etiquette. The subject taught by Jamalidin, whom his pupils address reverently as ustaz (“master”), appears to be edebiyet (“literature” – the word itself a derivative of adab). Abbas’s removal of Senem from the madrasa, followed by Jamalidin’s imprisonment, therefore marks the rupture of the ethical and literary order that first allowed their love to flourish. Even Shah Abbas, despite his despotic tendencies, defers to Jamalidin’s moral authority. Jamalidin’s eventual release from imprisonment also marks the return of reason and justice.

Some of the songs in the film also draw upon the Persianate vocabulary of longing. As Ghérip waits for Senem in Charbagh, his drawn-out cry of “yarim kelmidi” (“my beloved has not come”) turns the Persianate term yar (“beloved”) into an expression of anxiety and separation. Senem’s later declaration that her heart burns for Ghérip echoes a classical lyrical motif found in Rumi’s ghazals and Nadira’s love poems, where the burning heart, often expressed through the imagery of a kebab, highlights suffering, fidelity, and spiritual cleansing. In Sufi-inflected poetry, burning may also suggest purification through longing.

The repeated appearance of a zulfiqar (a bifurcated sword) in the film marks the continuity between Hesen’s moral authority and Ghérip’s eventual vindication. In Islamic traditions, the zulfiqar is associated with the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and evokes valor, justice, and martial authority. Because the sword has once belonged to Hesen and is later passed reverently to Ghérip before his return, it functions as a restored inheritance: Ghérip receives the symbol of justice that has been interrupted by Hesen’s murder and Shawaz’s usurpation.

Shah Abbas’s authority over marriage, confinement, exile, and execution gives the story a coercive dimension. His order to execute Ghérip is interrupted by Eid al-Adha (Qurban Héyit), whose associations with sacrifice, mercy, and communal renewal place sacred traditions above despotic wrath.

The forty-day wedding festivities arranged for Senem and Abdulla draw on a symbolic duration widely used in Persianate literary traditions to mark trial and transformation. In the film, the number forty gives the false marriage the appearance of ritualistic completeness. The imposed forty-day celebration ends not with Senem’s surrender but with Ghérip’s return and the restoration of the original covenant.

Direct and indirect allusions to paradise appear throughout the film and beyond. Senem’s reading of Perhat-Shérin leads to a fantasy of paradise, while Charbagh and the paired roses echo Persianate associations between gardens and paradisic beauty. In a 1980 painting based on the same story by the prominent Uyghur painter Ghazi Emet, the inclusion of two peacocks, a familiar emblem of splendor and paradise in Persianate visual culture, extends this imagery into courtly aesthetics, while its folded tail suggests the still-unrealized potential of earthly love.

The film’s Persianate poetic symbolism is presented through distinctly Uyghur cultural elements. Its dialogue and songs are based on highly poeticized Uyghur diction and syntax, while the film’s visual texture includes etles köynek (traditional silk dress), doppa (traditional skullcap), qapaq (a gourd turned into a water bottle), kerney (a long horn typically used in festivities), and chin ussuli (a traditional dance involving the balancing of numerous bowls on the dancer’s head). These elements give the love story a specifically Uyghur form and allow the broader Persianate poetic symbolism to be conveyed through Uyghur music, costume, and material culture.

Shérinjan: A Soviet musical afterlife

A revealing parallel appears in the 1986 Soviet Uyghur musical Séhirlik Alma (The Magical Apple), filmed in Bukhara and Khiva with songs performed by the Uyghur pop band Yashliq (“youth”) in honor of the band’s home city, Almaty, whose name means “where apples are from.” Although the sequence of love stories unfolds in a stylized pre-modern setting, one line of dialogue explicitly refers to the State Uyghur Dance Ensemble of the Kazakh SSR, an anachronism that marks the film as a playful Soviet Uyghur reworking of Persianate fairy-tale romance rather than a rigorous historical reenactment. Like the literary symbolism in Ghérip-Senem, the musical stages love through pop songs, lavish costumes, traditional and techno dances, garden imagery, and the symbolism of apples and roses.

A song in the musical, “Shérinjan,” offers the clearest example of this parallel poetic vocabulary. The song is a confession of love from a young man to his beloved. The beloved’s name evokes the poetic heroine, Shérin, while the affectionate suffix jan (a Persian-derived endearment that also means “soul” and “life”) draws on a Persianate language of intimacy in which the beloved is also the soul and life. Its lyrical images unfold through a familiar poetic sequence: apples thrown into the river drift without sinking, with the word for drifting, leylimeq, also evoking the poetic heroine, Leyli; the fire of love blazes without going out; gardens stir in the breeze; flowers summon the nightingale; and thirsty hearts cry yar-yar day and night. The singer’s refusal to enter the beloved’s garden or to pluck her pomegranate adds a note of restraint, turning desire into an ethical posture governed by adab. The song thereby reproduces many of the same symbolic associations that structure Ghérip-Senem: love moves through flowers, water, fire, garden, confession, and the disciplined longing of the faithful lover.

The only non-Uyghur song in the musical is the chorus of “Million alykh roz” (“A Million Scarlet Roses”), a classic by the late Soviet pop diva Alla Pugachëva, reinterpreted by a child before a young couple. Performed with a mixture of traditional Uyghur instrumentation and 1980s electronica arrangement, the song extends the Persianate symbolism of roses in a form familiar to a broader Soviet audience and inserts a recognizable Soviet pop refrain into a pre-modern romance setting without disrupting the musical’s fairy-tale fabric. The image of a million scarlet roses transforms the traditional pair-of-roses motif, as seen in Ghérip-Senem, into an extravagant public display of devotion.

The ubiquity of Persianate poetic symbolism in Ghérip-Senem reveals the depth of Uyghur cultural heritage and its rootedness in a cultural spectrum far broader than any single local or national tradition. Through its distinct Uyghur cultural forms, the film participates in a shared Persianate repertoire of romance, refinement, longing, and moral codes that has linked communities across Central Eurasia and beyond for centuries. The film’s significance, therefore, lies not only in its iconic status within modern Uyghur culture but also in the clarity with which it affirms Uyghur inheritance of a magnificent literary patrimony.

By Diego Benning Wang.

Diego Benning Wang is a historian of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Having received a PhD in history from Princeton University, an MA in Russian studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Russian studies from New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

The post “Ghérip-Senem”: The visualization of Persianate poetic symbolism in Uyghur cinema appeared first on Novastan English.

Seoul has elevated its relationship with Central Asia to summit level and placed critical minerals, supply chains and industrial cooperation at the centre of the agenda. But four experts interviewed by Novastan argue that the real test will be whether South Korea can turn regional diplomacy into investment, local value creation and practical cross-border cooperation across five very different states

When the leaders of South Korea and the five Central Asian states met in Seoul on 16 September, the symbolism was difficult to miss. A relationship that had operated through the Korea-Central Asia Cooperation Forum since 2007 was elevated to heads-of-state level for the first time, while the Seoul Declaration set out a broader framework for cooperation in industry, infrastructure, technology, climate and people-to-people ties.

The economic agenda was equally prominent. South Korea and the Central Asian states established a C5+1 meeting of industry ministers, agreed to deepen cooperation on critical minerals and supply chains, and dkiscussed local processing, manufacturing, infrastructure and digital transformation. A parallel business summit produced 19 memoranda of understanding.

But the diplomatic upgrade does not necessarily mean that South Korea suddenly has a coherent regional strategy for Central Asia.

The five states differ markedly in economic structure, resources, labour markets and their existing relations with Seoul. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have by far the deepest Korean industrial and political ties, while Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan occupy very different places in the relationship.

The more important question is therefore not whether South Korea has become more interested in Central Asia. It plainly has. It is whether a regional diplomatic framework can add something meaningful to relationships that will remain, in practice, highly differentiated.

Four specialists interviewed by Novastan suggest that it can – but only if Seoul avoids treating Central Asia as either a single economic bloc or simply a new source of strategic raw materials.

A new emphasis, not a new relationship

South Korea’s growing focus on supply-chain resilience can easily be presented as a dramatic shift. Yet Matteo Fumagalli, Director of the Institute of Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus Studies at the University of St Andrews, sees considerably more continuity.

“There is indeed an additional emphasis on supply chain resilience,” he told Novastan, but this is being added to “pre-existing priorities” rather than replacing them.

The change reflects a series of shocks that have forced governments to think differently about economic vulnerability: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, worsening trade tensions and instability in the relationship between the United States and China.

Alexandre Haym, an analyst of South Korean foreign policy, similarly places the current push in a longer trajectory. Seoul’s recent initiatives build on earlier efforts, including the New Northern Policy and the K-Silk Road strategy. In this reading, economic security has accelerated South Korea’s engagement with Central Asia rather than fundamentally reinventing it.

Critical minerals nevertheless give the relationship a new sense of urgency.

Central Asia possesses uranium, rare metals and other resources attractive to a Korean economy heavily dependent on imported inputs. Yet Fumagalli cautions against assuming that Seoul intends to replace its existing suppliers with Central Asian ones.

“I don’t think that Seoul’s objective is for Central Asia to become a key source of imports,” he said.

The key word is diversification.

South Korea is looking for additional suppliers and additional options, not necessarily a new dominant source of raw materials. And the distance between identifying a mineral deposit and incorporating it into a Korean industrial supply chain remains considerable.

Central Asian governments have only recently begun updating geological data that in some cases dated back to the Soviet period, Fumagalli notes. Exploration may identify promising reserves, but commercial development still requires finance, infrastructure, processing capacity, reliable energy and water, and customers willing to buy the resulting products.

That distinction matters because summit diplomacy can make a deposit strategically interesting without making it economically viable.

“Investment. Investment. Investment”

From the Central Asian perspective, the priorities are not identical to Seoul’s.

Asked what the region most wants from South Korea, Fumagalli’s answer was emphatic:

“Investment. Investment. Investment.”

For Central Asian governments, diversification is not simply about selling minerals to an additional foreign buyer. It is also about attracting capital, technology, training and industrial activity that remains in the region.

Aidar Kurmashev, Head of the Department of Asian Studies at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, argues that the success of a minerals partnership should therefore be assessed by the productive capabilities it creates.

“Resource exports can generate revenue,” he told Novastan. “The more demanding task is to use that activity to develop processing, engineering services and suppliers that can remain competitive over time.”

Technology transfer, in this sense, cannot simply mean importing Korean machinery. It requires local engineers able to operate and improve production processes, laboratories capable of maintaining quality standards, trained maintenance teams and domestic suppliers able to meet industrial specifications.

The objective need not be to manufacture the most sophisticated finished product domestically. In some cases, a refined metal, industrial component or intermediate material may represent a more realistic step up the value chain.

What matters is whether Korean investment leaves behind skills and commercially viable production.

That is also where the interests of Seoul and Central Asian governments can diverge.

South Korea wants resilient access to strategic inputs. Central Asian states increasingly want to avoid remaining exporters of unprocessed resources.

Professor Jieon Lee, Head of the Department of Central Asian Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, argues that an engagement driven too narrowly by Korean supply-chain concerns could undermine one of Seoul’s principal advantages in the region: the relatively positive image it has accumulated through education, culture, technology and long-term cooperation.

A relationship perceived as extractive would put that goodwill at risk.

One region, five different relationships

The difficulty for Seoul is that there is no single Central Asian economic model to which it can apply a uniform Korean strategy.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are the obvious anchors. Both have substantial populations, established industrial links with Korean companies, important mineral resources and large Koryo-saram communities.

Their relationship with Seoul is therefore qualitatively different from that of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan or Turkmenistan.

Fumagalli notes that South Korea itself needs different things from different Central Asian states. Labour migration, for example, matters more in its relationships with Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan than with Turkmenistan. Training programmes or cultural cooperation may have greater relevance elsewhere.

Lee argues that the answer is not to force uniformity, but to combine differentiated bilateral relationships with cooperation on what she calls “regional public goods.”

These could include water management, climate cooperation, human-capital development, digital governance and different stages of the critical-minerals value chain.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan may remain Seoul’s main industrial partners. Cooperation with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan might place greater emphasis on education, hydropower, labour mobility or development cooperation, while Turkmenistan presents a different set of opportunities in energy and logistics.

A regional strategy, in other words, does not require each country to receive the same Korean factory, investment package or sectoral priority.

Its value lies elsewhere.

Where regionalism can actually help

Kurmashev offers perhaps the clearest test of whether the new summit format matters.

“The summit can give political authority to work that already has an institutional base,” he said.

Simply creating another opportunity for leaders to meet would “change very little.”

The regional format becomes useful when it tackles problems that cannot be solved through a bilateral investment agreement alone.

A Korean company could build a factory in Kazakhstan, buy inputs from Uzbekistan and sell its products across several Central Asian markets. Yet even an excellent bilateral relationship cannot by itself resolve incompatible certification rules, unpredictable border procedures or transport arrangements involving several jurisdictions.

A delay at a border can undermine an investment whose financing and construction proceeded smoothly.

For Kurmashev, the summit’s significance will become clearer when it is possible to “trace a political decision to an observable change across a border.”

This also provides a more realistic way for the smaller Central Asian economies to participate in Korean-led production networks.

Regional cooperation need not mean reproducing an entire industrial chain in every country. A specialised supplier in Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan could benefit from a larger network centred on production elsewhere if borders, certification and logistics allow it to participate.

This is less spectacular than announcing another billion-dollar investment package.

But it may ultimately matter more.

The Middle Corridor is not the whole answer

Transport is another area where political rhetoric can obscure commercial reality.

The Middle Corridor across the Caspian Sea and South Caucasus has gained enormous geopolitical visibility as governments search for routes that reduce dependence on Russia.

For South Korea, however, geography creates an additional complication.

Because North Korea blocks direct overland access from South Korea to the Eurasian continent, Korean cargo must first travel by sea before entering a continental route.

“The Middle Corridor is important to many countries,” Fumagalli said. But for Korea, simply getting goods onto the Eurasian landmass adds both time and cost. Seoul is therefore examining multiple possibilities rather than betting everything on a single route.

Kurmashev likewise cautions against treating connectivity as one uniform corridor problem.

Korean goods entering Kazakhstan may arrive through China. A Korean-invested Kazakh factory selling to Europe may have a much stronger interest in the Trans-Caspian route. The same factory selling to Uzbekistan primarily needs predictable transport within Central Asia.

“The Middle Corridor is important, but its relevance depends on the origin and destination of the cargo,” he said.

The underlying issue is therefore less glamorous: customs procedures, compatible digital systems, certification, transport reliability and clear responsibility when shipments are delayed.

Those are precisely the areas in which a regional political framework can potentially complement bilateral investment.

Korea’s soft advantage – and its limits

South Korea does have one advantage that is harder to measure than investment flows.

It is generally perceived differently from Russia, China or the major Western powers.

Fumagalli describes Seoul as retaining a relatively “non-threatening” profile in Central Asia, reinforced by the extraordinary reach of Korean popular culture.

Historical ties through Koryo-saram communities, Korean universities, consumer technology, development programmes and K-pop all contribute to a familiarity that conventional economic statistics do not capture.

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

Kurmashev nevertheless warns against turning that favourable image into an assumption of automatic trust.

Korea has no history of ruling Central Asian territory and shares no border with the region, but governments, companies and local communities may still perceive individual projects differently. A positive national image does not settle concerns about employment, water use, working conditions or the terms of a particular investment.

Lee points to another increasingly important dimension: the experience of Central Asians in South Korea itself.

Students, migrant workers and other Central Asian residents encounter questions of labour rights, integration, discrimination and visa insecurity. Those experiences also shape perceptions of Korea.

Economic diplomacy therefore does not take place separately from human relationships.

A country may enjoy strong cultural appeal while simultaneously damaging its reputation through the everyday experience of the people who study and work there.

The test comes after the summit

The first Korea-Central Asia summit has already succeeded in one respect: it has institutionalised a relationship that Seoul increasingly regards as strategically important.

The Republic of Korea government itself emphasised that cooperation should move beyond individual infrastructure projects toward local processing, manufacturing, industrial capacity and “mutually beneficial value chains.”

The harder question is whether that language produces projects.

Fumagalli would watch whether announced investments – particularly in areas such as renewable energy – actually move forward.

Kurmashev proposes an even more concrete measure: financing secured, factories operating, transport becoming more reliable, and local companies acquiring capabilities they can use beyond a single Korean partnership.

For Lee, the regional framework will also have to prove that it can address shared problems without pretending that Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are interchangeable.

And Haym’s emphasis on continuity provides an important corrective to the language of diplomatic breakthroughs. South Korea has been building relationships in Central Asia for decades. The summit did not create them. It gave them a new institutional form.

That may be precisely why the most realistic Korean strategy will remain regional in form and bilateral in practice.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are likely to continue attracting the deepest economic engagement. The other Central Asian states will participate through different sectors, at different scales and for different reasons.

That is not necessarily a failure of regionalism.

The real test is whether the new framework can make those unequal relationships work better together – allowing investment to cross borders, local companies to enter production networks, skills and technology to remain in the region, and Central Asian governments to gain meaningful new economic choices.

If it does, South Korea may carve out a distinctive role in one of the world’s increasingly crowded arenas of economic diplomacy.

If it does not, Seoul will have succeeded in creating another summit – without fundamentally changing what lies beneath it.

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

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Former MP, minister, writer and political activist Oyungerel Tsedevdamba came of age during Mongolia’s peaceful democratic revolution. More than three decades later, she speaks to Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine about corruption, party financing, women in politics, younger voters, local democracy and why remembering the country’s communist past still matters.

When Mongolia’s democratic revolution unfolded in the winter of 1989-1990, Oyungerel Tsedevdamba was 24. The peaceful transition ended the one-party rule, opened the way to multiparty elections and political pluralism, and was followed by a new constitution in 1992.

For Tsedevdamba, however, the transformation was experienced less through constitutional language than through something more immediate: the sudden possibility of choice.

“The idea of having choices was so new,” she tells Novastan. Freedom to speak, travel, read and participate politically seemed almost unimaginable only a short time before. Thirty-six years later, she remains emphatically proud of what she calls Mongolia’s “homegrown democracy” – but far more critical of the political institutions that have developed within it.

Her concerns range from party financing and corruption to declining citizen participation in local government. At the same time, she sees reasons for optimism in younger voters, the increasing normality of women entering politics and a continuing public willingness to defend democratic freedoms.

“The idea of having choices was so new”

Novastan: You were 24 during Mongolia’s peaceful democratic revolution in 1990 and have described discovering the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at that time as formative. Looking back more than three decades later, what part of the democratic promise of 1990 do you think Mongolia has fulfilled most successfully, and where has it fallen furthest short?

Oyungerel Tsedevdamba: When I was 24, I was fascinated by the idea that we could have a free market, freedom of speech and freedom to travel. The multiparty system and elections were things we did not know much about, but I was still so excited simply to have more choices – including in politics.

The idea of having choices was so new. The possibility of being free to learn, read or watch whatever you wanted was fascinating. The 1990 democratic revolution fulfilled the promises of its time and gave us even more than we could have imagined possible.

I am very proud that we in Mongolia managed to build a homegrown democracy. Looking back 36 years later, I am still fascinated by the transformation we went through. But now we need to work on the future and free our political parties and government from corruption, which I see as the biggest enemy of democracy in our country.

Democracy between Russia and China

Mongolia’s democratic trajectory is unusual in its regional setting. Landlocked between Russia and China, it moved from Soviet-aligned one-party rule to a multiparty political system after the peaceful revolution of 1990. Its foreign policy has since sought relationships beyond its two immediate neighbours while maintaining close economic and political ties with both.

Read more on Novastan: “Mongolia cannot be understood through one lens”: Dr. Mendee Jargalsaikhan on democracy, China and Central Asia

Mongolia is often presented internationally as an exceptional democratic case between Russia and China. Does that description still feel accurate from inside the country, or does it obscure weaknesses in Mongolia’s democratic institutions and political culture?

I agree with that description. We made many decisions that our neighbours and other post-communist countries did not. Our path was bloodless and seemingly smooth, although underneath that were many everyday struggles that continue today.

Sometimes even Mongolia’s extreme cold tests whether people are prepared to demonstrate against government decisions. When young people do so at minus 30 degrees, I find that refreshing – and very Mongolian.

But when it comes to weaknesses in our democratic institutions and political culture, I believe the weakest institutions are the two major parties, the Mongolian People’s Party and the Democratic Party. Their financing systems are unsustainable and, in my view, systematically erode democracy and good governance.

The two parties have developed what I see as a dangerous competition for political wealth. That is one of the principal risks to the future of Mongolian democracy.

Leaving the Democratic Party after 29 years

You spent many years within the Democratic Party before founding the Civic Unity Party. What convinced you that Mongolia needed a new political party rather than reform of the existing opposition?

Leaving the Democratic Party after 29 years as a loyal member was the most painful political decision I have ever made. I cried as if I were divorcing someone I loved. But eventually I decided that enough was enough.

For years, I had openly criticised the financial system through which the party conducted its everyday activities and internal electoral processes. Many young people and women were unable to compete for nominations because of increasingly heavy party fees. In one parliamentary cycle, people seeking to participate in internal competition for a candidacy were expected to pay 100 million tugriks (around EUR 24,000).

When I concluded that my attempts to change this system had failed, I decided to leave the Democratic Party and establish the Civic Unity Party (CUP). Ideologically, CUP is close to the Democratic Party, but we are trying to build a different institutional culture.

Accessibility and affordability of politics for ordinary Mongolian citizens are central to that vision. Institutions do not have to be big and expensive. They should provide platforms through which citizens can exercise their constitutional rights. Young people, women, small-business owners and even pensioners should be able to participate without needing substantial personal wealth.

More women in parliament – but persistent barriers

The 2024 parliamentary election marked a major increase in women’s representation. Thirty-two women were elected to Mongolia’s expanded 126-seat parliament, bringing women’s representation to 25.4 percent. Twenty-four of them entered parliament through party lists operating under a gender “zipper” requirement.

Women performed much better through proportional party lists than in constituency contests. Does that show that quotas and electoral reform are working, or that deeper barriers to women winning political power remain?

Women’s participation in parliament has been increasing steadily since proportional representation was first introduced into parliamentary elections in 2012. But there is an interesting difference. In 2012, 45 percent of women MPs were elected from constituencies, including myself. In 2024, that figure was only 25 percent.

In my view, one reason for women’s lower success in constituency races in 2024 was the unusually large size of those constituencies. Electoral reform and quotas are generally working, but with reasonably sized constituencies there would be more room for women to achieve stronger representation.

You have been involved in women’s political participation for decades. What has changed most profoundly since the 1990s?

The biggest change I have witnessed over 35 years in politics is that politics has become a normal activity for women. Society has changed and become more accepting of women participating in political life.

Read more on Novastan: More Women in Central Asian Politics – But Where Is the Power?

But there are regions where resistance remains stronger. In parts of Mongolia’s eastern steppe, for example in Sükhbaatar province, masculine traditions associated with horse culture remain particularly prominent. Bayan-Ölgii also has a distinctive social and cultural context in which women can face different barriers to political participation.

The important thing is that the basic perception has changed. A woman entering politics is no longer regarded as something inherently unusual.

A younger political culture

You spoke positively in 2024 about seeing young people eager to vote and change the country. Is Mongolia’s younger generation developing a different political culture from the generation that led the democratic transition?

Yes. The younger generation is much more connected through the internet than the generation that led Mongolia through the democratic transition. They are demanding an end to corruption and the misuse of public resources – areas where they believe established parties have failed.

They also demand greater transparency, stronger ethical standards and a lower tax burden. What is particularly interesting is the way they express political views. They use comedy, social media, music and other creative forms of communication much more naturally than previous generations did.

“I was shocked”: discovering local democracy from the inside

Tsedevdamba is now an elected council member in Ulaanbaatar’s Khan-Uul District. The experience, she says, challenged assumptions she had developed during years in national politics.

Has working at the local level changed the way you think about democracy?

I was actually shocked by how detached many people have become from local government. Citizens who benefit directly from government programmes may have some interaction with it, but many others seem largely ignored.

The level of citizen participation in local democracy has decreased significantly compared with the period from 2012 to 2016. There are no longer the same opportunities for citizens to participate in local budget hearings or propose micro-projects through khoroo-level budgets.

Working at the local level has therefore given me a new political goal: restoring citizens’ power in local government. I believe Mongolia has experienced democratic backsliding at the local level during the past decade, and some of these changes have become so normalised that, in her view, local decision-makers barely question them anymore.

Tsedevdamba points to one case from Khan-Uul District as an example. In November 2024, she says district councillors voted to include the head judge of the district court in a local crime-prevention committee. She opposed the decision and subsequently complained to Mongolia’s Judicial General Council. According to her account, the council later instructed local representative bodies that judges should not participate in such committees, after which Khan-Uul’s council reversed its decision.

What toilets taught a former minister about politics

Some of Tsedevdamba’s most concrete lessons about politics have come not from parliament but from her work through Local Solutions and the “Let’s Change Our Toilets” campaign.

Your grassroots work focuses on very practical questions of sanitation and quality of life. What has it taught you about the gap between national policy and everyday reality?

The gap is huge. The more wealth the country generates, the further politicians can become from grassroots realities. If decision-makers better understood the basic realities of Mongolian lives and the natural environment, and invested more efficiently in improving living conditions, I believe the resources Mongolia already generates could do much more to reduce air and soil pollution and create a healthier environment.

Working to replace pit toilets for the past nine years has taught me how families actually make decisions, what they prioritise and what really matters to them. Learning from families, adapting to their needs and answering their questions made me realise how far removed I myself had been from those realities during much of my political career. I had been one of those politicians who was “off the ground.”

Read more on Novastan: Keeping the heat in: Mongolia’s overlooked answer to Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution

An average Mongolian household, by my estimate, lives on around $950 (approximately EUR 835) a month and has to stretch that income across housing, food, clothing for four seasons, winter heating, schooling and transport, often while dealing directly with an extremely harsh climate. Trying to change sanitation through market mechanisms rather than simply handing out free toilets was probably one of the best decisions I made because it forced us to understand what people were genuinely prepared and able to choose.

The progress has been slow – around 1,600 toilets changed over nine years – but that slowness has itself been a valuable lesson. I will not stop simply because the change is slow. Next summer, we plan to take the project further into the countryside, establish a camp on the steppe and add new showroom and sales locations in Ulaanbaatar.

Democracy and geopolitics

Mongolia’s democratic identity is often discussed geopolitically because of its position between Russia and China. How much does that geography constrain the country politically today?

Our domestic democratic process is relatively insulated from geopolitics, although new challenges are emerging, including bots and false information online.

Because of Mongolia’s unique geographic position, there has historically been broad political agreement that foreign policy should not become an arena for partisan competition. That consensus can constrain how openly political forces express different views on international issues, but it also helps prevent Mongolia’s internal political competition from being absorbed completely into wider geopolitical divides.

Read more on Novastan: Bolor Lkhaajav: “Mongolia does not need to choose between Russia and China”

Remembering what came before 1990

Tsedevdamba’s political work has long overlapped with another concern: historical memory. Her fiction explores the repression and social transformation of Mongolia’s communist period, partly through research into her own family history.

How important is historical memory to Mongolia’s democracy today? Do younger Mongolians sufficiently understand the repression and authoritarianism that preceded 1990?

One fear I had during the early years of democracy was that politicians from the former communist system would encourage nostalgia for the communist past among younger generations and make authoritarianism seem attractive again.

In 2005, government officials secretly burned copies of three volumes of research documenting the repression of the 1930s. For me, that was a wake-up call. Younger Mongolians had not experienced communism themselves. If our generation did not describe the full reality of that system, they could end up seeing only the brighter, propagandised version of the past.

That was one reason I wrote three volumes of historical fiction: The Green-Eyed Lama, covering 1937-1946; Sixty White Sheep, covering 1947-1952; and Uur River Stone, set around 1959 – the year our history textbooks mark as the official “victory of socialism.”

Together, the books explore what happened as private economic activity was dismantled and people lost the ability to run businesses, produce goods independently or freely expand their herds. What makes me particularly happy is that the books continue to be read widely, especially by young people. Mongolia’s younger generation is genuinely keen to understand the country’s history, and I find that very heartening.

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

The post “The idea of having choices was so new”: Oyungerel Tsedevdamba on Mongolia’s democracy 36 years later appeared first on Novastan English.

In Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts, winter air pollution is usually discussed in terms of what households burn to keep warm. But after eight years of working on residential energy efficiency in Mongolia, GERES argues that another question is just as important: how much heat do those homes need in the first place? Its experience with insulation, green finance and climate adaptation shows how heat loss is connected to a much wider set of challenges around housing, health, finance and urban policy.

When temperatures in Ulaanbaatar fall towards -40°C, keeping a poorly insulated house warm can become a relentless task. Heat escapes through roofs, walls and foundations, as well as windows and doors. Stop heating, and the indoor temperature can fall rapidly. Keep heating, and households must consume more fuel simply to maintain reasonable thermal comfort.“

Read more on Novastan: “Heritage is something alive”: Ganzorig Miimaa reimagines Mongolia through photography

This is an everyday reality in the Mongolian capital’s sprawling ger districts, where traditional gers stand alongside detached houses, many of them self-built or constructed incrementally. Nearly 200,000 households – almost half of all households in Ulaanbaatar – live in these areas, according to GERES.

For years, the consequences have been visible in the city’s winter air. Mongolia banned raw coal in Ulaanbaatar in 2019, replacing it with processed briquettes and promoting other heating alternatives. Before the ban, raw-coal burning for heating in ger districts was estimated to contribute up to 80% of the capital’s winter air pollution.

But the French NGO GERES has approached the problem from another direction. Rather than looking only at the fuel being burned or the technology used to generate heat, it has spent eight years asking how much energy a house requires in the first place.

Novastan submitted written questions to GERES Mongolia, which were answered with contributions from Davaajargal B., Deputy Project Manager for the SOAP II and FRESH projects, and Quentin Moreau, GERES Regional Director.

“One important lesson from our work over the past eight years is that we cannot consider the heating system and the building itself separately,” GERES told Novastan.

A more efficient stove, a different fuel or a transition towards renewable energy can reduce emissions. But without an efficient building envelope, much of the heat produced will still escape.

“You can improve a stove, change the fuel, introduce a more efficient heating technology, or even transition to cleaner energy such as renewables. But if the heat immediately escapes through the roof, walls, windows and doors, a large part of that investment is lost.”

Reducing energy demand before changing the energy source

This principle lies behind Switch Off Air Pollution, or SOAP, which GERES and its partners began implementing in Mongolia in 2018. Its second phase, SOAP II, ran from 2022 to 2026 with support from the European Union’s SWITCH-Asia programme and other partners, combining home insulation, professional training, green finance and renewable-energy solutions.

The premise is relatively simple: improving a house’s thermal performance reduces its underlying energy demand. A household consequently requires less fuel to achieve the same indoor temperature.

In practice, that can mean intervening across almost the entire building envelope.

“The building envelope is often poorly insulated,” GERES explained. “Roofs, walls, foundations, windows and doors can all become significant pathways for heat loss.”

According to winter monitoring data provided to Novastan by GERES, fully insulated houses have recorded reductions in energy consumption of up to around 50%, depending on the house and level of insulation. Insulated houses used, on average, 2.7 tonnes less fuel annually than non-insulated houses, GERES says, corresponding to an estimated reduction of approximately five tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per household.

Households have also reported more stable indoor temperatures, less frequent stove firing, lower fuel consumption and less smoke and dust inside their homes. Some reported fewer winter-related illnesses among family members, less absenteeism from work and school and lower health-related expenditure.

Read more on Novastan: “Mongolia cannot be understood through one lens”: Dr. Mendee Jargalsaikhan on democracy, China and Central Asia

These latter observations are self-reported rather than evidence establishing a direct causal relationship between insulation and improved health. But they illustrate why GERES increasingly sees thermal renovation as extending beyond energy efficiency alone.

Once the thermal performance of the house improves, the organisation argues, households are also better positioned to adopt cleaner heating technologies.

“A cleaner heating system is much more effective when the house itself does not require excessive amounts of heat,” GERES said. “So we see insulation as creating a platform for the transition to cleaner energy, rather than as an alternative to that transition.”

The distinction is important. Insulation is not being proposed as a substitute for cleaner energy. It reduces the amount of energy that any heating system must provide.

When the households that need insulation cannot afford it

There is, however, a fundamental problem. A renovation that saves money and energy over the long term still requires money upfront.

SOAP II has worked with commercial banks and non-bank financial institutions to develop green financing for household renovation. By the end of the project, it had worked with five banks and three non-banking financial institutions on green-loan products, including offers with annual interest rates of 6%.

Yet GERES’s experience also exposed a significant access-to-finance gap.

“The households that were most vulnerable were often precisely those who could not qualify for a loan,” the organisation said. “They might have irregular or low incomes, insufficient collateral, or an already high income-to-debt ratio.”

The result is a difficult paradox: households for whom lower heating expenditure could matter most can be among those least able to finance the investment required to achieve it.

One response has been GERES’s Simple Solutions, or do-it-yourself, campaign. Rather than expecting a household to move directly from no insulation to a comprehensive renovation, the programme provides an incremental entry point into energy efficiency.

Residents have been trained to implement relatively simple measures themselves using affordable and locally available materials, while trained households and local volunteers can pass that knowledge to their neighbours. The project developed 14 simple insulation solutions addressing heat loss through windows, doors, floors, walls, roofs and chimneys. Implemented together, GERES says, they can reduce household heat loss by up to 16%. By the end of SOAP II, 4,481 households had adopted energy-saving improvements and 660 had received support for roof insulation.

The approach is deliberately progressive.

“Once households implemented even relatively simple insulation measures, they could directly feel the difference – the house was warmer, the indoor temperature was more stable, and the living environment was more comfortable,” GERES explained.

That experience could then encourage deeper renovation later.

For GERES, however, do-it-yourself insulation does not eliminate the financing problem. Instead, its experience points towards a blended financing approach capable of recognising different household income levels.

Commercial green loans can work for households with sufficient borrowing capacity. Lower-income households may require concessional finance, guarantees or derisking mechanisms, while the most vulnerable may need targeted subsidies or direct public support.

Energy efficiency may generate future savings and wider social benefits, but that does not make the initial investment affordable.

Building a renovation market

Financing households is only one side of the equation. Mongolia also needs companies and craftspeople capable of carrying out energy-efficient renovation at sufficient scale and quality.

Across the two SOAP phases, more than 320 micro, small and medium-sized enterprises have been trained, according to GERES.

But training construction workers alone does not create a functioning renovation market.

“There needs to be demand from households, suitable financial products, reliable technical standards, appropriate materials, qualified companies that can deliver good-quality work at a reasonable price, and a clear pathway for households throughout the renovation process – from energy assessment and financing to selecting service providers and ensuring quality,” GERES said.

Quality assurance is particularly important.

Insulation is not simply a matter of attaching material to a wall or roof. The material used, installation methods, junctions between parts of the building envelope and construction details all influence the resulting thermal performance and environmental footprint.

GERES has therefore tested the Dulaan Shiidel delivery model, conceived as a one-stop-shop bringing together the different actors involved in renovation and providing households with a clearer pathway through the process.

In a mature version of such a system, a household would not have to become an energy-efficiency expert simply to renovate its home. A one-stop-shop could assess the building, identify an appropriate renovation package, explain costs and benefits, connect the household to suitable financing, identify qualified contractors and help ensure the quality of the completed work.

Not every house requires the same intervention, and not every household can afford comprehensive renovation immediately. The system would therefore also need to allow households to move progressively towards deeper renovation as their financial capacity permits.

For GERES, the distinction is crucial. Mongolia does not simply need more internationally financed insulation projects. It needs an energy-efficient renovation market capable of functioning beyond them.

Not every Mongolian city is Ulaanbaatar

SOAP II has already begun testing whether the approach can travel.

In Darkhan-Uul province, around 30 insulation brigades were trained and more than 100 households completed insulation improvements. The project also developed a replication toolbox covering technical guidance, implementation methodologies and good practices for detached-house insulation.

But replication does not mean simply exporting an Ulaanbaatar template.

Secondary cities can share many of the capital’s challenges – detached houses, severe winters, high heating costs, varying construction quality, air pollution and households with limited resources for renovation – while differing significantly in their housing stock, energy infrastructure, fuel availability, construction practices, social fabric and household incomes.

“The underlying principles are transferable, but the exact solutions cannot simply be copied from Ulaanbaatar,” GERES said.

That experience is increasingly travelling much further than Darkhan.

Through FRESH, GERES is drawing on market-intermediation approaches developed under SOAP in Mongolia and its low-energy-consumption housing work in Tajikistan in very different climatic contexts, including Morocco and Benin.

The transferable element is not a particular insulation material or heating system. It is the combination of technical, social and financial intermediation required to connect demand with appropriate services and financing.

GERES also identifies a common problem across these contexts: existing and often self-built housing can constitute a blind spot for building regulation and public policy.

Experience elsewhere is, in turn, influencing the way GERES looks at Mongolia.

From extreme cold to extreme heat

Climate change is complicating the technical problem that Mongolian housing must solve.

Homes designed principally around surviving extreme winter cold may increasingly have to manage the opposite problem as well: indoor overheating during hotter summer periods.

That requires thinking not only about keeping heat inside in January but also about passive cooling: strategic thermal mass, shading, cross-ventilation and reflective building envelopes that can limit heat gain without creating dependence on energy-intensive air conditioning.

The challenge also extends beyond individual buildings.

Read more on Novastan: Bolor Lkhaajav: “Mongolia does not need to choose between Russia and China”

Experience from FRESH in Benin and Morocco has highlighted how exposure to extreme temperatures interacts with the surrounding urban environment. Nature-based solutions, urban greening, heat-action planning and early-warning systems can complement physical interventions at building level.

Applied to Mongolia, this perspective makes the ger districts more than an insulation problem.

Access to urban infrastructure and services, tenure security, urban planning and building regulation can influence whether households can or will invest in improving their homes. Urban climate-mitigation goals can affect the deployment of clean energy, while regulations designed around conventional construction may not adequately account for the characteristics of self-built housing.

Flood risk adds another layer. GERES points to rapid and unplanned urban growth on sloping terrain, combined with intense summer rainfall, as a reason future housing development may need to combine thermal renovation with integrated drainage, permeable-surface design and slope stabilisation.

Energy efficiency therefore becomes part of a broader question: what constitutes adequate and climate-resilient urban housing in Mongolia?

Mongolia and Europe: knowledge travelling both ways

European cooperation has played an important role in GERES’s work.

In June 2025, GERES organised a study visit to France and Belgium for Mongolian policymakers and housing-sector stakeholders under SOAP II and FRESH. The visit focused on thermal renovation, insulation, sustainable finance and institutional approaches to the energy transition in housing.

GERES points to European institutions and models as potential references for Mongolia. France’s Agence nationale de l’habitat (ANAH) and local energy and climate agencies offer examples of institutional structures supporting renovation and one-stop-shop delivery.

European experience also provides possible models for blended finance, combining public support and private capital to derisk investment, alongside green credit lines and loan-guarantee structures. Energy audits, passive insulation standards and thermal performance certification are other areas where European technical experience can be relevant.

GERES also cites Energiesprong, an approach based on standardised and prefabricated renovation systems and long-term energy-performance guarantees, as a potential reference for aggregating demand and reducing costs.

But the organisation stresses that knowledge can travel in the opposite direction too.

Mongolian partners have accumulated experience implementing low-cost and rapidly deployable thermal retrofits in detached and self-built housing under severe budget constraints. Community mobilisation around household renovation could offer lessons for European programmes struggling with low uptake or owner hesitation.

Ulaanbaatar’s extreme winter conditions also provide a demanding environment for understanding thermal boundary performance, vapour-barrier behaviour and passive heating and cooling strategies under severe temperature fluctuations.

The relationship is therefore not simply one of European expertise being transferred to Mongolia. As energy poverty and climate adaptation become more prominent concerns elsewhere, some of the practical solutions being tested in Mongolia may become increasingly relevant outside the country.

Scaling the system

After eight years, one of the hardest assumptions to overturn, according to GERES, has been that energy-efficient housing will naturally become a priority once people understand its benefits.

It has not.

For households, insulation competes with food, transport, education and other immediate expenses. Even when residents understand that renovation could make their homes warmer and reduce energy consumption, a substantial upfront investment can be difficult to justify when the financial payback is delayed. Coal subsidies can further distort that calculation.

For banks and other financial institutions, detached-house insulation can involve relatively small loans but comparatively complicated assessment and monitoring. The administrative process may not be very different from that required for a much larger green investment.

For construction companies, meanwhile, demand remains dispersed and uncertain. Without a predictable pipeline of work, companies have less incentive to invest in specialised workers and develop dedicated renovation businesses.

And for policymakers, changing the fuel or heating technology can appear more immediate than improving the underlying thermal performance of hundreds of thousands of individual homes.

“So perhaps the biggest lesson is that energy-efficient housing is not just a technical issue,” GERES told Novastan.

“It is simultaneously a household affordability issue, a financial-sector issue, a construction-market issue and a policy issue.”

Moving from thousands of retrofits to hundreds of thousands would consequently require more than another project.

At policy level, GERES argues that Mongolia needs a long-term national framework addressing the energy performance of existing detached houses, rather than requirements focused only on new buildings. Such a framework would need clear technical standards, quality requirements, incentives and responsibilities for national and local authorities.

At financing level, no single instrument will be sufficient. Commercial green loans can serve households capable of borrowing, while lower-income and vulnerable households will require some combination of concessional finance, guarantees, targeted subsidies and blended financing. Domestic public resources could also be combined with international capital to create a larger and more durable financing mechanism.

The construction sector would require a much larger pool of qualified workers and companies capable of delivering renovation consistently and to appropriate standards. That means training, certification, quality assurance, access to appropriate materials and, crucially, predictable demand.

And the process would have to become much simpler for households.

“A household should not have to become an energy-efficiency expert, find a contractor, understand technical standards, search for financing and manage the renovation process completely on its own,” GERES said.

A functioning one-stop-shop could instead guide households from the initial energy assessment through the choice of renovation package and financing to contractor selection and quality control.

For a city where winter air pollution has long focused attention on what hundreds of thousands of households burn to stay warm, this amounts to a significant shift in perspective.

The challenge is no longer simply to demonstrate that insulation works, nor to choose between insulation and cleaner heating. It is to create the financing, skills, standards, institutions and market capable of making both work together on a national scale.

As GERES put it: “We have to scale the system itself.”

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

The post Keeping the heat in: Mongolia’s overlooked answer to Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution appeared first on Novastan English.

On 16 September, Seoul hosted the first-ever Korea–Central Asia Summit, bringing President Lee Jae-myung together with the heads of state of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – a dialogue that has run at ministerial level since 2007, now elevated to heads of state and producing a joint “Seoul Declaration” on supply-chain cooperation (Seoul Shinmun, 李대통령 16일 첫 중앙아시아 정상회의). Most coverage has treated this as a diplomatic first, full stop – a historic photograph, five new bilateral memoranda, a summit that “elevates” a relationship, nothing more. The more interesting story is why it took this particular shape now, in September 2026 rather than at any point over the preceding three decades, and what that shape reveals about a quiet shift in how Seoul thinks about the region.

From aid recipient to resource partner

For most of the three decades since 1992, Seoul’s relationship with Central Asia has combined development assistance with a real, if modest, industrial footprint – Daewoo’s car assembly plant in Uzbekistan since the 1990s and Samsung’s household-appliance manufacturing among the longest-running examples of Korean direct investment in the region (Modern Diplomacy, “K-Silk Road Boosts Seoul’s Central Asia Presence”). But that investment sat for decades within a relationship organized primarily around cooperation and technical assistance rather than resource dependence. That balance is now shifting. The Presidential Office frames this summit’s central purpose as combining Central Asia’s critical-mineral reserves with Korean processing technology – supply-chain language layered on top of the older development framing, not replacing it outright (Korea Herald). The anxiety behind this is concrete: by 2025, South Korea’s mineral-import dependence had reached roughly 99.7 percent, with more than four-fifths sourced from China (Kim et al., “Central Asia as New Battle Grounds”).

The build-out has been rapid and institutional, not rhetorical. Just three days before the summit, Korea’s industry ministry convened the first-ever “C5+1” meeting of industry ministers with all five Central Asian states, agreeing to build supply chains spanning mining, refining, high-value materials processing and finished-goods manufacturing, alongside a parallel track on industrial parks, smart-factory cooperation and manufacturing AI (Newspim, 한-중앙아 산업장관회의). On the ground, Korea’s own state geological survey (KIGAM) has agreed with Uzbekistan to carry out joint exploration of nickel and cobalt deposits at Sultanuvays, with the explicit logic – laid out by Korean officials themselves – that public-sector exploration is needed to de-risk projects private mining firms won’t touch without proven reserves; if the deposits prove commercially viable, the plan is to move toward a joint venture and eventually refining and production, with Korean firms invited in at that stage (Herald Business, “중앙아시아에서 여는 핵심광물 협력의 새 길”). In his own bilateral meeting with Uzbek President Mirziyoyev ahead of the summit, President Lee explicitly proposed pairing Korean processing technology with the Asian Development Bank’s financing capacity to stabilize Central Asian mineral supply chains (Segye Ilbo) – a formulation that captures Seoul’s emerging model exactly: Korea supplies expertise, others supply capital and territory.

The connectivity problem

None of this works if the minerals cannot reach Korean plants, and here the summit’s ambition runs ahead of infrastructure – though it is worth being precise about which infrastructure. Neither Korea nor Central Asia shares a border with the other, so cargo has, in principle, several ways to travel: north through Russia, west across the Caspian toward Turkey and the Black Sea (the “Middle Corridor”), or east and south through China to a Pacific port. Public Korean commentary on the K-Silk Road initiative has invoked the Middle Corridor as a rhetorical alternative to routes dependent on China’s Belt and Road infrastructure (BISI, “Korea’s new ‘K-Silk Road’ Initiative in Central Asia”), but there is little public evidence that Seoul has committed to the Trans-Caspian route specifically as the backbone of its minerals strategy. If anything, the available evidence points the other way: a peer-reviewed routing study comparing options for Korea–Central Asia cargo found that a China-transit corridor – Incheon to Qingdao to Horgos to Almaty – outperformed alternatives on cost, the single factor logistics firms weighted most heavily (Wang and Yeo, “Selecting a Cargo Transport Route to Central Asia”). The same BISI analysis is candid on this point: China’s Belt and Road infrastructure is likely to remain the dominant channel for regional development projects regardless of what Korea builds, precisely because it already exists at scale.

A Korean government-commissioned study of logistics barriers in Central Asia, based on interviews with Korean freight-forwarding firms already operating in the region, found customs procedures and inadequate transport infrastructure – not any single missing corridor – to be the two most severe obstacles, ranked above financing or licensing constraints (National Knowledge Information System, 중앙아시아 물류장벽 연구). Read against that finding, the more accurate framing is not that Seoul’s mineral strategy hinges on completing a specific Trans-Caspian route, but that it depends on a broader and messier connectivity problem – customs harmonization, storage capacity, transport reliability – that touches every route out of the region, Chinese-transit ones included.

Seoul’s response has been to avoid the corridor-building role entirely regardless of which route eventually dominates. Rather than financing rail or port capacity itself, Korea is positioning as a technology and processing partner layered onto infrastructure others pay for – hence President Lee’s pitch to route Korean expertise through Asian Development Bank financing rather than bilateral Korean capital in his meeting with President Mirziyoyev (Segye Ilbo).

Why now

Two pressures help explain the timing, though they are best read as a plausible interpretation rather than an explicitly stated Korean rationale. The first is status, and here Seoul has been unusually candid in its own words. President Lee has framed the summit explicitly as part of a wider diplomatic diversification, telling his own senior secretaries that “the global order is rapidly becoming multipolar” and that “this is exactly the moment to join hands with more countries and expand our diplomatic reach into more diverse regions” (Daily Hankook, 유럽서 첨단산업·중앙아서 핵심광물) – a framing his own spokesperson echoed by describing Korea as having “joined the resource-diplomacy race” already under way among the major powers (Asia Economy, 강대국 ‘러브콜’에 몸값 뛴 중앙亞). That timing follows a French state visit built around advanced-industry cooperation, suggesting a deliberate, sequenced diplomatic expansion rather than a Central Asia-specific reaction. It sits, too, against a crowded backdrop: roughly ten “C5+1”-style formats now link Central Asia to outside powers, Japan’s dating back two decades and Washington’s marking its tenth anniversary last November with over $100 billion in announced deals (CIRSD; U.S. State Department). For a country that has cultivated middle-power status as deliberate policy, being among the last major economies without a leaders’-level format with the region plausibly carried a cost measured in standing, even if no Korean official has said so in those terms.

Central Asia is not a passive audience

The five governments arriving in Seoul are practiced at extracting better terms from competing suitors without committing to any one of them. Kazakhstan runs parallel Caspian and Chinese overland links simultaneously rather than choosing between them (Times of Central Asia). Uzbekistan’s own framing of cooperation with Korea explicitly stresses local refining capacity and technology transfer over raw extraction (Kim et al.) – a hedge against what regional analysts call a “green resource curse,” and a pointed contrast with Chinese capital, which regional governments increasingly criticize for financing without technology transfer. Uzbekistan’s insistence, in the KIGAM nickel-cobalt talks, on holding open the option of a joint venture rather than a straightforward extraction concession is one small but telling instance of that same instinct at work – Tashkent structuring the deal so that value stays onshore if the deposit proves out. With Washington, Tokyo, Brussels and now Seoul all running comparable outreach in the same eighteen-month window, the five republics can accept summits and memoranda from all of them while committing exclusively to none, and each new suitor arriving in the region only strengthens that leverage rather than diminishing it.

An open bet, not a settled shift

The institutional architecture – the ministerial-to-presidential upgrade, the new C5+1 industry channel, joint KIGAM exploration on the ground – is real and represents coordination that didn’t exist two years ago. But the connectivity infrastructure needed to make a minerals strategy commercially viable does not yet exist in reliable form on any route, and Korea’s own logistics-sector research says as much: firms already moving freight through the region, not diplomats drafting communiqués, are the ones flagging customs and infrastructure as the binding constraint, regardless of whether that freight ultimately crosses the Caspian or transits China. What the summit signals, then, is a bet rather than a breakthrough: that being an early, technically credible partner is valuable now, even before the logistics catch up, and that Gulf, European and multilateral capital will eventually close the connectivity gap into which Korean firms can plug their offtake deals. Whether that bet pays off depends less on what is signed in Seoul this week than on whether the region’s transport and customs bottlenecks, on whichever route ends up mattering most, get resolved soon enough to matter.

By Kodirjon Eshonkulov.

Kodirjon Eshonkulov is an independent researcher specializing in Central Asian geopolitics, transboundary infrastructure, and relations with the European Union. He is a graduate of the Graduate School of International Studies at Ajou University in South Korea. Since 2017, he has worked as a correspondent and television journalist covering social and political reforms in Uzbekistan.

The post From Development Partner to Strategic Supplier: What Seoul’s First Central Asia Summit Really Signals? appeared first on Novastan English.

Bruce Pannier has watched Central Asia change for more than three decades – from the final years of the Soviet Union to a generation that no longer remembers it. In an interview with Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, the veteran journalist reflects on independent media, Russia’s changing role, generational shifts, overlooked communities and what outsiders still misunderstand about Central Asia.

In the summer of 1990, Bruce Pannier arrived at Tashkent State University. The Soviet Union still existed. Central Asia’s five future independent states did not.

More than three decades later, Pannier has become one of the most familiar English-language voices on Central Asia. At Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), he co-created and co-hosted Majlis, a podcast that brought together journalists, scholars and analysts to discuss developments across the region and, increasingly, to amplify perspectives from Central Asians themselves.

Today, he is part of the team behind Turan, a project covering Central Asia and the wider Turkic world. In this interview with Novastan, Pannier looks back at more than three decades of reporting and reflects on the changing media landscape, the impact of the war in Ukraine, generational change, overlooked communities and a region that, in his view, is increasingly defining its future on its own terms.

Novastan: You have been covering Central Asia for several decades. How did your interest in the region first begin?

Bruce Pannier: I was learning Russian and doing Soviet Studies in college. But I suppose everything started with two books: Eastern Approaches by Sir Fitzroy MacLean and Setting the East Ablaze by Peter Hopkirk. That was in the early and mid-1980s.

The leading American authority on Central Asia was Edward Allworth, who taught at Columbia University. I was fortunate to go and study under him. He loved Central Asia and, best of all, he knew thousands of years of the region’s history. He treated the Soviet period as just another chapter in that history, so we never looked at Central Asia through a Russian or Soviet lens.

Then I went to summer school at Tashkent State University in 1990, and I was completely hooked after that.

Were there particular places in Central Asia – a city, a region, a border area, a mountain landscape, a desert, a bazaar or an everyday encounter – that changed the way you understood the countries and societies you were covering?

Many. I worked in villages in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in 1992 and 1993.

They all had similar lives, working on farms growing crops or herding animals, but there were different ways to do this work in every village and different attitudes about living and working in rural areas.

I was amazed to find out how religious people remained there. I arrived in spring 1992 and, in one of the first villages I worked in, someone died. We all went to the very Muslim funeral, and almost everyone knew the prayers.

I was doing sociological research and one of the questions I asked was: “What building or facility would you like to see in your village?” The answer every time – and I mean every time – was a mosque.

I certainly gained a new respect for herders. I was instructed to do what the people in the villages did. I especially disliked picking cotton, but taking a herd out to pasture was my type of work.

You have a few dogs, a stick to keep stragglers moving and a couple of rocks to throw in front of animals, usually sheep, that are moving too far ahead. You find a good grazing area and sit under a tree watching the animals eat. When it’s time to go back, you round up the herd and head back to the village.

If the job paid better, I would be doing it now.

Of course, the inter-ethnic violence in Osh in June 2010 was a shock. I had thought, or at least hoped, that was all behind everyone.

Remember, I was at Tashkent State in summer 1990 when it happened before, though we couldn’t get much information about what was going on. When I was in Osh and other parts of the Fergana Valley in 1992, the events of 1990 seemed very far away. People didn’t talk about it much.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the mountains. I love mountains and enjoyed the many times I was in the Central Asian mountains.

I liked doing the trip between Bishkek and Osh in a marshrutka just because of the views. The road was in terrible shape until the end of the 1990s, but it didn’t matter to me when I was staring out of the window, or when we stopped along the road.

One time I was with a Kazakh friend in Shymbulak – then called Chimbulak. It’s a good ski area now, and even in 1992 there was a ski lift there. There were no skiers, but I convinced one of the park rangers, for five dollars, to turn on the ski lift long enough to take my friend and me to the top.

I remember him saying, in Russian, “For God’s sake, don’t break anything.”

We walked back down, and the view was magnificent.

And obviously, the Silk Road cities were amazing. Samarkand looks so different now compared with the early 1990s, but even back then it had a charm.

It was not well tended, and the old buildings looked old and in need of repair, but it really made me appreciate how old they were. And since I worked in villages, I could imagine what it was like for a farmer or herder to visit one of the big and bustling cities.

When you first started following Central Asia, what did outside observers most often misunderstand about the region? Has that changed today?

Well, when I first started following Central Asia, there were not many outside observers. Some Western media outlets were having difficulties even spelling the names of the Central Asian countries.

Probably the biggest misconception was that the people in Central Asia had accepted that they were part of the Soviet Union. When I was at TashGU that summer, there were people from all over Central Asia studying there, and it was clear they regarded Russia as a colonizer that was pilfering the region’s resources and trying to force them to become a “Soviet man or woman.”

That has clearly changed since the USSR collapsed. Since the Kremlin launched its full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022, we have seen some lively discussions in Central Asia about colonization and exploitation under Tsarist and then Soviet rule. Even the leaderships of some Central Asian countries are calling it a dark period in the region’s history.

Read more on Novastan: “I only needed a passport” : In Ukraine, Central Asian prisoners of wars caught between loyalty and regret

Majlis became one of the most recognizable English-language formats for discussing Central Asia. What was the original idea behind the podcast?

Muhammad Tahir and I started Majlis in 2014 in response to the increase in fighting in northern Afghanistan. Our first programme was about Turkmenistan being the Achilles heel of Central Asian security.

We weren’t sure then that we would ever do any more podcasts, but RFE/RL management liked it, and I agreed there was a wide variety of topics beyond deteriorating security in northern Afghanistan that we could cover, starting with the great reporting RFE/RL’s Central Asian services were doing in local languages and Russian.

Muhammad was something of a showman. He really embraced being the host, with me as the “in-house” RFE/RL expert. Majlis gave us a chance to show off our people in the Central Asian services and promote people outside RFE/RL who had made, or were making, a name for themselves in the field of Central Asian affairs.

Our guests really propelled the podcast forward, and I’m glad to see so many of them are now leading scholars in the field of Central Asian studies.

Why was it important for Majlis to include voices from Central Asia itself, and how did their perspectives shape the discussions?

There was often a difference in interpretations of events in Central Asia – sometimes large differences, but mostly nuances.

Someone like me, who has studied the region, lived there briefly and travelled widely, came to different conclusions about what events in the region meant and where they were leading Central Asia.

For about the first 20 years after independence, there were not many Central Asians who could articulate, in English, their views on the course of events. But when they started to appear, Muhammad and I were, firstly, very happy and, secondly, determined to give the voices of Central Asia – often people in their 20s and 30s – an opportunity to explain what was happening in their homelands.

It was possible to disagree with what some of the people from Central Asia said, but it was important to hear how they viewed the evolving world inside and outside Central Asia.

In the end, it’s their story. I think it made for a better understanding of the region for people outside it.

Were there episodes or discussions of Majlis that particularly stayed with you because they captured a turning point in the region?

Several dealt with the deterioration of security in northern Afghanistan. Most of our guests on this topic were from Afghanistan and supporters of Ghani, or at least not supporters of the Taliban, or from Central Asia. The gradual depression with which they spoke about events unfolding in northern Afghanistan between 2014 and 2021 certainly caused me to consider more and more the possibility that the Taliban would reconquer Afghanistan.

Several of the podcasts we did about women’s rights and gender-based violence were revealing, and I learned a lot, but I was troubled by some of the assessments given by guests.

One that really moved me was the description Freedom for Eurasia founder Leila Seiitbek gave of how she was a victim of ala kachuu, bride kidnapping, and escaped because she smoked a cigarette and her kidnapper’s family rejected her as a forced bride.

How has reporting on Central Asia changed since the 1990s, especially in terms of access, sources and risks for local journalists?

When I started work for the Open Media Research Institute (OMRI) in March 1995, the internet was not much help. People at OMRI would give me photocopies of current articles from Central Asian newspapers. Sometimes I had access to the actual newspapers, though these were at least several days old and usually more like a week or two old.

Back in the 1990s, certainly in the early and middle 1990s, journalists and media outlets in Central Asia were freer to write about what they wanted, with the exception of Turkmenistan. Kazakhstan had a vibrant independent media scene, very much like the one developing in Kyrgyzstan.

But even in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, journalists were pushing the limits of coverage on matters such as corruption, the deteriorating socio-economic situation, questionable state policies and other topics.

This situation changed as governments faced increasing challenges and decided that some criticism might be valid, but that some outlets were reporting too much about problems. In Tajikistan’s case, during the 1992-1997 civil war, this could be deadly, and more than a dozen journalists, foreign and local, were essentially assassinated.

By the end of the 1990s, it was becoming more difficult for journalists in Uzbekistan to report freely on a wide range of topics. The government would find charges such as fraud or failure to pay taxes – something unrelated to journalism – to use against journalists who were exposing shortcomings in the country. This became a standard practice, and even President Islam Karimov’s nephew, who was an independent journalist, was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital for his reporting.

Now, journalists in each country understand where the boundaries in reporting are, and there is a lot of self-censorship being practised.

How would you describe the current generation of journalists in Central Asia compared with those reporting in the 1990s or 2000s?

I suppose the biggest difference is the range of media now available. Everything is on the web now. Back in the 1990s, outlets were confined to the basic three – television, radio and print media, what people now refer to as “traditional media.”

It was easier for governments to shut down independent outlets among these three, or pressure outlets that featured criticism of government policies. That made it very difficult for journalists at independent outlets.

Today, the same pressures still exist, but “non-traditional” media are giving independent journalists opportunities they did not have in the past. That is why many of the best reports on Central Asia are coming from people with YouTube channels. Facebook and other social networks are also giving journalists – whether journalists by training or “citizen” journalists – opportunities to speak about corruption and state mismanagement.

I think the journalists in the 1990s and 2000s were just as brave and anxious to report the big news affecting their countries as journalists today.

I would mention one development that showed me that, given the chance, good independent journalism could take root in any of the Central Asian countries.

When Shavkat Mirziyoyev became Uzbekistan’s president in late 2016, he eased state control over the media and encouraged journalists to report on the important things happening in Uzbekistan. And they did. Given some space, journalists in Uzbekistan went right after corrupt officials and reported on other topics they would not have touched during the last decade or so of President Islam Karimov’s rule.

In fact, it proved to be too candid, and Mirziyoyev’s government had to rein in some of the coverage. But it showed the spirit of independent, objective journalism was still alive in Uzbekistan and that all it needed was an opportunity to blossom.

Independent media now operate across very different spaces – inside the region, in exile and through social media, podcasts, YouTube and investigative platforms. Has this changed what independent journalism means in Central Asia?

Certainly. The role of “non-traditional” media is becoming more important all the time.

Some of the cutting-edge criticism of policies or officials in Tajikistan or Uzbekistan has been coming from YouTube channels. This is true to a lesser extent, in my opinion, in the other three countries.

And, of course, the YouTube channels and websites such as Turkmen.news and Hronikatm.com dealing with Turkmenistan are all operating from outside the country.

Which independent media outlets or journalistic initiatives from Central Asia do you think deserve more international attention today?

In Kazakhstan, Vlast.kz, Orda.kz and KazTAG come to mind as good independent media outlets that could use some international attention and, if possible, funding. Unfortunately, Orda.kz recently ceased operations after legal difficulties that included its chief editor being sentenced to eight years in prison. I’m sure there are others, but those are three off the top of my head.

In Kyrgyzstan, Kloop Media is currently banned from operating inside the country. Temirov Live has also done some great investigative reporting and was closed down. Kaktus Media is still working in Kyrgyzstan, but it is one of only a few independent media outlets left.

The Central Asia Barometer was a great initiative that did some fantastic survey work. They had European funding. Unfortunately, they were pressured into stopping work. It would be great to find a way for them to resume operations.

What I would like to see generally is some form of cooperation or organization that brings independent journalists from Europe and Central Asia together. I know Vlast.kz and Orda.kz have employed Europeans, and the results were notable.

If it were possible to get funding for a media outlet covering EU-Central Asian cooperation, such as Global Gateway, and employing young European and Central Asian journalists, I think the results would be excellent and very enlightening.

What role have exile media, independent journalists and regional analysts played in keeping Central Asian stories visible internationally?

It varies from country to country. Independent journalists, including those working in non-traditional media, have been instrumental in calling out corrupt government officials who are then fired when authorities perceive the attention these reports are garnering nationally and, in some cases, internationally. I’m thinking mainly about YouTube channels.

In Turkmenistan’s case, exile media are almost the only source of objective news about what is happening inside the country. Obviously, RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, Azatlyk, is an exception, but Turkmen.news and Hronikatm.com are essential sites for following events in Turkmenistan.

There are some absolutely fantastic regional analysts, and since I am afraid I might forget someone, I will not list any names. So much of the best material appearing in English these days is being produced by Central Asians – and it is not translated into English; it is being written by them in English.

What can international media, donors and regional platforms do to support Central Asian journalists without distorting their priorities or making them more vulnerable?

This is a tough question. On the one hand, international publicity provides some protection for journalists – and activists and politicians – in Central Asia, and often keeps them out of prison or at least pressures authorities into some leniency.

On the other hand, in the ever-changing world, it is impossible to stay focused on any one topic. When attention wanes, these journalists are vulnerable.

International publicity around a particular journalist can also make that person a special target of authorities who do not want independent journalists or media outlets. If they work for foreign media, such as RFE/RL, governments can attack them as doing the bidding of their foreign paymaster.

The war in Ukraine has changed how many people in Europe and the United States look at Central Asia. What has it revealed about the region?

Deep-seated resentment against having been colonized, and growing efforts by many Central Asians and their governments to distance themselves from Russia.

This is particularly evident in the new security and defence partnerships the Central Asian states are forming with Türkiye, first and foremost, but also with Azerbaijan and some of the Gulf states.

Following on from that, I think Central Asians are understanding more and more that they do not need to depend on Russia, certainly not to the extent they did for the first 30 years after independence.

Russia is a leading trade partner and will remain so for the foreseeable future, but it is now clear that there are other partners, and some have ethnic or religious ties to Central Asia that Russia does not have.

Even if the war in Ukraine ends tomorrow, I don’t think there’s any way to go back to the status quo prior to February 2022.

Read more on Novastan: Who Made the Nations of Central Asia?

I still see articles that refer to Central Asia as Russia’s “backyard.” Central Asians never viewed it that way, and now they have less and less reason to accept such characterizations.

Has the war accelerated a real diversification of Central Asia’s foreign relations, or are we still overstating the change?

Accelerated. Definitely.

Prior to February 2022, Russia and China were the dominant partners for trade, investment and security, including energy security. Everyone else was at best running a distant second.

Read more on Novastan: Money, boxes and absent men: the hidden economy reshaping Central Asia

China and Russia are still important partners for Central Asia, Russia perhaps less so now. But many countries have stepped up their interaction with Central Asia. The EU and the Gulf Arab states have all increased their roles in and importance for Central Asia.

Türkiye and the Organization of Turkic States are also increasingly part of Central Asia’s future. Azerbaijan’s role in the OTS and as a key country in the Middle Corridor is bringing it closer to Central Asia, and in November 2025 there was even a “C6” meeting with the five Central Asian states and Azerbaijan.

Some people used to say Russia was the policeman and China the banker for Central Asia. Now the Central Asian states have options for both security and finance.

What are the social changes in Central Asia that outsiders tend to miss because they focus too much on presidents and geopolitics?

The younger generation, people under 30 or 35 years old, is very tech-savvy.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and to a lesser degree Kyrgyzstan, are all moving forward quickly and modernizing everything from architecture to online documents and payments. These three countries are becoming modern states.

Do you see a generational shift in Central Asia, especially among young people who no longer remember the Soviet Union?

Definitely, and it’s not only that almost everyone under 35 or 40 has a mobile phone and knows how to use computers.

For young people in the 1990s, it was often enough that their countries were independent. They remembered clearly what life was like as part of the Soviet Union and, even if socio-economic conditions were often not better, and at times perhaps even worse, they were independent and there was a feeling they were masters of their own destiny. Change could happen.

The current generation wants to be masters of their own destiny but often views the entrenched leadership in their countries as the primary obstacle to positive transformation. There is scepticism among some young people that their governments are willing to make changes that benefit the younger generation.

In the Soviet days, there wasn’t much people could do to change policies made in Moscow, but now they believe it is, or at least should be, possible to change policies in their own countries.

It must be frustrating for many younger people when they see their leaders cling to policies that benefit the regime, not the masses.

Which communities, regions or issues within Central Asia remain most invisible in international coverage?

There are many, but I’m just going to mention the situations of the Karakalpaks in the Republic of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan and the Ismailis in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast in eastern Tajikistan.

In both cases, the rights of minority groups are being trampled as the governments in those countries attempt to forcibly assimilate these people.

I would also mention that the situation of ethnic minorities in Turkmenistan receives almost no attention – in fairness, because it is so difficult to obtain information.

Central Asia is still relatively little known in France and Europe. What stories would you recommend European-based media cover more often?

I think the obvious story is the Middle Corridor, or Trans-Caspian International Transport Route. People in Europe don’t know much about their countries’ trade with Central Asia.

Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Romania and some other European countries are buying Kazakh oil, which is especially important now as EU countries try to stop buying Russian oil. France buys uranium from Kazakhstan, and other countries in Europe probably will as more nuclear power plants are built.

If you buy dried apricots or raisins in Poland, Germany, France, the UK or the Baltic countries, there is a good chance the dried fruit came from Uzbekistan.

Many European travellers have gone to Central Asia. Marco Polo, of course, but more recently, in the 19th century, Arminius Vámbéry from Hungary, Aurel Stein, also a Hungarian who became a British citizen, Sven Hedin from Sweden – and yes, I know about his later connection to Nazi Germany – the Frenchman Paul Pelliot, and others.

Their stories are fascinating, and they are stories of Europeans in Central Asia.

Of course, there is always the ancient Silk Road that linked Europe to Central Asia long ago. The two regions have been in contact for a long time.

Interestingly, although the climate and landscape are very different between the two regions, they are located roughly at the same latitudes, meaning if you travel straight west from Central Asia you end up in Europe, and vice versa going straight east from Europe, with only the Caucasus or southern Russia separating them.

You are now working on Turan, a project focused on Central Asia and the wider Turkic world. What are you hoping to bring to readers through it?

First, there are a lot of stories about Central Asia that are under-reported or not reported at all by media outside the region. That has generally been true since the five countries became independent in late 1991.

Second, unfortunately, there is not much money for outlets and organizations in Europe that are interested in Central Asia. The most obvious example is Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which has been forced to drastically reduce its coverage of Central Asia due to budget cuts.

Turan hopes to fill that void to some extent and bring Central Asia’s stories to an audience on YouTube – and not only Central Asia’s stories, but those from more broadly across the Caspian, including Türkiye and Iran.

The Turan Research Center is part of the Yorktown Institute, so the coverage style leans towards that of a think tank. I think that’s noticeable from the topics and the language used. Many of the reports are based on articles written for the Turan Research Center.

I am not running the channel. I’m just a member of the team. The driving forces are the chief editor and the people doing the graphics.

What advice would you give to a relatively small independent media outlet like Novastan trying to cover Central Asia seriously?

I think Novastan is doing a great job, especially with covering youth culture. I like that Novastan covers niche topics like the French-Uzbek theatre presentation, as well as big stories such as the shrinking Caspian or the lexicon of Kazakh decolonization.

The photographs of scenes from everyday life in Central Asia are excellent.

Many – all? – of your writers have travelled or lived in Central Asia, and it shows in the coverage and choice of topics.

I think advertising is the biggest drawback for Novastan, but again, many organizations are facing this problem. Advertising requires money and a social media team.

The material is there, and in English, French and German. The problem is getting enough people to see it and recommend it, so that it comes to the attention of a wider audience.

For a European outlet like Novastan, what is the best way to work with Central Asian journalists – not only by quoting them as sources, but by building real editorial partnerships and giving their perspectives more visibility?

One possibility is offering Central Asian journalists, including those working for state media, an opportunity to write for European outlets. It would likely require translation.

And the matter of payment could be complicated, since it could lead to accusations of them being funded, and therefore influenced, by foreign sources.

But if some Central Asian journalists were willing to write without expecting remuneration, simply for the exposure in Europe and a chance to boost their credentials and CVs, it would solve that problem.

In the case of journalists writing for state media, they could present the state version of events. Agree or disagree, it is a view that needs to be taken into consideration when assessing the situation in Central Asia.

After all these years covering Central Asia, what still surprises you about the region?

There are always surprises. For me personally, the biggest surprise – and it is a happy one – is seeing the five countries getting along so well.

I travelled through Central Asia quite a bit, especially in the 1990s. I was in every country and listened to what people said about the neighbouring countries. A lot of it was negative, which was really strange to me, since when I was in summer school in Tashkent in 1990 there were people from all over Central Asia, many different ethnicities, and they all agreed that Moscow, the Soviet government, was exploiting them.

There was a sort of equality, a kinship that formed between the peoples of the different Central Asian Soviet republics, a quiet mutual agreement that they were all being neglected and mistreated.

But once they were independent, there were some cruel comments about the neighbours and other indigenous ethnic groups. And, of course, the worst expression of this was in southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010.

I was there, mostly in Osh, speaking to people from every side, and it was often chilling and always extremely disappointing and sad to hear what so many people were saying at that time.

That situation is at least becoming better now. That sense of brotherhood and common cause I heard in talks with groups of Central Asians at Tashkent State in 1990 is returning, though now the Central Asians are stronger, no longer victims of a colonizer.

Central Asia is still often covered internationally through politics, security and geopolitics. Which authors, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, artists or cultural works from the region would you recommend to readers who want to understand Central Asia differently?

This would also be a very long list, and I worry about leaving somebody out.

For material in English, and often in Russian, some of the authors I would recommend are Temur Umarov, Assel Tutumlu, Diana Kudaibergen and Asel Doolotkeldieva, just to name a few. There are obviously dozens more.

You can find the work of Central Asian scholars on several Western websites, and I will just mention the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Oxus Society.

I will say it’s worth looking at the media outlets in all five Central Asian countries as much as possible. Even state media and the journalists working for these outlets are worth following, even in places like Turkmenistan where almost every article mentions “Hero Arkadag.”

It is one side of the story, the side the governments tell their people.

There are many good journalists and outlets outside Central Asia that do fantastic jobs keeping track of events in the region or posting photos of life there that convey to people what it’s like to be there, what you see in front of your face.

When I was working there in the 1990s, hardly any people from the West were going there, so nobody knew much about it. Now there are many people writing about Central Asia who have travelled extensively there, spent a lot of time in one or several places, or have just been following events and writing about them.

The level of knowledge is so much higher than it was. It makes me smile all the time to see how many great people are sharing their deep knowledge and experiences of Central Asia with the rest of the world.

I am not familiar with contemporary filmmakers and musicians, so I really couldn’t say much about them. I would recommend watching the movies Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are making about their history.

It is important to see how their forefathers are portrayed and think about the effects that has on the people living in these countries today.

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

The post Bruce Pannier: “Central Asians never viewed their region as Russia’s backyard” appeared first on Novastan English.

Following a small river from the mountains into the Kazakh steppe, filmmaker Kristina Mikhailova set out to imagine its dreams. Five years later, the journey had become a portrait of Kazakhstan told through the voices of its women – and an intensely personal exploration of freedom, identity and belonging.

A small river runs for 130 kilometres through Kazakhstan, beginning among mountain peaks and glaciers before gradually disappearing into the vast landscape below. When filmmaker Kristina Mikhailova first decided to follow the Aksay from beginning to end, she imagined making a film about the river’s dreams.

Five years later, that idea had become something much larger.

Along the river, Kristina interviewed around 100 women, asking each an unusual question: if you were a river, what kind of river would you be? Fifteen of them eventually became part of River Dreams, a 98-minute film in which the Aksay serves simultaneously as landscape, witness and metaphor.

What emerged is not simply a portrait of a river. Through women’s stories of freedom, violence, dignity and belonging, the film became what its director describes as “a political portrait of Kazakhstan through a female perspective”.

The film has since travelled internationally, receiving around 30 festival invitations and and winning the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in the Forum section at the 2026 Berlinale. It has also drawn enthusiastic audiences closer to home, including three sold-out screenings in Kazakhstan and a packed morning screening in Kyrgyzstan, where it won Best Feature-Length Documentary Film at the UmutDoc International Documentary Film Festival in Bishkek.

Yet bringing the film to a wider audience in Kazakhstan itself has proved much more difficult. Kristina says censorship has prevented River Dreams from securing the domestic release she wants.

For Novastan, Kristina Mikhailova spoke with Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine about the “sisterhood of rivers”, the women she met along the Aksay, her Ukrainian grandmother’s memories, female agency and violence, her identity as a Russian Kazakhstani, and the painful experience of feeling deeply attached to a country that she sometimes feels is pushing her away.

A sisterhood of rivers

Novastan: The film began with the idea of following the Aksay River for its entire 130-kilometre course. What were you looking for when you first set out?

Kristina Mikhailova: When I started filming, I was very young. This was the idea for my first feature-length film: I wanted to follow the river all the way, 130 kilometres from beginning to end, and imagine what it might dream about – to film those dreams as I saw them.

But after walking the entire river alone, I saw how much it changed along the way. I wanted to capture those changes and see reality through the river’s eyes, to personify it. I was working with a post-humanist approach and looking for a way to give the river a voice.

That is how I came up with the idea of asking the girls who lived along the river what kind of rivers they would be.

That question immediately helped me understand the person in front of me and shape the conversation in a way that allowed her to share something very important to her. In the Kazakhstani context, very little space is often given to women’s perspectives. It mattered to me that, as a woman, I was creating such a space, and that through the film other women could have that space too.

Gradually, what emerged was a political portrait of Kazakhstan through a female perspective.

Why did you choose the Aksay in particular?

Aksay, or Aksaika, is a very small, modest river. I wanted to film precisely this kind of inconspicuous river, because we have so many of them.

Its journey is typical of many mountain rivers in Central Asia: they begin among mountain peaks and glaciers and then disappear somewhere in the steppe or flow into lakes, never reaching the ocean.

By filming Aksay, I was also filming all these other rivers. I called it a “sisterhood of rivers”.

It is funny because I once heard someone say that the film shows some of the negative aspects of women’s lives in Kazakhstan because I had chosen the “wrong” river – one that was too insignificant. Apparently, if I had chosen some great, “proper” river, the story would have turned out differently.

I doubt it.

Making female agency visible

You interviewed around 100 women during the making of the film, with 15 eventually appearing in the final version. What did these encounters teach you?

First and foremost, I learned about myself.

Recently, I started thinking about how I changed over the five years it took to make the film. Of course, I established myself as a filmmaker, my name became known and new opportunities opened up. But something much more personal happened too: I discovered myself as a woman of Kazakhstan. I saw who I was.

Through meeting other women, I realised how different we are and how many pains we share. I came to understand relationships between men and women better – and men themselves, too.

For me, it was a genuine step up in my understanding of myself. One film led to so many personal discoveries.

Freedom seems to be one of the central themes of the film. Did making it change the way you understood freedom and the restrictions women face?

I am glad you noticed the theme of freedom because, for me, it was one of the key themes on a human level.

While making the film, I realised how many layers restrictions can have. Some are so deeply embedded and so difficult even to recognise that overcoming them can sometimes seem utopian.

But if we are talking about empowerment, then yes, absolutely. And women expand these possibilities for themselves.

I think every one of the 100 girls I interviewed, and each of the 15 who eventually appeared in the film, helped create a safe space through her story and her willingness to share her vulnerability – a safe space for all of us within those 98 minutes.

It is a space that women throughout Kazakhstan can enter.

That is why I am trying so hard to secure a wide release for the film in Kazakhstan. I want every Kazakhstani woman to be able to see it. Its distribution title is Qyz Republic.

The film deals with difficult experiences, including violence, but the women are never reduced to victims. Was challenging stereotypical representations of women something you consciously set out to do?

I did not explicitly set out to move away from stereotypical representations of women. I had a different objective: to make female agency visible.

That sounds slightly paradoxical, but there is a need for it.

Above all, I wanted my girls to feel strong.

I think both men and women can connect with that experience. But for girls in particular, the film creates a place where they can recognise themselves, feel seen and feel strong – where they can see themselves as capable of preserving their dignity despite everything.

The culmination of this, of course, comes in the final scenes involving violence. At that point, the conflict becomes completely explicit – almost black and white.

But in my view, not one of my girls looks like a victim.

The river as witness

The landscape itself seems to function almost like another character. How did you want the river and its surroundings to appear on screen?

The landscape is definitely my silent witness – the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

I always wanted the landscape cinematography to be minimalist and static, without camera movement. I wanted it to record impartially whatever was in front of it, creating what my cinematographer calls “moving photographs”.

I wanted to leave room for a transcendental experience beyond my own statement, so that each viewer could develop their own idea of the river through these landscapes.

I did not want to dramatise them or deliberately select only emotionally charged scenery. I showed the landscapes as the river passed through them, from beginning to end.

Of course, a lot had to be left out, but I think the film still gives you a sense of roughly every ten kilometres of the river’s journey.

I wanted the landscape to speak for itself.

A grandmother’s river

Your grandmother also appears in the film, although you did not originally intend for her to be part of it. How did her story enter the film?

I think I inherited my particular attentiveness to the world around me from my grandmother.

She understood the world intuitively. The war had a profound impact on her childhood – on where and how she was able to study – and eventually brought her to Kazakhstan as a little girl.

When my grandmother arrived here, she spoke only Ukrainian. She did not know Russian. I think that sharpened her perception too: she had to read reality and learn from it through observation.

I had not originally planned to include my grandmother in the film. I simply decided to speak with her by the river about our family history and her past. Then, during the editing process, I found this moment when she suddenly comes alive while remembering the river of her childhood.

My grandmother is 93. That is almost a century. Yet both the river of her childhood in Siberia and my river in Kazakhstan can overflow, flooding houses and cities.

Through my grandmother’s memory, I wanted this sense of timelessness to enter the film.

“I belong entirely to this place”

The film is multilingual, much like Kazakhstan itself. How does your own identity shape the perspective from which you portray the country?

I love the fact that the film turned out to be multilingual – just like our reality in Kazakhstan. I see that as an advantage.

But I understand that, as a Kazakhstani whose passport says “Russian”, I have my own perspective. It cannot express the general mood surrounding identity in Kazakhstan.

Speaking purely about my own feelings, I belong entirely to this place. I am deeply connected to it.

But sometimes – or often? – I feel that it is trying to push me out.

I feel that both as a Russian Kazakhstani and as a woman and filmmaker.

At the same time, there is nowhere else on Earth where I feel so needed, or where I can so easily find common ground with people.

I understand everything here. Unfortunately, I cannot accept everything.

Between documentary and visual art

River Dreams combines documentary filmmaking with dreams, metaphor, music and highly stylised imagery. Did you ever think of it as a conventional documentary?

From the beginning, I was not making a traditional documentary. For me, it was a large artistic practice that happened to come closest to documentary cinema.

Essentially, I was making visual and conceptual art.

So I did not restrict the means I could use. I looked for ways of expressing my metaphors through different images, visual registers and the editing itself.

In the end, I think the river itself dictated what its dreams should look like.

I receive very different reactions to these techniques. Some people call them outstanding. Some see them as nothing more than B-roll. Some say they are not poetic at all, while others find them endlessly poetic. Some people think they are naive.

I like the fact that they provoke an emotional response and make the imagination work. I think that is what real cinema should do.

At least, that is what cinema does to me. And I am glad my film has had that effect on other people.

Music also plays a prominent role in the film. What did you want it to contribute?

Music plays a very important role.

The film includes several compositions by a Scottish artist I like and a track by a well-known American artist. But the most important element for me is the a cappella singing.

It appears four times. I perform one short melody myself, while the others are sung by girls I met along the river. Then, at the end, there is a music video featuring the classic line-up of the group KeshYOU, which becomes a separate, meta-ironic statement for me.

I feel no affinity with the idea, familiar across the post-Soviet space, that “real cinema” should not have music.

I use music because, for me, it speaks first and foremost to our emotions. And it fits this film particularly well because the film’s structure is itself profoundly emotional.

Success abroad, censorship at home

The film has now travelled widely and received considerable international recognition. What has the response been like?

By the time we are recording this interview, the Kazakhstani premiere has already taken place and we have had three sold-out screenings.

In Kyrgyzstan, we filled a cinema at 9:30 in the morning and won the festival’s Grand Prix. The film has received an award at the Berlinale and around 30 festival invitations around the world.

Soon I will leave for a three-month tour through Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The US premiere has already taken place in New York, and the Latin American premiere is coming next.

But despite all of this, I am still struggling to get the film into general release at home.

The reason is censorship.

I hope we will manage to overcome it, but as an artist I find the fact that I constantly have to fight simply humiliating.

It is still difficult for me to cope with the enormous pain of not being accepted at the state or industry level.

And yet the reaction from audiences in Kazakhstan itself seems to have been very different. How do you reconcile those two experiences?

Kazakhstan is also my audience – both women and men.

The film received an extraordinary and deeply emotional response here. I saw rivers of tears. I heard so many people open up to me after the screenings.

And my heart is torn between my love for my homeland and the searing pain of feeling that it rejects me.

I do not yet know how to resolve that contradiction.

I tried to express it in the film.

“The universe is my country”

After five years making this film and speaking to so many people along the river, how do you think about Kazakhstan’s future?

I think about the country’s future as the future of the people who live in it.

In Kazakhstan, I have met so many people who give me hope. They express their opinions openly. They value their freedom and are prepared to fight for it. They create space for others. They make the people around them happier.

But there have also been periods when I encountered many people filled with self-censorship and despair – people who seem no longer to regard their own dignity as something inviolable.

That is why thinking about the country’s future is very painful for me at the moment.

In the film, I describe a dream I had as a child. I am a baby who keeps growing and expanding until I reach the dimensions of the universe, but I never reach its boundaries.

Now I feel as though I am that baby again, and the universe is my country, Kazakhstan.

Maybe I need to go beyond its boundaries. Maybe I am already outgrowing them.

But I do not know.

My family lives here.

I love this place very deeply.

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

The post “River Dreams”: A river, 100 women and a portrait of Kazakhstan appeared first on Novastan English.

In August-September 2026, the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit took place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Initially conceived as a platform for regional security cooperation, the organization used its 2026 summit to reiterate demands for a multipolar international order through appeals to Eurasian connectivity. State-overseen media in some of the organization’s authoritarian member states repeatedly invoked euphemistic terms such as “Silk Road” and “Digital Silk Road” alongside declarations of multipolarity. These references accompanied efforts by regional powers, particularly China and Russia, to secure recognition as global powers and challenge the predominance the United States has exercised since the end of the Cold War. For the post-Soviet states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, embracing the Silk Road paradigm presents a particular dilemma, as they seek greater international recognition through a framework that designates them primarily as intermediaries between larger powers.

Read more on Novastan: In Central Asia, China is taking advantage of Russia’s isolation at war

The Making of the Silk Road Paradigm

 Since the early 2010s, the Silk Road has become a pervasive framework for representing Central Asia and the South Caucasus in tourism, scholarship, current affairs, and policy analysis. Many hotels and travel agencies in these regions bear the name or feature imagery of camels and caravans, while international tour operators market visits to these countries as Silk Road journeys. Conferences and institutional associations, including the Tbilisi Silk Road Forum and the Silk Road Universities Network, adopt the same designation. American academic institutions have also embraced it, most notably the Silk Road Studies Program formerly affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University’s incipient Silk Road Studies program.

Uyghur and Uzbek restaurants across Western Europe and North America operate under names such as “Silk Road” and “Caravan.” The Chinese-American cello virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma applied the same paradigm to musical performance through his Silk Road project, conceived in 1998. Its eclectic ensemble reduces the rich musical traditions of various Eurasian nations to one or two representative performers, prioritizing national representation over demonstrating genuine historical musical connections across Eurasia. In a 2021 video from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the popular Emirati food blogger Khalid al-Ameri gleefully attributes the enormous portions of Tashkent-style pilaf (to’y oshi) to the appetites of merchants traversing the Silk Road, as if local culinary traditions existed chiefly to serve transient traders.

    The Silk Road paradigm was popularized in the former Soviet space during late perestroika, almost a quarter-century before China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, as  late Soviet and early post-Soviet publications attest. UNESCO provided institutional endorsement by launching a research program dedicated to the “Silk Roads” in 1988. In 1994, the Samarkand Declaration on Silk Road Tourism established a framework for international cooperation to promote the region’s historical routes and cultural heritage. Four years later, Baku hosted a conference on the restoration of the historic Silk Road under the EU’s auspices. The United States adopted the designation for its own New Silk Road initiative in 2011. Uzbekistan’s 2009 postage stamps promoted the theme, followed by subsequent issues depicting mapped routes, camels, caravans, and other popular Silk Road imagery. Russia also issued a Silk Road commemorative coin honoring the Eurasian Economic Community. The tourism expansion across post-Soviet Eurasia in the 2010s further encouraged Silk Road branding. For the newly independent states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, the paradigm offered a means of asserting historical identities and international significance after the Soviet collapse amid the limitations of established Western regional classifications, as Central Asia and the South Caucasus fitted awkwardly within conventional definitions of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or South Asia.

    Scholarship and popular historical writing in the English-speaking world have helped popularize the Silk Road as a framework for interpreting Central and Inner Eurasia. Valerie Hansen and Susan Whitfield have made substantial contributions to the study of underexplored communities and cultural encounters through works organized around this designation. Christopher Beckwith’s monograph applies the term to a broad history of Central Eurasia while emphasizing the historical agency of the region’s vernacular communities. Peter Frankopan adopts the pluralized Silk Roads for an expansive Eurasian synthesis for a general readership. In their accounts of premodern Eurasia, these authors organize historical interpretation around a designation that did not exist during the periods under examination. Maps of the Silk Road and its supposed branches, now ubiquitous in tourist promotions and geopolitical analysis, further reinforce the impression that the term describes a coherent framework. References to the Silk Road also supply historical context in prominent Anglophone media outlets’ reporting on the dire human rights situation of the Uyghurs.

    The Silk Road paradigm often entails a teleological interpretation of Eurasian history by projecting the modern concept of globalization onto premodern exchanges. Conventional accounts describe a network of routes linking China with Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean from the period when the Han and Roman empires coexisted to the mid- or late fifteenth century, before the Age of Discoveries fundamentally reshaped global connections. Replacing a single road with a plurality of routes leaves largely intact the presumption that these exchanges constituted a coherent and enduring trans-Eurasian system. The term itself was a nineteenth-century coinage, appearing in Carl Ritter’s work in 1838 before the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen gave it greater scholarly prominence in 1877. The existence of exchanges between distant regions does not establish that the people involved shared a conception of a unified system joining Eurasia’s eastern and western extremities. Treating their activities as successive stages of globalization risks attributing a common direction to interactions shaped by distinct local circumstances and changing sociopolitical realities. The conventional fifteenth-century endpoint similarly obscures the continuation of overland exchange across the Eurasian landmass into the modern period.

    The Silk Road has also acquired a geographical scope that encompasses entire regions of Central and Inner Eurasia. In this usage, Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia fall under a common designation derived from their association with routes connecting China with Europe. The term consequently covers the political, social, religious, and cultural histories of these territories, including developments whose significance extends well beyond commercial or cultural transmission. This usage conflates the history of connections among regions with the histories of the regions themselves. Establishing that a society participated in a network of exchange provides limited justification for treating that network as the principal framework for interpreting its historical development.

Between China and Europe

    The Silk Road paradigm presents China and Europe as the principal cultural and commercial centers of premodern Eurasia, relegating the intervening lands and peoples to an intermediary position within a linear rather than territorial conception of space. This hierarchy obscures the development of local political institutions and intellectual traditions, assigning historical importance primarily according to a society’s contribution to exchanges between the two endpoints.

The mathematical scholarship of al-Khwarazmi, the philosophical and medical writings of Avicenna, the musical theories of al-Farabi, the astronomical discoveries of al-Biruni, the linguistic and ethnographic works of Mahmud al-Kashgari, and the poetry of Ferdowsi, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Ahmad Yasawi, Yusuf Balasaguni, and Ali-Shir Nawa’i exemplify contributions whose significance exceeds the transmission of ideas between distant centers and deserves consideration in its own right. Even when exchange remains the principal subject of inquiry, emphasizing these two endpoints understates India’s importance. During the Roman period, Mediterranean commerce with India, often through Central Asia, was considerably more voluminous than commerce with China. The Seleucid Empire and the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms had sustained earlier political and cultural connections, whose Hellenistic legacies persisted beyond their rule.

    The Silk Road paradigm’s Sino-centrism and Euro-centrism often obscure the cultural agency of vernacular communities in Central Eurasia. Communities selectively adapted and appropriated cultural imports, changing their forms and significance before they circulated further. Scholars such as al-Khwarazmi elaborated the Indian system underlying Arabic numerals before it reached Europe. Chess acquired new rules, pieces, and social meanings as it spread from India through Persia and onward to Europe, with “checkmate” being a Persian loan. Christian communities adapted Syriac script to write Sogdian and Old Uyghur. Regional variants of instruments such as the zurna, qanun, and kamancha differ in construction and performance practice, reflecting the musical traditions and preferences of the communities that developed them. Regional preparations of noodles (laghman, lamian), dumplings (chuchvara, manti), fried dough (çäkçäk, tush, sachima), and fruit leathers (lavashak, guodanpi) also require attention to local specificities.

Exchange Beyond Trade

The Silk Road paradigm’s emphasis on commerce often obscures the role of conquest, pastoral mobility, and permanent migration in facilitating cultural exchange across Eurasia. Scythian expansions and the Arab, Mongol, and Timurid conquests intensified cultural contacts through military service, imperial rule, and population displacement, frequently under conditions of extreme violence. Timur’s deportation of artisans from conquered cities to Samarkand made forced migration a major source of the Timurid capital’s architectural and artistic achievements. Similar developments followed Shah Abbas I’s deportation of Armenians from Nakhichevan to Isfahan, where churches combined Armenian and Safavid architectural characteristics. Nomadic communities sustained other forms of exchange through seasonal movement and recurrent encounters with settled populations.

Research on mountain routes through Inner Asia suggests that pastoral mobility helped establish some of the connections subsequently used by long-distance traders. The migrations of Qypchaqs, Seljuks, Kalmyks and other Oirat groups, and Alans carried military practices, oral literature, and material culture into new settings, where interactions with settled populations encouraged further adaptation. Jewish diasporic communities across Central Eurasia maintained connections through kinship, religious institutions, and scholarship, sustaining exchanges that extended beyond the activities of merchants, best exemplified by the Moroccan-born rabbi Yosef Maimon’s efforts to promote religious education and Sephardic liturgical practices among Bukharan Jewish communities in Central Asia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Commerce itself often depended on the routes and social relationships established through these movements.

Silk Without China

The history of silk production further undermines the Silk Road paradigm’s Sino-centrism. Sericulture had spread into Central Asia and Iran well before the thirteenth century, and tenth-century geographical accounts describe silk production across much of Iran. Communities developed their own practices of silkworm breeding and textile manufacture, while Shaki and Shamakhi in modern-day northern Azerbaijan became important centers of silk production and trade in the Caucasus. Before Azerbaijan took control of the city in late 2023, one of the main streets of Stepanakert (Khankandi), the de facto capital of Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh, was called Silk Weavers’ Street (Metaqsagorts’neri poghots).

The smooth, colorful khan atlas (“royal silk”), produced most famously in the ancient city of Margilan in the Ferghana Valley, is widely regarded as a national symbol of Uzbekistan. The expansion of production diversified the sources of silk entering regional and distant markets while sustaining its commercial importance. Raw silk remained a major export of Safavid Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Iranian workshops produced luxury fabrics for domestic consumption and foreign buyers. In Shaki, wealth from silkworm breeding and cocoon sales supported urban development in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as reflected in the magnificent summer palace of the Shaki khans. These economies depended on local agricultural conditions and commercial institutions and could sustain production and exchange without continuous input from China. The association of silk with China, therefore, provides little justification for assigning a subordinate historical role to societies that became substantial producers and exporters themselves.

From Historical Metaphor to Geopolitical Strategy

    The Silk Road paradigm’s retrospective Sino-centrism also lends historical legitimacy to the Chinese government’s contemporary geopolitical ambitions. China’s position among the largest premodern economies provides an insufficient basis for assuming comparably extensive political influence, cultural ties, or transit connections with the principal centers of Central Eurasia and beyond. The extent and character of these connections varied considerably across periods, depending on changing political arrangements and networks sustained by communities and Eurasian land empires with their own interests and institutions.

Read more on Novastan: China in Central Asia: Fact-checking and myth-busting

Official Chinese presentations of BRI invoke the pluralized historical Silk Roads to portray contemporary transit investments as the renewal of historical connections. This presumed continuity frames the expansion of Chinese interests as restoring a lost position, encouraging acceptance of Beijing’s ambitions to reshape Eurasia’s political and economic development. Central Asia and South Caucasus states embrace the same framework to attract Chinese investment, promote transit infrastructure centered around China, and secure greater international recognition. Their self-presentation as intermediaries risks making that recognition contingent on their usefulness to larger powers, while reinforcing a historical hierarchy that privileges China’s geopolitical objectives.

Read more on Novastan: China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway: Who wins from Central Asia’s new trade route?

Marco Polo and the Politics of Eurasian Space

    The Silk Road paradigm’s anachronistic Sino-centrism also appears in bestselling American author Robert Kaplan’s use of Marco Polo’s travels to interpret contemporary geopolitics. In The Return of Marco Polo’s World, Kaplan uses the Venetian traveler’s itinerary to explain the strategic significance of China’s expanding connections across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. The itinerary of a single traveler offers limited grounds for establishing either the density of historical exchange or a common geopolitical orientation among the societies he encountered. Polo’s journeys depended on Mongol imperial arrangements and networks maintained by merchants, religious communities, and local authorities, whose activities served numerous purposes beyond connecting Europe with China.

Kaplan explicitly presents Kublai Khan’s empire as a guide to contemporary Chinese strategy, encouraging the interpretation of Mongol-era connections as precedents for China’s present ambitions, although Chinggisid imperial domains encompassed much of Eurasia and included political centers well beyond China. This analogy risks attributing a continuous geopolitical agenda to distinct political entities and subordinating other Eurasian societies to a narrative of Chinese resurgence. Kaplan’s advocacy of a sustained American naval presence also exposes a tension in his emphasis on Chinese centrality: American naval power helps sustain the maritime trading system on which China depends, while US military positions and alliances along the First and Second Island Chains constrain China’s pursuit of predominance in the western Pacific.

What the Eurasian Frame Leaves Out

    The Silk Road paradigm’s Eurasian frame also erases the Western Hemisphere when used to interpret contemporary global power dynamics. The United States, which emerged from the Cold War as the sole superpower, lies outside this paradigm’s geographical space. The postwar economic order still depends on financial arrangements shaped by American power, with the US dollar retaining its central role in international transactions, banking, and reserve holdings. The scale of the US economy and the global operations of US corporations sustain commercial relationships that cannot be adequately represented through routes joining China and Europe. American corporations, especially those based in Silicon Valley, occupy leading positions in the global high-technology industry. US military deployments and alliances, including a naval presence along major shipping routes, remain integral to the security arrangements within which much of this commerce occurs. Interpreting Chinese infrastructure expansion primarily through a Eurasian historical frame risks overstating China’s capacity to displace American dominance by discounting the United States’ pivotal role on the global stage.

When Influence Ran East

    The history of China’s Tang dynasty (618–907) challenges Sino-centric accounts of Eurasian exchange that portray China primarily as a source rather than a recipient of cultural influence. Conventionally celebrated as an apogee of Chinese cultural achievement, the Tang period coincided with extensive political and cultural engagement with Central Asia. The Tang capital, Chang’an (Xi’an), maintained close ties with the region, where Tang campaigns and protectorates established a substantial, though uneven, presence. Turkic soldiers and commanders contributed significantly to Tang military power, while Uyghur allies provided crucial assistance during the eighth century. Central Asian music and dances shaped Tang court entertainment, notably through Sogdian dances, while the pipa, often called the Chinese lute, developed from Middle Eastern and Central Asian prototypes. Elite men and women adopted Central Asian clothing and equestrian fashions; Crown Prince Li Chengqian dressed as a Turkic khan, established a tent camp within the palace grounds, and ate mutton cut with his sword. Sogdian communities in Chang’an and other urban centers contributed to commercial, artistic, and religious life, with manuscripts recovered from the caves of Dunhuang preserving evidence of their activities and beliefs. Imported fruit varieties, vegetables, and livestock, including peaches from Samarkand and prized Central Asian horses, further demonstrate the material significance of these contacts.

Christianity and Manichaeism reached Tang China through networks connecting Iran and Central Asia. Translations of Buddhist and Christian scriptures expanded Chinese religious literature, while Buddhist translation continued an earlier process of incorporating Sanskrit terms into Chinese. Li Bai (Li Bo), among China’s most celebrated poets, may have been born in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. Popular narratives about the battle of Talas in 751, fought between the Tang dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate, often obscure the political agency of Central Eurasian communities by crediting the Abbasid victory with bringing Chinese westward expansion to a definitive end. The conflict emerged from regional rivalries involving Ferghana and Chach, whose ruling families sought allies to advance their own interests. Karluk forces played an important part in the Tang defeat, with Chinese accounts attributing the outcome partly to their defection to the Abbasid side. Tang expansion depended heavily on Turkic troops and commanders and alliances with Sogdian rulers. Tang garrisons remained in the Tarim Basin after Talas, while An Lushan’s rebellion in 755 and subsequent Tibetan advances led to Tang’s decline. An Lushan (Rokhshan in Sogdian), a general of Sogdian and Turkic ancestry, captured two Tang capitals and forced the emperor to flee, while the prolonged conflict severely weakened the dynasty.

Beyond the Silk Road

    Prominent historian of Central Asia Scott Levi has advocated the scholarly embrace of the Silk Road paradigm despite its conceptual laxity. However, its acceptance in Western academia would inevitably lend greater legitimacy to the expansive agenda of an authoritarian dictatorship whose repressive policies have actively destroyed the communities and cultural legacies that have long formed the backbone of Western imaginations of the Silk Road.

By Diego Benning Wang.

Diego Benning Wang is a historian of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Having received a PhD in history from Princeton University, an MA in Russian studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Russian studies from New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

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