More than a decade after the documentary True Appaloosa brought attention to Kyrgyzstan’s spotted horses, breeder Munarbek Kuldanbaev is trying to turn a handful of surviving animals into a viable population. He speaks to Novastan about genetics, Soviet-era crossbreeding, the Chaar’s place in Kyrgyz heritage and the long road towards official recognition.

When True Appaloosa (available in Europe on Prime Video) was filmed more than a decade ago, the question at its centre was whether Kyrgyzstan’s spotted horses might be related to the American Appaloosa.

For Munarbek Kuldanbaev, founder of the Chaar Appaloosa Foundation and a breeder of Chaar horses, that question eventually became the beginning of a much larger project.

Kuldanbaev now insists on an important distinction. Whatever ancient connections may exist between spotted horse populations, the American Appaloosa and the Kyrgyz Chaar should not be treated as the same breed. They developed in different environments and cultural traditions, he argues, and the Chaar should be understood on its own terms as an indigenous Kyrgyz horse.

The breeding programme began with the stallion Chaar Suluu and five mares. Today, according to Kuldanbaev, it numbers more than 80 horses, while other breeders in Kyrgyzstan have also begun developing Chaar lines of their own.

The challenge, however, is not simply to produce more spotted horses. Kuldanbaev says decades of crossbreeding have altered indigenous Kyrgyz horse populations, particularly during the twentieth century. His project therefore combines genetic research, physical characteristics, historical references and traditional knowledge in an attempt to identify and restore what he describes as the Chaar’s “original type”.

That raises a more difficult question: when does conservation become reconstruction?

It is a question Kuldanbaev does not avoid. He acknowledges that no living population remains unchanged over centuries and that restoring the Chaar inevitably contains an element of reconstruction. His argument is that such reconstruction must be guided by evidence rather than by aesthetic preference.

His longer-term ambition is formal recognition of the Chaar in Kyrgyzstan. The project is working towards a population of 500 horses with documented pedigrees, which Kuldanbaev says would provide the basis for an application for official breed recognition.

For him, the stakes go beyond horse breeding. Preserving the Chaar, he argues, also means preserving part of Kyrgyzstan’s nomadic history, cultural heritage and biodiversity.

Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine spoke with Munarbek Kuldanbaev about how the project has evolved, what genetic research can – and cannot – tell us about the Chaar, and what role Kyrgyzstan should play in preserving indigenous breeds.

Novastan: True Appaloosa documented the early years of your search for the Chaar horse. More than a decade later, what has changed most since the film was made – both in your understanding of the Chaar and in the project itself?

Munarbek Kuldanbaev: As you can see in the film, True Appaloosa was not really about the Chaar horse. At that time, we were trying to answer a different question: whether the Kyrgyz spotted horse was related to the American Appaloosa.

The answer is that they do share some genetic similarities, but we have to be very careful about saying that the Kyrgyz spotted horse is a “true Appaloosa”.

Even if they may have some common roots, the Appaloosa and the Kyrgyz Chaar horse are different breeds, each with its own history shaped by the land where it developed, as well as by the culture and traditions of the people who bred and used these horses.

After the film was released, I began asking myself what should come next. I already had Chaar Suluu, I had learned about the extensive crossbreeding of indigenous Kyrgyz horses before, during and after the Soviet period, and I had a strong personal ambition to change the situation.

Years later, I can see what that decision has led to. The revival programme started with Chaar Suluu and five mares. Today, we have more than 80 Chaar horses. I see more and more local breeders becoming interested in breeding the Chaar and participating in its reintroduction.

For me, this is probably the biggest change since the film.

Back then, I was searching for answers. Today, I can see, touch and feel the result of that search. The work has become something bigger than my own story – it has become a living population of Chaar horses and a growing interest in preserving them.

The programme began with Chaar Suluu and five mares. What happened to Chaar Suluu after the documentary, and how important is his genetic line today?

Chaar Suluu remained at the heart of the project after the film.

During the filming of True Appaloosa, he was one of the horses from which we collected material for genetic research. The results showed that, among the horses we tested, he had one of the lowest levels of genetic influence from other breeds. That was one of the reasons I considered him so important for the revival programme.

He also carries the LP gene associated with leopard spotting. Around 90% of Chaar Suluu’s foals have been spotted, and he produces many of the coat colours and patterns traditionally associated with the Chaar and Appaloosa.

But Chaar Suluu could not do this alone.

When I began the programme, I also had another spotted stallion, Chaarat. Two of his sons, Ak-Suluu and Tan-Suluu, have become important breeding stallions and are now being bred to Chaar Suluu’s daughters.

The goal was never simply to reproduce one exceptional horse. It was to build a viable Chaar population and establish several breeding lines.

Chaar Suluu was the foundation, but the future of the Chaar has to be bigger than one stallion.

What historical evidence is there for the Chaar as a traditional Kyrgyz horse?

Unfortunately, there are very few written historical records from ancient Kyrgyzstan itself. But that does not mean there is no historical evidence.

A great deal of information about horses and nomadic peoples in this region was recorded by Chinese chroniclers.

Chinese historical records speak of the famous “heavenly horses” of Central Asia, sometimes described as horses that “sweated blood”, and of the nomadic peoples who bred them. There are also representations of spotted horses in ancient Chinese ceramics.

But perhaps the most important evidence survives in Kyrgyz culture and tradition.

Spotted horses have played a special role in ceremonies and traditional practices. They could serve as a protective symbol or talisman for a family or clan.

The Chaar also appears repeatedly in Kyrgyz oral tradition. In folk tales, legends and traditional stories, the Chaar is mentioned as a distinctive horse.

There is also an important reference in the epic Manas. The first horse of Manas is named Toru Chaar, which can be translated as “brown spotted”.

Read more on Novastan: Manas and the Making of Kyrgyzstan

None of these pieces of evidence on its own proves the complete genetic history of the modern Chaar. But taken together – chronicles, artistic representations, oral traditions, ceremonies and Manas – they suggest that spotted horses have deep roots in Kyrgyz and wider Central Asian horse culture.

How do you define a Chaar horse today? What distinguishes it from another spotted Kyrgyz horse or from an American Appaloosa?

Today, I define the Chaar as a distinct Kyrgyz breed with its own history, genetic foundation, physical characteristics and behaviour.

The spotted coat is one of its most recognisable characteristics, but spotting alone is not enough.

For me, the Chaar is a combination of coat pattern, origin, conformation, temperament, endurance and genetics.

Physically, it should be a strong, hardy and functional horse adapted to Kyrgyzstan. It should have good bone, strong legs and hooves, balanced conformation and the ability to travel long distances across difficult mountain and steppe terrain.

Read more on Novastan: Siblings on horseback

Temperament is equally important. It is an intelligent and independent horse that can work with people while retaining its natural independence.

It is not a decorative horse. It should be able to work and live in the conditions in which it developed.

This is also where I make a distinction between the Chaar and the American Appaloosa.

They share visible characteristics, especially their spotted coats, and there are genetic similarities. But they developed in different regions, environments and cultural traditions.

The Appaloosa developed in North America. The Chaar developed in Central Asia and is closely connected to the history of the Kyrgyz nomadic people.

That is why I do not call it a “Kyrgyz Appaloosa”. The Chaar has its own identity.

You describe your work as restoring the Chaar in its “original type”. How do you determine what that original type was, and where does preservation end and reconstruction begin?

Determining the original type of the Chaar is not simply a matter of choosing horses that look the way I think a Chaar should look.

We have tried to approach this scientifically, combining genetic research with physical observation, traditional knowledge, history and folklore.

Genetic studies helped us understand what remained of the population and how much it had been affected by crossbreeding.

We identified a group of horses with relatively low levels of influence from outside breeds and then examined their conformation, physical characteristics, temperament and behaviour.

At the same time, we compared those observations with descriptions of the Chaar in Kyrgyz history, folklore, legends and oral traditions.

For me, this is where preservation ends and reconstruction begins.

Read more on Novastan: Equestrian link

Preservation means protecting an existing population and maintaining its diversity and characteristics. But when a population has been heavily affected by crossbreeding and some of its original characteristics have been partially lost, simply preserving what exists today can also mean preserving the result of that change.

That is why I use the word “restoration”.

We are not trying to create a new breed according to our own preferences. We are trying to identify the characteristics that survived, understand them through genetics and historical evidence, and then use careful selection to bring those characteristics together again.

There is inevitably an element of reconstruction because no living population remains completely unchanged over centuries.

But that reconstruction has to be guided by evidence.

What has the genetic research told you about the ancestry and distinctiveness of the Chaar?

The genetic research helped us look at the history of the Chaar from a completely different perspective – through its DNA.

Researchers compared the Chaar with horse populations from different parts of the world.

The results place the Chaar among Central Asian horse populations, with particularly close relationships to Mongolian and Yakutian horses and links to other traditional populations in the region.

The population also retains significant genetic diversity, which is important for its future.

One of the most interesting findings concerns the spotted coat. Many of the Kyrgyz horses studied carried the Leopard Complex, the same genetic mechanism associated with spotting in breeds such as the Appaloosa.

When researchers compared the DNA region around this mutation with Leopard Complex horses from Europe and the United States, their results suggested that the mutation may have originated in Asia.

But this is not proven. More research, including horses from other parts of Asia, is needed.

That is important to emphasise.

Genetics does not give us a final story about the origin of the Chaar. It gives us evidence with which to test hypotheses.

Did that research confirm the ideas explored in True Appaloosa, or did it change what you believed?

In an important sense, it confirmed what we were exploring, but it also made the story more complicated.

The spotted horses of Kyrgyzstan and spotted horses in America share the same Leopard Complex mutation.

For me, that supports the possibility that, very far back in history, these horses belonged to a broader ancestral population.

But at some point their histories separated.

Horses in America were shaped by the American landscape, climate, history and the people who bred them. Horses that remained in Central Asia were shaped by its mountains, climate, nomadic cultures and breeders.

So today, I would not call the American Appaloosa and the Chaar the same breed. They are clearly different horses.

They may, however, carry a much older common genetic story.

The research has given us important pieces of the puzzle, but not the whole picture. Where exactly did the Leopard Complex mutation arise? How did those horse populations spread? At what point did they separate?

Every answer opens another question.

With a relatively small founding population, how do you avoid inbreeding?

From the beginning, that was one of the main risks I was thinking about.

We started with Chaar Suluu and five mares, but I also introduced a second stallion, Chaarat, which gave us another male line.

Chaarat became the sire of several important stallions, including Besh, Ak-Suluu and Tan-Suluu.

We are now carefully planning matings between the different lines to avoid breeding animals that are too closely related.

At the moment, we believe we can maintain genetic diversity within our own herd for approximately another five to seven years. After that, we will need to introduce new mares from outside our herd.

The encouraging development is that two other breeders in different regions of Kyrgyzstan have now begun their own Chaar breeding programmes.

In the future, we may therefore be able to exchange mares between breeding programmes and create a wider population rather than depending on one herd.

The goal is not simply to increase numbers. It is to build a genetically sustainable population.

How does the Chaar fit into Kyrgyzstan’s broader equestrian heritage?

The Chaar has always been part of the broader story of the Kyrgyz horse, but for a long time very few people outside a small circle knew that this type of horse still existed.

When True Appaloosa was shown on television, it was almost a discovery for the Kyrgyz public.

Many breeders became interested. That was positive, but it also created a danger.

Some began crossing spotted horses with other breeds in an effort to make them larger and heavier. For us, that risks changing the qualities that make the indigenous horse distinctive.

Our project is therefore not simply about increasing the number of Chaar horses.

It is about preserving the characteristics that developed through environment, history and traditional breeding.

An indigenous breed should not be frozen in the past, but neither should it be changed until the characteristics that made it distinctive disappear.

And the Chaar is much more than a horse.

By preserving it, we are also preserving part of Kyrgyz history and nomadic culture, as well as an element of the biodiversity of Central Asia.

Your long-term objective is official recognition of the Chaar as a breed. Where does that process stand?

At present, the Chaar is not officially recognised as a breed, either internationally or in Kyrgyzstan.

Formal recognition is an important next step because it would give the Chaar official status and create a stronger foundation for long-term conservation.

To submit an application in Kyrgyzstan, we are working towards a sufficiently large population of purebred horses with documented pedigrees.

The target we are using is 500 horses with reliable pedigree information.

We are therefore building the population, documenting the bloodlines and developing a breeding system that preserves what we consider the original type while maintaining genetic diversity.

Recognition should not simply be a certificate or a name in a registry.

Before seeking it, we need to demonstrate that there is a stable population, a documented pedigree structure and clear characteristics distinguishing the Chaar from other populations.

What support do you currently receive from the Kyrgyz authorities?

At the moment, we do not receive financial, veterinary, scientific or institutional support from the Kyrgyz government for the conservation of the Chaar.

I have approached government institutions several times, including on recognition and conservation.

My impression is that the system in this field has not yet fully moved away from approaches inherited from the Soviet period. There is still a strong reliance on established standards and procedures, and new research or approaches can be viewed cautiously.

For several years I tried to combine the Chaar breeding programme with my business. It became increasingly difficult.

We also faced serious losses from wolf attacks, including animals representing genetic material that had taken years of breeding to develop.

In 2021, I decided to devote myself completely to the Chaar project.

With friends in France, we then launched an accelerated breeding programme. In 2023, an international structure was established in France to support the conservation work and make private fundraising more transparent.

So far, conservation has been driven primarily by private initiative and international cooperation rather than government funding.

But we would welcome serious cooperation with Kyrgyz government agencies, veterinary institutions, universities and scientists.

More broadly, what should the state do to preserve indigenous horse breeds?

I believe the state’s role should be limited, but important.

The government does not need to manage the breeding itself.

What it should do is recognise indigenous breeds officially, protect their legal status, support scientific research and provide reasonable benefits or exemptions for breeders genuinely preserving them.

It should also support veterinary work and traditional pasture systems without trying to control individual breeding decisions.

The actual preservation and breeding should remain in the hands of breeders, researchers and local communities who understand the horses.

For me, the best model is simple: the state should recognise and protect; the people should preserve and develop.

Interview conducted by Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine.

The post “The Chaar is much more than a horse”: reviving Kyrgyzstan’s indigenous spotted breed appeared first on Novastan English.

Independent journalism cannot survive on good journalism alone. Marius Dragomir, director of the Media and Journalism Research Center, speaks to Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine about media capture, donor dependence, the transition from volunteer initiatives to professional newsrooms, the particular economics of Central Asian and exiled media, and the growing threat AI poses to specialist publications.

Why good journalism does not guarantee financial survival

Novastan: To begin, could you introduce yourself and the Media and Journalism Research Center to our readers? What questions have guided your work on media ownership, funding, policy and editorial independence?

Marius Dragomir, director of the Media and Journalism Research Center: I am a journalist by training who ended up spending most of his career studying the economics and politics of journalism rather than practising it. I spent over a decade at the Open Society Foundations, where I ran the research and policy portfolio of the Program on Independent Journalism and edited comparative projects such as Television Across Europe and Mapping Digital Media, which covered 56 countries. I then directed the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University until it closed in 2022, and I founded the Media and Journalism Research Center that same year to continue that body of work.

MJRC is an independent research centre funded through a mix of research grants, philanthropic contributions and commercial revenue. All profits are reinvested in research, and we accept no government money of any kind. That last point is not a slogan, but a methodological necessity. It is difficult to publish credible research on how governments capture media while taking money from governments.

Our main projects follow the links between ownership, influence, money and journalism. The State Media Monitor, for example, maps the funding, governance and editorial autonomy of state and public media worldwide: in the 2025 edition, 606 outlets across 170 countries. The Media Influence Matrix examines, country by country, who actually shapes journalism: government and regulators, funders, and technology companies. The Global Media Finances Map tracks the financial performance of some 24,000 media companies in around 60 countries. We also run a Media Capture Monitoring Report with IPI in Vienna.

The question that has guided all of it is deceptively simple: who pays for journalism, through which channel, and what does that money buy? Ownership registries and press-freedom rankings tell you part of the story. But influence over journalism is usually exercised through the accounting department, not the newsroom: through an advertising contract, a licence renewal, a printing bill, a tax audit, a grant condition. If you want to understand editorial independence, it is important to follow the invoices.

Independent media are often evaluated primarily through the quality and public value of their journalism. Why does strong editorial work so often fail to produce financial sustainability?

Because quality and revenue are produced by two different organisational capacities, and most independent outlets have only invested in one of them.

Journalism was never really sold to audiences at cost. For most of the twentieth century, readers paid a fraction of the price of producing news, and advertisers covered the rest, in most cases not because they valued journalism, but because they had no cheaper way to reach an audience. Once they found one, that subsidy left, and it left permanently.

What remains is a market in which attention, not quality, is the priced commodity. Nothing in that market rewards the six months of work behind an investigation more than it rewards a piece of aggregation produced in 20 minutes. In captured markets, the distortion is even blunter: the biggest buyer of advertising is often the state, and it is not buying attention at all, but compliance.

We also have to remember that independent newsrooms are usually founded by journalists, for good reasons. But journalistic culture treats commercial work as slightly disreputable, something to be done reluctantly and by whoever has least to do. An outlet can win awards for a decade while nobody ever owns the revenue line.

Excellent journalism does not fail to produce sustainability. It simply does not produce it by itself: it has to be converted into money by someone whose job that is, and that conversion is a professional skill, not a moral consequence of doing good work.

What are the main structural weaknesses of the traditional media business model today? Are these problems fundamentally different for small, nonprofit or specialist publications than for large national media organisations?

The traditional model rested on three pillars that have all been removed.

First, bundling: a newspaper sold sport, classifieds, weather, obituaries and investigative reporting in one package, and the profitable parts paid for the unprofitable ones. Digital distribution unbundled all of it.

Second, control of distribution: a printing press and a licence were expensive, which created a barrier to entry and a local monopoly. That barrier is gone.

Third, direct access to the audience: publishers now reach most readers through intermediaries – search engines, social platforms, and increasingly AI assistants – that own the relationship, set the terms, and can change them overnight.

For small, nonprofit and specialist publications, the diagnosis differs in important ways. Their weakness is not the collapse of a legacy model they never had; it is a structural overhead problem. There is a floor of institutional cost – legal compliance, accounting, fundraising, editorial management, security, technology – that does not shrink in proportion to the size of the newsroom. A five-person outlet carries almost the same administrative burden as a 50-person one and has one-tenth of the capacity to absorb it. That is why so many small outlets are structurally condemned to under-invest in the very functions that would make them sustainable.

Their advantages are real but narrow. They have low fixed costs, no legacy print infrastructure, no unionised back office and, very importantly, a defined and identifiable audience, which is the precondition for any direct revenue model. A specialist publication covering Central Asia knows exactly who its readers are and why they need it, in a way a general national daily no longer does.

Large national organisations face the opposite problem: they have the resources to build revenue capacity but are far more exposed to capture. They are big enough to be worth buying, worth pressuring and worth subsidising. Our financial analysis of Hungarian media companies, published in 2025, showed measurably how proximity to political power reshapes the financial outcomes of media firms.

Small outlets are rarely captured through acquisition: they are captured through starvation, or simply outlawed.

Can readers and donors sustain independent media?

Your research has emphasised the importance of building a direct relationship between media outlets and their audiences. Under what conditions can memberships, subscriptions and reader donations provide a meaningful source of income? Why do these models succeed for some publications but fail for others?

Four conditions, in my experience, and the model tends to fail when any one of them is missing.

One is a clearly bounded community. People do not pay for information, which is abundant. They pay for belonging, identity, or a service they cannot obtain elsewhere. Outlets serving a defined community – a profession, a diaspora, a region, a cause – convert far better than general-interest outlets, regardless of quality.

Second is a market where paying is normal, safe and technically possible. This is the condition most often overlooked from Western Europe. In much of the world, small recurring online payments are unusual, card penetration is low, and, decisively, a domestic payment to an independent outlet leaves a traceable record. In an environment where an outlet may be declared extremist, asking readers to subscribe is asking them to accept a risk, not a price.

Third, an actual product. Membership is not a donation button. It is a set of obligations the outlet takes on: newsletters, events, access, data, community, a reason to renew. Many outlets adopt the vocabulary of membership without building the product, then conclude the model does not work.

And finally, someone who owns it. The single strongest predictor is whether anybody is professionally responsible for the revenue relationship. For example, for-profit European digital natives derive their main revenue from advertising, website subscriptions and grants, in that order, while nonprofits rely on grants, individual donations and membership. Legal form shapes the achievable revenue mix more than most founders expect at the moment they register the organisation.

Where these models fail, it is usually for one of three reasons: the audience is large but poor or dispersed; the outlet asks for money without changing anything it offers in return; or it starts asking too late, after grant income has already collapsed, when there is no time left to build the habit.

Audience revenue is a slow asset. It has to be built while you still have other money.

Many independent outlets rely heavily on grants and international donors. What are the principal benefits and risks of this model? Can donor dependence influence editorial priorities even when funders never directly interfere with content?

The benefit is straightforward and should not be minimised: donor money funds journalism that no market will pay for. Investigative reporting on corruption in an authoritarian state has, from a commercial standpoint, a negative expected return. Without philanthropy, most of the independent journalism produced in many countries in the Global South over the past 20 years would not exist.

The risks became brutally visible in 2025. When the US government suspended most foreign assistance, roughly $150 million in annual support for journalism and the wider information ecosystem disappeared almost overnight. The consequences: closures, mass layoffs, abandoned investigations.

The cut also taught another lesson: many organisations believed they had diversified, holding grants from several different agencies and implementing partners, only to discover that every one of those grants traced back to the same ultimate source, and all were cancelled simultaneously.

On the second half of your question: yes, donor dependence shapes editorial priorities even when no funder ever comments on content, and this is the more insidious mechanism precisely because nobody is doing anything wrong.

Influence operates through anticipation. Editors learn which themes attract funding – this year climate, next year disinformation, then AI, then gender – and reporting drifts toward the fundable. Story selection begins to be justified internally by whether it fits a logframe. Impact is reported in metrics donors recognise, which are rarely the metrics that matter to the audience. Over several cycles, an outlet can end up producing journalism that is accountable primarily to institutions abroad rather than to readers at home.

And there is a political cost that is now unavoidable in an increasing number of countries. Foreign funding has been converted into a legal weapon in countries that have adopted legislation on foreign-funded organisations. That makes the very funding that keeps an outlet alive a pretext to delegitimise it as a foreign instrument.

What do international donors and media-development organisations most frequently misunderstand about the needs of independent media? How do funding criteria, project cycles and reporting requirements shape the organisational behaviour and editorial priorities of the outlets they support?

Five things, in descending order of damage.

They fund projects when organisations need institutions. Donors buy outputs: an investigation series, a training programme, a podcast. What outlets need is the capacity to exist: a business manager, a lawyer, an accountant, a security budget, a functioning CMS. These are usually classified as overhead and capped at some arbitrary percentage. The result is systemic under-investment in exactly the functions that would end donor dependence.

Secondly, project cycles do not match institutional time. Building an audience-revenue base takes three to five years. Grants run twelve to eighteen months. An outlet is therefore asked to become sustainable on a timetable that makes sustainability structurally impossible, and instead spends its senior editorial time writing applications. In small newsrooms, fundraising and reporting compete for the same person, usually the editor-in-chief, who is also the best reporter.

Thirdly, reporting requirements consume the capacity they are meant to safeguard. A five-person outlet managing four grants with different reporting formats, currencies, audit standards and impact frameworks is running a compliance department disguised as a newsroom. Donors underestimate this because each individually imposes a reasonable burden; nobody counts the aggregate.

Fourth, impact is measured in the wrong units. Reach and output are easy to count and largely meaningless. What a captured environment requires is different: did a procurement decision change, did a public debate shift, did an official resign, did the audience trust you enough to send documents? Those outcomes are slow, irregular and unsuited to quarterly reporting.

And finally, exits are unmanaged. Funders enter loudly and leave quietly. There is rarely a wind-down plan, a transition fund or an endowment mechanism. If 2025 taught the sector anything, it is that responsible donors should be building reserve and endowment structures – including pooled, multi-donor vehicles insulated from any single government’s foreign policy – rather than annual grant cycles that transfer all volatility onto the weakest party in the chain.

From volunteer initiative to professional newsroom

Some media organisations begin as volunteer initiatives but later seek to establish professional structures and remunerate editors, journalists and contributors. What determines whether that transition succeeds? What mistakes should volunteer-founded publications avoid?

This transition kills more promising publications than censorship does, and the causes are almost always internal.

What determines success, in the cases I have observed, is that the organisation formalises its governance before significant money arrives, not after. It decides who decides – who can hire, who can spend, who appoints the editor – while the stakes are still low enough that the conversation is not personal.

It defines roles rather than distributing tasks. Volunteer organisations run on generalists; professional ones need someone who owns revenue, someone who owns editorial, someone who owns operations, and these should not be the same person.

And it accepts that the founding culture must end. A volunteer collective runs on consensus, goodwill and unlimited discussion. That is not a management system, and it does not survive payroll.

The mistakes to avoid are consistent. One is paying everyone a little. Spreading a small budget across 15 contributors produces 15 people who are underpaid and still treat the outlet as a side project. Two properly paid full-time roles change an organisation.

Another is not paying the founders. Founder self-sacrifice looks noble and creates a hidden subsidy that masks the real cost base, and an organisation that cannot survive the day its founder burns out.

Another is choosing the legal form by accident. The structure you register determines which revenue you can access: whether you can take tax-deductible donations, sell advertising, receive foundation grants. Many outlets discover this three years too late.

And finally, professionalising editorial while leaving management voluntary is a major error. The business side is the side that most needs a paid professional, and it is invariably the last to get one.

Diversification is frequently presented as the solution to media sustainability. In practice, how many sources of revenue can a small organisation realistically manage without diverting excessive time and energy away from journalism?

There is no given formula. But from experience, I can say that between two and six revenue sources appears optimal, and that more sources do not correlate with greater success. Outlets with fewer than two sources are likely to fall in the bottom third of revenue earners in their markets. So there is a floor and there is a ceiling.

The reason there is a ceiling is that every revenue stream has a fixed management cost that has nothing to do with how much it earns. Advertising needs a salesperson and an ad server. Membership needs a payment system, a CRM, retention work and a product. Events need logistics and risk. Grants need proposals and audits. Consultancy and training pull your best journalists out of the newsroom.

Each one is a small business, and a five-person organisation cannot operate six small businesses without ceasing to be a newsroom.

The practical rule I would offer: no revenue line without an owner. If nobody’s name is against it, it is not a revenue stream; it is an aspiration that consumes attention. Three streams that someone actively manages will out-earn seven that everyone manages occasionally.

I would add one refinement about diversification that the 2025 funding shock made obvious: what matters is not the number of sources but their correlation. Four grants from four organisations ultimately funded by the same government are a single point of failure. One grant, one advertising base, one membership programme and one licensing deal is genuinely diversified, because no single political or economic event removes all four at once.

How money becomes a tool of media capture

Media capture is often associated with censorship or direct political control. How does capture operate more subtly through ownership, government advertising, subsidies, commercial dependency, regulatory decisions or access to distribution?

Capture is what happens when direct censorship becomes unnecessary. I defined it in a paper in 2019 as a situation in which most or all news media operate as part of a government-business cartel that controls the flow of information in order to protect its unrestricted access to public resources. The key point is that capture is an economic arrangement, not an editorial one.

It works through four levers: media regulation, state-owned outlets, government financing, and private ownership. Within financing, governments use four recognisable tactics: direct funding, state advertising, subsidies, and deliberate market disruption. What unifies them is that none requires anyone to tell a journalist what to write.

State advertising is the cleanest instrument. It is legal, discretionary, unaudited and enormous relative to these markets. When the state is the largest buyer of advertising, media outlets are not operating in a market; they are competing for patronage. No instruction is needed, because every editor can calculate.

Read more on Novastan: Leaving the island: Japarov’s campaign to silence independent media

Then there are the less visible mechanisms. One is informal payments: payments to outlets from politicians and officials – prime ministers, mayors, MPs, sitting and former presidents. This money never appears in any accounts, which is precisely the point.

Another is opacity: companies are not obliged to disclose revenues, so basic market data simply do not exist. Where nobody can see the finances, capture cannot be proven.

Regulation and administrative friction also contribute to building capture: accreditation rules, registration requirements for online publications, licensing, tax inspections, “false information” statutes. Ownership transfer, when companies close to the government buy media outlets, is the most efficient method of all.

And, of course, distribution and infrastructure: printing, kiosks, cable carriage, app stores, domain blocking all matter in how content is controlled. Control of the pipe is control of the publication.

Read more on Novastan: Pressure from Russia increases on Central Asian media outlets

Can private or philanthropic ownership protect editorial independence, or does dependence on wealthy individuals and foundations simply create different forms of vulnerability? What governance safeguards are most effective in protecting editorial decision-making?

It can, but it substitutes one dependency for another, and the honest answer is that ownership form matters far less than governance design.

Private ownership by a wealthy owner, for example, can truly insulate a newsroom from state pressure: a patron with independent wealth can absorb losses and ignore the withdrawal of state advertising. But it creates a different exposure: to that individual’s business interests, political ambitions, mortality and change of mind. Central and Eastern Europe offers an abundant record of proprietors who bought outlets as instruments rather than businesses. Our State Media Matrix includes a whole category, captured private media, precisely because privately owned outlets can be as editorially captured as state ones.

Philanthropic ownership avoids the profit motive but not the dependency. A foundation-owned outlet is subject to strategic shifts, board politics and the thematic fashions of the philanthropic sector. It is more stable and more transparent than an oligarch, but it is not a guarantee.

What actually protects editorial decision-making is a set of structural safeguards, and I would rank them roughly in this order.

First, structural separation of funding from appointment: whoever provides the money must not control who is appointed editor. This is the single most important rule.

Second, appointment rules: fixed, non-renewable terms, supermajority or qualified appointment procedures, and a formal role for the newsroom in the selection or veto of the editor-in-chief.

Third, a capital structure that outlasts the donor: endowments, trusts and foundation-ownership models remove annual renewal as an instrument of pressure.

Fourth, radical transparency of funding: publishing every source above a threshold as a form of protection.

And finally, self-imposed concentration limits. An internal rule that no single source may exceed, say, 40% of revenue is worth more than any editorial charter.

The sustainability challenge for Central Asian media

Your Media Influence Matrix studies of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan examined how state financing, ownership, political influence, informal payments and foreign donor support shape journalism. Looking back at those findings, how do you think the two media systems have evolved since 2019, and which developments most urgently merit renewed research today?

I have to be honest here because we have not conducted updated fieldwork in Central Asia since those studies, and I would not want to offer an assessment of how the two systems have evolved based on third-party sources. Our method depends on locally sourced financial and regulatory data collected by researchers in the country, and without that I would be speculating.

What I can restate is the baseline we established in 2019, because it defines what would have to be re-measured.

The two countries presented distinct configurations. Kazakhstan was a system of financial dominance: an overwhelming state presence in media funding combined with no obligation on companies to disclose their finances, and marginal donor money.

Read more on Novastan: In Central Asia, the Freedom of Press is in Decline

Kyrgyzstan was a system of informal dependence: a weak advertising market, media instrumentalised by politicians and businessmen who treated outlets as tools rather than businesses, and widespread undisclosed payments from officials, but alongside a rather plural space, a significant donor presence, and a handful of outlets that funded themselves from grants and advertising and could therefore set their own editorial line.

On what most urgently merits renewed research, I would name four things.

First, the actual flow of state media financing since 2019: amounts, recipients and the conditions attached. This is the single most consequential and least documented lever in both countries, and it is precisely the kind of figure that cannot be estimated from outside.

Second, the economics of exile: what it costs to run a Kyrgyz or Kazakh newsroom from abroad, how it is financed, and whether any of it is sustainable beyond the current funding cycle.

Read more on Novastan: When Freedom of Speech Is a Joke: Author of a Satirical News Outlet Detained in Kazakhstan

Third, the migration of journalism to YouTube and Telegram, where a substantial part of independent reporting now appears. We know very little about who funds these projects, what they earn, or how exposed they are to platform decisions.

Fourth, the effect of the 2025 collapse in US media assistance, which I suspect hit this region harder than the global headline figures suggest, and which will have reshaped the funding structure we described in 2019 more thoroughly than any legal change.

Independent Central Asian media often operate across borders or from exile, while attempting to reach audiences exposed to state-controlled information and increasingly restrictive legislation. Does this require a different sustainability model from that used by independent media in Western Europe?

Yes, fundamentally, and the standard Western sustainability playbook is close to useless for them.

The reason is a structural mismatch: for an exiled outlet, the audience and the revenue base are in different countries. A German or French independent outlet builds a virtuous circle: it serves a local audience, that audience pays, local advertisers want to reach it.

An exiled Central Asian or Azeri or Iranian outlet has an audience it cannot legally monetise, in a jurisdiction where its brand may be criminalised, reached through channels that can be blocked, while its costs are incurred in euros in a European capital. Every link in the Western circle is broken.

Read more on Novastan: Closure of Radio Azattyk sparks discontent from civil society and international human rights activists

Their cost structure is also different in kind, not degree: legal defence, digital security, physical security, relocation and visas for staff and their families, trauma support, redundant infrastructure, translation, and the permanent overhead of operating under two legal systems. These are not luxuries, yet they are rarely funded.

And there is a distinctive risk absent in Western Europe: asking the audience for money can endanger the audience. A domestic bank transfer to an outlet designated extremist is evidence, making reader revenue – the model everyone recommends – not merely difficult but ethically fraught.

So what does work? In practice, based on my experience, a different portfolio is needed.

First, revenue raised outside the audience’s jurisdiction: diaspora communities in Europe, North America and other relevant countries who can pay safely and often have strong motivation.

Then, institutional and B2B income needs to be considered: syndication, content licensing to international outlets, translation, research and consultancy for organisations that need country expertise they cannot generate themselves.

Increasingly, we have found that shared services are becoming important for such media. The most realistic efficiency for small exile media is not individual growth but pooled infrastructure: shared legal counsel, shared security, shared accounting, shared fiscal hosting in an EU jurisdiction, joint fundraising vehicles, and so on. Myanmar’s exiled outlets moved towards exactly this kind of cooperation after 2025.

AI poses a new threat to independent journalism

Artificial intelligence and automated information systems are increasingly determining which sources people encounter and how information is summarised. What risks does this create for smaller independent publications, particularly those covering countries or regions that receive limited international attention? Could their reporting become essential to AI systems while bringing them little traffic, recognition or revenue?

Your question contains a sharp formulation of the problem, and the answer is: yes, exactly that. Their reporting can become essential to AI systems while returning almost nothing in traffic, recognition or revenue. This is the defining economic asymmetry of the coming period, and small outlets covering under-reported regions are its most exposed victims.

There are various aspects of that. Let me refer to a few that I consider important.

One is what I call referral collapse: the distribution model that publishers built for 20 years assumed intermediaries would send readers onward. Answer engines are designed not to. When a summary satisfies the query, the visit never happens. For a small outlet whose advertising, membership conversion and reputational visibility all depend on that visit, the loss is not just a decline in traffic; it is the removal of the mechanism by which reporting converts into anything at all.

Another aspect is extraction asymmetry, concentrated on the specialists. Precisely because you are the only detailed English-language source on, say, Kyrgyz media legislation or Tajik labour migration, your reporting is disproportionately load-bearing in any system generating answers about the region.

Large publishers can negotiate licensing deals; a specialist outlet with four staff has no leverage, no legal capacity and no realistic path to individual negotiation. Thus, we expect a situation where the most essential sources have the least bargaining power. That is an inversion of how markets are supposed to work.

And finally, relevant to your question is the language problem, which worries me most. Models are trained on what exists in a language. For some languages – and here I would guess most of the Central Asian ones – the available corpus is dominated by state and state-aligned media, simply because they publish more. Independent reporting is a rounding error by volume.

So the statistical baseline for what is “normally said” about these countries is likely to be drawn overwhelmingly from captured sources, and it is then reproduced fluently, in the user’s own language, with no visible provenance and none of the contextual cues that would once have signalled a state outlet.

Media capture can thus be laundered into apparently neutral infrastructure. This is a new distribution channel for propaganda that requires no propagandist.

MJRC has begun mapping this terrain: our study on how AI is changing media and journalism in Central Europe, Control Beyond Code, which examines the ownership and financial structures behind the AI systems newsrooms are adopting, and the AI Information Map, which maps the sources of information the largest LLMs use to give answers in various languages.

What can small publishers actually do? Three things, none sufficient alone.

Build channels that do not pass through an intermediary – newsletters, events, direct communities, Telegram – because owned relationships are the only assets not subject to unilateral repricing.

Negotiate collectively. Licensing is only viable for small publishers through consortia, and this is where regional and thematic associations should be putting their effort.

And push for provenance and attribution requirements in regulation, because if summarisation is going to become the default interface for information, the minimum acceptable standard is that the source is visible, attributed and linkable.

What does sustainable independent media look like?

Looking ahead, what would a genuinely healthy and sustainable independent-media organisation look like? Which combination of revenue, governance, audience engagement and institutional support offers the best prospect of editorial independence over the long term?

This is very difficult to answer, as there is no ideal model and local context and factors matter immensely. But generally, I would describe it in five dimensions, and I would insist that no one of them substitutes for another.

Revenue first: between two and six streams, with no single source above roughly 40% and no two major sources sharing an ultimate political principal. At least one stream should come directly from the audience, however small, because it is the only income that is also a measure of whether anyone needs you. And at least one person must be professionally responsible for revenue.

Then, governance. A structural firewall between whoever funds the organisation and whoever appoints its editor. Fixed terms, transparent appointment procedures, a formal newsroom role in editorial leadership decisions, and published funding down to a low threshold.

Then, audience. A defined community rather than a general public, and a relationship the outlet owns rather than rents from a platform. In a period when intermediaries are actively removing referral traffic, direct audience relationships have shifted from a marketing asset to a survival asset.

Institutional support next. This is the part that cannot be solved by any individual newsroom, and where policy has to do the work: multi-year unrestricted core funding rather than project grants; pooled and endowed funding vehicles insulated from any single government’s foreign policy; favourable tax treatment for nonprofit journalism; shared back-office and legal infrastructure; and enforceable transparency in state advertising allocation, which remains the most powerful and least regulated instrument of capture worldwide.

Finally, reserves and realism about scale. Six to twelve months of unrestricted reserves, and an accurate sense of the size the organisation can sustainably be. A great many outlets have destroyed themselves by growing into a grant.

A healthy independent outlet is one that could survive losing its largest funder, its largest platform and its most prominent journalist – not comfortably, but survivably.

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

The post “Follow the invoices”: Marius Dragomir on how money shapes independent journalism appeared first on Novastan English.

For more than two decades, the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway existed mainly on planning maps and in diplomatic communiqués. First discussed in the late 1990s, the project was repeatedly delayed by disagreements over financing, track gauge and route.

That changed when construction was formally launched in Kyrgyzstan’s Jalal-Abad region in December 2024. A year later, a syndicate of Chinese banks signed a loan agreement securing the project’s main external financing.

For the first time, the railway is taking physical shape rather than remaining a proposal. But its long-term significance will depend on more than steel, concrete and tunnels. The three governments will also have to manage debt, land disputes and environmental risks, while determining where the railway fits within an increasingly complex network of Eurasian trade corridors.

The planned route runs for approximately 523 kilometres. It begins in Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang region, crosses into Kyrgyzstan through the Torugart Pass, continues through Arpa and Makmal to Jalal-Abad, and then reaches Andijan in Uzbekistan, where it connects with the existing Uzbek and wider Central Asian rail network.

China’s railway network uses the 1,435 mm standard gauge, while the existing networks of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan use the Soviet-derived 1,520 mm gauge. Under the CKU design, the standard-gauge line will extend from China into Kyrgyzstan as far as Makmal. There, a transshipment hub will transfer cargo to trains running on the broader 1,520 mm gauge for the western section of the route.

The Kyrgyz section carries most of the project’s engineering difficulty. Roughly 90 percent of the route through Kyrgyzstan passes through mountainous terrain. It will include 29 tunnels and 50 bridges with a combined length of around 120 kilometres – roughly 40 percent of the 304-kilometre Kyrgyz section.

A $4.7 billion bet

The total cost of the railway is estimated at around $4.7 billion.

Under the financing agreement signed in Bishkek in December 2025, approximately half of that amount – around $2.3 billion – is being provided through a 35-year loan from a consortium of Chinese banks led by the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China. The loan is to be repaid by the joint venture established to build and operate the railway.

The remainder is being provided as equity. The joint venture, registered under Kyrgyz law, is 51 percent Chinese-owned, while Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan each hold 24.5 percent.

Kyrgyzstan’s equity contribution amounts to approximately $609 million. Around half is to come from the state budget, while the other half is being financed through a $304.5 million preferential loan from China’s Export-Import Bank. The loan has a 25-year maturity, a five-year grace period and an annual interest rate of 1.5 percent.

Authorities hope to open the line by 2030, although the scale of the engineering works and the mountainous terrain leave significant room for delays.

Kyrgyzstan: transit opportunity, financial exposure

For Kyrgyzstan, the railway offers something the country has long lacked: a direct rail connection with China and the possibility of turning its geography from a constraint into an economic asset.

President Sadyr Japarov has said that the completed railway will transform Kyrgyzstan “into a transit power”. The government expects transit revenues, new jobs and a stronger role for the country in regional trade.

Around 5,000 people are currently employed on the Kyrgyz section, including some 2,000 Kyrgyz citizens. Supporting infrastructure, including substations and transmission lines, is also being built.

But the opportunity comes with financial exposure.

Kyrgyzstan already owed China’s Export-Import Bank around $1.5 billion in early 2026, making China the country’s largest single external creditor. The new railway adds further liabilities, even if the borrowing terms are relatively favourable.

This has prompted debate over whether the project could deepen Kyrgyzstan’s dependence on Chinese financing. The more useful question, however, is not whether the railway fits the contested label of a Chinese “debt trap”, but whether the revenues it generates will ultimately justify Kyrgyzstan’s additional exposure.

The loans have long maturities, low interest rates and grace periods intended to keep repayments manageable. Yet future debt servicing will depend in part on transit and logistics revenues that remain projections rather than receipts.

There is also a separate question over how much of the economic value generated by the railway will remain inside Kyrgyzstan. If warehousing, customs services, freight consolidation and other higher-value logistics activities are concentrated elsewhere, Kyrgyzstan could gain transit revenue while capturing a smaller share of the wider commercial benefits.

Uzbekistan: the logistics-hub strategy

Uzbekistan enters the project from a different position.

Andijan is already connected to the country’s national rail network, meaning Uzbekistan does not face the immense engineering challenge of building a new railway across the Tien Shan. Instead, the CKU line would extend Uzbekistan’s transport network eastward and give the country a more direct rail connection with China.

That fits a broader Uzbek strategy of turning the country into a logistics hub connecting East Asia, Central Asia and routes leading west and south.

Domestic infrastructure has already strengthened this position. The Pop-Angren railway links the Fergana Valley directly with the rest of Uzbekistan without requiring trains to cross neighbouring territory. Tashkent is simultaneously promoting other international routes, including the proposed Trans-Afghan corridor towards Pakistan and transport links across the Caspian towards the South Caucasus, Türkiye and Europe.

For Uzbekistan, the CKU railway is therefore not a stand-alone project. Its value lies in how it can connect with a wider network of existing and proposed corridors.

If those connections prove commercially viable, Uzbekistan could strengthen its position as one of the principal junctions between China and markets to the west and south.

Land, compensation and environmental costs

The railway’s benefits are national and regional, but many of its immediate costs are local.

Under the intergovernmental arrangements, Kyrgyzstan is responsible for a range of obligations on its territory, including social and environmental impact assessments, protection of cultural heritage, land acquisition, demolition and resettlement.

According to the Kyrgyz government, 214 homes are to be demolished to make way for the railway – 191 of them in Suzak district in Jalal-Abad region and the remainder in Naryn.

The government says that most affected owners have accepted compensation and that only a small number continue to dispute the amounts offered. However, some residents have publicly challenged the compensation process, while the use of compulsory acquisition has generated public resistance in affected communities.

Authorities have hired an independent company to assess the value of affected properties, but questions about transparency, participation and compensation remain sensitive as construction advances.

Environmental concerns are also becoming more visible.

Kyrgyz regulators have already fined contractors for environmental violations. Specialists have warned that large-scale tunnelling, blasting and earthworks in mountainous terrain can affect watercourses, habitats and local ecosystems.

Kyrgyz economist Kubat Rahimov has noted that mountain railway construction can require rivers to be redirected and concrete supports to be placed in watercourses, with potential consequences for surrounding flora and fauna.

Chinese and Kyrgyz officials have stressed environmental requirements in contractor selection and construction. But the scale of the engineering works means environmental management will remain an important test throughout the project.

A new route – but not a replacement for Kazakhstan

The strategic importance of the CKU railway comes less from the line itself than from the networks it can connect.

Once operational, it will create another overland rail route between China and Central Asia that bypasses Kazakhstan. From Uzbekistan, freight could continue west through existing networks towards Turkmenistan and the Caspian Sea, or connect with other routes feeding into the broader Trans-Caspian system towards Azerbaijan, Georgia, Türkiye and Europe.

Longer-term plans also envisage stronger connections south towards Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

But CKU should not be understood as a replacement for the established China-Kazakhstan rail corridors.

The new line will cross difficult mountainous terrain and will operate largely as a single-track railway. Kazakh analyst Marat Shibutov has argued that these physical constraints will limit the number and length of trains that can use the route.

The difference in scale is considerable. Rail freight between China and Kazakhstan exceeded 32 million tonnes in 2024, while the CKU railway’s eventual annual capacity is commonly estimated at around 15 million tonnes.

Its importance therefore lies less in displacing Kazakhstan than in adding another option to the Eurasian transport network.

For China, this means greater route diversification. For Central Asian states, it creates additional bargaining power and greater resilience if disruption affects one of the region’s existing corridors.

Who captures the gains?

The strategic gains are easiest to identify at state level.

China acquires another westbound route that reduces its reliance on Kazakhstan and gives Xinjiang an additional connection to Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan gains a direct railway link with China and the possibility of substantial transit revenues. Uzbekistan advances its ambition to become a major logistics junction linking China with Central Asian, Trans-Caspian and southern transport corridors.

Construction companies, banks and logistics operators are also among the project’s most immediate economic beneficiaries.

Whether those gains will spread more widely is harder to predict.

Construction jobs are temporary. Families along the route are already dealing with displacement and compensation. And Kyrgyzstan will benefit most if it can develop logistics, warehousing, customs and other services around the railway rather than serving primarily as territory through which trains pass.

The same question applies regionally. The CKU railway could redistribute trade flows and create new economic opportunities, but the value generated by the corridor will depend on border procedures, customs governance, freight costs and connections with other transport networks.

None of this diminishes the railway’s historic significance. After decades of delay, the project is finally moving from diplomatic ambition to physical infrastructure.

But the CKU railway is also the beginning of a longer contest over financing, environmental protection, compensation, logistics and regional competition. The outcome of that contest – more than the rails themselves – will determine who ultimately benefits from Central Asia’s newest trade route.

Kodirjon Eshonkulov

Kodirjon Eshonkulov is an independent researcher specialising in Central Asian geopolitics, transboundary infrastructure and relations with the European Union. He is a recent 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. His writing on Uzbekistan’s water scarcity and Middle Corridor policy has appeared in The Times of Central Asia and the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst.

The post China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway: Who wins from Central Asia’s new trade route? appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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

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

The reality is more complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

A region greener than its reputation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many parks does Central Asia have?

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

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

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

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

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

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

When ecotourism becomes mass tourism

Kazakhstan illustrates the contradiction particularly clearly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New parks, old capacity problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fire as the test of protection

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is supporting conservation?

Central Asian states are not dealing with these pressures alone.

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

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

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

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

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

Protection with people, not against them

Forests are rarely empty spaces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both are true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more on Novastan: Manas and the Making of Kyrgyzstan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A close English rendering would be:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is why I always return to these words:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more on Novastan: Violence against foreign students in Bishkek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The drivers behind the corridor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bag of rice and the problem of geography

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

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

The difficult question is how these goods arrive.

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

Each option carries disadvantages.

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

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

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

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

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

From pulao to plov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pakistan looks north

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karachi already works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gwadar offers something else

Gwadar has become the more powerful symbol.

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

Its significance also derives from China’s role.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gwadar and the Balochistan question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This creates a contradiction at the centre of the project.

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

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

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

What has actually moved?

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, actual shipments matter.

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

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

Afghanistan: bridge and bottleneck

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

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

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

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

This represents progress, but the terminology matters.

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

The political environment is no less difficult.

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

Such closures affect people far beyond foreign ministries.

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

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

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

Routes around the bottleneck

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet strategic commitment does not automatically produce commercial demand.

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

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

Central Asia already has alternatives

Pakistan is also entering a competitive market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Babur to border paperwork

The north-south connection is not new.

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

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

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

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

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

A gateway, but not yet a corridor

Pakistan has moved beyond promises, but only partly.

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

These are real developments.

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

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

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

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

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

That is when a diplomatic corridor becomes an economy.

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

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

As Kazakhstan prepares to elect its new Kurultai, women are becoming increasingly visible in political institutions across Central Asia. Their presence, however, still falls sharply as offices acquire greater executive, territorial and economic authority.

Kazakhstan’s political parties have selected their candidates for the country’s first election to the new unicameral Kurultai, scheduled for 23 August. Seven parties submitted lists before nominations closed on 13 July, and the Central Election Commission has begun registering them ahead of the formal campaign.

Read more on Novastan: Kazakhstan’s Next Elections: Between Reform and Managed Competition

The election will help determine the shape of Kazakhstan’s new political system following the entry into force of its new constitution. It also raises a more specific question: what place will women occupy in the redesigned parliament?

Kazakhstan requires at least 30 percent of candidates on each party list to belong collectively to three categories: women, people aged 35 or under, and persons with disabilities. The same combined threshold applies when seats are distributed. The quota therefore guarantees representation for the three categories together, but no fixed proportion specifically for women.

All seven parties say their submitted lists meet the legal requirement. But the combined nature of the quota makes the number of women selected – and their position within the lists – particularly important.

The question reaches beyond Kazakhstan. Across Central Asia, women are more visible in politics than they were a generation ago. Quotas and electoral reforms have increased their representation in parliament, while women now lead legislative chambers and hold prominent positions in governments and presidential administrations.

Yet the closer one moves towards executive command, territorial authority and control over strategic areas of government, the more rapidly women disappear.

Women may occupy a substantial share of parliamentary seats, work throughout public administrations and sit on local councils while remaining much rarer among governors, mayors, district heads, party leaders and the ministers responsible for finance, energy and security.

Central Asia has therefore made more progress in bringing women inside political institutions than in placing them at the head of those institutions.

Parliament is the easiest place to count

Parliamentary representation provides the clearest evidence of change.

Women currently hold 58 of the 148 filled seats in the lower house of Uzbekistan’s parliament, or 39.2 percent. In Kyrgyzstan, women occupy 30 of the 90 seats in the Jogorku Kenesh, exactly one third of the chamber. Tajikistan’s lower house includes 18 women among its 62 members, or 29 percent, while women hold 31 of the 122 currently filled seats in Turkmenistan’s Assembly, equivalent to 25.4 percent.

These figures compare favourably with the global average of 27.5 percent recorded at the beginning of 2026.

Kyrgyzstan offers the most striking recent example of how electoral rules can transform representation. Its November 2025 parliamentary election introduced a system under which each three-member constituency had to return at least one woman and at least one man. Women’s share of seats rose by 12.9 percentage points – the largest increase recorded in any country holding parliamentary elections in 2025.

The change is significant. It created a much larger group of female MPs and could eventually expand the pool of women with the experience and public profile required for ministerial, party and executive positions.

Read more on Novastan: The Vocabulary of Reform: Why Central Asia Is Reimagining Its Political Traditions

But the Kyrgyz election also illustrates the limits of using gender statistics in isolation. The vote took place amid restrictions on political competition and pressure on opposition figures and independent media. A parliament can become more gender-balanced without necessarily becoming more politically pluralistic.

The same caution applies elsewhere in the region. A large share of female parliamentarians is an important measure of inclusion, but it does not by itself reveal how independently MPs can operate, how candidates are selected or how effectively the legislature can scrutinise the executive.

Representation remains meaningful. It is simply not the same thing as power.

What quotas can – and cannot – change

Quotas matter because political recruitment rarely corrects its own inequalities.

Parties tend to select candidates from familiar professional, business and administrative networks. Across Central Asia, these networks remain heavily male, particularly at the senior levels from which candidates for powerful positions are drawn.

Women may also face unequal access to campaign financing, fewer opportunities to develop relationships with party leaders and local officials, and social expectations that continue to place a greater share of family responsibilities on them. Political life can expose women to forms of scrutiny and harassment that their male colleagues are less likely to encounter.

Well-designed quotas can interrupt this cycle. Kyrgyzstan’s experience shows that rules affecting actual election outcomes can produce rapid change. Candidate quotas alone are less reliable: parties may formally include women while placing them in weaker positions or giving them little influence over party decisions.

Read more on Novastan: Women’s Day in Kazakhstan: hundreds gather for rally in Almaty

Kazakhstan’s current system raises a different problem. By grouping women, young people and persons with disabilities within one 30 percent threshold, the law allows parties considerable flexibility in deciding how that quota is filled. A list can comply with the rule without allocating any predetermined share to women.

The first party list registered in the current campaign illustrates the limitation of the available statistics. Respublica’s list contains 75 candidates, of whom 38 – 50.7 percent – collectively belong to the three quota categories. The official figure does not say how many of those 38 candidates are women.

Quotas can open doors. They do not determine what happens after women enter the institution.

They cannot guarantee committee leadership, influence over legislation or access to senior party structures. Nor can they ensure that parliamentary experience becomes a route towards executive authority.

Women ministers – but in which ministries?

The number of women in government matters, but the portfolios they receive often reveal more than the total.

Across Central Asia, female ministers and senior officials are regularly associated with education, healthcare, culture, labour, social protection, family policy and women’s affairs. These are substantial fields of government, frequently involving large budgets and responsibilities that directly affect millions of citizens.

Yet women remain much less visible in defence, interior affairs, energy, finance, infrastructure and the institutions closest to presidential decision-making.

Read more on Novastan: Hitting the road: the first female bus drivers in Uzbekistan

This reflects a wider division in political life. Women are frequently considered appropriate leaders in sectors connected to education, care, families and social welfare, while coercive power, natural resources and macroeconomic management remain overwhelmingly associated with men.

The distinction should not be used to dismiss social-policy portfolios as unimportant. Education, healthcare and social protection are central functions of the state. The question is why women’s access to government so often remains concentrated within them.

Counting ministers without examining their responsibilities can therefore produce a flattering but incomplete picture. Five women managing social portfolios do not represent the same distribution of authority as women heading finance, energy, the interior ministry or a presidential administration.

The issue is not simply how many women sit around the cabinet table. It is which parts of the state they have been entrusted to direct.

Inside local government, but rarely at its head

The divide becomes even clearer at the local level.

International comparisons usually focus on women elected to local councils. But “local government” can describe several very different positions: councillors, municipal employees, deputy mayors, village leaders, district chiefs and regional governors.

Combining them under a single percentage obscures the difference between working within an administration and controlling it.

National and Russian-language sources across Central Asia show that women are far from absent from local political life. They serve in representative councils, work throughout municipal administrations and occupy deputy positions. In some countries, women are institutionally assigned responsibility for family or gender policy within local government.

But women’s representation falls substantially at the top of the territorial hierarchy.

Read more on Novastan: In Tajikistan, daughters-in-law face a hidden system of control

In Kazakhstan, women form a large part of the public administration and are represented in local maslikhats. Yet regional akim posts and the leadership of the country’s largest cities have remained overwhelmingly male. The gap between women’s presence inside local government and their access to the post of akim is much wider than parliamentary figures alone would suggest.

The distinction is particularly important because akims are not merely local administrators. They oversee budgets, land use, development projects, public services and the implementation of presidential policy across their territories.

Kazakhstan’s gradual introduction of direct elections for rural and some district-level akims may create new routes into executive office. The Central Election Commission publishes information on elections for villages, settlements, rural districts and district-level cities, making it possible to trace the number of female candidates and winners over time.

In Uzbekistan, women hold a significant proportion of seats in local Kengashes and are systematically represented within local executives through deputy hokim positions dealing with family and women’s affairs.

This arrangement guarantees women a place within regional, district and city administrations. But it also places them in a specifically gendered field of responsibility. A female deputy hokim dealing with family policy does not exercise the same authority as the hokim responsible for the administration as a whole.

The system therefore combines inclusion with occupational segregation: women are present, but their institutional role is often defined in advance.

Kyrgyzstan presents another striking contrast. Women now occupy one third of the national parliament, but they remain considerably less visible among mayors, district akims and the heads of rural administrations. Its parliamentary success has not yet been reproduced across the territorial executive.

Tajikistan also maintains substantial female participation within public institutions and local representative bodies, while women frequently serve as deputy chairs in regional, city and district administrations. Far fewer reach the post of chair, where general executive authority is concentrated.

In Turkmenistan, women hold around one quarter of parliamentary seats and the Assembly itself is chaired by a woman. But the leadership of the country’s regions, districts and principal cities remains heavily male. Official appointments can be traced through presidential decrees and reports of government meetings, although the information is rarely consolidated into a single accessible gender breakdown.

The regional pattern is therefore not that women are simply excluded from local government.

It is that they often enter as councillors, administrators or deputies while men continue to dominate the offices that command entire territories.

How political parties imagine women

Statistics reveal where women are. Political language can reveal what parties and governments expect them to do.

Across Central Asia, official programmes regularly discuss women in connection with maternal health, family welfare, employment, small businesses, poverty reduction and protection from violence. Female entrepreneurship has become an especially common theme, combining economic participation with an image of individual responsibility that rarely challenges the wider distribution of political power.

Women appear less frequently as a political constituency whose access to decision-making should be expanded across all policy areas.

The distinction is visible in the way political documents frame women. They may be presented as:

• mothers and carers;
• entrepreneurs and workers;
• vulnerable citizens requiring protection;
• guardians of family and national values;
• beneficiaries of social programmes;
• political leaders and autonomous decision-makers.

These categories are not mutually exclusive. Family policy, childcare and social protection directly influence women’s ability to enter politics and remain in public life.

The problem arises when women’s political legitimacy is explained primarily through their family role. A programme may speak extensively about “supporting women” while saying little about candidate recruitment, party leadership, campaign finance or access to executive office.

A genuine gender-mainstreaming approach would not confine women to a dedicated section on family or social affairs. It would examine how taxation, transport, regional development, agriculture, employment policy and state budgets affect women and men differently.

The manifestos submitted for Kazakhstan’s Kurultai election will offer an immediate test. Will parties discuss women primarily as families, workers and beneficiaries, or will they set out concrete proposals concerning women’s political careers and access to decision-making?

Prominent women – and different paths to influence

Central Asia has produced several highly visible female political figures, but their careers illustrate different forms of authority.

Roza Otunbayeva remains the region’s only woman to have served as head of state. She became Kyrgyzstan’s interim president following the 2010 uprising and oversaw a constitutional transition during an exceptionally turbulent period. Her career demonstrated that a woman could reach the highest office, but it did not establish a lasting regional pattern.

Tanzila Narbaeva, chair of Uzbekistan’s Senate, represents a different route to prominence. She has held senior state positions and has become closely associated with labour, social policy and women’s rights. Her role makes her one of the region’s most institutionally prominent female politicians.

Dunyagozel Gulmanova, the speaker of Turkmenistan’s Assembly, similarly occupies one of the country’s highest formal offices. Yet the limited autonomy of Turkmenistan’s parliament makes it difficult to equate formal rank with independent political influence.

Saida Mirziyoyeva has emerged as one of Uzbekistan’s most prominent public officials through senior roles connected to the presidential administration and her visibility in areas including communications, education, culture and social policy. As the daughter of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, she also holds a distinctive position within Uzbekistan’s highly centralised presidential system. Her profile reflects both the senior institutional responsibilities she has assumed and her proximity to the executive centre.

Read more on Novastan: Kirghizie : Des émirs féminins à la présidente

Her case should not be reduced either to a celebratory story of female advancement or to family ties alone. It instead illustrates how access to the highest levels of political influence in Central Asia can depend on a combination of official position, presidential confidence and proximity to the centre of power.

The region’s most visible women have reached prominence through very different paths: elections, administrative careers, parliamentary leadership, political upheaval and close association with presidential institutions.

A list of “famous women” therefore tells readers little unless it also asks where their authority comes from, what they control and whether their careers create opportunities for other women.

Beyond counting seats

Sustainable Development Goal 5 calls for women’s “full and effective participation” and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making. The wording is useful because “effective” participation cannot be measured by presence alone.

A fuller assessment must ask whether women:

• lead political parties;
• influence candidate selection;
• chair powerful parliamentary committees;
• control economic and security portfolios;
• govern regions, districts and cities;
• have access to campaign financing;
• can criticise executive policy;
• receive serious rather than gendered media coverage;
• can participate without harassment or intimidation.

It must also take account of the political environment itself.

A tightly controlled state can appoint women to senior offices while limiting the autonomy of all political actors. A more competitive system can still expose female candidates to discrimination, abuse and unequal access to resources.

Gender representation is therefore neither meaningless symbolism nor a complete measure of political openness. It is one important part of a larger political picture.

Read more on Novastan: Saïda Mirzioïeva, la fille du président à l’ascension politique fulgurante

Across Central Asia, the progress is real. Women occupy more parliamentary seats, electoral rules are beginning to alter candidate selection, and female officials have reached positions that would have been exceptional a generation ago.

But the gains are distributed unevenly.

Women are more likely to sit in a legislature than to govern a region. They are more likely to work inside a city administration than to serve as mayor. They are more likely to manage education or social policy than finance, energy or security. They are frequently praised as mothers, carers and community figures, but less often treated as unrestricted contenders for executive power.

Kazakhstan’s new Kurultai election offers a timely opportunity to observe this distinction.

The proportion of women elected on 23 August will provide one visible measure of change. The more consequential test will come later: which committees they lead, how much influence they exercise within their parties, and whether parliamentary representation becomes a route towards the institutions that command budgets, territories and strategic areas of government.

Across Central Asia, women have increasingly entered political institutions. The next question is whether those institutions are prepared to share power with them.

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

The post More Women in Central Asian Politics – But Where Is the Power? appeared first on Novastan English.

From Kazakhstan’s Kurultai to Uzbekistan’s Mahalla, governments across Central Asia are increasingly framing political reform through institutions rooted in local history rather than imported political models.

For much of the three decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, discussions about political reform in Central Asia were conducted using a familiar international vocabulary. Elections, constitutions, political parties, decentralisation, civil society and good governance became the dominant language through which both governments and international organisations described political development.

Also read on Novastan: Kazakhstan’s Next Elections: Between Reform and Managed Competition

Increasingly, however, another vocabulary is emerging.

Across the region, governments are reviving concepts such as the Kurultai, the Mahalla, the Halk Maslahaty and councils of elders. These institutions are rarely presented as alternatives to constitutional government. Rather, they are increasingly portrayed as ways of making governance more legitimate, more participatory and more deeply rooted in national history.

This raises an important question. Are Central Asian governments simply giving traditional names to modern institutions? Or are they gradually developing a distinct political vocabulary through which reform itself is imagined?

Also read on Novastan: The Lexicon of Kazakh Decolonisation

Political reform is not only about changing institutions. It is also about changing the language through which those institutions are understood and legitimised.

Beyond Imported Models

All political systems derive legitimacy from history as much as from law. France invokes the Revolution and the Republic. Britain draws upon Parliament and Magna Carta. The United States continues to frame politics through the language of its Founding Fathers.

Central Asia is increasingly doing the same.

Rather than presenting reform exclusively through concepts inherited from the Soviet period or borrowed from international governance discourse, governments across the region increasingly anchor their legitimacy in historical narratives that resonate more directly with domestic political traditions.

This does not necessarily represent a rejection of constitutionalism or modern statehood. Instead, it reflects an attempt to reconcile contemporary governance with locally meaningful historical references.

Also read on Novastan: “Alaqan”: Aida Adilbek’s decolonial documentary cinema

Kazakhstan: The Kurultai and the Listening State

Kazakhstan perhaps best illustrates this evolution.

Since the January 2022 events, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has promoted the idea of a “Listening State”, constitutional reform and the National Kurultai as central elements of the “New Kazakhstan”. Alongside referendums, electoral reform and strengthened consultative mechanisms, the Kurultai has become part of a broader effort to redefine how political authority is presented.

The Kurultai is neither a parliament nor an opposition forum. Rather, it functions as a consultative platform bringing together selected representatives of public life, academics, experts and civil society to deliberate on questions of national identity, reform and long-term development.

Whether viewed as meaningful consultation or carefully managed participation, the Kurultai illustrates an important point. It seeks legitimacy not only through elections or representative institutions, but also through an institution whose historical roots reach back to the political culture of the Eurasian steppe.

Also read on Novastan: Manas and the Making of Kyrgyzstan

Uzbekistan: The Mahalla Between Community and State

Uzbekistan offers a different but equally important example through the Mahalla.

Often translated simply as a neighbourhood community, the Mahalla is in practice much more than a local tradition. It plays a role in social assistance to families in need, neighbourhood mediation, community mobilisation, welfare delivery and the administrative interface between citizens and the state, including in sensitive areas such as the registration and monitoring of religious communities.

It also intervenes in family life, including disputes concerning marriage, divorce and domestic violence. In many cases, Mahalla-level mediation provides rapid community support. Yet it has also been criticised for encouraging reconciliation in situations of gender-based violence, discouraging divorce or prioritising family cohesion over the protection and autonomy of women experiencing abuse.

Under the banner of the “New Uzbekistan”, the Mahalla has been presented not as a relic of the past but as a cornerstone of modern governance. Its strength lies precisely in this dual nature: deeply embedded in everyday community life while simultaneously serving as an important interface between society and the state.

Kyrgyzstan: Contesting the Meaning of the Kurultai

If Kazakhstan presents the Kurultai as a consultative institution, Kyrgyzstan illustrates how the same historical concept can become an object of democratic contestation.

Successive debates over the People’s Kurultai have revolved around fundamental constitutional questions. Should it merely advise elected institutions? Should it exercise oversight? Does it strengthen democratic participation or risk creating a parallel source of political legitimacy?

Rather than providing definitive answers, Kyrgyzstan demonstrates that historical institutions themselves become arenas of political debate when adapted to modern constitutional systems.

Turkmenistan: Tradition as State Legitimacy

Turkmenistan represents perhaps the most institutionalised version of this regional tendency.

The Halk Maslahaty, together with councils of elders and the symbolic authority of aksakals, presents political authority through the language of continuity, wisdom and national consensus. These institutions are not designed as arenas of political competition. Instead, they frame presidential authority within narratives of collective consultation and historical legitimacy.

Their significance therefore lies less in electoral politics than in the symbolic vocabulary through which political authority is justified.

Tajikistan: Statehood, Unity and the Persianate Legacy

Tajikistan follows a different path.

Its political vocabulary is less centred on Turkic or nomadic traditions than on national unity, statehood and the Persianate cultural heritage. References to the Samanid dynasty, the Tajik language and the country’s civil war increasingly serve to anchor contemporary political authority within a narrative of historical continuity and national resilience.

At the local level, elders and community mediation continue to play important social roles. While these traditions are not usually presented as formal instruments of political reform, they nevertheless perform a similar function: linking governance to ideas of continuity, cohesion and collective identity.

A Region Reimagining Its Past

Taken together, these examples suggest a broader regional phenomenon.

Central Asia is not abandoning elections, constitutions or representative institutions. Nor is it simply returning to pre-modern forms of governance.

Instead, governments are increasingly combining modern constitutional structures with institutions, concepts and symbols drawn from selectively reinterpreted historical traditions. The result is neither a rejection of international governance norms nor a simple revival of the past. It is a process of institutional hybridisation.

Also read on Novastan: Dead in the Water: Has the Common Turkic Alphabet Failed to Boost Turkish Influence in Central Asia?

This trend also intersects with a wider romanticisation of Turkic, steppe and nomadic heritage. Institutions such as the Kurultai or the authority of aksakals are often presented as evidence of an ancient political culture rooted in consultation, consensus and collective wisdom. Such narratives can offer valuable alternatives to the assumption that political modernity must always be expressed through imported institutional models. Yet they also carry risks. Complex historical realities can be simplified into reassuring myths, while diverse and sometimes hierarchical political traditions become reimagined as timeless expressions of participatory governance.

Türkiye’s recent decision to replace “Central Asia” with “Turkestan” in parts of its school curriculum reflects this wider intellectual shift. Increasingly, the region is being described through historical and cultural concepts associated with the Turkic world rather than Soviet-era geography or externally imposed terminology. Whether one views this as decolonisation, cultural revival or geopolitical symbolism, it illustrates the growing importance of historical narratives in shaping contemporary political identities.

More Than Words

The emergence of this vocabulary reflects deeper transformations.

A generation with little or no memory of the Soviet Union has reached adulthood. Nation-building has entered a more mature phase. Governments increasingly seek legitimacy not only through economic development or institutional reform but also through narratives that resonate with national history and collective identity.

This does not mean these institutions necessarily produce more accountable governance. Traditional concepts can broaden participation, but they may also reinforce hierarchy, exclude dissenting voices or provide new symbolic foundations for existing power structures.

The question facing Central Asia is therefore not whether it is returning to its past. It is not. Nor is it simply reproducing Western constitutional models. Increasingly, the region appears to be constructing something in between: modern states that seek legitimacy through institutions inspired as much by their own historical narratives as by international governance norms.

Whether these hybrid models ultimately strengthen accountability, broaden participation or merely repackage existing political authority remains an open question. What is already clear, however, is that Central Asia is no longer only reforming its institutions. It is also reinventing the language through which political legitimacy itself is imagined.

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

The post The Vocabulary of Reform: Why Central Asia Is Reimagining Its Political Traditions appeared first on Novastan English.

At Central Asian airports, remittances do not always look like money. They can look like taped cardboard boxes arriving from Istanbul, oversized suitcases from Moscow, bags of clothes bought in Turkish markets, phones, cosmetics, fabrics, spare parts, children’s shoes or household appliances carried across borders as luggage. In a village in southern Tajikistan, they can look like a half-finished house paid for by a son working in Russia. In Kyrgyzstan, they can arrive as a notification on a banking app. In Uzbekistan, they can help pay for a wedding, medical treatment, a sibling’s education or the first stock for a small shop.

Remittances are often described as a financial flow. In Central Asia, they are closer to an invisible welfare state. They pay for food, debt, construction, school fees, ceremonies, medicine and daily consumption. They keep families afloat, sustain rural economies and reduce pressure on governments that cannot create enough jobs at home. But they also reveal one of the region’s deepest vulnerabilities: millions of households depend on wages earned elsewhere.

The dependence is most visible in Tajikistan. For years, Tajikistan has ranked among the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Money sent home by workers abroad has represented more than a third of GDP in recent years, and in some estimates even more. The numbers matter, but they do not fully capture the social reality. In parts of the country, especially poorer and rural regions, migration is not an exception but a stage of life. Young men leave after school, before marriage, after marriage, or when family debts accumulate. They go to Moscow, St Petersburg, regional Russian cities, construction sites, markets, warehouses and service jobs. Some return seasonally. Others stay away for years.

This absence has reshaped village life. In some Tajik communities, working-age men are missing for long stretches of the year. Women, grandparents and children manage daily routines, land, livestock, school, family ceremonies and household budgets. The money sent from Russia gives women responsibility, but not always authority. A wife may manage the household, but major decisions can still be made by an absent husband, his parents or the wider family. Migration can strengthen families by giving them income, but it can also strain marriages, delay return, create second households abroad or leave women carrying both economic and social burdens.

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Kyrgyzstan tells a related but slightly different story. Labour migration, especially to Russia and Kazakhstan, has long supported households across the south and in rural areas. Remittances once represented close to a third of GDP; more recently the share has fallen, partly because of economic diversification and changing migration patterns. Yet the money remains crucial. It pays for homes in Osh, Jalal-Abad and Batken, supports families in villages, and helps households survive when local wages are low. Unlike Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan also benefits from membership in the Eurasian Economic Union, which gives its citizens easier access to the Russian labour market than Tajik or Uzbek migrants. But this advantage does not remove the underlying dependence on external work.

Uzbekistan is different again. Its economy is larger and more diversified, so remittances make up a lower share of GDP than in Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan. But in absolute terms, Uzbekistan is one of the region’s major remittance recipients because of its population size and the large number of citizens working abroad. Uzbek migrants work in Russia, Kazakhstan, Türkiye, South Korea, the Gulf and increasingly other destinations. The state has tried to regulate labour migration more actively, including through organised recruitment and agreements with foreign employers. Still, much of the system remains family-driven: someone leaves, sends money, returns, leaves again, or helps another relative migrate.

Kazakhstan occupies another position in this regional economy. It sends migrants abroad too, but it is also a destination. Workers from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan come to Kazakhstan for construction, agriculture, services, markets and domestic work. In this sense, Kazakhstan is not only part of the remittance map as a country of origin, but also as a regional labour hub. Turkmenistan, by contrast, is harder to include with precision. Migration exists, but reliable data is limited and the country’s closed political environment makes the scale of remittances more difficult to assess.

Also read on Novastan: The paradoxes of migration from Tajikistan to Russia: an interview with Dr Elena Borisova

How the money is sent has changed dramatically. In the 1990s and 2000s, many families associated remittances with money-transfer offices and familiar brands such as Western Union, MoneyGram, Zolotaya Korona, Unistream or Contact. A migrant would queue, send cash, and relatives would collect it in a bank branch or transfer office. That world has not disappeared, but it has been transformed by sanctions, banking restrictions, digitalisation and the spread of smartphones.

Today, remittances often move through mobile banking apps, card-to-card transfers, e-wallets, national payment systems and fintech platforms. A migrant in Moscow can send money from a Russian bank account to a relative’s card in Dushanbe, Osh, Samarkand or Namangan. In Tajikistan, fintech and banking services such as Alif, Dushanbe City, Eskhata or other local platforms have become part of everyday financial life. In Uzbekistan, digital payment ecosystems such as Click, Payme, Uzum Bank and bank apps allow money to move quickly into household budgets. In Kyrgyzstan, mobile banking and card systems have made transfers faster and more routine.

This technical shift matters. When remittances arrive instantly, migration becomes part of daily household management. Money is no longer only a monthly transfer collected in cash. It can pay for groceries, utilities, school supplies, medicine or construction materials almost in real time. The migrant is physically absent but financially present. A father in Russia can still pay a bill in Tajikistan. A brother in South Korea can send money for a wedding. A son in Kazakhstan can support his mother’s medical treatment. Digital transfers make separation easier to manage, but they also normalise it.

Yet not everything moves through banking apps. Central Asia also has a “box economy”. Shuttle traders, relatives and small entrepreneurs carry goods across borders, especially through routes linking the region with Türkiye, Russia, Dubai and China. Istanbul is particularly important. Flights between Istanbul and Tashkent, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Almaty and other cities carry not only tourists and business travellers, but also small traders moving textiles, clothes, shoes, cosmetics and household goods. Some items are gifts. Others are for resale. Many fall somewhere in between. The result is a blurred line between migration, remittances and trade.

This matters because goods sent or carried home can function like remittances. A migrant may not send cash, but may bring phones, clothes or equipment that can be sold. A woman may travel to Istanbul, buy merchandise, and return to sell it in a bazaar or through Instagram and Telegram. A relative abroad may send goods through cargo services rather than money through a bank. In household economies where cash is scarce and small trade is common, goods are another way of transferring value.

The comparison with elite mobility is revealing. Central Asian governments also promote a very different kind of movement: students, civil servants and professionals sent abroad through state-backed scholarship schemes. Kazakhstan’s Bolashak and Uzbekistan’s El-Yurt Umidi belong to this world. They are designed to bring skills, networks and prestige back home. But they highlight the contrast at the heart of Central Asian mobility. Some citizens leave as future administrators, engineers or specialists. Many more leave as builders, drivers, cleaners, carers, traders or seasonal workers whose earnings keep households afloat.

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Russia remains the centre of this system, but it has become a more uncertain centre. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has needed migrant labour more than ever, especially in construction, manufacturing, logistics and services. Labour shortages have increased the demand for Central Asian workers. At the same time, migrants face a harsher environment: police checks, nationalist rhetoric, bureaucratic uncertainty, military recruitment pressure and social hostility. After the Crocus City Hall attack near Moscow in March 2024, Tajik migrants in particular reported more raids, deportations and difficulties entering Russia. Tajikistan even summoned the Russian ambassador over the treatment of its citizens.

This has exposed the fragility of a model built on migration. For Russia, Central Asian workers are necessary but politically vulnerable. For Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, migration reduces unemployment and brings in money, but it also exports social problems rather than solving them. If Russia tightens rules, deports workers or becomes less attractive, households across Central Asia feel the shock. If the rouble weakens, remittances lose value. If migrants face discrimination, the cost is borne not only by them, but by families waiting at home.

Destinations are diversifying. South Korea attracts workers through more regulated labour schemes. Türkiye combines labour, trade and cultural proximity. The Gulf has become more visible. Kazakhstan remains a regional magnet. Europe is still more difficult to access, but increasingly present in aspirations and small migration networks. But diversification is uneven and often expensive. For many families, Russia remains the most accessible option because of language, networks, transport links and relatively low entry costs.

The central question is therefore not whether remittances are good or bad. For many families, they are indispensable. They reduce poverty, finance education, build homes and open small businesses. Without them, social hardship would be much deeper. But dependence on remittances also allows states to postpone harder questions: how to create jobs at home, how to raise rural incomes, how to protect migrants abroad, how to support women left in charge of households, and how to turn money sent home into productive investment rather than only consumption.

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Remittances are Central Asia’s invisible welfare state, but they are also a warning. They show the strength of family solidarity across borders, and the weakness of domestic labour markets. They connect Tajik villages, Kyrgyz towns and Uzbek neighbourhoods to Moscow, Istanbul, Almaty, Seoul and Dubai. They arrive as bank notifications, cash transfers, cargo parcels and taped cardboard boxes. They build houses and empty villages. They pay for weddings and prolong absence. They keep economies moving, but they also reveal how much of Central Asia’s future is still being financed by people who had to leave.

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

The post Money, boxes and absent men: the hidden economy reshaping Central Asia appeared first on Novastan English.

This article is published as part of a partnership between AUCA and Novastan, which brings graduate students’ academic work to a wider readership. Through this collaboration, Novastan aims to highlight research produced in and on Central Asia, and to make academic perspectives more accessible to the public.

In 2024, nearly one in every two marriages in Bishkek ended in divorce. According to official statistics, 45.4% of marriages registered in the capital resulted in divorce, compared to the national average of 28.9%. Across Kyrgyzstan, divorce has become increasingly common over the past several years. The trend is gradual rather than dramatic, but it is consistent. While roughly one in four marriages ended in divorce several years ago, the figure is now approaching one in three nationally and nearly one in two in Bishkek.

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These numbers suggest that divorce is no longer unusual. Yet statistics tell only part of the story. Demographic change does not automatically transform social attitudes. A phenomenon can become common while still carrying stigma, judgment, and social consequences. This contradiction sits at the center of contemporary discussions about divorce in Kyrgyzstan.

This article is based on my own research that combined 31 survey responses, eight in-depth interviews, and an analysis of more than 200 social media comments. Rather than asking why people divorce, it explores how divorce is experienced, interpreted, and discussed in contemporary Kyrgyz society. It focuses not on legal procedures but on the social life of divorce: the conversations, expectations, judgments, and cultural meanings that continue long after a marriage ends.

One finding emerged repeatedly throughout the research: although divorce affects both spouses, its social consequences are often profoundly gendered. Women were more willing to discuss their experiences, while men frequently avoided conversations about divorce altogether. Existing scholarship suggests that emotional restraint remains an important part of dominant expectations of masculinity, while women are more often expected to explain, justify, and carry the social consequences of family outcomes.

Divorce is becoming statistically ordinary. Socially, however, it often remains a highly visible event, particularly for women.

Divorce rarely begins with leaving

If you listen carefully to how people talk about divorce, the story rarely begins with separation, it begins with staying.

Participants repeatedly described years of trying to preserve relationships before seriously considering leaving. They spoke about compromise, adaptation, and the belief that greater effort might eventually solve existing problems. Divorce did not appear in their stories as a first option. It appeared only after other possibilities had been exhausted.

“I kept thinking maybe I just need to try a bit more”.

“I thought it was my responsibility to keep the family together, even if it was hard”.

These statements reveal an important pattern. For many participants, especially women, the question was not whether they should leave but whether they had done enough to stay. The burden of proof worked in one direction, continuing the marriage required little explanation, ending it required justification.

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Several interviewees described spending years adapting to circumstances they considered temporary. They hoped that communication would improve, that family tensions would ease, or that personal sacrifices would eventually strengthen the relationship. In many cases, divorce was viewed as a last resort rather than a legitimate option among many possibilities.

What is particularly striking is how often responsibility was framed in gendered terms. Several women described feeling personally accountable for the success or failure of the marriage, even when difficulties involved both partners equally. When relationships deteriorated, many initially interpreted this not as evidence of incompatibility but as evidence that they needed to try harder.

As a result, divorce is rarely experienced as a single decision. Instead, it emerges at the end of a long process shaped by effort, repetition, compromise, and self-questioning. Before leaving comes staying, and before staying comes the belief that staying is what one is supposed to do.

Living under the question: “What will people say?”

Long before divorce becomes visible to others, many participants begin imagining how it will be perceived.

Several interviewees described preparing explanations before speaking to relatives or friends. Others delayed conversations entirely. What mattered was not only the existence of social reactions but the anticipation of them.

“You think it’s your situation, but very quickly it’s not just yours anymore”.

This finding resonates with the concept of “uyat”, often translated as shame. Scholars describe uyat as a mechanism through which social norms are maintained and behaviour is evaluated through the eyes of others. The concept extends beyond individual embarrassment. It reflects an awareness that personal actions can become subjects of collective evaluation.

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Within this context, divorce is rarely experienced as a purely private matter. Participants frequently described thinking not only about their own feelings but also about how neighbours, relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances might interpret the situation.

Survey results reflected this pattern clearly, reactions came from multiple directions simultaneously. Friends and colleagues were among the most frequently mentioned groups, followed by parents and relatives from the spouse’s side. Extended family members, neighbours, and members of the broader community also played important roles.

The significance of these reactions lies not only in what people say but in the awareness that divorce becomes socially visible. Once it becomes visible, it enters conversations. It becomes interpreted, discussed, and evaluated.

“The hardest part wasn’t the divorce itself, but the realization that people would see it and talk about it”.

Female participants discussed this anticipation particularly often. Many worried about how others would interpret their divorce. Concerns about reputation, respectability, and blame appeared repeatedly. Some feared being seen as selfish. Others worried that people would assume they had failed as wives or mothers.

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Men were not absent from these conversations, but they appeared less frequently as subjects of social scrutiny. Women, by contrast, often expected to be asked what they had done wrong, whether they had tried hard enough, or why they failed to preserve the marriage.

The result is that social norms become powerful not only because people enforce them but because individuals internalize them. Even before reactions occur, people anticipate them. In this way, the possibility of judgment becomes part of the divorce experience itself.

Family as the interpreter of what is right

While society creates a broader environment of expectations, family often becomes the institution through which divorce acquires moral meaning.

Participants frequently described conversations focused less on emotional well-being and more on responsibility, effort, and obligation.

“I felt like I had to prove that I didn’t just leave without a reason”.

Relatives encouraged participants to remain patient, think about the children, and continue trying to preserve the family. Yet these expectations were rarely distributed equally.

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Several women described being reminded of their duties as wives and mothers. References to patience, sacrifice, and endurance appeared repeatedly in their stories. Existing research from Kyrgyzstan and other patriarchal societies suggests that women are more likely to be viewed as guardians of family stability, making their decision to leave more visible and more likely to be questioned.

Importantly, these conversations were not always experienced as hostile. Many participants emphasized that relatives acted out of concern. Advice was often framed as support rather than criticism. Yet even supportive conversations frequently relied on the same assumptions: that preserving the family should remain the primary goal.

Participants also described being reminded of the years invested in the marriage, shared responsibilities, and the consequences of divorce for children. These arguments transformed divorce from a personal decision into a moral question. Leaving the marriage was not evaluated only in terms of individual well-being. It was evaluated in relation to obligations toward family and community.

This dynamic helps explain why divorce can remain socially difficult even when it becomes more common. Statistical frequency does not automatically remove moral expectations. The expectation to preserve the family continues to shape how divorce is interpreted and discussed.

The words that stay after

After the legal process ends, another dimension of divorce often remains: language.

Participants described encountering labels such as “razvedenka”, a term used for divorced women that frequently carries negative social connotations.

“When people say ‘divorcee’ it’s no longer just a fact. It’s as if everything about the person is immediately understood”.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of gendered perceptions appeared here. Participants repeatedly referred to labels used for divorced women, while comparable labels for divorced men appeared far less frequently in interviews and online discussions. This asymmetry suggests that women’s marital status remains more socially visible after divorce.

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The label does more than describe marital status. It often implies assumptions about character, responsibility, and social value. As a result, women frequently carry a social identity attached to divorce long after the legal process ends.

Several participants described subtle shifts in social interactions. They noticed changes in how people spoke to them, what questions they asked, and what assumptions they made. Some reported feeling excluded from certain social situations. Others described being treated as cautionary examples rather than individuals with unique experiences.

One participant recalled not being invited to a wedding because she was perceived as bringing bad luck. Whether such incidents are common or rare, they reveal how divorce can acquire symbolic meanings that extend beyond the event itself.

Language matters because it shapes perception. When a complicated life experience becomes reduced to a single label, the label often replaces the story behind it. People stop asking what happened and begin assuming they already know.

From city to region: different experiences of visibility

Participants consistently distinguished between urban and rural experiences.

“In villages everyone knows each other. In the city you can divorce and nobody knows”.

The difference is not necessarily one of values but of visibility. In smaller communities, personal information circulates rapidly through overlapping social networks. Divorce therefore becomes more public and more difficult to separate from one’s reputation.

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In cities such as Bishkek, greater anonymity creates more opportunities for privacy. Social expectations remain present, but they are reinforced less through constant observation.

Participants frequently described village life as a setting where personal events quickly become collective knowledge. In such environments, divorce is more likely to become a topic of discussion across different social circles. This visibility can intensify pressure and increase awareness of public judgment.

For divorced women, this visibility often carries additional consequences. Reputation remains closely tied to expectations surrounding marriage and family, making community scrutiny particularly significant.

These observations correspond with broader demographic trends. Divorce rates tend to be higher in urban areas than in surrounding regions. Although many factors contribute to this difference, participants frequently linked it to varying levels of visibility, anonymity, and social control.

A society between two models of marriage

Many participants compared their experiences with those of previous generations.

“They stayed together not because they were happy, but because that’s how it was supposed to be”.

Increasingly, younger generations evaluate relationships not only by their longevity but also by their quality.

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“We no longer look at how long people lived together, but at how they lived”.

Participants linked this shift to education, media exposure, and growing discussions about emotional well-being and healthy relationships. Access to new ideas has expanded conversations about personal boundaries, mutual respect, and emotional fulfillment.

Yet new ideas have not replaced older expectations entirely. Instead, both coexist.

This coexistence creates tension. Individuals may value personal well-being while simultaneously feeling pressure to conform to traditional expectations. They may believe that unhealthy relationships should end while also fearing the social consequences of divorce.

As a result, divorce occupies an ambiguous position in contemporary Kyrgyz society. It is becoming more common and, in some ways, more accepted. At the same time, it continues to carry stigma and remains subject to social judgment.

The findings reveal a central paradox. Divorce in Kyrgyzstan is becoming statistically ordinary, yet socially it often remains extraordinary.

The research also suggests that these consequences remain deeply gendered. While both men and women experience separation, women more frequently bear the burden of public evaluation, family expectations, social labeling, and responsibility for preserving relationships.

In this sense, divorce is not judged solely as the end of a marriage. It is often interpreted as a reflection of how successfully women are perceived to have fulfilled expected social roles.

Understanding divorce therefore requires looking beyond legal procedures and demographic statistics. It requires examining the cultural expectations, family dynamics, social norms, and gendered assumptions that continue to shape how separation is experienced and understood in contemporary Kyrgyzstan.

As divorce becomes increasingly common, an important question remains: will social attitudes eventually adapt to demographic reality, or will the gap between lived experience and public perception continue to persist? For now, the evidence suggests that while marriage is changing, the expectations surrounding it still carry considerable weight. That weight is often invisible, but for many divorced women, it remains impossible to ignore.

By Amaliia Abubakirova, Journalism student at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA)

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

The post The Hidden Weight of Divorce in Kyrgyzstan: Why Its Social Consequences Remain Gendered appeared first on Novastan English.

Central Asia is often described as the next frontier in the global race for rare earths. The reality is both more promising and more complicated. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and their neighbours do hold major reserves of critical raw materials, from uranium and copper to chromium, manganese, tungsten, antimony, graphite and rare earth elements. But much remains uncertain: some deposits are still under exploration, processing capacity is limited, and the most valuable parts of the supply chain remain outside the region.

What is already clear, however, is that governments, state mining companies and foreign investors are moving fast. The European Union has signed critical raw materials partnerships with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. American investors are looking at tungsten and rare earths. France is active in uranium. Development banks are financing graphite and mining governance. China remains the unavoidable reference point, because it dominates global refining and processing.

For Central Asia, the question is not only what lies underground. It is whether the region can avoid becoming simply another supplier of raw materials for richer industrial powers.

Why these minerals matter

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The term “critical raw materials” can sound technical, but the products they make possible are familiar. A smartphone contains copper, tungsten, rare earth elements and other metals. An electric vehicle depends on lithium, graphite, copper and sometimes cobalt. Wind turbines require steel, copper and powerful permanent magnets. Satellites, missiles, semiconductors and aircraft all need specialised metals.

Rare earths are only one part of the story. They include elements such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, cerium, lanthanum and yttrium. Some are used in permanent magnets for electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, missiles and electronic devices. Others are used in polishing, catalysts, lasers or specialised industrial applications.

But Central Asia’s strategic importance is wider than rare earths. Uranium is essential for nuclear power. Copper is needed for electrical grids, renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles and data centres. Graphite is used in battery anodes. Tungsten hardens steel and is used in cutting tools, aerospace and defence. Antimony is used in flame retardants, ammunition, batteries and semiconductors. Chromium and manganese are essential for steel. Titanium is used in aircraft, spacecraft and medical implants. Molybdenum strengthens steel used in pipelines, industry and defence. Gallium is important for semiconductors, radar systems and advanced electronics.

In other words, the issue is not only about “green energy”. It is also about industrial power, military technology, digital infrastructure and geopolitical dependency.

What is actually known

According to the OECD, Central Asia holds a significant share of global reserves of several critical raw materials. The region accounts for around 39% of global manganese ore reserves, 31% of chromium, 20% of lead, 13% of zinc, 9% of titanium, 6% of aluminium, and about 5% each of copper, cobalt and molybdenum.

Kazakhstan is the strongest player. It is already the world’s largest uranium producer and can export many of the materials included in the European Union’s critical raw materials list. Its known strengths include uranium, chromium, manganese, copper, titanium, tungsten, beryllium, gallium and rare earth potential.

Uzbekistan is also increasingly visible. The country has large copper resources, uranium, molybdenum, tungsten, gold-associated metals and rare metals. Its mining sector is dominated by national champions such as Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Complex, Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Company and Navoiyuran.

Kyrgyzstan has a smaller mining sector, but it is important for antimony, gold and rare earth occurrences. Tajikistan is also relevant for antimony, silver and rare metals. Turkmenistan remains the least transparent case, with public information still much thinner than for the rest of the region.

Kazakhstan’s rare earth moment

The strongest recent rare earth story comes from Kazakhstan. In 2025, the Kazakhstani authorities announced the discovery of the Zhana Kazakhstan deposit, reportedly containing more than 20 million metric tons of rare earth metals. The deposit is said to include neodymium, cerium, lanthanum and yttrium, with an average content of about 700 grams per ton.

The announcement attracted attention because neodymium and related elements are central to permanent magnets used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and defence technologies. But it should be treated with caution. A deposit is not the same as a mine. A mine is not the same as a processing industry. And processing rare earths is technically difficult, expensive and environmentally sensitive.

This is one of the main problems in the global rare earth race. China does not dominate only because it has resources. It dominates because it controls refining, separation and manufacturing capacity. For Central Asia, the real challenge is therefore not only geological. It is industrial.

The companies entering the race

In Kazakhstan, several national and foreign actors are already positioning themselves.

Tau-Ken Samruk, the state mining company, is expected to play a central role in exploration and strategic mineral projects. Kazatomprom remains the key uranium actor, while Eurasian Resources Group is important for aluminium, copper, cobalt and gallium. ERG has announced plans to produce gallium in Kazakhstan, a metal used in semiconductors, radar systems and missile guidance.

American interest is also growing. Cove Capital has been linked to tungsten projects in Kazakhstan, including Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty, in partnership with Tau-Ken Samruk. Tungsten is strategically important because it is used in hard metals, defence and industrial tools, while Western countries are trying to reduce dependence on China.

Sarytogan Graphite, active in Kazakhstan’s Karaganda region, is another example. Graphite is essential for battery anodes, especially in electric vehicles. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development acquired a stake in the company in 2024, showing that development banks are also entering the critical minerals field.

In Uzbekistan, the main actors are domestic state companies. Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Complex is central for copper, molybdenum and other metals. Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Company remains one of the country’s major mining giants. Navoiyuran, the Uzbekistani uranium company, has signed with France’s Orano to develop a new uranium mining venture.

These examples show that the critical minerals race is not only a matter of abstract geopolitics. It is already visible in company strategies, financing decisions and bilateral agreements.

Europe, China, Russia and the United States

For Europe, Central Asia is attractive because it offers potential diversification. The European Union signed a strategic partnership with Kazakhstan in 2022 on sustainable raw materials, batteries and renewable hydrogen value chains. In 2024, it signed a similar memorandum with Uzbekistan. The first EU-Central Asia summit in Samarkand in 2025 also placed critical raw materials within a broader agenda of trade, transport, energy and connectivity.

For the United States, Central Asian minerals are part of a larger attempt to reduce dependence on China in strategic supply chains. Interest in tungsten, rare earths, gallium and other materials fits into this broader competition.

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China remains the central actor, even when it is not directly mentioned. It is the world’s dominant processor of rare earths and many other critical minerals. Any Western strategy on Central Asian resources is therefore, implicitly or explicitly, about reducing China’s leverage.

Russia still matters through legacy infrastructure, Soviet-era geological knowledge, uranium links and regional influence. But Moscow is no longer the only external actor able to shape Central Asia’s mineral future. This is one reason why the topic is becoming politically sensitive.

The real bottleneck: processing

The most important part of the story is not extraction. It is processing.

A country can have uranium, copper, tungsten or rare earth deposits and still capture only a small part of the value. The highest profits and strategic leverage often come from refining, separation, metallurgy, battery components, magnets and advanced manufacturing.

This is where Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are trying to change the model. Both countries want more local value creation, not only raw exports. Uzbekistan is promoting mining reform and industrial processing. Kazakhstan is trying to position itself as a partner for value chains rather than just a supplier of ore.

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The risk is obvious. Central Asia has already experienced extractive economic models: cotton, oil, gas, uranium and metals have often generated revenue without creating diversified, high-value economies. Critical minerals could reproduce the same pattern under a greener label.

Environmental and social risks

Critical minerals are often presented as tools of the green transition, but their extraction can be environmentally damaging. Mining requires water, energy, chemicals and waste management. Rare earth processing can be particularly polluting if not properly regulated. In a region already facing water stress, desertification and fragile ecosystems, this matters.

There are also governance questions. Who benefits from new mining projects? How transparent are contracts? Are local communities consulted? Are environmental standards enforced? Do projects create skilled employment, or mainly export raw materials?

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For Central Asian governments, the opportunity is real. But so is the danger of a “green resource curse”, where global demand for clean technologies reinforces old patterns of dependency, opacity and environmental damage.

A starter pack for readers

The simplest way to understand the issue is this:

• Rare earths such as neodymium and dysprosium are used in magnets for electric vehicles, wind turbines and defence technologies.
• Uranium is used for nuclear power.
• Copper is used in electrical grids, renewable energy, electric vehicles and data centres.
• Graphite is used in battery anodes.
• Lithium is used in rechargeable batteries, though Central Asia is not yet a major global lithium centre.
• Cobalt is used in batteries and aerospace alloys.
• Tungsten is used in hard metals, cutting tools, aerospace and military equipment.
• Antimony is used in flame retardants, ammunition, batteries and semiconductors.
• Chromium and manganese are used in steelmaking.
• Titanium is used in aircraft, spacecraft and medical implants.
• Molybdenum is used in high-strength steel.
• Gallium is used in semiconductors, radar and advanced electronics.
• Beryllium is used in aerospace, satellites, telecommunications and defence systems.

This is why Central Asia’s mineral base is suddenly being watched so closely. The region is not only sitting on obscure metals. It may hold some of the materials needed for the energy transition, digital technologies and modern defence industries.

More than a mine?

The coming years will show whether Central Asia can turn critical minerals into a development opportunity. The region has the resources. It has growing diplomatic attention. It has national mining companies and foreign investors willing to engage.

But the decisive question is whether Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and their neighbours can move beyond extraction. Without processing, transparency, environmental standards and local value creation, the new critical minerals boom could simply repeat older patterns of dependency.

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Central Asia is not yet the next rare earth superpower. But it is becoming an important region in the global competition for critical raw materials. For the region itself, the challenge is to ensure that what lies beneath the ground helps build something above it.

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

The post What lies beneath Central Asia? Rare earths, critical minerals and the new race for resources appeared first on Novastan English.

Some books are interesting because they tell a story. The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini is interesting because it captures an entire world at the moment before it disappears.

Through the eyes of a clever, frightened and observant boy in late nineteenth-century Bukhara, Sadriddin Aini turns childhood into history. Village schools, sandstorms, canals, cholera, hunger, superstition, poetry, cruelty and humour all pass through the same narrow lanes.

The result is more than a memoir: it is a portrait of old Central Asia, and a quiet explanation of why that world could not remain unchanged.

Why the past refused to become propaganda

Originally published in Tajik as Yoddoštho / Ёддоштҳо between 1949 and 1954 in Stalinabad (now Dushanbe), The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini, appeared in English in 1998. Published at a time when Soviet writers were often expected to celebrate factories, production and Stalinist progress, Aini instead returned to childhood. That choice matters because the book is not a nostalgic retreat into the past. It is Aini’s attempt to explain how a child of old Bukhara became a modern writer, reformer and Soviet-era national figure.

Also read on Novastan: “Hafiz Saifullaev’s prose marks a fruitful turning point in Russian-language Tajik literature”

The book begins in rural Bukhara, among village celebrations, halva workshops, shifting sands, irrigation canals, family disputes, religious lessons, fasting, fairs, harvests and death. Aini writes about the physical struggle of everyday life: villagers fighting sandstorms, digging canals, enduring hunger and disease. But he also captures the mental universe of the time: fear of demons, belief in exorcism, the authority of religious teachers, the prestige of Persian poetry and the weight of inherited customs.

One of the most striking things about the book is that it does not read like simple Soviet propaganda. Aini certainly condemns the old order. Poverty, superstition, arbitrary power, clerical abuse and social cruelty appear throughout the book. However, the book does not present history as a clean march from darkness to socialism. Lenin is absent; Saadi is present. Poetry often matters more than ideology.

That ambiguity made Aini’s work powerful, but also politically delicate. Aini was not an anti-Soviet dissident, and Yoddoštho was published in the Soviet Union. The memoirs could be read as anti-feudal, anti-clerical and pro-enlightenment, which made them acceptable to Soviet editors. Yet his writing sat uneasily within Soviet nationality policy. It preserved a Persianate world of Islamic learning, village ethics, oral memory and Bukharan social complexity. It helped build modern Tajik identity while also describing a shared Central Asian past that did not fit neatly into Soviet national borders.

Bukhara between Tajik and Uzbek memory

The renewed relevance of The Sands of Oxus lies in the fact that Central Asia is once again debating its past. Jadidism, Bukhara, colonialism, Soviet modernisation, Islamic heritage, national identity and the relationship between Uzbek and Tajik cultural histories are all being reconsidered.

Aini stands exactly at that intersection. He was born in what is now Uzbekistan, wrote across Tajik and Uzbek contexts, and described Bukhara, a city central to both national narratives. His memoirs are therefore not only personal recollections. They are an archive of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central Asian life: village customs, schools, professions, beliefs, family structures and social hierarchies.

This is why the book speaks so strongly today. It recalls a Central Asia before national borders hardened, when Persianate culture, Turkic speech, Islamic education, local identities and imperial pressures overlapped in complicated ways.

In Tajikistan: a national classic

In Tajikistan, Aini is foundational. He is not simply a writer, but a national institution: the father of modern Tajik prose, a builder of the literary language, and a figure through whom Tajik Soviet and post-Soviet identity have been narrated.

For Tajik readers, Yoddoštho is more than an autobiography. It is almost a national archive. Through Aini’s childhood, Bukhara becomes part of a recoverable Tajik past. Village life, old schools, artisans, religious figures, intellectuals and reformers all become elements of a literary homeland.

The book therefore carries emotional and cultural weight. It preserves a world that Tajik national memory claims as central to its own formation.

In Uzbekistan: a shared but sensitive legacy

In Uzbekistan, Aini’s reception is more layered. He belongs to Uzbek literary history as well: he lived in Bukhara and Samarkand, wrote in Uzbek contexts, and engaged with the Jadid and Soviet transformations of the region.

Yet his legacy is sensitive because his work also helped define a distinct Tajik literary identity, often by presenting Persian-speaking Bukhara as a central part of Tajik cultural history. In a country where Bukhara is one of the great symbols of Uzbek heritage, this creates a complex overlap rather than a simple national ownership.

Today, as Uzbekistan revalorises Jadidism and revisits its early modern intellectual history, Aini can be read in a new way: not only as a Soviet Tajik monument, but as a Bukharan intellectual whose life crossed the Uzbek-Tajik divide.

Before borders hardened

Beyond Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, The Sands of Oxus is less of a national classic, but it remains an important regional text. In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, Aini does not occupy the same canonical place as national literary figures such as Abai, Chingiz Aitmatov or Makhtumkuli. Yet his memoirs illuminate a shared Central Asian problem: how traditional authority, religious education, rural poverty, imperial pressure and Soviet modernisation interacted before borders and national canons became fixed.

Also read on Novastan: Central Asia through the lens of… Behzod Boltayev

The book is therefore valuable not only for Tajik or Uzbek readers, but for anyone interested in how Central Asia entered the twentieth century.

A past too complex for Soviet ideology

The Sands of Oxus is not a fast book, but it is a rewarding one. Its power lies in detail: a schoolroom, a sandstorm, a canal, a death, a rumour, a poem, a beating, a feast. Through these fragments, Aini turns childhood into a map of pre-Soviet Central Asia.

The book refuses to belong neatly to one category. It is Tajik and Bukharan, Persianate and Soviet, autobiographical and political, nostalgic and accusatory. That refusal is exactly what makes it so relevant today. At a time when Central Asian states are reassessing Jadidism, Soviet rule, colonial legacies and the ownership of cities such as Bukhara, Aini’s memoirs are a reminder that the region’s past cannot be divided cleanly into today’s national narratives. They show a world where Persianate culture, Islamic learning, rural poverty and early reformist politics overlapped before Soviet borders turned shared histories into competing national legacies.

Maya Ivanova, Author for Novastan-English and Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Bukhara Before the Border: Aini and the Politics of Tajik-Uzbek Memory appeared first on Novastan English.

Few works of literature are as politically alive as the Kyrgyz epic Manas. It is not simply an old poem, nor only a heroic tale recited by specialists. In Kyrgyzstan, Manas is a national reference point, a school subject, a monument, an airport name, a political symbol and a language of identity. It tells the story of a people gathering around a hero, but it also helps explain how modern Kyrgyzstan imagines itself: independent, mountainous, resilient, threatened from outside, and always searching for unity.

A story too large to stay in the past

The origins of Manas are difficult to date precisely because the epic was transmitted orally for centuries before being written down. Kyrgyz tradition often presents it as a very ancient work, sometimes linked to events of the ninth or tenth century; Western scholarship has been more cautious, pointing out that the earliest references are much later and that parts of the plot may reflect political realities from later centuries. In 1995, four years after independence, Kyrgyzstan turned Manas into a state-building event: the UN General Assembly formally recognized the year as the millennium commemoration of the Kyrgyz national epic.

What is certain is that Manas belongs to a living oral tradition. It was performed by manaschi, epic reciters who chant the story without musical accompaniment and who are respected not just as performers, but as carriers of memory. UNESCO describes the trilogy of Manas, Semetey and Seytek as a work that expresses the historical memory of the Kyrgyz people and tells of the unification of scattered tribes into one nation.

What the epic is about

At its core, Manas is a heroic epic about unity, warfare, migration, leadership and survival. The central figure, Manas, is a warrior who gathers and defends the Kyrgyz people against powerful enemies. The wider trilogy continues through his son Semetey and grandson Seytek, turning the story into a multi-generational saga of struggle, succession, loyalty, betrayal and renewal. The trilogy is a narrative about Manas’ uniting the forty scattered Kyrgyz tribes against attacks by powerful neighbours and leading his people through the Altai and toward the Alai region.

Also read on Novastan: « Manastchy » : l’âme kirghize dans toute sa poésie

The epic is enormous, but its political grammar is clear: a people survive when they unite; a leader is legitimate when he protects the community; enemies are both external and internal; and identity is forged through memory, sacrifice and struggle. This is why Manas is not read merely as literature. It is often treated as a national code.

Why Manas matters so much to Kyrgyz people

For Kyrgyz people, Manas is important because it offers a deep narrative of origins and continuity. It links modern Kyrgyz identity to a heroic past, to nomadic culture, to the mountains, to clan memory and to the idea of unity among the “forty tribes”, a motif also echoed in the forty rays of the Kyrgyz flag. This matters especially because Kyrgyzstan, like other post-Soviet states, had to build a national story after 1991. Manas offered something older than the Soviet Union and broader than a modern state border. It gave independent Kyrgyzstan a heroic genealogy, a cultural anchor and a language of sovereignty. In a young state marked by regional divisions, political upheaval and economic vulnerability, the epic’s promise of unity has remained attractive.

Manas in school and education

Yes, Manas is studied in Kyrgyzstan. It appears in school education and in higher education through literature, cultural history and “Manas studies” or Manasovedenie. In schools with the Kyrgyz-language teaching Manas is studied in eighth grade, in schools with the Russian-language teaching – in ninth grades and the eleventh grade in courses on Manas studies.

The epic is also used more broadly as a source of moral and civic education. Research on Kyrgyz education links Manas to the upbringing of schoolchildren and youth, especially through themes of cultural heritage, wisdom, moral values and national identity. At university level, the University of Central Asia has offered a “Manas Studies” course examining the epic’s role in the formation and development of Kyrgyz society and national identity.

Also read on Novastan: Le président kirghiz a signé le décret pour renommer Djalal-Abad en Manas

This educational presence is important politically. Teaching Manas is not just about preserving folklore. It is about shaping citizens through a national story.

Manas in everyday life

In Kyrgyzstan, Manas is everywhere. It appears in statues, street names, school lessons, cultural festivals, public ceremonies, tourism branding, official speeches and national iconography. Performances by manaschi remain part of social gatherings, celebrations and ceremonies. Traditional Manas performances take place at social gatherings, community celebrations and ceremonies, preserving the practice as a living form rather than a museum object.

The epic is also physically present in Bishkek. The statue of Manas on Ala-Too Square places the hero at the symbolic centre of the capital. Streets, institutions and cultural initiatives carry his name. Bishkek’s main airport was named “Manas” at the suggestion of Chinghiz Aitmatov, in honour of the hero of the Kyrgyz national epic. Manas functions as the country’s most recognisable national symbol. Even people who have never read or heard the full epic know Manas as the emblem of Kyrgyz strength, unity and sovereignty.

The political uses of Manas

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Manas acquired a new political function. Kyrgyzstan was no longer a Soviet republic but an independent state, and nation-building had to reconcile two potentially competing ideas: Kyrgyz ethnic identity and citizenship in a multi-ethnic country. For ethnic Kyrgyz, independence meant becoming the titular people of a sovereign state. For many Russians, Uzbeks, Germans, Jews and other minorities, it could also create a sense of sudden displacement within a country they had long considered home.

President Askar Akayev therefore used Manas carefully. He presented the epic as a unifying source of national values, but avoided turning it into an openly exclusionary ethnic ideology. This was politically important after the Kyrgyz-Uzbek clashes in the Ferghana Valley and amid fears that Russians, Germans and Jews would leave the country in large numbers. Drawing on the Soviet-era recognition of Manas as cultural heritage, Akayev promoted seven principles inspired by the epic as a basis for independent Kyrgyzstan’s national ideology. These principles softened the epic’s more divisive themes, including ethnic conflict, religious antagonism and hostility toward China, and instead emphasised ethnic pride, friendship among nationalities, hard work, respect for nature, humanism, nobility and forgiveness.

Also read on Novastan: L’épopée de « Manas » : encyclopédie de l’histoire et des mœurs kirghizes

This political use has continued in different forms. After 2010, the promotion of Manas intensified partly because of heritage politics, including concern over China’s 2009 UNESCO inscription of the Manas tradition associated with Kyrgyz communities in China. More recently, Manas has returned as a tool of state symbolism under President Sadyr Japarov. In September 2025, Japarov signed a law renaming Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan’s third-largest city, as Manas. 

This is where the epic becomes current affairs. Invoking Manas allows political leaders to wrap infrastructure, centralisation, regional development, sovereignty and national unity in heroic language. It can inspire cohesion, but it can also serve as political theatre: a way to claim legitimacy by presenting contemporary decisions as continuations of an ancient national mission.

A national epic, but also a political risk

The political power of Manas lies in its flexibility. It can be used to promote unity in a divided country, cultural pride in a globalised world, and sovereignty in a region shaped by Russian, Chinese and broader geopolitical influence. But the same flexibility can also narrow public debate.

When leaders invoke Manas, they borrow the authority of the nation’s deepest cultural symbol. That can make ordinary political choices appear sacred or inevitable. A city renaming, a state-building project, a moral campaign or a geopolitical message can be presented not merely as policy, but as loyalty to ancestral memory.

Also read on Novastan: Un conteur récite l’épopée de Manas pendant plus de 14 heures pour battre le record du monde

This is the double edge of Manas. As an epic, it preserves a people’s imagination. As a political symbol, it can elevate power above criticism.

Why Manas still matters today

Manas remains valid today because Kyrgyzstan still faces many of the questions the epic dramatises: how to hold a diverse society together, how to defend sovereignty between larger powers, how to balance regional identities, how to define leadership, and how to transform memory into a future rather than a museum.

Also read on Novastan: Manas, de la tradition orale au jeu vidéo

The epic’s message of unity is still powerful, especially in a country with strong regional identities and a history of political upheaval. Its warnings are also still relevant. Manas shows that unity cannot be reduced to slogans. It depends on justice, loyalty, wise leadership and the ability to hold a community together without erasing its differences.

That is why Manas should be read not only as a monument of Kyrgyz culture, but as a living political text. It is the story Kyrgyzstan tells about where it comes from. It is also one of the languages through which power in Kyrgyzstan still explains where the country should go.

Maya Ivanova for Novastan

The post Manas and the Making of Kyrgyzstan appeared first on Novastan English.

Kyrgyz director Tolomush Zhanybekov turns his camera toward the people and places often left outside the frame: cemetery guards, pensioners selling their belongings, children facing humiliation, brothers bound by care and solitude. Born in Balykchy and based in Kyrgyzstan’s contemporary film scene, he builds a cinema rooted in roads, bazaars, industrial landscapes and social margins.

His films The Road, Birdsong, Balyk and Barakholka reveal a Kyrgyzstan far from the usual images of mountains and nomadic traditions. Through silence, fragile encounters and carefully chosen locations, Tolomush Zhanybekov explores loneliness, vulnerability and the quiet dignity of people living on the edges of public attention.

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In an interview with Novastan, the young filmmaker discusses his childhood, his relationship with cinema, the places that shape his work, the ethics of filming vulnerable people and the emergence of a new generation of Kyrgyz directors seeking to show an authentic, unvarnished Central Asia.

Novastan : Could you tell us about your journey into cinema? When did you first feel that you wanted to become a director?

Tolomush Zhanybekov : Since childhood, my main friend was the television. I hardly ever left the house: I watched all kinds of films and, figuratively speaking, spoke with the screen. Stories for my own films were constantly being born and developing in my head. Most likely, the desire to become a director came from that childhood solitude.

You were born in Balykchy, and several of your films seem very closely connected to specific places. Could you tell us where The Road, Birdsong, Balyk and Barakholka were shot, and why you chose those particular locations?

My graduation film, The Road, was shot in the city of Balykchy, where I was born and grew up. It is a very textured, visually rich place. Birdsong was shot in the village of Kaji-Say, in the Issyk-Kul region. In Soviet times, it was a thriving industrial town where coal was mined, and there was a uranium tailings site nearby. Today, there is a persistent feeling that time froze there somewhere in the 1990s. Balyk and Barakholka were shot in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

For readers discovering your work for the first time, could you briefly present each of these films in two or three sentences: what is it about, where does it take place and what drew you to this story?

The Road: The story of a 65-year-old cemetery guard. He lives and works far from the noise of the world, and in this silence, alone with those who have passed away, he paradoxically feels much more comfortable than among the living.

Birdsong: A documentary about two brothers. The elder brother finds it difficult to go outside, and the only person who looks after him is his younger brother, who goes to the village centre every day in search of casual work. Their meeting at the end of the day is the most important thing in their lives. Since childhood, I had been interested in what it means to have a brother, how such relationships work, how brothers support one another and what they talk about. One day, in a small village, I met these protagonists and understood that I had to make a film about them.

Barakholka: A documentary about pensioners. Every weekend, near my home, they set up a street market where they sell their old, vintage belongings. I have always been fascinated by watching them, their daily lives and the past they are selling off.

Balyk: A short fiction film about a teenager who stutters heavily, which makes it difficult for him to communicate with others. It is partly a personal story, as I faced this problem myself.

For readers who do not know Kyrgyzstan well, how would you describe places such as Balykchy, Bishkek, Barakholka or Kaji-Say, geographically, socially and personally?

Balykchy is the city of my childhood, in northern Kyrgyzstan, surrounded by picturesque but harsh landscapes. A place of winds and memories.

Bishkek is the city where I grew up. It is a noisy capital, where people from all regions come in search of a better life, creating a bubbling social melting pot.

Read also on Novastan: Kirghizstan : les déchets radioactifs continuent de polluer les eaux de Kadji Saï

Kaji-Say is an abandoned industrial trace of a bygone era, squeezed between the mountains and Lake Issyk-Kul, where history itself seems to have come to a standstill.

Barakholka is not just a market, but a living open-air social archive, where people’s destinies are revealed through old objects.

How important is location to you in the process of making a film? Do you first find a place and build a story around it, or does a character appear first, after which you look for the right space?

In my work, location is a fully-fledged character. It conveys the atmosphere of the film in its own right. Sometimes I see a textured place, and a plot immediately begins to take shape within it. And sometimes I work the other way around: first the image of a character is born, and then I look for a space that could organically receive that character or emphasise their inner state.

Your films often focus on people who usually remain outside public attention: children, pensioners, solitary figures, people living or working in difficult social conditions. Why are you drawn to these kinds of protagonists?

In contemporary Kyrgyz cinema, these layers of the population are undeservedly neglected. They are rarely shown on screen. Mentally, all my characters are united by a deep inner loneliness, and it is precisely this vulnerability, this invisibility to the wider world, that attracts and moves me most.

In The Road, the road seems to be something more than just a physical space. What does it mean to you?

You are right. During my student years, I first came face to face with death: every autumn during my four years of study, someone in my family died. This tragic cycle forced me to think constantly about death and even, subconsciously, to wait for it. It may sound naive now, but at the time I desperately wanted to make sense of and understand a person’s departure. From these experiences came the metaphor of the road as a path between worlds, a transit from life into non-being.

Silence and atmosphere also play a very strong role in The Road. Is silence important in your cinema?

Yes, absolutely. To return to the previous question: to make sense of such fundamental things as life and death, silence was vitally necessary for me. In addition, as a director, I feel very close to a pure visual language. I like it when thoughts, feelings and dramaturgy can be conveyed to the viewer without unnecessary words, through pauses and the atmosphere of the frame.

Birdsong was your first documentary film. What pushed you towards documentary cinema?

By nature, I am a contemplative person. Since childhood, I could sit for hours and openly observe people, although now, of course, I do it more carefully and tactfully. Documentary is the foundation of cinema. It always contains genuine organic life, living human faces and real stories that cannot be artificially constructed within the framework of a fiction script.

How did you meet the protagonists of Birdsong, and how did you manage to build trust with them?

I was walking through the centre of the village and sat down at a bus stop, observing the local residents. From a distance, a man wearing a kalpak approached me. We began talking. From what he told me, I understood that he lived with his elder brother, was constantly looking for any kind of casual work and spoke about him all the time, with immense tenderness and anxiety. I suggested that he appear in a film, he agreed, and I immersed myself in their fragile, closed world.

Read also on Novastan: Vie et mœurs des déchets uraniques centrasiatiques

The trust between us probably emerged on the level of pure energy. My original intention was to make this film with great love and respect for them. I think the viewer feels that warmth through the screen and through the way the camera angles were chosen.

When you film real people, especially vulnerable people, how do you decide what can be shown and what should remain off camera?

It is always an extremely difficult inner dilemma. In documentary cinema, you very quickly become close to your protagonists. They become dear to you, and subconsciously there is a strong desire to protect them, to defend them, to show them from their best side.

During filming, I gather a lot of material. At the editing stage, when the final story is being built, I always mentally put myself in their place: how would I feel if this personal information became public? Here it is critically important to sense the fine line between artistic truth and ethics, to understand what needs to remain for the dramaturgy and what must be hidden from the viewer’s eyes forever.

In Balyk, the main character is a boy who lives between school, work at the market, loneliness and humiliation. Where did this story begin?

The word Balykchy means “fisherman” in Kyrgyz. In childhood, our family lived by cooking and selling fish. In addition, during my school years, I stuttered very badly. I remember that in the lower grades we had speed-reading tests: we had to read as many words as possible in one minute. In second grade, my classmates read between 40 and 65 words, while because of my stutter I managed only nine.

It was an enormous stress and trauma. At home, alone, I could read completely normally. I would memorise texts in advance, but as soon as I stood in front of the class, everything collapsed. The plot of Balyk grew out of these painful personal memories.

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What does the title Balyk mean to you? Is the fish a symbol in the film?

Yes, the fish is a key symbol here. When you cut or kill a fish, it does not make a single sound. Its “facial” expression does not change; you cannot read pain or emotion in it. My main character is locked in the same way in his muteness and loneliness in the face of a cruel outside world. He suffers silently, like a fish.

The market in Balyk is not only a workplace, but an entire social world. What did you want to show through this environment?

I wanted to capture our authentic bazaar. It is a unique space, always incredibly interesting to be in and to observe: all kinds of types, destinies, tragedies and comedies collide there. Moreover, the East is historically and culturally tied to bazaar culture. It is its heart and the mirror of society.

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Balyk is a Kyrgyz-French co-production. How did this international collaboration come about, and did it influence the development of the film or its reception?

In 2024, a Script Lab for authors from Central Asia was organised in Kazakhstan as part of the Post Space film camp. My mentor was Katya Khazak, a producer from France. At that time, I already had a rough cut of Balyk. I showed her the material, she liked the film very much and offered to help complete it at a high international post-production level.

Our project was supported by the European fund Creative Europe MEDIA. Thanks to this collaboration, we shortened and significantly improved the editing, and carried out professional sound correction and colour correction. This greatly raised the artistic level of the film.

Could you explain the title Kesilish joldogu pensionerlerdin maekterinen (Barakholka)? How would you translate it into English or French?

In English, the title translates as: Conversations of Pensioners at a Crossroads. The title contains a double meaning: the physical crossroads of the streets where they stand, and the crossroads of life at which they find themselves in the twilight of their days.

Why did you decide to film pensioners at Barakholka? What did you want to convey through their conversations?

I wanted to reveal their deep social loneliness, but at the same time to show their desperate, touching attempt to remain part of society, to be among people. Through their everyday conversations, sometimes sad, sometimes paradoxical, an astonishingly sincere and unembellished life emerges.

The outside view of Kyrgyzstan often focuses on mountains, nomadic traditions and impressive landscapes. Your films, by contrast, turn more towards everyday life, urban or semi-urban spaces, roads, markets and social margins. Is this a conscious choice?

Yes, it is an entirely conscious artistic choice. Our country is incredibly full of contrasts. Of course, we have majestic mountains and postcard landscapes, but there is another side of reality too: the everyday life of ordinary people, urban outskirts, the underside of society. This underside is still very little explored and rarely conveyed in cinema, and it is precisely this that I want to reveal to the viewer.

How would you describe the current generation of young Kyrgyz directors?

We are a generation of sincere and, in a good sense, naive directors. There is an enormous, pure desire burning in us to make films despite any difficulties and to rediscover for the world an authentic, non-ceremonial Central Asia.

Also read on Novastan: « Kourmanjan Datka » : l’épopée féminine, nationaliste et historique de la reine de l’Alaï

What are the main difficulties independent filmmakers face in Kyrgyzstan today: funding, distribution, education, censorship, access to audiences?

I would say that the main problems are specialised education and an acute lack of infrastructure for film production. Making films in co-production with other countries is especially difficult. We still lack the legal and technical foundations for easy international partnerships.

Do you feel part of a broader Central Asian cinema, or do you primarily see your work in the context of the Kyrgyz film scene?

I think I feel more like part of a broader regional, Central Asian cinema. Our countries have very similar historical backgrounds, common social problems and a mentality that is close in spirit, so we understand each other’s pains and joys very well.

What would you like international audiences to better understand about Kyrgyzstan through your films?

I do not have any specific educational or didactic goal. My task as a director is simpler and, at the same time, more difficult: to tell human stories honestly. If, through these local stories, foreign viewers can empathise with the characters, then the universal language of cinema has worked.

For Novastan readers who would like to discover your work: where can they watch your films? Are The Road, Birdsong, Balyk and Barakholka available online, shown only at festivals, or can they be watched on request?

Unfortunately, the films are not freely available online for now. They are currently in an active period of their life, so legally they can mainly be seen at film festivals.

Are there any upcoming screenings or festivals where viewers in Kyrgyzstan, France, Europe or online will be able to see your work?

No screenings are planned for the very coming months. The main wave of screenings and festival premieres is expected closer to autumn, when the new global film season traditionally begins.

Also read on Novastan: « Centaure » : film poétique et critique sur la société kirghize

If readers discover your work through this interview, which film would you advise them to start with, and why?

I would recommend watching them in strict chronological order, starting with the 2022 work. That way, viewers will be able to see not only the stories of the characters, but also my personal evolution as an author, the development of my directorial language and my cinematic thinking as a whole.

What are you working on now, and would you like to make a feature film in the future?

Right now, I am working on my next short film. At the same time, I am taking a big step forward: I am writing the screenplay for my debut feature film.

Interview by

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

Maya Ivanova, Contributor at 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 Through roads, markets and silence: Tolomush Zhanybekov films Kyrgyzstan’s unseen lives appeared first on Novastan English.

On 10 February, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov dismissed Kamchybek Tashiev, head of the State Committee for National Security, or GKNB, and a central figure in power for several years. His removal, followed by dismissals targeting those close to him in several institutions, brings an end to an alliance that had structured Kyrgyzstan’s political-security apparatus.

The ruling tandem that had dominated Kyrgyzstan for more than five years has finally cracked. On 10 February, by dismissing Kamchybek Tashiev, head of the State Committee for National Security, by decree, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov did not merely end a long-standing collaboration with his closest ally. He also regained control of the coercive apparatus that had until then been one of the pillars of the system established since he came to power in 2020.

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For more than five years, Kamchybek Tashiev had been the most powerful man in Kyrgyzstan after the president, overseeing the main anti-corruption investigations. He appeared publicly during spectacular arrests and embodied an increasingly omnipresent security apparatus. A co-founder of the Mekentchil party and a key actor in the political upheavals that brought the tandem to the top of the state, he had gradually turned the security services into a pillar of the regime. In a political system marked by the personalisation of power, his influence extended far beyond the institutional framework of his position.

Under his leadership, the GKNB became one of the nerve centres of the state. Its prerogatives expanded, its resources increased and its visibility grew. Internal promotions, the allocation of housing to officers, nepotism and direct interventions in the management of sensitive economic cases: Kamchybek Tashiev had gradually built a network of authority and loyalty that structured the regime’s balance.

Kamchybek Tashiev, security architect of Sadyr Japarov’s regime

Kamchybek Tashiev began his political career in 2007 as minister of emergency situations. After disagreements with former Prime Minister Daniyar Usenov, he left his post in 2009, before siding with the opposition during the Kyrgyz revolution of 2010. These events enabled him to found his party, Ata-Zhurt, in 2006, and to win the early parliamentary elections of 10 October 2010 with 15.89% of the vote and 28 seats.

He thus returned to political life as a member of Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Council from 2010 to 2013. In 2014, Ata-Jurt merged with Respublika in an attempt to win the 2015 parliamentary elections, but this merger displeased Kamchybek Tashiev, who left the party and joined Mekenchil, which he had co-founded with Sadyr Japarov on 16 June 2010 and which brought together many members of Ata-Jurt.

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The parliamentary elections of 4 October 2020 once again turned into a conflict extending beyond the political sphere, with major demonstrations from 5 to 15 October 2020. Amid this new socio-political chaos, former Prime Minister Sadyr Japarov and his supporters, including Kamchybek Tashiev, increased pressure on former President Sooronbay Jeenbekov, who resigned on 15 October 2020. As a result, Sadyr Japarov became acting president and appointed Kamchybek Tashiev head of the GKNB on 16 October that year.

Also read on Novastan : Condamnation d’Almazbek Atambaïev : retour sur le parcours mouvementé des anciens présidents du Kirghizstan

His influence was also visible during the border clashes with Tajikistan in April 2021 and September 2022. As head of the GKNB, the body overseeing the border guards, Kamchybek Tashiev played a central role in managing operations and ceasefire negotiations. These crises strengthened his image as a strongman guaranteeing Kyrgyzstan’s territorial integrity.

Dismantling extended to several institutions

Tashiev’s departure has been accompanied by a wider reorganisation. Within the GKNB itself, his deputies for state security were removed, and a new acting head was appointed without delay.

President Japarov then stated that an Investigative Committee would be created and would report directly to the president, while the GKNB’s area of competence would be reduced. The agency will henceforth focus on intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism and organised crime, Radio Azattyq noted. “It is necessary to depoliticise the State Committee for National Security and free it from the influence of political parties, ideologies and various stakeholders,” assured Jumgalbek Shabdanbekov, the new GKNB chief appointed on 19 February, in an interview with the local newspaper Vecherny Bishkek.

But the reshuffle goes far beyond the security apparatus alone. The minister of natural resources, ecology and technical supervision, Meder Mashiev, as well as his deputy minister, Bolot Jusupbekov, were dismissed. In the south of the country, considered Tashiev’s electoral stronghold, mayors, notably in Osh and Manas, are being replaced.

Also read on Novastan : Les pistonnés : portraits au vitriol des enfants des présidents kirghiz

Even more significantly, people directly close to Kamchybek Tashiev have been targeted. While the parliamentary mandate of his brother, Shaiyrbek Tashiev, has not so far been called into question despite rumours of dismissal, the head of the transport prosecutor’s office, Nurgazy Matisakov, who is Tashiev’s nephew, has been removed. These decisions reflect a desire to neutralise not only one figure, but an entire family and political network.

A shift ahead of the presidential election

This rupture comes one year before the 2027 presidential election, in a climate marked by criticism of the economic and energy situation, as well as by a petition calling for an early vote.

Also read on Novastan : Le Kirghizstan s’inquiète d’une crise énergétique majeure cet hiver

Presidential statements, however, have sought to ease tensions. On 13 February, the head of state told the state news agency Kabar that there was no division between his supporters and those of his former ally, assuring that his “friendship with Kamchybek Tashiev will continue”. A few days later, he added: “We remain friends. But he will not resume public office. He needs to rest and focus on his health.”

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The end of the tandem between Sadyr Japarov and Kamchybek Tashiev thus marks a phase of increased concentration of power in the hands of the presidency. It remains to be seen whether this centralisation will durably strengthen the stability of Kyrgyzstan’s system, or whether it will reveal new fault lines within the political elites.

Lenny Cabrol Noto
Contributor 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 Kyrgyzstan, after the dismissal of the GKNB chief, the political-security apparatus is reshuffled appeared first on Novastan English.

The visit to Bishkek on 26 February by EU sanctions envoy David O’Sullivan reflects the European Union’s tougher stance on the circumvention of sanctions targeting Russia in the region. Kyrgyzstan could thus become the first country targeted by heavy counter-sanctions from Brussels.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Central Asia has become a strategic link in parallel trade flows allowing Russia to keep its economy afloat. Faced with this situation, the European Union is sharply toughening its tone, placing Kyrgyzstan on the front line of its new pressure strategy.

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Bishkek’s role as a re-export platform is now documented. Analyses show a surge in Kyrgyz imports from China, notably trucks, components and industrial parts, which are then re-exported to the Russian market.

According to internal European Commission documents cited by Kazakh media outlet Kursiv, imports of so-called “priority” goods, often dual-use civilian and military products, from the European Union to Kyrgyzstan have increased by around 800% since 2022. Over the same period, Kyrgyz exports to Russia have jumped by around 1,200%, fuelling suspicions of re-export to the Russian market.

This circuit allows Moscow to bypass Western restrictions, while undermining international rules on trade transparency.

Activation of the “anti-circumvention” tool

For the first time, Brussels is considering deploying its most coercive instrument: the sanctions anti-circumvention tool. This mechanism, which would be part of a twentieth sanctions package – delayed by Hungary’s veto – would make it possible to ban the export of certain products to a third country without having to provide irrefutable proof of their re-export, as reported by Reuters.

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The targeted measures could include export bans on industrial machine tools, including CNC machines, and radio equipment, as well as action against the financial sector. A Kyrgyz cryptocurrency company is reportedly under scrutiny for allegedly supporting financial interests linked to Russia.

Discussions are focused instead on targeted measures, Radio Free Europe explains, such as listing Kyrgyz companies or financial institutions if they facilitate the circumvention of restrictions against Moscow.

A major diplomatic crisis

This Western pressure is considerably straining relations between the EU and Bishkek, at a time when the country is also trying to move closer to the United States. David O’Sullivan, the EU’s special envoy for sanctions, personally urged the local authorities to change their policy.

“We are not asking Kyrgyzstan not to have trade relations with Russia. We are only asking that this trade relationship not involve the deliberate circumvention of our sanctions,” he stressed during his visit to Bishkek on 26 February.

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Kyrgyzstan’s response has so far been direct, according to sources quoted by the British daily Financial Times: the country reportedly threatened to take the European Union to international courts if such sanctions were imposed. These allegations were immediately denied by the Kyrgyz government, local media outlet 24.kg reported in early March.

Roman Fuster
Contributor 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 Kyrgyzstan in the EU’s sights for the twentieth sanctions package against Russia appeared first on Novastan English.

Used as a symbol throughout Central Asia, whether by sports clubs or municipalities, the snow leopard enjoys great popularity. This helps ensure its protection, as it is included on the international list of endangered animals.

The snow leopard, or irbis, is a large feline living in the mountains of Central and South Asia. Today, the species is on the Red List: only between 3,500 and 7,500 individuals remain worldwide. Officially, snow leopards have the status of a “vulnerable species”, one level below the “endangered” category.

In 2013, in Bishkek, during the Global Snow Leopard Conservation Forum, International Snow Leopard Day was established. It is celebrated on 23 October. On this date, experts and environmentalists organize various events dedicated to the protection of snow leopards.

Fergana News has decided to make its modest contribution to raising awareness about the preservation of rare species and is publishing an article prepared using data from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

From Afghanistan to Siberia

The irbis is a large mammal of the feline family, living exclusively in cold climates. The snow leopard has a long, slender body which, including the head, can reach 100 to 130 centimetres in length. Its thick coat, marked with dark ring-shaped spots, provides excellent protection against frost.

Its distinctive feature is its long, bushy tail, which measures between 80 and 105 centimetres. The predator weighs between 22 and 40 kilograms.

The geographical range of snow leopards is fairly vast, covering around 1.2 million square kilometres. It stretches from the Hindu Kush range in eastern Afghanistan, through the Pamir, the Tian Shan, the Karakoram and the Himalayas, as far as the Altai and the Sayan Mountains in southern Siberia.

These animals are therefore found in the territory of four former Soviet republics of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. These predators favour large prey, especially ungulates: sheep, mountain goats, argalis, roe deer and deer. But they also sometimes hunt smaller animals, such as ground squirrels and even birds.

A habitat threatened by human presence

The snow leopard fears humans. This is why, in some regions, it is called the ghost of the mountains. The animal lives at altitudes between 1,000 and 4,000 metres — more rarely up to 6,000 metres — above sea level and hides in caves and hard-to-reach valleys. It is practically impossible to encounter one. If one appears on a camera trap, it is already considered a real stroke of luck.

However, humans have managed to create problems even for these hermits. The issue is poachers engaged in the smuggling of wild ungulate horns. Illegal hunters reduce the food resources available to snow leopards.

Read also on Novastan : Sauver la panthère des neiges : comment les scientifiques luttent pour la survie d’une espèce

Shepherds also contribute to the problem. Because of pasture degradation, they are forced to move higher into the mountains, thereby driving irbises out of their usual habitats. Moreover, the felines remain predators and sometimes attack domestic livestock, risking becoming targets themselves for armed shepherds.

Climate change, linked to rising temperatures and the drying-up of glacial water sources, is also forcing the predators to migrate in search of more suitable habitats. All these factors have brought the snow leopard practically to the brink of extinction. Fortunately, some committed people understand the importance of preserving the mountain ecosystem, including its rare species.

A group of volunteers

In an area of the Tian Shan range in Kyrgyzstan, a group of volunteer rangers has formed and taken responsibility for monitoring 380 square kilometres in one of the harshest regions of Central Asia. Braving freezing cold and armed poachers, these volunteers strive to protect the prey and habitat of snow leopards.

As one of them, Baatyrbek Akmatov, explains, he and four of his companions are responsible for monitoring the Baiboosun community reserve. Many of these activists are former hunters and understand the scale of the damage caused to nature by wildlife smuggling, including of ibexes.

“We decided to launch this initiative, otherwise we will lose everything,” Baatyrbek Akmatov says of his group’s activities. “I don’t want to show children on my mobile phone that we once had this environment, these animals. I want them to be able to see them with their own eyes.”

The volunteers are supported by international organizations, in particular UNEP, as well as by local partners such as CAMP Alatoo and the Ilbirs Foundation. The project also receives financial support from Germany’s International Climate Initiative.

Changing mindsets

According to UNEP, the Kyrgyz government could not afford to pay the rangers, but gave them the authority to manage the territorial corridor and arrest poachers. In addition, experts from the United Nations Programme trained the volunteers and provided them with the necessary equipment.

At first, many local residents were outraged by the patrols. Shepherds feared they would be banned from grazing their livestock. But over time, according to Baatyrbek Akmatov, residents began to change their mindset, becoming aware of the importance of environmental protection.

UNEP’s partners became actively involved, training the population in agricultural practices less vulnerable to climate change. As a result, many people turned to beekeeping, cheese production or greenhouse farming, which helped increase their incomes.

The results of the patrols, the rangers say, are already being felt. For the first time in almost two decades, wild boars have returned to the region. Mountain goats, which had almost disappeared from sight, are now regularly observed. Deer antlers have also been discovered in the mountains, a sign that they too may be returning. Finally, recently, 12 snow leopards were spotted in and around the Baiboosun reserve.

Strict measures to protect the leopard in Uzbekistan

It should be emphasized that the protection of irbises is ensured at state level in all the former Soviet Central Asian republics where this feline species lives. It is listed in the Red Books of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

In addition, the authorities provide for penalties for hunting rare animals. For example, in Uzbekistan, poachers are prosecuted under the provisions of a government decree on damage to wildlife. According to this text, the fine for harming irbises amounts to 3,000 base calculation units — 1.2 billion soms, or 85,600 euros — for citizens of the republic, or 400,000 dollars — 343,000 euros at the Central Bank exchange rate — for foreigners.

Read also on Novastan : Deux léopards des neiges photographiés près du grand lac d’Almaty, une première en plus de 30 ans

Furthermore, in 2021, the Uzbekistani authorities adopted the Action Plan for the Conservation of the Snow Leopard in the country, covering the period up to 2030.

The snow leopard as a national symbol

The snow leopard is also remarkable for its imprint on culture and sport, becoming a widespread element of heraldry. The irbis is a national symbol for two countries. In Kazakhstan, this predator acquired this status during the presidency of Nursultan Nazarbayev. It was explained that, since ancient times, this rare animal had embodied power, strength and prosperity.

Indeed, the snow leopard appears on the national currency. It is represented on the 10,000 tenge banknote from the 2003 issue and on banknotes of the same value issued in 2024. The stylized high-mountain feline was also the official mascot of the 2011 Asian Winter Games, which were held in Almaty and Astana.

Since July 2025, the snow leopard has also appeared on new Kazakh passports, in holographic form, helping to protect the document against counterfeiting.

An ornament for many coats of arms

In December 2023, the president of Kyrgyzstan, Sadyr Japarov, signed a decree recognizing the snow leopard as a national symbol of the country. It was stated that the species was not only part of the country’s natural heritage, but also a symbol of national identity, strength and freedom, widely present in the republic’s culture, folklore and heraldry. Recognizing the irbis at such a high level was intended to unite the efforts of the authorities, scientists, civil society organizations and international organizations to protect and promote these felines.

The irbis appears on the coats of arms of certain cities, districts and republics, and not only in Central Asia. The animal has thus long adorned the heraldic emblems of Russian regions such as Tatarstan and the Republic of Khakassia, as well as districts of the Krasnoyarsk region, including Ermakovsky and Shushensky.

Read also on Novastan : Le léopard des neiges, symbole national de la diplomatie verte au Kirghizstan

As for Central Asian cities, the spotted feline has been incorporated into Almaty’s coat of arms since July 1993. It holds in its mouth a branch bearing eight apple blossoms, corresponding to the number of districts in the municipality.

Since January 1994, a highly stylized snow leopard has appeared on Bishkek’s main symbol. According to the emblem’s description, the irbis is drawn at the centre of an azure circle inside a white square. The whole composition is set against the background of a fortress silhouette, and beneath the broken line of the mountains appears the name of the Kyrgyz capital.

An ideal symbol for athletes

In July of the same year, the coat of arms of Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, was adopted, with the snow leopard also playing the central role. According to artist Grigory Ulko, who designed the emblem, he was inspired by a legend according to which an irbis descended from the mountains to bless the builders during the founding of the city. To better understand the structure of the predator’s muzzle, the artist drew his domestic cat, Prokhor.

One could say that the snow leopard leads a sporting life, so much do its strength and endurance attract the founders of sports clubs. For example, in the Kontinental Hockey League, two teams have chosen to refer to the animal in their names: Ak Bars Kazan and Barys Astana. The trend also extends to summer sports: in 2024, in the Kyrgyz city of Karakol, a team named Bars was created, with, of course, a magnificent irbis as its logo.

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But the most famous link between the big cat and sport is undoubtedly the title of “Snow Leopard”, awarded to seasoned mountaineers since the Soviet era, more precisely since the 1960s. Since 1990, this prestigious title has been awarded to those who have climbed five “7,000-metre peaks” of the former USSR: two peaks in the Tian Shan and three in the Pamir.

Such is the irbis: rare, discreet, but emblematic, especially in Central Asia.

The editorial team of Fergana News

Translated from Russian by Aruzhan Urazova and from French by Mathieu Lemoine.

The post How Central Asia is trying to protect the snow leopard appeared first on Novastan English.

Last April, Kyrgyzstan’s special forces carried out heavy-handed raids on two of Bishkek’s most popular electronic-music bars. Expecting a hotspot of drugs and illicit activity, officers found instead a young, diverse nightlife community carving out one of Bishkek’s few remaining safe spaces for self-expression. After a year marked by escalated repression and shrinking civil liberties in Central Asia’s “island of democracy,” Novastan sits down with two leading figures from the targeted venues to discuss how their communities endure as Kyrgyzstan slides deeper into authoritarianism.

Kyrgyzstan has long been seen beyond Central Asia as a rare abode of democratic values in a region dominated by post-Soviet authoritarianism. When Sadyr Japarov, the country’s current president, suddenly rose to power in the wake of the 2020 Kyrgyz Revolution, he swore to the nation from day one to protect the Kyrgyz people’s cherished liberty. Four years later, the president himself has emerged as the largest threat to Kyrgyzstan’s already fragile democracy.

Japarov’s governance in just the first two years of his rule landed Kyrgyzstan on the 2022 Freedom House Index’s list of “consolidated authoritarian regimes.” In 2024, Kyrgyzstan earned a position on the CIVICUS Monitor’s “watchlist of countries experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.” At the heart of Japarov’s consolidation of power lies the systematic erosion of Kyrgyzstan’s already flimsy freedom of expression. Japarov has frequently deployed his power over state institutions to stifle dissent in both political and civic spheres. An unlikely casualty of the crackdown has been Bishkek’s emerging techno scene.

Japarov’s Techno Raids

On the night of 14 April 2024, Kyrgyzstan’s special forces, working alongside local police, raided Ailan Bar to conduct a search for illegal substance use at electronic music gatherings. In addition to heavy firearms and drugs tests, the police brought along a professional camera crew to document the raid for their social media page. The following night, another raid was done at PLUR, another of Bishkek’s techno institutions, in a similar fashion. Both bars are central to Bishkek’s electronic music scene and known throughout the city for providing above all else a “safe space” for all partygoers, regardless of background. 

In both instances, officers drew their weapons and forced the men present to lie on the floor with their hands behind their backs while they searched the venues. According to RFE/RL, police assaulted several people at Ailan Bar, striking one in the leg and another in the stomach.

In both raids, police were noted to be genuinely surprised with the minimal amount of illicit substances they were able to sniff out. At Ailan Bar, officers opened the raid with a lecture on “irresponsible drug use,” a message that fell flat when only three of the dozens present tested positive for cannabis use. The police statement regarding that night notes they were only able to find “a ready-made cigarette with narcotics” and a packet of a legal anti-epilepsy medication.

The lack of significant narcotics did not surprise Chyngyz, one of Ailan Bar’s directors and part-owners. “Our community is quite healthy in that sense,” he asserted. Chyngyz explained that like himself, the vast majority of those who enjoy techno music in Bishkek do not use illegal substances at their parties. “I think if people truly love electronic music, they don’t need drugs.”

Read More on Novastan: Inside Bishkek’s Metal Boom: Portrait of a Music Pioneer in Kyrgyzstan

Unlike most patrons to Bishkek’s techno venues, some of the police involved with the raid were later revealed to be engaging in illegal activities themselves. “In the fall, I read in the news that one of the investigators present at the raid got charged with corruption,” Chyngyz stated.

New Wave of Kyrgyz Populism Threatens Self-Expression

For both partygoers and staff, the raids were an unprecedented shock. Up to that point, both bars had been cooperative with local police and had never faced any prior incidents. Both the heavy-handed police tactics and the state’s post-raid messaging indicated that the operations were directed from the highest levels of government.

The raids aligned neatly with Japarov’s emerging populist agenda to enforce traditional Kyrgyz values. “In the government’s eyes, young people must study and start a family. There’s no room for alcohol and dancing,” Chyngyz states. 

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In addition to sensationalizing illegal drug usage in electronic music spaces, authorities have begun to frame Bishkek’s techno community as a conduit for LGBTQ+ influence, portraying it as a danger to Kyrgyz youth due to the bars’ inclusive policies. LGBTQ+ youth in Kyrgyzstan already face severe state and social repression, and to many, Bishkek’s electronic music parties are the only spaces where they are fully allowed to be their truest selves. This, to those running Bishkek’s techno institutions, is a red line they will not back down from. “Keeping our environment safe for all is our main responsibility,” Chyngyz states firmly.

Repression Necessitates Adaptation

After the raid, PLUR bar began adjusting its strategies to deal with the new wave of state repression. Constrained by resources and now under the state’s watchful eye, the bar’s operators refused to surrender to their opposition. “We hadn’t done a lot yet. We still hadn’t shown everybody what we really want to create,” says Innokentii, PLUR’s creative director. “No one has told us no yet.” 

Ailan Bar, too, remained committed to their vision to provide safety and a safe space for their community in the months following the raid. However, their brazen commitment to provide for and defend the LGBTQ+ community had to transition to more covert operations if it were to continue in the new repressive climate. Prior to the raids, Chyngyz used to host regular “queer nights” at Ailan Bar. He is firmly committed to continuing these events, but recognizes that Ailan Bar’s public advertising must now be more strategic. “It is all about being discreet. Queer people must know that they are welcome here, but also the wrong people must not know that queer people are welcome.”

Read More on Novastan: Queer life under pressure in Kyrgyzstan

Since the raid, Ailan Bar has closed its physical location and transitioned to a model where the organization pops up for one-time events across Kyrgyzstan. The bar’s organizers note that they feel safer in Kyrgyzstan’s more remote regions away from the state’s watch. 

PLUR has since taken on a new identity as QQ Bar and moved into a smaller space closer to the city center. Innokentii sees the move as an opportunity to learn from their past mistakes. “I want to make it stable enough to continue without me if I leave the country. I’m not from here—I don’t want to die here,” he says. Innokentii, like a large part of Bishkek’s contemporary techno community, came to Kyrgyzstan from Russia in recent years to flee war drafts. Helping to create spaces for electronic music in Bishkek helps him feel close to the subculture in his home country, a subculture that remains his central inspiration.

In order to ensure their subculture survives, Chyngyz has founded a DJ school within Ailan Collective to train and teach the next generation of Bishkek’s rebellious electronic music scene.

The Future for Bishkek Ravers

While law enforcement targeting youth subcultures is nothing new for Kyrgyzstan, those involved with Bishkek’s techno scene note that the current wave of repression feels different than those that have preceded it. “With the previous government, it is not right to categorize what we had as ‘freedom.’ We had negligence. We could only exist freely because the government didn’t care about us,” Chyngyz notes. “Now, authorities no longer turn a blind eye–they have a blueprint and they follow it. They’re populists, and populists have to show results in order to keep the people happy.”

After the raids, both bars saw their regular number of attendees dwindle. However, since the bars have implemented new strategies to prevent police altercations, they have largely been successful in fending off further government attacks. In just over a year and a half since the April raids, the crowds have largely returned. QQ Bar, even in their smaller venue, now sees over two hundred attendees at their most popular events. 

The techno community in Bishkek is as diverse as it is tight-knit. Chyngyz notes that he always finds it hard to describe the demographics of his crowd to others, as it spreads across every age group, profession, and walk of life. Innokentii, however, notes that there is one thread that unites all of their party participants. “Unlike techno scenes in larger cities, in Bishkek, everyone who comes is a character.”

With the survival of Bishkek’s techno institutions, the venues now serve as a cultural meeting point for the city’s other repressed creative communities. Innokentii notes that it is not an uncommon sight at QQ Bar to see people from Bishkek’s art industry, bar industry, rock scene, and rap underground all mixing freely.

Bishkek’s electronic music vanguard now sees their scene’s creativity and resilience as more than a local story. They have created something unique that they want to share with the world. While domestic challenges persist, few in Bishkek’s techno leadership appear ready to back down. “If you’re scared, you do it scared. So we do it scared,” Chyngyz remarked.

Chyngyz believes that the techno scene’s ability to adapt to evermounting challenges and unite diverse communities is not only what has led to the scene’s survival in Bishkek, but truly illuminates what the community is all about. “Techno is something that has the power to unite completely different people with completely unrelated backgrounds–people who maybe can’t even speak the same language. But they love techno, and enjoy the space it provides. Out of nothing, you create common ground.”

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Joseph Fisher for Novastan

The post “If You’re Scared, You do it Scared”: How Bishkek’s Techno Scene Survives State Repression appeared first on Novastan English.

It has been one year since the Organization of Turkic States approved the implementation of a common Turkic alphabet, designed for uniform use in all member states. Under the guise of bolstering Turkic unity, Ankara has spearheaded the initiative with the aim to draw the Central Asian states into its political orbit. However, due to limited funds, lack of political incentives, and preexisting linguistic policy, the Central Asian states have largely chosen to ignore the common alphabet entirely. 

In September 2024, the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) announced to the world the creation of a 34-letter common Turkic alphabet based on the Latin script, approved on paper by all member states. The initiative, spearheaded by Türkiye, has been in the works since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Now one year since the common alphabet’s announcement, the manoeuvre has yet to make the large waves in the Central Asian information space that Türkiye had initially hoped for.

The proposed common alphabet exists within the larger regional debate surrounding the political futures of the Central Asian languages. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of the newly independent republics began the process of transitioning their languages from a Cyrillic to a Latin-based script. However, in Central Asia, the decision of switching to a Latin script remains a fierce debate across the region even three decades later. 

Türkiye, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s expansionist foreign policy, has offered a guiding hand by leading the OTS initiative to create a common Turkic alphabet. Türkiye first adopted the Latin script in 1928 as a part of its early independence-era modernisation reforms. By encouraging the Central Asian states to undergo a similar process, Türkiye also aims to cement its position as the dominant centre of the Turkic world.

So far, Erdoğan’s plan has not cultivated many strong allies in Central Asia’s political elite. Most states in the region remain embroiled within national debates over the post-Soviet future of their titular languages, making Central Asian governments particularly resistant to carry out such a monumental linguistic shift at the international level.

Competition for “Middle Power” Status

In the year since the OTS announcement, regional heavyweights Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan remain resistant in adopting the common Turkic alphabet within their borders. According to Nargiza Muratalieva, a Bishkek-based political scientist, “Kazakhstan is not ready to share its leadership in Central Asia, given its attempts to promote itself as a middle power.” Kazakhstan has spent the post-Soviet decades centralizing Central Asian political power within its own borders, with the goal to secure a respected “middle power” status to both the region and the international community at large. Uzbekistan, the largest Central Asian country by population and second largest in terms of GDP, shares similar ambitions. Both countries view the Turkish-led OTS alphabet as an attempt by Türkiye to cement itself as the dominant power in the region, and thus, a threat to their respective national directives.

Read more on Novastan: The Lexicon of Kazakh Decolonisation

While both nations have yet to consider the implementation of the common Turkic alphabet, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have independently embarked on national plans to switch the script of their titular languages from Cyrillic to Latin. In both cases, the political leadership has underestimated the difficulty of this task, leading to much longer timelines for the initiative than initially expected. Currently, both states are stuck in a transitional state where both scripts are used interchangeably. Critics complain that the current linguistic paralysis in the countries is both confusing for citizens and financially taxing for administrations. The Diplomat reports that the 2018 budgetary estimate for Kazakhstan’s Latinization program sat at US$664 million, equivalent to roughly 39% of Kazakhstan’s GDP for that year.

The challenges Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have faced implementing a Latin script have meant that neither government seems willing to invest in the OTS alphabet as a third system for their citizens to learn and their country to switch to. Even Turkmenistan — a state which successfully phased out Cyrillic usage in the 1990s — remains resistant to the OTS plan to change their national standard. Largely closed off from the outside world and averse to foreign influence, the common Turkic alphabet offers few advantages to Ashgabat.

Kyrgyzstan: The Cyrillic Exception

At the unveiling ceremony of the common Turkic alphabet, all eyes were on Kyrgyzstan. To mark the alphabet’s adoption, Erdoğan gifted each represented nation a copy of two books translated into the new alphabet. One of the books was a novel written by Chinghiz Aitmatov, a regionally renowned author hailing from Kyrgyzstan. Erdoğan’s choice was hardly coincidental. Kyrgyzstan today is the only Turkic state to not even attempt to switch the national script away from Cyrillic.

Western analysts attribute Kyrgyzstan’s continued use of Cyrillic to the close relationship with Russia the country has maintained through its post-Soviet independence. Russia largely views increased Turkish influence in Central Asia as a threat to its foothold in the region, and acts to mitigate the country’s power in states like Kyrgyzstan where it still holds considerable influence. However, in the case of Kyrgyzstan’s refusal to adopt the OTS Latin-based alphabet, Muratalieva believes the reasons are more pragmatic than political. “The simplest explanation is the lack of financial resources to accept and to introduce this alphabet on a national level,” Muratalieva explains. While Türkiye has spearheaded the alphabet initiative on paper, the country has remained resistant to supplying funds to OTS member states interested in making the national switch. The lack of available funds severely limits the capacity of financially-limited states like Kyrgyzstan, the smallest economy of the OTS bloc.

When Sadyr Japarov, the president of Kyrgyzstan, was asked about his opinion on the linguistic future of the Kyrgyz language, he stated that “it is too early to talk about transitioning the Kyrgyz language to the Latin alphabet”, RFE/RL reports. Muratalieva believes Japarov’s strategy is to watch and wait how its larger regional neighbours Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan fare in their respective transitions to a Latin-based script. “If one of them succeeds, Kyrgyzstan will follow,” she theorizes.

Azerbaijan as a Potential Model

Not all hope is lost for Turkish power in Central Asia. Azerbaijan, while outside the region, provides a model for the post-Soviet Turkic states open to cooperation with Türkiye, showing how partnership with the state can lead to successful development. Türkiye and Azerbaijan have been close allies ever since the country gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. This strategic partnership has allowed for Azerbaijan to largely chart its own path, both economically and politically distant from Russia. 

One of the first directives Azerbaijan embarked on after independence was the complete transition of its national language from Cyrillic to Latin, a goal it achieved by the turn of the century. The Azerbaijani Latin-based script in its modern form is now very closely related to both the Turkish standard script and the newly proposed OTS alphabet. Such linguistic integration between the two nations has opened many new doors for transnational partnership, successes closely monitored by the Central Asian states.

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Since the beginning of the Russo-Ukraine War, Central Asian states have become increasingly hesitant of close partnership with Russia. Regional leadership fears Russia’s close geographic proximity to their borders may lead to future military conflict. Türkiye, attempting to offer an alternative to Russian partnership in the region, markets its distance from Central Asia as a compelling security guarantee. While maintaining territorial distance from potential Central Asian partners, Türkiye benefits from cultural and religious closeness to the region’s common Turkic heritage. The common Turkic alphabet is only one of many pathways the country is intent to forge with Central Asia through the leverage of common Turkic traditions. Turkish soft power in Central Asia, while currently marginal, is steadily increasing with time.

Türkiye has made it clear that it is willing to take on administrative and economic sacrifices to implement the new alphabet within its own borders, but has maintained its reluctance to take on the financial burdens necessary to implement the script in the Central Asian Turkic states. Combined with Türkiye’s unwillingness to meddle in preexisting linguistic turmoil in Central Asia or directly confront Russia’s lingering cultural influence over the region, has enough time passed to call the OTS common alphabet project a failure? Likely so. 

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Joseph Fisher for Novastan

The post Dead in the Water: Has the Common Turkic Alphabet Failed to Boost Turkish Influence in Central Asia? appeared first on Novastan English.

Kyrgyzstan is sliding down to full blown autocracy. The country has traditionally stood out for offering greater protections for free speech, political parties, and NGOs than any other Central Asian nation. However, this began to change after President Sadyr Japarov came to power, reshaping the nation’s political landscape. Today, the once-free press is no longer truly free.

On October 28, 2025, the Oktyabrsky District Court in Bishkek declared three independent media outlets – Kloop Media Foundation, TemirovLive, and Ait Ait Dese (TemirovLive’s Kyrgyz-language sister channel) – as extremist organisations. In Kyrgyzstan, anyone who now shares materials produced by these outlets can face criminal charges. This move marks yet another step in the ongoing repression of independent media in the country.

Just a month ago, on September 17, 2025, two video makers from the Kloop, Alexander Alexandrov and Joomart Duulatov, were sentenced to a penal colony for five years. Both were charged for involvement in the production of videos for TemirovLive, that would allegedly have incited public unrest. The lack of evidence was striking throughout the trial. No connection could be proven between the work of Alexandrov and Duulatov with TemirovLive, or between Kloop and TemirovLive. On top of that, even the prosecutors themselves admitted that the videos concerned contained no direct incitements to civil unrest.

These accusations came after eight (former) Kloop employees were arrested in late May 2025, and held for questioning by the security forces, the GKNB. None were initially allowed to see their lawyers. The next few days, all suspects were released except for Alexandrov, Duulatov and two accountants. The GKNB subsequently published videos in which the (former) employees confessed to inciting civil unrest. These videos were likely taken under duress, as Alexandrov seemed to indicate himself. All four were taken to court, where the two journalists retracted their confessions. The accountants denied their involvement in the case. While shocking, the sentencing comes as no surprise.

The crackdown on Kloop and TemirovLive is the latest example of tightening repression under the regime of President Sadyr Japarov.

Read more on Novastan: Leaving the Island – Japarov’s campaign to silence independent media

The TemirovLive link

Kloop and TemirovLive have, for many years, been strongholds of independent journalism in Kyrgyzstan. Apart from this, the alleged link between Kloop and TemirovLive seems to come mostly from both outlets’ reporting on corruption. Resultingly the two organisations, as well as their founders and staff, have been repeatedly pressed with legal charges in the past.

Most infamous is the case of Bolot Temirov, the founder of TemirovLive, who was arrested on January 22, 2022, for the possession of drugs, which he claims were placed on him. This happened two days after he and his platform TemirovLive published a new investigation, accusing the head of the GKNB, Kamchybek Tashiev, of corruption.

Kloop and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a US NGO supporting investigative journalism on organised crime and corruption, subsequently discovered that TemirovLive and Temirov himself were monitored long before the publication. In May 2022, Temirov was stripped of his Kyrgyz citizenship, after which he was acquitted on practically all charges laid against him later that year, in September 2022, because the investigation against him had been prejudiced. Still the harassment did not stop: Temirov was forcibly exiled to Russia in November 2022 in just a few hours’ time. His lawyers, friends and family did initially not know what had happened to him.

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New laws and the beginning of the end for free media

Japarov has taken numerous steps to restrict free journalism since coming to power following the 2020 October Revolution. First, on July 28, 2021, he implemented a law that would allow an “authorised state body” – whatever that may be – to block websites that publish so-deemed “false or inaccurate information”. To date, the Ministry of Culture has been its principal executor, as it has been actively persecuting free media under this new law.

In April 2024, the Kyrgyz parliament also passed a foreign agent law, akin to the one in Russia, which further limits the possibilities of NGOs and media that receive funds from abroad. The rationale for passing the foreign agent law is clear: to silence dissenting voices. Under the previous administration, numerous articles were published exposing large scale corruption, particularly in the Matraimov case, where a large politically connected corruption scheme was exposed in the Kyrgyz customs agency, stealing several million dollars.

Furthermore, Kloop’s election observation missions documented blatant violations during the 2020 and subsequent elections, prompting a partial recount and rerun of the 2021 parliamentary elections. These findings, along with Kloop’s daily reporting, underscore the vital role that that independent media has played in Kyrgyzstan, even in the face of mounting repression.

Read more on Novastan: In Central Asia, the Freedom of Press is in Decline

The autocrat’s way: closing publications and arresting critics

Kloop is not the first to meet the ire of Kyrgyzstan’s government. Over the past years, the authorities have adopted two main tactics for targeting media. One involves targeting key figures within organizations, through arrests, exile, intimidation or constant surveillance by security forces. The other focuses on restricting media outlets, including forced closures and the blocking of their websites.

In January 2024, eleven journalists from TemirovLive and Ait Ait Dese were arrested, even after Temirov himself had been exiled. During the same time, their offices (and that of 24.kg, another independent media outlet) were raided by the GKNB. Three journalists were eventually sentenced to long prison terms for calling for civil disobedience. According to Kyrgyz law it is illegal to call “for active disobedience to legitimate demands of the representatives of the authorities (…)”. Those found guilty of violating this law can face a minimum sentence of five years imprisonment.” The law’s ambiguous phrasing makes it easy to target journalists and other government critics.

The first victim of the earlier-mentioned disinformation law from July 2021 was the local branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), known as Azattyk. In October 2022, Azattyk was forced to close down over materials published about the September 2022 border conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which became a highly sensitive political issue. The Ministry of Culture argued that the materials published contained false information. The website remained blocked until July the next year, when Azattyk and the Ministry of Culture reached a settlement. For their part, Azattyk had to delete a video they had made about the conflict. In return they were allowed again to operate in Kyrgyzstan.

The laws on civil disobedience and disinformation have been used repeatedly against free media all across Kyrgyzstan, for instance against 24.kg, Kaktus media, Next TV, and Aprel TV. Most recently, in August this year, a new law was passed restricting foreign ownership in media organisations to 35%.

Read more on Novastan: Closure of Radio Azattyk sparks discontent from civil society and international human rights activists

The repression of Kloop

The recent arrests are not the first time that Kloop was targeted. On August 28, 2023, Kloop was taken to court over allegedly failing to name all media activities it was engaged in, as per its foundational charter, and not registering as a mass media outlet. The next month, its website was blocked.

During the court case, more allegations were levelled against Kloop: their alleged criticism would spur people on to protest against the government and lead to their reader’s ‘zombification’. The brunt of the lawsuit focused on the alleged ‘negativity’ of Kloop’s reporting. According to the prosecutors, this negativity could also lead to sexual anomalies or “chemical (…) addictions.”

In the end, Kloop was formally liquidated. It tried to go to the Supreme Court over the case, but the Court denied the request without informing the defendant within one month – as is legally required. Afterwards, Kloop continued its work under the legal entity of Koomar Media. Despite the blocking and outlawing of the Kloop legal entity, the Kloop journalists continued their investigations. This included an investigative piece on the president and his close associate Kamchybek Tashiev, head of the GKNB. The eki dos (two friends), as they are commonly called, would be involved in various corruption schemes.

The sentencing of Alexanderov and Dulaatov served as yet another stark warning that Kyrgyzstan’s democracy is in retreat. At best, those engaged in anti-corruption journalism must now fear for their freedom; at worst, it signals that no journalist is safe. With the declaration of TemirovLive, Kloop, and Ait Ait Dese as extremist organisations, the threat extends beyond journalists. Anyone who reads or shares independent media content can now face prosecution, even if they are not directly involved in journalism. The future of Kyrgyzstan’s independent press remains uncertain – but one thing is clear: the outlook is bleak.

Written by Stijn van der Veen

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The post Kyrgyzstan’s march to smother the free press appeared first on Novastan English.