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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From bustling markets and changing neighbourhoods to overlooked courtyards, a photography exhibition at Karakol Bus Station offers a different perspective on Kyrgyzstan. Featuring works by more than 50 amateur photographers, it also asks a deceptively simple question: who gets to create art?

Passengers arriving at Karakol Bus Station in eastern Kyrgyzstan this October may find something unexpected alongside the ticket counters and waiting areas: a photography exhibition documenting everyday life across the country.

Opened on 16 October, Kyrgyzstan Beyond the Postcard (Неоткрыточный Кыргызстан) brings together works by more than 50 contributors from cities across Kyrgyzstan. Rather than showcasing the country’s spectacular mountain landscapes, alpine lakes or familiar tourist attractions, the exhibition turns its attention to courtyards, markets, residential neighbourhoods and the often-overlooked details of urban life.

Organised by the Street Gudit photography community and the Peshcom urban initiative, the exhibition runs until 31 October. Most of its contributors are not professional photographers, and many of the images were taken using mobile phones.

The organisers hope to challenge not only conventional representations of Kyrgyzstan, but also assumptions about who has the right to produce and exhibit art.

Turning a bus station into an art gallery

The choice of Karakol Bus Station as the exhibition venue was deliberate.

“We initially wanted to hold the exhibition somewhere other than a gallery or museum, in a space that is not usually used for exhibitions,” Anna Karamurzina, the exhibition’s curator, told Novastan.

For Karamurzina, the bus station offers an opportunity to reach an audience that might not ordinarily seek out contemporary photography.

Since the opening, the organisers have observed passengers stopping with their backpacks and suitcases to read about the project and examine the photographs.

“Someone who might never have planned to visit an exhibition in a gallery can encounter art at the bus station, simply on their way somewhere,” she explained.

The venue also carries symbolic significance. Just as a bus station brings together travellers from different cities, the exhibition connects the experiences and perspectives of people living across Kyrgyzstan.

Some photographs are displayed inside the building, while many others have been installed outside. In one particularly striking coincidence, images documenting urban development are exhibited alongside construction work taking place next to the station itself.

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

The surrounding city thus becomes part of the exhibition, blurring the distinction between the photographs and the everyday environment they portray.

A Kyrgyzstan rarely seen in tourist brochures

The exhibition emerged from Street Gudit, a community launched in 2025 to encourage people to explore and document their urban surroundings through street photography.

The organisers began with weekly photography challenges on Telegram and held three street photography workshops in Naryn, Karakol and Osh.

When they launched an open call for the exhibition, however, the response exceeded their expectations.

Read more on Novastan: Through roads, markets and silence: Tolomush Zhanybekov films Kyrgyzstan’s unseen lives

“We thought we had a fairly good understanding of our participants and the kinds of photographs they would submit,” Karamurzina recalled. “But we received works not only from the Street Gudit community, but also from many other residents of Kyrgyzstan who wanted to share their stories.”

The diversity of submissions was a particularly welcome surprise.

The photographs explore subjects ranging from access to public space and mobility to environmental challenges, historical memory and the transformation of urban neighbourhoods.

Urban development emerged as a particularly prominent theme, reflecting the rapid changes taking place in cities across the country.

Instead of familiar images of Kyrgyzstan’s natural beauty, visitors encounter children playing in Naryn, construction reshaping Bishkek’s Asanbay neighbourhood, and scenes from the livestock market in Razzakov.

Other photographs capture flea markets, overlooked streets and ordinary residential buildings, offering glimpses of places and experiences that rarely appear in conventional representations of the country.

“We don’t have the usual glossy landscapes of Kyrgyzstan,” Karamurzina explained. “Instead, there are many photographs of cities, including their most hidden courtyards and streets.”

For the organisers, these images are not simply alternatives to tourist photography. They are also a way of documenting how residents experience their cities, the changes they witness and the places that matter to them.

“We wanted to give people across Kyrgyzstan an opportunity to share what concerns them, moves them, surprises them, or inspires them,” said Rada Valentina kyzy, one of the exhibition’s organisers.

“This exhibition is an attempt to show our country not from the outside, but from within, through the way ordinary people see, feel, and experience the places where they live.”

Who has the right to create art?

Beyond offering an alternative portrait of Kyrgyzstan, the exhibition raises a broader question about artistic expression.

Can photographs taken by ordinary residents, sometimes using nothing more than a mobile phone, be considered art?

Rather than providing a definitive answer, the organisers have invited visitors to decide for themselves.

Voting boxes have been installed at the exhibition, allowing visitors to express their opinions on whether the works on display qualify as art. The results are expected to be announced on the exhibition’s final day.

The initiative reflects Street Gudit and Peshcom’s wider interest in the right to the city, a concept that emphasises residents’ ability to participate in shaping, using and representing the urban spaces in which they live.

For Karamurzina, giving non-professional photographers a platform is central to that ambition.

“We support the idea that everyone can create and tell their own stories, including visual ones, without necessarily having a specialised education,” she said.

Opening the exhibition to participants regardless of their experience or equipment allows Kyrgyzstan to be represented not only through the work of professional photographers, but also through the perspectives of its residents.

And by bringing those photographs into a public transport hub, the organisers are extending the same principle to the audience: art should not be confined to conventional cultural institutions.

For passengers passing through Karakol Bus Station, the exhibition offers a chance to see familiar aspects of everyday life from a different perspective, and perhaps reconsider what deserves to be photographed, displayed and called art.

Practical information: Kyrgyzstan Beyond the Postcard is open until 31 October 2026 at Karakol Bus Station, 149 Przhevalsky Street, Karakol, daily from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Admission is free.

The exhibition is organised by Street Gudit and Peshcom, in partnership with Liderstvo and Karakol’s municipal Department of Transport, Tourism and Digitalisation. It is supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, with funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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

The post Beyond the postcard: An exhibition in Kyrgyzstan puts everyday life in the frame appeared first on Novastan English.

Blending crime drama, psychological suspense and Kyrgyz mythology, Mergen explores corruption, environmental exploitation and the struggle for justice in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. Director Chingiz Narynov speaks to Novastan about the legends that inspired his film, the challenges of casting its characters, and why audiences at home and abroad have interpreted it differently.

Watch here the trailer of Mergen.

Kyrgyz cinema has increasingly attracted international attention, with filmmakers exploring contemporary social issues through a variety of cinematic forms. In Mergen, director Chingiz Narynov draws on the country’s rich mythological traditions to tell a dark story about corruption, greed, environmental destruction and the limits of individual morality.

Read more on Novastan: Through roads, markets and silence: Tolomush Zhanybekov films Kyrgyzstan’s unseen lives

Set in a fictional town, the film follows Nurtai, a police officer confronting a world where powerful interests often prevail over justice. Combining elements of a detective story and psychological thriller with references to Kyrgyz folklore, Mergen raises questions about humanity’s relationship with nature and the moral compromises imposed by an unequal society.

The film is featured in the programme of the 2026 Asian Film Festival Barcelona. Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine spoke with Narynov about the making of Mergen, the importance of local mythology, and his plans for future projects.

Read more on Novastan: New voices: Central Asian short films at the GoEast Festival 2024

Novastan: Mergen combines elements of crime drama, psychological thriller and Kyrgyz mythology, while presenting a rather dark vision of contemporary society. What inspired you to tell this story, and what message did you hope to convey?

Chingiz Narynov: The starting point was Kyrgyz mythology. One day, screenwriter Aikyz Gaparova and I were discussing the ancient legend of Karagul-Botom, particularly how relevant it remains today and how it resonates with contemporary problems in Kyrgyz society. That conversation gradually developed into the idea for the film.

Read more on Novastan: “Manastchy”: the Kyrgyz soul in all its poetry

At the same time, we wanted to tell a contemporary story, which led us towards genre cinema. The problems facing Kyrgyzstan largely shaped the film’s mood and atmosphere. Ultimately, ancient legends and present-day realities came together in Mergen.

The characters are particularly convincing, and the casting is one of the film’s strengths. How did you select the actors playing Nurtai, Kerim and the young girl, Anara? Were any of these roles cinematic debuts?

The casting process was lengthy. We spent a long time looking for the right actor to play Nurtai, but when Omurbek Israilov came in, I immediately felt that we had found our protagonist.

Kerim was more complicated. We held more than eighteen auditions with different actors. Nazym Mendebairov was among our first candidates, but I wanted to move away from the familiar criminal roles that audiences associated with this well-known actor. After a long search, however, we returned to him. Ultimately, he was the most convincing person for the part.

Regina Talantbekova, who played Anara, had already had some acting experience, as far as I remember, but Mergen was her feature-film debut. I think she did a wonderful job.

Another remarkable debut was the role of Turdukul, played by Tilektesh Usenakunov, who had previously worked primarily as a stunt performer. The role of Jacob also has an interesting story behind it. He was played by Toon Cavens, a mathematics teacher at a private school in Bishkek, making his film debut in Mergen. I think he did a wonderful job.

Nurtai is a police officer trying to uphold justice in a world dominated by corruption, violence and powerful interests. He seems torn between his professional duty, his conscience and a system he can do little to change. How did you develop this character, and what did you want to say through him about justice and personal responsibility?

In our circumstances, a police officer who acts strictly according to the law and his conscience can almost seem like a fairytale character.

That was precisely the painful issue I wanted to address: the feeling that a person with a conscience is doomed to fail within an imperfect, corrupt system, and that without some kind of intervention from above, they cannot achieve anything.

I think the nihilism that is widespread in our society is largely connected to the gap between how things ought to work and how they actually function.

For someone with an idealistic view of the world, that discrepancy can create a profound internal fracture. Through Nurtai, I wanted to convey this contradiction.

Gold mining, poverty and human greed play important roles in Mergen. In Kyrgyzstan, longstanding controversies surrounding the Kumtor gold mine have raised questions about environmental damage, control over natural resources and the distribution of mining revenues. Did these debates influence your film? How closely does the social inequality portrayed in Mergen reflect contemporary Kyrgyz realities?

It wasn’t only Kumtor that influenced us. Kyrgyzstan has experienced numerous conflicts surrounding mineral extraction.

The tension between the desire to make money and the desire to protect nature and natural resources keeps resurfacing in public debate. Naturally, all of this found its way into our creative thinking.

I see the film as a kind of crystal in which the internal problems of our society and the atmosphere surrounding us have come together.

We wanted to talk about ourselves, about the things we know and the things that hurt us. That is how the film took shape.

Kyrgyz mythology is central to the film. Mergen draws on the legend of Kozhozhash, a hunter who violates the laws of nature, but you also mentioned Karagul-Botom as an important inspiration. The film additionally references Umai-Ene, a female mythological figure associated with motherhood and nature. How did you bring these different traditions together, and what relevance do they have for contemporary Kyrgyz society?

We drew inspiration from a whole range of Kyrgyz epics and legends.

We took a key plot twist from Karagul-Botom. Kozhozhash was also important: it is the story of a hunter who violates the laws of nature and a tale about human greed.

For us, one of its most significant messages is that you should never take more than you need.

Umai-Ene is a goddess from Tengrism who embodies motherhood and femininity, as well as the connection with the earth and nature.

I consider these images and stories highly relevant today. Otherwise, I would not have turned to them.

With every passing year, Kyrgyz folklore and our culture become increasingly interesting to me.

Spoiler warning: The following question discusses the film’s ending.

The ending of Mergen is particularly intriguing and open to interpretation. Does Nurtai actually manage to return to the past and save the girl, or are we seeing his imagined version of how events might have unfolded? Why did you decide to leave the ending ambiguous?

We always intended to have an open ending, allowing viewers to experience what happened for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

I have my own interpretation: Nurtai really did manage to return to the past, influence events and change everything.

But I don’t want to impose that interpretation on the audience. I deliberately leave viewers free to decide for themselves.

The natural landscapes and filming locations contribute enormously to the film’s atmosphere. I noticed that the closing credits mention Balykchy and Kadzhi-Sai in the Issyk-Kul Region. Kadzhi-Sai, in particular, is known for its Soviet-era uranium mining and industrial heritage. Where was Mergen filmed, and how did these locations influence the film’s visual identity?

We shot most of the film in a small settlement called Ak-Tyuz. We also filmed in Kadzhi-Sai, Balykchy and Naryn.

When choosing locations, we looked for places that felt organic to our story and conveyed the atmosphere we needed.

By bringing together different locations, we created the fictional town of Mergen.

I think we managed to achieve what I had envisioned. The town turned out exactly as I wanted it to look.

Finally, how have audiences in Kyrgyzstan responded to Mergen, particularly its portrayal of corruption, poverty and environmental exploitation? Has the reaction differed internationally? And are you currently working on any new films?

The reactions of international and local audiences have been noticeably different.

For international viewers, it is primarily a genre film, somewhere between a detective story and a thriller: a mystery they want to solve, a puzzle whose pieces gradually fall into place.

In Kyrgyzstan, audiences picked up on the social issues much more deeply. Corruption and environmental problems need no additional explanation here because we encounter them every day.

After local screenings, we had some fascinating discussions. People asked questions and thanked us for the film. It was during these conversations that I particularly felt how relevant the story was to our society.

After Mergen, I wanted to take a little break from directing and writing.

I’m currently working on several projects as a producer. We have both a fiction film and a documentary in development, some of which are being produced in collaboration with Kyrgyzfilm. I’m also involved as a producer in several animation projects.

I’m gradually preparing for my next personal project, but I don’t think I’ll begin working on it for at least another year. We’ll see!

This interview was conducted in Russian and translated into English by Novastan. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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

The post “A Person of Conscience Is Almost a Fairytale Character”: Chingiz Narynov on His Kyrgyz Thriller Mergen appeared first on Novastan English.

A four-day expedition to Kyrgyzstan’s Adygene glacier brought seven women into the field with glaciologist Gulbara Omorova. For filmmaker Tynymgul Eshieva, the journey is part of a larger effort to document both the rapid transformation of Kyrgyzstan’s glaciers and the women working to understand them.

In August, seven women set out into Kyrgyzstan’s Ala-Archa gorge for a four-day expedition. Some were experienced hikers; others had never undertaken a high-altitude trek of this kind. Their destination was the Adygene scientific station, around 11 kilometres into the mountains.

They were not going simply to see a glacier.

From 16 to 19 August, the participants worked alongside Kyrgyz glaciologist Gulbara Omorova, installing ablation stakes to measure melting, recording glacier movement with GPS and carrying out bathymetric measurements on lakes below the ice.

Behind the expedition was documentary filmmaker and producer Tynymgul Eshieva. She is developing The Voice of the Glaciers (Мөңгүлөрдүн үнү), a feature-length documentary centred on Omorova and her work in Kyrgyzstan’s mountains.

The film is still in development and is currently expected to be completed in 2028. But Eshieva has already been filming a landscape that is changing fast enough for those returning to it to see the difference with their own eyes.

“We filmed the teaser in June last year, and then we went back for the expedition in August this year,” Eshieva told Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine. “The glacier looked completely different. You don’t need instruments to see it. You can see with your own eyes how rapidly it’s disappearing.”

A glacier changing within a lifetime

The measurements reinforce what the eye can see.

During the expedition, around 1.4 metres of surface lowering was recorded near the glacier terminus over approximately one month. Over an entire ablation season, melting in the lower sections can amount to several metres.

Omorova’s longer-term research paints an even starker picture. The Adygene glacier system comprises three glaciers – Bolshoy Adygene, Panfilov and 30-let VLKSM. Bolshoy Adygene has decreased in area from approximately 3.5 square kilometres in 1962 to 2.8 square kilometres in 2025, a loss of around 20 percent. More strikingly, the annual rate of area loss has accelerated from 0.006 to 0.033 square kilometres per year.

The smaller glaciers are retreating too. Between 1977 and 2024, Panfilov lost around 20 percent of its area and 30-let VLKSM around 29 percent.

For Eshieva, however, seeing the process at close range changed the meaning of such figures.

“It’s completely different to see it with your own eyes,” she said. “You can read the news, follow websites, see the numbers online. But when you go there, when you stand on the glacier and feel it, it’s something else.”

What struck her just as strongly was the work required to produce those numbers.

“She carries heavy equipment up the mountain. She takes the measurements again and again, with total commitment,” Eshieva said of Omorova. “It’s slow, repetitive work, sometimes even boring, but it’s absolutely necessary. Without people like her doing it year after year, we simply wouldn’t know what is happening.”

The woman behind the measurements

Eshieva has known Omorova since the mid-2000s. Long before either woman imagined making a documentary together, they talked, hiked and even climbed a peak near Bishkek.

Eshieva only began documentary filmmaking in 2023. While editing her first feature documentary, also about a woman activist, she began searching for another project. She hopes to complete that film next year.

The catalyst came through social media.

The Adygene research station had been robbed and scientific equipment stolen. Omorova appealed publicly for help. People who had never visited a glacier responded, crowdfunding enough money to replace what had been lost.

“That was the moment I thought: this could be a film,” Eshieva recalled. “Here is a woman who fights for her science, for the environment, for justice, and she doesn’t wait for anyone to do it for her. And ordinary people answered her call.”

She began filming.

Omorova’s route into glaciology itself began far from the ice. Trained in sociology, she travelled to villages to interview residents about social issues. During a visit to Batken, farmers told her about shortages of water.

Already an experienced mountaineer with training in alpinism, she began asking why.

That question eventually took her towards glaciology and the Adygene station. It also illustrates one of the central realities of glacier retreat: what happens high in Kyrgyzstan’s mountains does not remain there.

Read more on Novastan: The recession of the Tian Shan glaciers and other recent studies

From the glacier to the valley

As glaciers retreat, they transform not only water availability but the landscape around them.

Omorova’s monitoring has identified 16 new moraine-glacial lakes in the Adygene complex since observations began in 1977. Some glacial lakes can become unstable, making continuous observation essential.

During the August expedition, the participants went out by boat to conduct bathymetric measurements using an echo sounder. By measuring water depth at different points, researchers can map the lake and track how it changes.

Monitoring can also involve automatic loggers recording water levels and temperatures, water-column profiling and examination of the moraine dams holding back the lakes.

Read more on Novastan: Life by the river: the Naryn in Kyrgyzstan

The relationship between melting ice and downstream risk is complex. A lake that appears stable today may change as the glacier, surrounding terrain and permafrost evolve. The purpose of monitoring is therefore not to predict an outburst from a single measurement, but to observe the glacier-lake system continuously and identify changes that may eventually become warning signs.

Eshieva did not originally set out to make a film about the relationship between glaciers and water.

“When I started, my idea wasn’t to connect what happens up on the glacier with what happens down below,” she said. “But the more I filmed, the more I saw that they are deeply connected.”

Whether that relationship ultimately becomes central to the documentary remains open.

“People often ask me at pitching forums: is this a film about water? For now, it isn’t,” she said. “Documentary is a long process. You follow a person’s life, sometimes for two or three years, sometimes ten. I don’t know yet where it will go.”

Seven women on the ice

The August expedition itself emerged partly from necessity.

Eshieva had initially envisaged a camp for aspiring ecologists, selected through an open call and led by Omorova. But by August, funding for the film had not materialised and the summer field season was slipping away.

“I felt I had to do something,” she said.

She changed the plan, crowdfunded an expedition and invited women interested in learning about glaciers to join. There was no competitive selection process. Participants simply had to be willing and able to commit to four days in the mountains.

Seven ultimately went.

Their backgrounds and levels of mountain experience differed. Two already knew Omorova from previous events. One was a journalist and experienced hiker with an interest in environmental issues. Others discovered the expedition through social media.

After the 11-kilometre ascent to the station, they did more than watch scientists at work. They learned to use equipment, take measurements and collect data themselves.

“It was important for us not simply to bring the participants to the mountains,” Eshieva said. “We wanted to give them an opportunity to experience scientific work from the inside – to understand how specialists monitor glaciers, document changes and collect data.”

For participant Rahbar Khomidova, who travelled from Tajikistan to join the expedition, the experience carried a wider message.

“The voice of the glaciers should be heard not only by scientists, but by each and every one of us,” she said. “Their story is the story of our shared future.”

A film about who gets to lead

Yet Eshieva is reluctant to define The Voice of the Glaciers simply as a climate documentary.

For now, she and Omorova have agreed that its centre should remain the scientist herself – and what her experience says about women working in fields where they continue to face significant obstacles.

“I want the film to inspire a new generation of scientists, and to be a starting point for talking about our environment, our mountains, about care, about ourselves, and about the glaciers we always thought of as a gift from God,” Eshieva said.

The project has already begun attracting support. The August expedition received equipment from the Union of Hiking Tourism of the Kyrgyz Republic, insurance coverage from NSC and partial financial support from the Creative Industries Park, alongside crowdfunding and contributions from Eshieva’s friends. The Embassy of France in Kyrgyzstan has also supported the film.

More recently, Eshieva presented the project at the Doc by the Sea Producers Lab. The Voice of the Glaciers received 50,000 Kyrgyz soms from the Bir Duino initiative as well as a prize from Kyrgyzfilm.

Funding is nevertheless still needed to turn the material into the approximately 72-minute feature Eshieva envisages.

That uncertainty is part of documentary filmmaking. The glacier, meanwhile, is not waiting for the film to be finished.

Omorova’s observations indicate that the ablation season itself is becoming longer. In 2026, melting continued beyond the end of September. Near the terminus, she measured approximately 4.5 to five metres of surface lowering over the season; even in the accumulation zone, where snow and firn would ordinarily persist, lowering reached approximately 2.5 to three metres.

For Eshieva, those transformations have made the patient work of the woman she has known for two decades newly visible.

“I want to show the work that women do in Central Asia,” she said. “There are so many obstacles here, and still there are women who lead. Gulbara is one of them.”

“These are people whose ideas we can listen to,” she added. “And we should listen to.”

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

The post On a disappearing Kyrgyz glacier, seven women learn to read the ice appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For three years, a truck driver from Kyrgyzstan has been working across the European Union, sleeping, cooking and living inside his vehicle for months at a time. His story reveals both the opportunities and the precarious realities faced by Central Asian drivers working far from home.

Alex is sitting on the bed inside the cabin of his truck, his head almost touching the ceiling.

“I can’t stand,” he says as he films the cramped space around him.

On the bed beside him, he chops a cucumber next to a box of garlic. Between his legs, a gas stove supports a kazan filled with pearl barley, meat, potatoes and garlic. The truck is not only his workplace. For much of the year, it is also his kitchen, bedroom and living room.

In another video, Alex opens the small refrigerator squeezed into the cabin. It is packed with salted fish fillets and what he estimates to be between 10 and 15 kilograms of meat. Above it sits a basket of dry goods: rice, pearl barley, salt and soy sauce. When the weather is good, he cooks outside in the truck park. When it is not, everything happens inside.

Alex, a pseudonym, is in his early forties and comes from Kyrgyzstan’s Talas region. For the past three years, he has worked as a long-distance truck driver in the European Union. The wages are considerably higher than those available to him at home, but getting to Europe was difficult, and life on the road has proved far more precarious than the promise of European employment might suggest.

Losing money before reaching Europe

Alex’s path into European trucking began with failure.

On his first attempt to find work abroad, he says he lost between 60,000 and 70,000 Kyrgyz som to a posrednik, or middleman, in Slovakia. He obtained the contact through an acquaintance. According to Alex, the intermediary promised to arrange a work visa, contracts and other documents.

“The money was burned,” he recalls.

He tried again and lost money a second time, though less than on the first occasion. It was only on his third attempt that he found a viable route. Rather than relying on another intermediary, Alex contacted a Lithuanian logistics company directly through WhatsApp. According to him, the company prepared a contract, invitation letter and the other documents he needed. Within two or three months, the process was complete, and his principal expenses were administrative fees and flights.

The experience left him deeply suspicious of intermediaries. Although some of his criticism is based on what he has heard from other drivers rather than his own experience, he believes agencies can withhold information or charge workers for poorly explained services.

His experience reflects concerns documented more widely among migrant truck drivers. Research on the European road transport sector has described cases in which drivers paid high recruitment fees, faced unexpected charges after arrival or were misled about working conditions. Other research on Central Asian migration to Europe has similarly identified weaknesses in recruitment systems, including inadequate contract verification and limited pre-departure information.

A truck that doubles as a home

Once Alex started working in Europe, the realities of the job became clearer.

He has worked for companies based in Lithuania and Czechia, driving across large parts of the European Union. Alex says he initially started on around €85 per day, but once he moved into vehicle transport – the work he now specialises in – his pay rose to around €100-€120 per day, sometimes reaching €130.

His current Czech employer, he says, allows him to work for considerably longer periods and with fewer expenses than his previous Lithuanian company. By comparison, the Lithuanian employer operated what Alex describes as a “cadence” system, with drivers moved in and out of different routes and countries by minibus.

“They split drivers up across Europe, over to Germany, France, Italy and Belgium,” he says. One driver would arrive with his belongings and continue the work while another returned home in the same minibus.

The financial attraction of Europe is obvious to him.

“In Kyrgyzstan a driver’s salary is roughly $800 per journey,” Alex says, but a single trip can mean collecting cargo in China and returning to Kyrgyzstan, or driving from Kyrgyzstan through Kazakhstan and onwards to Russia.

On those routes, “nothing is provided”, he says. Repairs, tyre changes and other costs may have to be handled by the driver. Border queues can also consume days. Drivers may wait two or three days, or sometimes as long as a week, he says, while spending part of their earnings on food and other expenses along the way.

By contrast, he considers trucking in the EU better paid and, in some respects, easier. But that income comes with a lifestyle dominated by the vehicle itself.

Even buying groceries can become an expedition. In one video recorded in Germany, Alex walks back from Lidl carrying a full shopping bag. On that occasion, the supermarket was only 2.5 kilometres from where he had parked. At other stops, he says, drivers may have to walk five or even ten kilometres to reach a large shop.

Truck parking determines much of daily life. Drivers cannot simply take their vehicles into many city streets, while roadside facilities do not always provide the food or services they need. Finding somewhere to stop is itself a recurring problem. Alex has filmed parking areas where trucks double-park, occupy exits or line the roadside because designated spaces are full.

“The number one problem is always parking,” he says, especially in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Czechia. Spain and France are somewhat easier, though he says parking around Lyon and Paris can also be difficult.

Basic facilities vary considerably. Alex carries his own water and has recorded truck stops without showers.

“The most important thing,” he says, “is that it has a toilet.”

Sleeping where you work

Alex says he rarely stays in a hotel or hostel while on the road. Most nights, he sleeps in the bed built into the truck cabin.

That can mean spending entire days and nights inside the same few square metres. The truck becomes somewhere to eat, sleep, exercise, store food and wait between assignments.

At night, security is another concern. Alex loops the seatbelts through the interior door handles in an attempt to make it harder for thieves to force open the cabin while he sleeps. He says he has not personally experienced a break-in, but learned the technique from other drivers and from stories circulating among them.

EU rules prohibit drivers from taking their regular weekly rest period of at least 45 hours inside their vehicles. Suitable accommodation outside the truck should instead be provided, with the cost covered by the employer.

Alex is familiar with the rule.

“For 45 hours the driver must rest and the company must provide him with a proper room so that he can go in there and sleep and rest,” he says.

But according to him, that often does not happen.

“No one arranges hotel accommodation. The driver is the one who has to sort it out,” he says, adding that in his experience only a minority of companies consistently comply.

At his former Lithuanian employer, Alex recalls drivers being housed between assignments in three large dormitories. He personally saw two of them, one with five floors and another that appeared to have four. Drivers could spend periods there waiting to be assigned another route.

His current Czech employer, he says, gives him more freedom to decide when and for how long to take a break.

When the driver carries the risk

Pay is another source of uncertainty.

Alex says his experience has varied considerably between employers. At his first company in Lithuania, drivers waiting to be deployed were supposed to receive the Lithuanian minimum wage, he says, but he claims this did not happen. Instead, while he and several other drivers waited between assignments, the company charged them €15 per night for accommodation.

Alex also alleges that one former manager at the Lithuanian company accepted payments from drivers in return for preferential treatment. According to him, drivers could pay to receive trucks with more spacious, higher-roof cabins or to move more quickly into an assignment, while others remained in the dormitories waiting for work.

When he returned to work, Alex says further sums were deducted from his salary without a clear explanation.

The reasons were difficult for him to understand. His contract was in Lithuanian, a language he does not speak. When he was eventually given a Russian-language contract, he remembers employers telling workers to sign quickly.

“Come on, sign here quickly, quickly, quickly. No need to read it, just sign it quickly,” he recalls.

“We were glad they were taking us on, so we just agreed.”

Damage to cargo can also become a financial burden.

Alex recalls transporting BMW cars for his Lithuanian employer and being charged €1,000 after some of the vehicles were found to have scratches.

His current Czech employer, he says, operates differently. The company covers the first incident of damage. On a second occasion, the cost may be divided between employer and driver, while after a third incident the driver can be expected to cover the full amount.

According to Alex, this arrangement was explained to him verbally rather than set out in his contract.

He considers such systems unfair because drivers may not always be able to see damage while loading vehicles. Snow, rain, poor lighting or darkness can make scratches difficult to identify, he says. At unloading, by contrast, inspectors may examine vehicles under bright lights or with mirrors and lamps.

“The driver does not have such capabilities,” Alex says.

Even theft can become the driver’s problem. He recalls a friend whose fuel was stolen and who, according to Alex, had to give up around half of one month’s salary to cover the loss.

A wider dispute over working conditions

Alex says his own relationships with employers have generally remained manageable. Other migrant truck drivers in Europe have experienced much more direct confrontations.

In 2023, dozens of drivers, many of them from Uzbekistan and Georgia, staged protests at the Gräfenhausen motorway service area in Germany in a dispute with their Polish employer. They accused the company of withholding wages and criticised working conditions, including long periods spent living inside trucks.

The Gräfenhausen protests attracted wider attention because they brought grievances normally scattered across motorways, parking areas and logistics depots into public view.

Alex’s own experience is not identical to that of the striking drivers. But some of the pressures he describes – long periods inside a truck, deductions he struggles to understand, and dependence on employers far from home – echo concerns raised elsewhere in the road transport sector.

The Road Transport Due Diligence Foundation has documented broader patterns in which third-country drivers may be formally employed in one EU member state while spending much of their working time elsewhere, alongside delayed wages and deductions that workers struggle to understand.

Europe through a windscreen

Alex’s life in Europe is not defined entirely by work.

During rest stops, he tries to exercise. He bought a skipping rope and trains in truck parking areas. When time allows, he walks around wherever he happens to be parked.

His journeys have also brought unexpected encounters: ships in Belgium, local markets, unfamiliar towns and landscapes, and animals he had never seen before.

On one occasion in Antwerp, Alex and some colleagues visited the zoo.

“That’s where, for the first time, I saw a flamingo,” he says. He also remembers seeing elephants and giraffes.

One thing he particularly appreciates about Europe is the greenery.

“There are even bridges that simply connect the wildlife on the right side of the motorway with that on the left-hand side,” he says, referring to wildlife crossings. “Not for cars, not for anything else, not for trains, but specifically for animals, so that the animals can cross back and forth.”

He also values being able to travel around the Schengen area during his time off without needing separate tourist visas. He has visited Paris and the Louvre, Madrid, Antwerp, Prague and Luxembourg. Rome remains on his list.

Another difference he notices is policing. In his experience, traffic police in Europe behave differently from those he remembers at home.

“They aren’t like we have back home, always waving their batons and handing out fines,” he says. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen here.”

Other aspects of life are less convenient. Alex says truck stops often offer little beyond fast food, and he sometimes struggles to find halal options along his routes.

More broadly, he feels that migrant drivers are treated as more interchangeable than local workers.

“For their own drivers they treat them differently and provide them with better vehicles,” he says of some employers.

In his view, migrant drivers are easier to replace.

“If an Indian won’t do the work, then a Russian will come to do it. If not a Russian then a Ukrainian. If not a Ukrainian then a Filipino. If not Filipino then an Uzbek, Tajik or Kazakh.”

It is his interpretation of a labour market in which drivers from different countries are constantly moving through the same companies, routes and parking areas.

Earning in Europe, imagining a future in Kyrgyzstan

But these glimpses of Europe are incidental.

Alex did not come for tourism, and he does not describe trucking as a long-term dream.

“If I could have the job I do back home, I would do it,” he says.

The reason he stays is money.

Flights to Kyrgyzstan are expensive, and Alex has relatives to support. Until recently, he says, he had spent almost two years in Europe without returning home because leaving work and paying for the journey made little financial sense.

He has two daughters. He speaks to them regularly and sends money, clothes and other things home.

Read more on Novastan: Money, boxes and absent men: the hidden economy reshaping Central Asia

“Going home is not profitable,” he says.

For now, the truck is a means to something else.

Alex is saving. His ambition is to buy one or two apartments in Kyrgyzstan and eventually establish a farm with sheep, sweetcorn and potatoes.

In Talas, he estimates that suitable land costs around €10,000 per hectare. A decent farm, he says, would require at least five to ten hectares, alongside additional investment in buildings, equipment and livestock. By his own estimate, establishing the kind of farm he imagines could ultimately require around €200,000.

“My children are growing up,” he says. “Until my pension I will work, I think. In the future I will receive a European pension.”

The cramped cabin, the long walks to supermarkets and the nights spent sleeping behind the steering wheel are, in his mind, temporary sacrifices.

Europe is where he earns the money.

Kyrgyzstan is where he imagines his future.

By Anvar Whitlock, Contributor for Novastan.

The post Far from home, behind the wheel: A Kyrgyz truck driver on Europe’s roads appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new emphasis, not a new relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The key word is diversification.

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

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

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

“Investment. Investment. Investment”

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

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

“Investment. Investment. Investment.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One region, five different relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its value lies elsewhere.

Where regionalism can actually help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it may ultimately matter more.

The Middle Corridor is not the whole answer

Transport is another area where political rhetoric can obscure commercial reality.

The Middle Corridor across the Caspian Sea and South Caucasus has gained enormous geopolitical visibility as governments search for routes that reduce dependence on Russia.

For South Korea, however, geography creates an additional complication.

Because North Korea blocks direct overland access from South Korea to the Eurasian continent, Korean cargo must first travel by sea before entering a continental route.

“The Middle Corridor is important to many countries,” Fumagalli said. But for Korea, simply getting goods onto the Eurasian landmass adds both time and cost. Seoul is therefore examining multiple possibilities rather than betting everything on a single route.

Kurmashev likewise cautions against treating connectivity as one uniform corridor problem.

Korean goods entering Kazakhstan may arrive through China. A Korean-invested Kazakh factory selling to Europe may have a much stronger interest in the Trans-Caspian route. The same factory selling to Uzbekistan primarily needs predictable transport within Central Asia.

“The Middle Corridor is important, but its relevance depends on the origin and destination of the cargo,” he said.

The underlying issue is therefore less glamorous: customs procedures, compatible digital systems, certification, transport reliability and clear responsibility when shipments are delayed.

Those are precisely the areas in which a regional political framework can potentially complement bilateral investment.

Korea’s soft advantage – and its limits

South Korea does have one advantage that is harder to measure than investment flows.

It is generally perceived differently from Russia, China or the major Western powers.

Fumagalli describes Seoul as retaining a relatively “non-threatening” profile in Central Asia, reinforced by the extraordinary reach of Korean popular culture.

Historical ties through Koryo-saram communities, Korean universities, consumer technology, development programmes and K-pop all contribute to a familiarity that conventional economic statistics do not capture.

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

Kurmashev nevertheless warns against turning that favourable image into an assumption of automatic trust.

Korea has no history of ruling Central Asian territory and shares no border with the region, but governments, companies and local communities may still perceive individual projects differently. A positive national image does not settle concerns about employment, water use, working conditions or the terms of a particular investment.

Lee points to another increasingly important dimension: the experience of Central Asians in South Korea itself.

Students, migrant workers and other Central Asian residents encounter questions of labour rights, integration, discrimination and visa insecurity. Those experiences also shape perceptions of Korea.

Economic diplomacy therefore does not take place separately from human relationships.

A country may enjoy strong cultural appeal while simultaneously damaging its reputation through the everyday experience of the people who study and work there.

The test comes after the summit

The first Korea-Central Asia summit has already succeeded in one respect: it has institutionalised a relationship that Seoul increasingly regards as strategically important.

The Republic of Korea government itself emphasised that cooperation should move beyond individual infrastructure projects toward local processing, manufacturing, industrial capacity and “mutually beneficial value chains.”

The harder question is whether that language produces projects.

Fumagalli would watch whether announced investments – particularly in areas such as renewable energy – actually move forward.

Kurmashev proposes an even more concrete measure: financing secured, factories operating, transport becoming more reliable, and local companies acquiring capabilities they can use beyond a single Korean partnership.

For Lee, the regional framework will also have to prove that it can address shared problems without pretending that Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are interchangeable.

And Haym’s emphasis on continuity provides an important corrective to the language of diplomatic breakthroughs. South Korea has been building relationships in Central Asia for decades. The summit did not create them. It gave them a new institutional form.

That may be precisely why the most realistic Korean strategy will remain regional in form and bilateral in practice.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are likely to continue attracting the deepest economic engagement. The other Central Asian states will participate through different sectors, at different scales and for different reasons.

That is not necessarily a failure of regionalism.

The real test is whether the new framework can make those unequal relationships work better together – allowing investment to cross borders, local companies to enter production networks, skills and technology to remain in the region, and Central Asian governments to gain meaningful new economic choices.

If it does, South Korea may carve out a distinctive role in one of the world’s increasingly crowded arenas of economic diplomacy.

If it does not, Seoul will have succeeded in creating another summit – without fundamentally changing what lies beneath it.

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

The post South Korea’s Central Asia strategy is regional in form, bilateral in practice appeared first on Novastan English.

On 16 September, Seoul hosted the first-ever Korea–Central Asia Summit, bringing President Lee Jae-myung together with the heads of state of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – a dialogue that has run at ministerial level since 2007, now elevated to heads of state and producing a joint “Seoul Declaration” on supply-chain cooperation (Seoul Shinmun, 李대통령 16일 첫 중앙아시아 정상회의). Most coverage has treated this as a diplomatic first, full stop – a historic photograph, five new bilateral memoranda, a summit that “elevates” a relationship, nothing more. The more interesting story is why it took this particular shape now, in September 2026 rather than at any point over the preceding three decades, and what that shape reveals about a quiet shift in how Seoul thinks about the region.

From aid recipient to resource partner

For most of the three decades since 1992, Seoul’s relationship with Central Asia has combined development assistance with a real, if modest, industrial footprint – Daewoo’s car assembly plant in Uzbekistan since the 1990s and Samsung’s household-appliance manufacturing among the longest-running examples of Korean direct investment in the region (Modern Diplomacy, “K-Silk Road Boosts Seoul’s Central Asia Presence”). But that investment sat for decades within a relationship organized primarily around cooperation and technical assistance rather than resource dependence. That balance is now shifting. The Presidential Office frames this summit’s central purpose as combining Central Asia’s critical-mineral reserves with Korean processing technology – supply-chain language layered on top of the older development framing, not replacing it outright (Korea Herald). The anxiety behind this is concrete: by 2025, South Korea’s mineral-import dependence had reached roughly 99.7 percent, with more than four-fifths sourced from China (Kim et al., “Central Asia as New Battle Grounds”).

The build-out has been rapid and institutional, not rhetorical. Just three days before the summit, Korea’s industry ministry convened the first-ever “C5+1” meeting of industry ministers with all five Central Asian states, agreeing to build supply chains spanning mining, refining, high-value materials processing and finished-goods manufacturing, alongside a parallel track on industrial parks, smart-factory cooperation and manufacturing AI (Newspim, 한-중앙아 산업장관회의). On the ground, Korea’s own state geological survey (KIGAM) has agreed with Uzbekistan to carry out joint exploration of nickel and cobalt deposits at Sultanuvays, with the explicit logic – laid out by Korean officials themselves – that public-sector exploration is needed to de-risk projects private mining firms won’t touch without proven reserves; if the deposits prove commercially viable, the plan is to move toward a joint venture and eventually refining and production, with Korean firms invited in at that stage (Herald Business, “중앙아시아에서 여는 핵심광물 협력의 새 길”). In his own bilateral meeting with Uzbek President Mirziyoyev ahead of the summit, President Lee explicitly proposed pairing Korean processing technology with the Asian Development Bank’s financing capacity to stabilize Central Asian mineral supply chains (Segye Ilbo) – a formulation that captures Seoul’s emerging model exactly: Korea supplies expertise, others supply capital and territory.

The connectivity problem

None of this works if the minerals cannot reach Korean plants, and here the summit’s ambition runs ahead of infrastructure – though it is worth being precise about which infrastructure. Neither Korea nor Central Asia shares a border with the other, so cargo has, in principle, several ways to travel: north through Russia, west across the Caspian toward Turkey and the Black Sea (the “Middle Corridor”), or east and south through China to a Pacific port. Public Korean commentary on the K-Silk Road initiative has invoked the Middle Corridor as a rhetorical alternative to routes dependent on China’s Belt and Road infrastructure (BISI, “Korea’s new ‘K-Silk Road’ Initiative in Central Asia”), but there is little public evidence that Seoul has committed to the Trans-Caspian route specifically as the backbone of its minerals strategy. If anything, the available evidence points the other way: a peer-reviewed routing study comparing options for Korea–Central Asia cargo found that a China-transit corridor – Incheon to Qingdao to Horgos to Almaty – outperformed alternatives on cost, the single factor logistics firms weighted most heavily (Wang and Yeo, “Selecting a Cargo Transport Route to Central Asia”). The same BISI analysis is candid on this point: China’s Belt and Road infrastructure is likely to remain the dominant channel for regional development projects regardless of what Korea builds, precisely because it already exists at scale.

A Korean government-commissioned study of logistics barriers in Central Asia, based on interviews with Korean freight-forwarding firms already operating in the region, found customs procedures and inadequate transport infrastructure – not any single missing corridor – to be the two most severe obstacles, ranked above financing or licensing constraints (National Knowledge Information System, 중앙아시아 물류장벽 연구). Read against that finding, the more accurate framing is not that Seoul’s mineral strategy hinges on completing a specific Trans-Caspian route, but that it depends on a broader and messier connectivity problem – customs harmonization, storage capacity, transport reliability – that touches every route out of the region, Chinese-transit ones included.

Seoul’s response has been to avoid the corridor-building role entirely regardless of which route eventually dominates. Rather than financing rail or port capacity itself, Korea is positioning as a technology and processing partner layered onto infrastructure others pay for – hence President Lee’s pitch to route Korean expertise through Asian Development Bank financing rather than bilateral Korean capital in his meeting with President Mirziyoyev (Segye Ilbo).

Why now

Two pressures help explain the timing, though they are best read as a plausible interpretation rather than an explicitly stated Korean rationale. The first is status, and here Seoul has been unusually candid in its own words. President Lee has framed the summit explicitly as part of a wider diplomatic diversification, telling his own senior secretaries that “the global order is rapidly becoming multipolar” and that “this is exactly the moment to join hands with more countries and expand our diplomatic reach into more diverse regions” (Daily Hankook, 유럽서 첨단산업·중앙아서 핵심광물) – a framing his own spokesperson echoed by describing Korea as having “joined the resource-diplomacy race” already under way among the major powers (Asia Economy, 강대국 ‘러브콜’에 몸값 뛴 중앙亞). That timing follows a French state visit built around advanced-industry cooperation, suggesting a deliberate, sequenced diplomatic expansion rather than a Central Asia-specific reaction. It sits, too, against a crowded backdrop: roughly ten “C5+1”-style formats now link Central Asia to outside powers, Japan’s dating back two decades and Washington’s marking its tenth anniversary last November with over $100 billion in announced deals (CIRSD; U.S. State Department). For a country that has cultivated middle-power status as deliberate policy, being among the last major economies without a leaders’-level format with the region plausibly carried a cost measured in standing, even if no Korean official has said so in those terms.

Central Asia is not a passive audience

The five governments arriving in Seoul are practiced at extracting better terms from competing suitors without committing to any one of them. Kazakhstan runs parallel Caspian and Chinese overland links simultaneously rather than choosing between them (Times of Central Asia). Uzbekistan’s own framing of cooperation with Korea explicitly stresses local refining capacity and technology transfer over raw extraction (Kim et al.) – a hedge against what regional analysts call a “green resource curse,” and a pointed contrast with Chinese capital, which regional governments increasingly criticize for financing without technology transfer. Uzbekistan’s insistence, in the KIGAM nickel-cobalt talks, on holding open the option of a joint venture rather than a straightforward extraction concession is one small but telling instance of that same instinct at work – Tashkent structuring the deal so that value stays onshore if the deposit proves out. With Washington, Tokyo, Brussels and now Seoul all running comparable outreach in the same eighteen-month window, the five republics can accept summits and memoranda from all of them while committing exclusively to none, and each new suitor arriving in the region only strengthens that leverage rather than diminishing it.

An open bet, not a settled shift

The institutional architecture – the ministerial-to-presidential upgrade, the new C5+1 industry channel, joint KIGAM exploration on the ground – is real and represents coordination that didn’t exist two years ago. But the connectivity infrastructure needed to make a minerals strategy commercially viable does not yet exist in reliable form on any route, and Korea’s own logistics-sector research says as much: firms already moving freight through the region, not diplomats drafting communiqués, are the ones flagging customs and infrastructure as the binding constraint, regardless of whether that freight ultimately crosses the Caspian or transits China. What the summit signals, then, is a bet rather than a breakthrough: that being an early, technically credible partner is valuable now, even before the logistics catch up, and that Gulf, European and multilateral capital will eventually close the connectivity gap into which Korean firms can plug their offtake deals. Whether that bet pays off depends less on what is signed in Seoul this week than on whether the region’s transport and customs bottlenecks, on whichever route ends up mattering most, get resolved soon enough to matter.

By Kodirjon Eshonkulov.

Kodirjon Eshonkulov is an independent researcher specializing in Central Asian geopolitics, transboundary infrastructure, and relations with the European Union. He is a graduate of the Graduate School of International Studies at Ajou University in South Korea. Since 2017, he has worked as a correspondent and television journalist covering social and political reforms in Uzbekistan.

The post From Development Partner to Strategic Supplier: What Seoul’s First Central Asia Summit Really Signals? appeared first on Novastan English.

Bruce Pannier has watched Central Asia change for more than three decades – from the final years of the Soviet Union to a generation that no longer remembers it. In an interview with Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, the veteran journalist reflects on independent media, Russia’s changing role, generational shifts, overlooked communities and what outsiders still misunderstand about Central Asia.

In the summer of 1990, Bruce Pannier arrived at Tashkent State University. The Soviet Union still existed. Central Asia’s five future independent states did not.

More than three decades later, Pannier has become one of the most familiar English-language voices on Central Asia. At Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), he co-created and co-hosted Majlis, a podcast that brought together journalists, scholars and analysts to discuss developments across the region and, increasingly, to amplify perspectives from Central Asians themselves.

Today, he is part of the team behind Turan, a project covering Central Asia and the wider Turkic world. In this interview with Novastan, Pannier looks back at more than three decades of reporting and reflects on the changing media landscape, the impact of the war in Ukraine, generational change, overlooked communities and a region that, in his view, is increasingly defining its future on its own terms.

Novastan: You have been covering Central Asia for several decades. How did your interest in the region first begin?

Bruce Pannier: I was learning Russian and doing Soviet Studies in college. But I suppose everything started with two books: Eastern Approaches by Sir Fitzroy MacLean and Setting the East Ablaze by Peter Hopkirk. That was in the early and mid-1980s.

The leading American authority on Central Asia was Edward Allworth, who taught at Columbia University. I was fortunate to go and study under him. He loved Central Asia and, best of all, he knew thousands of years of the region’s history. He treated the Soviet period as just another chapter in that history, so we never looked at Central Asia through a Russian or Soviet lens.

Then I went to summer school at Tashkent State University in 1990, and I was completely hooked after that.

Were there particular places in Central Asia – a city, a region, a border area, a mountain landscape, a desert, a bazaar or an everyday encounter – that changed the way you understood the countries and societies you were covering?

Many. I worked in villages in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in 1992 and 1993.

They all had similar lives, working on farms growing crops or herding animals, but there were different ways to do this work in every village and different attitudes about living and working in rural areas.

I was amazed to find out how religious people remained there. I arrived in spring 1992 and, in one of the first villages I worked in, someone died. We all went to the very Muslim funeral, and almost everyone knew the prayers.

I was doing sociological research and one of the questions I asked was: “What building or facility would you like to see in your village?” The answer every time – and I mean every time – was a mosque.

I certainly gained a new respect for herders. I was instructed to do what the people in the villages did. I especially disliked picking cotton, but taking a herd out to pasture was my type of work.

You have a few dogs, a stick to keep stragglers moving and a couple of rocks to throw in front of animals, usually sheep, that are moving too far ahead. You find a good grazing area and sit under a tree watching the animals eat. When it’s time to go back, you round up the herd and head back to the village.

If the job paid better, I would be doing it now.

Of course, the inter-ethnic violence in Osh in June 2010 was a shock. I had thought, or at least hoped, that was all behind everyone.

Remember, I was at Tashkent State in summer 1990 when it happened before, though we couldn’t get much information about what was going on. When I was in Osh and other parts of the Fergana Valley in 1992, the events of 1990 seemed very far away. People didn’t talk about it much.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the mountains. I love mountains and enjoyed the many times I was in the Central Asian mountains.

I liked doing the trip between Bishkek and Osh in a marshrutka just because of the views. The road was in terrible shape until the end of the 1990s, but it didn’t matter to me when I was staring out of the window, or when we stopped along the road.

One time I was with a Kazakh friend in Shymbulak – then called Chimbulak. It’s a good ski area now, and even in 1992 there was a ski lift there. There were no skiers, but I convinced one of the park rangers, for five dollars, to turn on the ski lift long enough to take my friend and me to the top.

I remember him saying, in Russian, “For God’s sake, don’t break anything.”

We walked back down, and the view was magnificent.

And obviously, the Silk Road cities were amazing. Samarkand looks so different now compared with the early 1990s, but even back then it had a charm.

It was not well tended, and the old buildings looked old and in need of repair, but it really made me appreciate how old they were. And since I worked in villages, I could imagine what it was like for a farmer or herder to visit one of the big and bustling cities.

When you first started following Central Asia, what did outside observers most often misunderstand about the region? Has that changed today?

Well, when I first started following Central Asia, there were not many outside observers. Some Western media outlets were having difficulties even spelling the names of the Central Asian countries.

Probably the biggest misconception was that the people in Central Asia had accepted that they were part of the Soviet Union. When I was at TashGU that summer, there were people from all over Central Asia studying there, and it was clear they regarded Russia as a colonizer that was pilfering the region’s resources and trying to force them to become a “Soviet man or woman.”

That has clearly changed since the USSR collapsed. Since the Kremlin launched its full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022, we have seen some lively discussions in Central Asia about colonization and exploitation under Tsarist and then Soviet rule. Even the leaderships of some Central Asian countries are calling it a dark period in the region’s history.

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

Majlis became one of the most recognizable English-language formats for discussing Central Asia. What was the original idea behind the podcast?

Muhammad Tahir and I started Majlis in 2014 in response to the increase in fighting in northern Afghanistan. Our first programme was about Turkmenistan being the Achilles heel of Central Asian security.

We weren’t sure then that we would ever do any more podcasts, but RFE/RL management liked it, and I agreed there was a wide variety of topics beyond deteriorating security in northern Afghanistan that we could cover, starting with the great reporting RFE/RL’s Central Asian services were doing in local languages and Russian.

Muhammad was something of a showman. He really embraced being the host, with me as the “in-house” RFE/RL expert. Majlis gave us a chance to show off our people in the Central Asian services and promote people outside RFE/RL who had made, or were making, a name for themselves in the field of Central Asian affairs.

Our guests really propelled the podcast forward, and I’m glad to see so many of them are now leading scholars in the field of Central Asian studies.

Why was it important for Majlis to include voices from Central Asia itself, and how did their perspectives shape the discussions?

There was often a difference in interpretations of events in Central Asia – sometimes large differences, but mostly nuances.

Someone like me, who has studied the region, lived there briefly and travelled widely, came to different conclusions about what events in the region meant and where they were leading Central Asia.

For about the first 20 years after independence, there were not many Central Asians who could articulate, in English, their views on the course of events. But when they started to appear, Muhammad and I were, firstly, very happy and, secondly, determined to give the voices of Central Asia – often people in their 20s and 30s – an opportunity to explain what was happening in their homelands.

It was possible to disagree with what some of the people from Central Asia said, but it was important to hear how they viewed the evolving world inside and outside Central Asia.

In the end, it’s their story. I think it made for a better understanding of the region for people outside it.

Were there episodes or discussions of Majlis that particularly stayed with you because they captured a turning point in the region?

Several dealt with the deterioration of security in northern Afghanistan. Most of our guests on this topic were from Afghanistan and supporters of Ghani, or at least not supporters of the Taliban, or from Central Asia. The gradual depression with which they spoke about events unfolding in northern Afghanistan between 2014 and 2021 certainly caused me to consider more and more the possibility that the Taliban would reconquer Afghanistan.

Several of the podcasts we did about women’s rights and gender-based violence were revealing, and I learned a lot, but I was troubled by some of the assessments given by guests.

One that really moved me was the description Freedom for Eurasia founder Leila Seiitbek gave of how she was a victim of ala kachuu, bride kidnapping, and escaped because she smoked a cigarette and her kidnapper’s family rejected her as a forced bride.

How has reporting on Central Asia changed since the 1990s, especially in terms of access, sources and risks for local journalists?

When I started work for the Open Media Research Institute (OMRI) in March 1995, the internet was not much help. People at OMRI would give me photocopies of current articles from Central Asian newspapers. Sometimes I had access to the actual newspapers, though these were at least several days old and usually more like a week or two old.

Back in the 1990s, certainly in the early and middle 1990s, journalists and media outlets in Central Asia were freer to write about what they wanted, with the exception of Turkmenistan. Kazakhstan had a vibrant independent media scene, very much like the one developing in Kyrgyzstan.

But even in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, journalists were pushing the limits of coverage on matters such as corruption, the deteriorating socio-economic situation, questionable state policies and other topics.

This situation changed as governments faced increasing challenges and decided that some criticism might be valid, but that some outlets were reporting too much about problems. In Tajikistan’s case, during the 1992-1997 civil war, this could be deadly, and more than a dozen journalists, foreign and local, were essentially assassinated.

By the end of the 1990s, it was becoming more difficult for journalists in Uzbekistan to report freely on a wide range of topics. The government would find charges such as fraud or failure to pay taxes – something unrelated to journalism – to use against journalists who were exposing shortcomings in the country. This became a standard practice, and even President Islam Karimov’s nephew, who was an independent journalist, was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital for his reporting.

Now, journalists in each country understand where the boundaries in reporting are, and there is a lot of self-censorship being practised.

How would you describe the current generation of journalists in Central Asia compared with those reporting in the 1990s or 2000s?

I suppose the biggest difference is the range of media now available. Everything is on the web now. Back in the 1990s, outlets were confined to the basic three – television, radio and print media, what people now refer to as “traditional media.”

It was easier for governments to shut down independent outlets among these three, or pressure outlets that featured criticism of government policies. That made it very difficult for journalists at independent outlets.

Today, the same pressures still exist, but “non-traditional” media are giving independent journalists opportunities they did not have in the past. That is why many of the best reports on Central Asia are coming from people with YouTube channels. Facebook and other social networks are also giving journalists – whether journalists by training or “citizen” journalists – opportunities to speak about corruption and state mismanagement.

I think the journalists in the 1990s and 2000s were just as brave and anxious to report the big news affecting their countries as journalists today.

I would mention one development that showed me that, given the chance, good independent journalism could take root in any of the Central Asian countries.

When Shavkat Mirziyoyev became Uzbekistan’s president in late 2016, he eased state control over the media and encouraged journalists to report on the important things happening in Uzbekistan. And they did. Given some space, journalists in Uzbekistan went right after corrupt officials and reported on other topics they would not have touched during the last decade or so of President Islam Karimov’s rule.

In fact, it proved to be too candid, and Mirziyoyev’s government had to rein in some of the coverage. But it showed the spirit of independent, objective journalism was still alive in Uzbekistan and that all it needed was an opportunity to blossom.

Independent media now operate across very different spaces – inside the region, in exile and through social media, podcasts, YouTube and investigative platforms. Has this changed what independent journalism means in Central Asia?

Certainly. The role of “non-traditional” media is becoming more important all the time.

Some of the cutting-edge criticism of policies or officials in Tajikistan or Uzbekistan has been coming from YouTube channels. This is true to a lesser extent, in my opinion, in the other three countries.

And, of course, the YouTube channels and websites such as Turkmen.news and Hronikatm.com dealing with Turkmenistan are all operating from outside the country.

Which independent media outlets or journalistic initiatives from Central Asia do you think deserve more international attention today?

In Kazakhstan, Vlast.kz, Orda.kz and KazTAG come to mind as good independent media outlets that could use some international attention and, if possible, funding. Unfortunately, Orda.kz recently ceased operations after legal difficulties that included its chief editor being sentenced to eight years in prison. I’m sure there are others, but those are three off the top of my head.

In Kyrgyzstan, Kloop Media is currently banned from operating inside the country. Temirov Live has also done some great investigative reporting and was closed down. Kaktus Media is still working in Kyrgyzstan, but it is one of only a few independent media outlets left.

The Central Asia Barometer was a great initiative that did some fantastic survey work. They had European funding. Unfortunately, they were pressured into stopping work. It would be great to find a way for them to resume operations.

What I would like to see generally is some form of cooperation or organization that brings independent journalists from Europe and Central Asia together. I know Vlast.kz and Orda.kz have employed Europeans, and the results were notable.

If it were possible to get funding for a media outlet covering EU-Central Asian cooperation, such as Global Gateway, and employing young European and Central Asian journalists, I think the results would be excellent and very enlightening.

What role have exile media, independent journalists and regional analysts played in keeping Central Asian stories visible internationally?

It varies from country to country. Independent journalists, including those working in non-traditional media, have been instrumental in calling out corrupt government officials who are then fired when authorities perceive the attention these reports are garnering nationally and, in some cases, internationally. I’m thinking mainly about YouTube channels.

In Turkmenistan’s case, exile media are almost the only source of objective news about what is happening inside the country. Obviously, RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, Azatlyk, is an exception, but Turkmen.news and Hronikatm.com are essential sites for following events in Turkmenistan.

There are some absolutely fantastic regional analysts, and since I am afraid I might forget someone, I will not list any names. So much of the best material appearing in English these days is being produced by Central Asians – and it is not translated into English; it is being written by them in English.

What can international media, donors and regional platforms do to support Central Asian journalists without distorting their priorities or making them more vulnerable?

This is a tough question. On the one hand, international publicity provides some protection for journalists – and activists and politicians – in Central Asia, and often keeps them out of prison or at least pressures authorities into some leniency.

On the other hand, in the ever-changing world, it is impossible to stay focused on any one topic. When attention wanes, these journalists are vulnerable.

International publicity around a particular journalist can also make that person a special target of authorities who do not want independent journalists or media outlets. If they work for foreign media, such as RFE/RL, governments can attack them as doing the bidding of their foreign paymaster.

The war in Ukraine has changed how many people in Europe and the United States look at Central Asia. What has it revealed about the region?

Deep-seated resentment against having been colonized, and growing efforts by many Central Asians and their governments to distance themselves from Russia.

This is particularly evident in the new security and defence partnerships the Central Asian states are forming with Türkiye, first and foremost, but also with Azerbaijan and some of the Gulf states.

Following on from that, I think Central Asians are understanding more and more that they do not need to depend on Russia, certainly not to the extent they did for the first 30 years after independence.

Russia is a leading trade partner and will remain so for the foreseeable future, but it is now clear that there are other partners, and some have ethnic or religious ties to Central Asia that Russia does not have.

Even if the war in Ukraine ends tomorrow, I don’t think there’s any way to go back to the status quo prior to February 2022.

Read more on Novastan: Who Made the Nations of Central Asia?

I still see articles that refer to Central Asia as Russia’s “backyard.” Central Asians never viewed it that way, and now they have less and less reason to accept such characterizations.

Has the war accelerated a real diversification of Central Asia’s foreign relations, or are we still overstating the change?

Accelerated. Definitely.

Prior to February 2022, Russia and China were the dominant partners for trade, investment and security, including energy security. Everyone else was at best running a distant second.

Read more on Novastan: Money, boxes and absent men: the hidden economy reshaping Central Asia

China and Russia are still important partners for Central Asia, Russia perhaps less so now. But many countries have stepped up their interaction with Central Asia. The EU and the Gulf Arab states have all increased their roles in and importance for Central Asia.

Türkiye and the Organization of Turkic States are also increasingly part of Central Asia’s future. Azerbaijan’s role in the OTS and as a key country in the Middle Corridor is bringing it closer to Central Asia, and in November 2025 there was even a “C6” meeting with the five Central Asian states and Azerbaijan.

Some people used to say Russia was the policeman and China the banker for Central Asia. Now the Central Asian states have options for both security and finance.

What are the social changes in Central Asia that outsiders tend to miss because they focus too much on presidents and geopolitics?

The younger generation, people under 30 or 35 years old, is very tech-savvy.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and to a lesser degree Kyrgyzstan, are all moving forward quickly and modernizing everything from architecture to online documents and payments. These three countries are becoming modern states.

Do you see a generational shift in Central Asia, especially among young people who no longer remember the Soviet Union?

Definitely, and it’s not only that almost everyone under 35 or 40 has a mobile phone and knows how to use computers.

For young people in the 1990s, it was often enough that their countries were independent. They remembered clearly what life was like as part of the Soviet Union and, even if socio-economic conditions were often not better, and at times perhaps even worse, they were independent and there was a feeling they were masters of their own destiny. Change could happen.

The current generation wants to be masters of their own destiny but often views the entrenched leadership in their countries as the primary obstacle to positive transformation. There is scepticism among some young people that their governments are willing to make changes that benefit the younger generation.

In the Soviet days, there wasn’t much people could do to change policies made in Moscow, but now they believe it is, or at least should be, possible to change policies in their own countries.

It must be frustrating for many younger people when they see their leaders cling to policies that benefit the regime, not the masses.

Which communities, regions or issues within Central Asia remain most invisible in international coverage?

There are many, but I’m just going to mention the situations of the Karakalpaks in the Republic of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan and the Ismailis in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast in eastern Tajikistan.

In both cases, the rights of minority groups are being trampled as the governments in those countries attempt to forcibly assimilate these people.

I would also mention that the situation of ethnic minorities in Turkmenistan receives almost no attention – in fairness, because it is so difficult to obtain information.

Central Asia is still relatively little known in France and Europe. What stories would you recommend European-based media cover more often?

I think the obvious story is the Middle Corridor, or Trans-Caspian International Transport Route. People in Europe don’t know much about their countries’ trade with Central Asia.

Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Romania and some other European countries are buying Kazakh oil, which is especially important now as EU countries try to stop buying Russian oil. France buys uranium from Kazakhstan, and other countries in Europe probably will as more nuclear power plants are built.

If you buy dried apricots or raisins in Poland, Germany, France, the UK or the Baltic countries, there is a good chance the dried fruit came from Uzbekistan.

Many European travellers have gone to Central Asia. Marco Polo, of course, but more recently, in the 19th century, Arminius Vámbéry from Hungary, Aurel Stein, also a Hungarian who became a British citizen, Sven Hedin from Sweden – and yes, I know about his later connection to Nazi Germany – the Frenchman Paul Pelliot, and others.

Their stories are fascinating, and they are stories of Europeans in Central Asia.

Of course, there is always the ancient Silk Road that linked Europe to Central Asia long ago. The two regions have been in contact for a long time.

Interestingly, although the climate and landscape are very different between the two regions, they are located roughly at the same latitudes, meaning if you travel straight west from Central Asia you end up in Europe, and vice versa going straight east from Europe, with only the Caucasus or southern Russia separating them.

You are now working on Turan, a project focused on Central Asia and the wider Turkic world. What are you hoping to bring to readers through it?

First, there are a lot of stories about Central Asia that are under-reported or not reported at all by media outside the region. That has generally been true since the five countries became independent in late 1991.

Second, unfortunately, there is not much money for outlets and organizations in Europe that are interested in Central Asia. The most obvious example is Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which has been forced to drastically reduce its coverage of Central Asia due to budget cuts.

Turan hopes to fill that void to some extent and bring Central Asia’s stories to an audience on YouTube – and not only Central Asia’s stories, but those from more broadly across the Caspian, including Türkiye and Iran.

The Turan Research Center is part of the Yorktown Institute, so the coverage style leans towards that of a think tank. I think that’s noticeable from the topics and the language used. Many of the reports are based on articles written for the Turan Research Center.

I am not running the channel. I’m just a member of the team. The driving forces are the chief editor and the people doing the graphics.

What advice would you give to a relatively small independent media outlet like Novastan trying to cover Central Asia seriously?

I think Novastan is doing a great job, especially with covering youth culture. I like that Novastan covers niche topics like the French-Uzbek theatre presentation, as well as big stories such as the shrinking Caspian or the lexicon of Kazakh decolonization.

The photographs of scenes from everyday life in Central Asia are excellent.

Many – all? – of your writers have travelled or lived in Central Asia, and it shows in the coverage and choice of topics.

I think advertising is the biggest drawback for Novastan, but again, many organizations are facing this problem. Advertising requires money and a social media team.

The material is there, and in English, French and German. The problem is getting enough people to see it and recommend it, so that it comes to the attention of a wider audience.

For a European outlet like Novastan, what is the best way to work with Central Asian journalists – not only by quoting them as sources, but by building real editorial partnerships and giving their perspectives more visibility?

One possibility is offering Central Asian journalists, including those working for state media, an opportunity to write for European outlets. It would likely require translation.

And the matter of payment could be complicated, since it could lead to accusations of them being funded, and therefore influenced, by foreign sources.

But if some Central Asian journalists were willing to write without expecting remuneration, simply for the exposure in Europe and a chance to boost their credentials and CVs, it would solve that problem.

In the case of journalists writing for state media, they could present the state version of events. Agree or disagree, it is a view that needs to be taken into consideration when assessing the situation in Central Asia.

After all these years covering Central Asia, what still surprises you about the region?

There are always surprises. For me personally, the biggest surprise – and it is a happy one – is seeing the five countries getting along so well.

I travelled through Central Asia quite a bit, especially in the 1990s. I was in every country and listened to what people said about the neighbouring countries. A lot of it was negative, which was really strange to me, since when I was in summer school in Tashkent in 1990 there were people from all over Central Asia, many different ethnicities, and they all agreed that Moscow, the Soviet government, was exploiting them.

There was a sort of equality, a kinship that formed between the peoples of the different Central Asian Soviet republics, a quiet mutual agreement that they were all being neglected and mistreated.

But once they were independent, there were some cruel comments about the neighbours and other indigenous ethnic groups. And, of course, the worst expression of this was in southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010.

I was there, mostly in Osh, speaking to people from every side, and it was often chilling and always extremely disappointing and sad to hear what so many people were saying at that time.

That situation is at least becoming better now. That sense of brotherhood and common cause I heard in talks with groups of Central Asians at Tashkent State in 1990 is returning, though now the Central Asians are stronger, no longer victims of a colonizer.

Central Asia is still often covered internationally through politics, security and geopolitics. Which authors, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, artists or cultural works from the region would you recommend to readers who want to understand Central Asia differently?

This would also be a very long list, and I worry about leaving somebody out.

For material in English, and often in Russian, some of the authors I would recommend are Temur Umarov, Assel Tutumlu, Diana Kudaibergen and Asel Doolotkeldieva, just to name a few. There are obviously dozens more.

You can find the work of Central Asian scholars on several Western websites, and I will just mention the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Oxus Society.

I will say it’s worth looking at the media outlets in all five Central Asian countries as much as possible. Even state media and the journalists working for these outlets are worth following, even in places like Turkmenistan where almost every article mentions “Hero Arkadag.”

It is one side of the story, the side the governments tell their people.

There are many good journalists and outlets outside Central Asia that do fantastic jobs keeping track of events in the region or posting photos of life there that convey to people what it’s like to be there, what you see in front of your face.

When I was working there in the 1990s, hardly any people from the West were going there, so nobody knew much about it. Now there are many people writing about Central Asia who have travelled extensively there, spent a lot of time in one or several places, or have just been following events and writing about them.

The level of knowledge is so much higher than it was. It makes me smile all the time to see how many great people are sharing their deep knowledge and experiences of Central Asia with the rest of the world.

I am not familiar with contemporary filmmakers and musicians, so I really couldn’t say much about them. I would recommend watching the movies Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are making about their history.

It is important to see how their forefathers are portrayed and think about the effects that has on the people living in these countries today.

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

The post Bruce Pannier: “Central Asians never viewed their region as Russia’s backyard” appeared first on Novastan English.

An assessment of President Sadyr Japarov’s tenure, the political realignment following the dismissal of the head of the security services, and growing economic dependence on China… For Novastan, prominent Kyrgyz political scientist Emil Dzhuraev looks back at the political, economic and geopolitical upheavals facing Kyrgyzstan.

Emilbek Dzhuraev is a Kyrgyz political scientist and analyst who holds a PhD in political science from the University of Maryland. His areas of expertise include political regimes and democratization in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia, as well as constitutional development and regional geopolitics. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, a regular commentator on Kyrgyz and Central Asian political developments, and co-founder of Crossroads Central Asia, a Bishkek-based think tank.

In this interview with Novastan, conducted in collaboration with IFME (Institut français des mondes eurasiatiques), he discusses Kyrgyzstan’s current political situation in light of the forthcoming presidential election scheduled for January 2027.

Novastan: Since Sadyr Japarov came to power in 2020-2021, following the October revolution, Kyrgyzstan has undergone major constitutional and institutional transformations. How would you broadly describe the political system that has emerged under Japarov?

Emil Dzhuraev: With the arrival of the new government in early 2021 and Sadyr Japarov’s accession to the presidency, a process of constitutional reform was also set in motion, culminating in the adoption of a new Constitution in May 2021. In a sense, this represented a radical and decisive break with the Constitution that had been in force for ten years. The 2010 Constitution had established a form of semi-parliamentary system: Parliament had significant legislative powers, as well as powers to appoint and dismiss the government, while the president’s powers were much more limited. In 2010, this had itself represented a major departure from the much more presidential system that had prevailed previously.

In 2021, we therefore saw the return of a very strong and centralized presidential system. Unlike earlier versions of the presidential system, in the early 2000s or even the 1990s, the president’s powers are now more firmly established at the constitutional level. They are no longer simply de facto powers arising from political circumstances: they are explicitly enshrined in the Constitution. The president is both the head of the executive branch and the highest representative of the state.

The Constitution also grants the president extensive executive powers. For instance, Parliament now has only a limited role in appointing and dismissing members of the government. In most cases, it is the president who appoints and dismisses them, and dismissals can take place without parliamentary involvement. The president also participates in the appointment of judges, all the way down to courts of first instance.

If you look at the current Constitution, the provisions concerning the rights and powers of the president probably constitute the longest section devoted to any state institution.

Kyrgyzstan was long considered the most politically pluralistic country in Central Asia, to the point of being nicknamed the “island of democracy.” Based on what you have said, is the country now moving towards a form of autocracy?

Many observers have noted that Kyrgyzstan has moved towards greater autocracy in recent years and away from democratic norms and principles. Unfortunately, this is also happening against the backdrop of a global democratic retreat and democratic backsliding. The authoritarian shift in Kyrgyzstan is therefore not a unique phenomenon, and there is currently no particularly favorable international environment for a return to democracy.

The question now is whether political pluralism in Kyrgyzstan can be rebuilt. This has proved very difficult under the current Constitution, which gives the authorities significant repressive powers. Political parties, different political groups and the various currents within society have been heavily constrained in their ability to exert any meaningful influence on politics.

Parliamentary elections were brought forward from 2026 to November 2025. What did this early election actually change in the balance of power between the presidency, Parliament and the political elites?

The parliamentary elections were brought forward by one year, and the exact reasons for this decision are not fully understood. The official explanation put forward by the government was that it was related to the proximity of the 2027 presidential election. Even if one views this explanation with some skepticism, I think it is nevertheless grounded in an obvious reality: by the time the country would have elected its Parliament, it would also have been entering the presidential campaign and electoral process. There would have been a two- or three-month period beginning with the parliamentary electoral cycle during which Kyrgyzstan’s political life would have been very open and vulnerable to all kinds of shocks, with a potential risk of instability.

After the elections, and looking at their results, a second explanation can also be considered, in which the president may or may not have played a role. The new Parliament includes a number of figures promoted by Mr. Tashiev who are likely to support his initiatives and main political priorities. And that is precisely what we have begun to see.

Once the new Parliament was installed, at the very beginning of 2026, rumors and a kind of public campaign began suggesting that the presidential election should also be brought forward. There is indeed a debate linked to the discrepancy between the old and new Constitutions: the old Constitution provided for a single six-year presidential term, while the new one provides for two five-year terms. Mr. Japarov’s first term falls between the two systems and, according to some reports, Tashiev’s supporters wanted the election to take place this year, after five years in office.

Kamchybek Tashiev, who played a central role in the Japarov regime, was dismissed in February 2026 as head of Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security. What were the reasons for and consequences of this decision?

I think the real reason is that the president and his closest circle – although it is difficult to say exactly who belongs to that circle or how large it is – felt that Mr. Tashiev was moving rapidly towards a presidential bid.

More than that, it was not simply a matter of preparing for the scheduled election: Tashiev’s group was pushing for an early election. More seriously, the president’s entourage apparently believed that Tashiev’s team could secure a majority in Parliament that would allow it to launch impeachment proceedings against Mr. Japarov on the grounds that he had exceeded the five-year term provided for under the current Constitution.

There have therefore been all kinds of allegations, rumors and suspicions which are, of course, very difficult to confirm at this stage, because nothing has been officially documented in a way that would establish that such plans or statements actually existed.

Judicial proceedings are currently underway against Mr. Tashiev and some of his closest associates. They are accused of preparing to overthrow the government. This is essentially the charge they are defending themselves against. At first instance, the district court found them guilty. But the evidence is very limited, and this obviously raises serious concerns about our judicial system and judicial practices.

Japarov has now publicly confirmed his intention to seek a second presidential term in January 2027. At this stage, do you see any political actor capable of seriously challenging him? Could the political break between Japarov and Tashiev ultimately turn into an electoral confrontation?

At this stage, it is very difficult to imagine serious competition against Mr. Japarov when he seeks re-election. No one doubted that he would seek a second term. Recently, in an interview, he said that he had wanted to give up a second term in favor of Mr. Tashiev, but I do not think anyone really takes that statement seriously.

After five years of an extremely intolerant and repressive political environment in Kyrgyzstan, I think we have exhausted our pool of potential competitors – or at least the most important and capable political opponents of Mr. Japarov are currently not in a position to challenge him.

Among other things, a law was also passed – and I think it was strongly motivated by political considerations – during Parliament’s last session. It provides that anyone convicted of certain serious or particularly serious crimes, even after serving their sentence and even after being rehabilitated, will be barred from running for elected office. Of course, this currently applies to almost all of the major figures in the political opposition.

Kyrgyzstan has experienced strong economic growth in recent years. To what extent is this growth actually translating into improved living conditions for ordinary Kyrgyz citizens, and is this likely to become a political issue during the 2027 election campaign?

Indeed, President Japarov’s government strongly emphasizes macroeconomic results – the positive ones, of course, rather than the negative ones – particularly the fact that GDP has recorded very high growth over the past four or five years, often among the highest rates in the region.

But recently, a great deal of public discussion, mainly online – Kyrgyzstan’s political space has shifted to the Internet because it is now almost impossible to engage in political debate offline – has focused on the deterioration or stagnation of living standards, particularly the cost of living and inflation.

Some incomes may be rising, but the cost of living is rising even faster. Inflation is significant. The prices of basic goods and the consumer basket are genuinely increasing. According to Kyrgyzstan’s official economic statistics, the inflation rate may be below 10 percent, and perhaps even slightly below the GDP growth rate. But many people feel that inflation is much higher when it comes to essential goods.

As the election approaches, it will therefore not be enough for President Japarov to say that we have built so many kilometers of roads, so many schools or so many factories, because for a large proportion of ordinary citizens, the day-to-day cost of living will be the main issue.

Kyrgyzstan experienced major political upheavals in 2005, 2010 and 2020, the year you described as a “third departure.” What remains today of the political conditions that produced these revolutions?

First, the economic slowdown resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, combined with the very difficult state of public finances and government obligations, particularly the payment of pensions, had practically emptied Kyrgyzstan’s budget. Repayment of the external debt was also a major problem.

Second, large-scale political corruption and, linked to it, organized crime were very significant factors. The parliamentary elections – which triggered this third political crisis – were also heavily dominated by money and corruption.

Third, I think there was simply a weakness on the part of the government in implementing decisions and effectively exercising its electoral mandate. This notably showed that the president at the time, Sooronbay Jeenbekov, was a very weak president who had surrendered much of his power to corrupt elements within his entourage.

If we look back at that period and compare it with the current situation in 2026, I think President Japarov’s government has eliminated many of these problems. The economy is very different from what it was in 2020, and organized crime is no longer present in the same way.

Of course, some people now argue that law-enforcement agencies within the government itself have become comparable to a form of organized crime, but that represents a different way of exercising power. The presidential apparatus is very powerful, and the state’s capacity to govern has increased considerably compared with 2020.

So I think those conditions are largely no longer present today. And, of course, one of the factors that made the October 2020 movement possible was the existence of elections and political pluralism that allowed parties to mobilize effectively. That is precisely what no longer exists under this highly centralized and hyper-presidential system.

If there were to be a “fourth departure,” it would therefore have to emerge under very different conditions and from different triggers.

Geopolitically, Kyrgyzstan is deeply tied to Russia, increasingly economically dependent on China, and seeking closer relations with the European Union and other external partners. How much room for maneuver does Bishkek have today?

Russia’s war in Ukraine has given Kyrgyzstan more room for maneuver in pursuing this multi-vector foreign policy. At certain points during these four and a half years of war, it did seem that things were becoming more difficult.

But because the war has lasted much longer than expected – much longer than Putin anticipated – it has given countries that are highly dependent on and closely tied to Russia more room for maneuver.

First, this is because Russia has had to devote far more of its resources, including diplomatic resources, to the war itself and to dealing with Western sanctions and isolation.

Second, China, Russia’s main partner and supporter, has also sought to gain more room for maneuver in regional geopolitics, and it is gradually obtaining that space.

Amid all of this, I think Mr. Putin has understood that, in order to meet Moscow’s own needs – particularly given the disruption of transport, logistics and trade networks – and in Russia’s own interests, it was important, even necessary, to give the Central Asian countries, including Kyrgyzstan, more space to pursue their own foreign policies.

I think much of the space left by Russia has been occupied by China. But Kyrgyzstan is also actively pursuing other directions in its foreign relations, particularly with the European Union and certain Middle Eastern countries, which have become very important, as well as, of course, with Turkey and its Central Asian neighbors.

The recent peace agreement between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan ended years of tensions and border conflicts and was signed in March 2025. How could this agreement affect Kyrgyzstan’s domestic politics and Japarov’s political legitimacy? Could it also strengthen Bishkek’s position within the broader regional balance in Central Asia?

From the perspective of Kyrgyzstan’s position in Central Asian politics, this is clearly a positive development: no longer having political disputes with your neighbors is a good thing.

At the same time, we were negotiating and resolving these disputes with both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. With Tajikistan, this included two episodes of open and violent conflict, in 2021 and 2022.

In terms of the legitimacy of Mr. Japarov’s government, however, this remains one of the most difficult issues to assess. The border question had remained unresolved for 30 years because whenever we faced these disputes, it was obvious that they could not be resolved without exchanging territory, without giving something up in order to obtain something else.

This is partly why previous governments and leaders had failed to resolve the issue. Japarov and his partner Tashiev clearly had both a popular mandate in 2021 and the political capacity needed to implement these kinds of decisions, including reaching certain compromises with neighboring countries.

In the long term, things will of course become clearer, because many aspects of the new borders and territorial exchanges are not yet widely understood, and most people in Kyrgyzstan do not know precisely where the border now runs.

However, I think that over time this will probably cease to be a major political issue. Some things could nevertheless retain symbolic importance, such as the large water reservoir. It is an obvious feature that everyone has heard about, that appears on maps and that everyone can see: it has, de facto, been ceded to Uzbekistan.

In practice, the water from this reservoir was already primarily intended for Uzbekistan because that is where the relevant economic activity is located. But the population eventually became aware of this situation.

If we look beyond the 2027 election, what do you see as the main political trends in Kyrgyzstan over the next six years?

Compared with most stable political systems, it is very difficult to predict anything in Kyrgyzstan because things can change very dramatically.

If we follow the current trajectory, several major challenges and questions arise for the future. The first concerns succession. Five years will pass quickly, and the question will be whether President Japarov will be prepared to relinquish power peacefully and openly to whoever wins the election, since he is legally entitled to only two terms. There are already rumors that his son could seek to succeed him.

Another major challenge, frequently raised by government critics and activists, concerns the evolution of our geopolitical relationship with China. Beijing’s activities in many countries, including Kyrgyzstan, are tied to numerous geopolitical interests. Anti-Chinese sentiment can easily be inflamed, and it is easy to mobilize such sentiment among the Kyrgyz population. The issue is all the more important because Kyrgyzstan has taken out numerous loans and entered into many financing agreements with China, and has therefore accumulated considerable debt.

The third major challenge in the coming years will be servicing our debt. Can the Kyrgyz economy continue to grow and increase its revenues over the next few years? The past three or four years have been very successful – at least for the government – but can this momentum continue?

Economic data and broader historical experience suggest that it is very difficult to sustain growth rates of 9, 10 or 11 percent a year for such a long period: growth will eventually slow. But when it does, what will that look like? Will the country enter a recession, experience a collapse, or face some other form of crisis? Economic growth has been heavily driven by sectors and sources of revenue that are not necessarily sustainable in the long term. Construction cannot continue growing at this pace indefinitely.

If that happens, Kyrgyzstan’s debt could become a very serious problem. That is precisely what the Kyrgyz government needs to be concerned about.

Interview by Roman Fuster,
Contributor to Novastan

The post “A Fourth Political Reset?”: An Interview with Kyrgyz Political Scientist Emil Dzhuraev appeared first on Novastan English.

In August-September 2026, the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit took place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Initially conceived as a platform for regional security cooperation, the organization used its 2026 summit to reiterate demands for a multipolar international order through appeals to Eurasian connectivity. State-overseen media in some of the organization’s authoritarian member states repeatedly invoked euphemistic terms such as “Silk Road” and “Digital Silk Road” alongside declarations of multipolarity. These references accompanied efforts by regional powers, particularly China and Russia, to secure recognition as global powers and challenge the predominance the United States has exercised since the end of the Cold War. For the post-Soviet states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, embracing the Silk Road paradigm presents a particular dilemma, as they seek greater international recognition through a framework that designates them primarily as intermediaries between larger powers.

Read more on Novastan: In Central Asia, China is taking advantage of Russia’s isolation at war

The Making of the Silk Road Paradigm

 Since the early 2010s, the Silk Road has become a pervasive framework for representing Central Asia and the South Caucasus in tourism, scholarship, current affairs, and policy analysis. Many hotels and travel agencies in these regions bear the name or feature imagery of camels and caravans, while international tour operators market visits to these countries as Silk Road journeys. Conferences and institutional associations, including the Tbilisi Silk Road Forum and the Silk Road Universities Network, adopt the same designation. American academic institutions have also embraced it, most notably the Silk Road Studies Program formerly affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University’s incipient Silk Road Studies program.

Uyghur and Uzbek restaurants across Western Europe and North America operate under names such as “Silk Road” and “Caravan.” The Chinese-American cello virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma applied the same paradigm to musical performance through his Silk Road project, conceived in 1998. Its eclectic ensemble reduces the rich musical traditions of various Eurasian nations to one or two representative performers, prioritizing national representation over demonstrating genuine historical musical connections across Eurasia. In a 2021 video from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the popular Emirati food blogger Khalid al-Ameri gleefully attributes the enormous portions of Tashkent-style pilaf (to’y oshi) to the appetites of merchants traversing the Silk Road, as if local culinary traditions existed chiefly to serve transient traders.

    The Silk Road paradigm was popularized in the former Soviet space during late perestroika, almost a quarter-century before China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, as  late Soviet and early post-Soviet publications attest. UNESCO provided institutional endorsement by launching a research program dedicated to the “Silk Roads” in 1988. In 1994, the Samarkand Declaration on Silk Road Tourism established a framework for international cooperation to promote the region’s historical routes and cultural heritage. Four years later, Baku hosted a conference on the restoration of the historic Silk Road under the EU’s auspices. The United States adopted the designation for its own New Silk Road initiative in 2011. Uzbekistan’s 2009 postage stamps promoted the theme, followed by subsequent issues depicting mapped routes, camels, caravans, and other popular Silk Road imagery. Russia also issued a Silk Road commemorative coin honoring the Eurasian Economic Community. The tourism expansion across post-Soviet Eurasia in the 2010s further encouraged Silk Road branding. For the newly independent states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, the paradigm offered a means of asserting historical identities and international significance after the Soviet collapse amid the limitations of established Western regional classifications, as Central Asia and the South Caucasus fitted awkwardly within conventional definitions of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or South Asia.

    Scholarship and popular historical writing in the English-speaking world have helped popularize the Silk Road as a framework for interpreting Central and Inner Eurasia. Valerie Hansen and Susan Whitfield have made substantial contributions to the study of underexplored communities and cultural encounters through works organized around this designation. Christopher Beckwith’s monograph applies the term to a broad history of Central Eurasia while emphasizing the historical agency of the region’s vernacular communities. Peter Frankopan adopts the pluralized Silk Roads for an expansive Eurasian synthesis for a general readership. In their accounts of premodern Eurasia, these authors organize historical interpretation around a designation that did not exist during the periods under examination. Maps of the Silk Road and its supposed branches, now ubiquitous in tourist promotions and geopolitical analysis, further reinforce the impression that the term describes a coherent framework. References to the Silk Road also supply historical context in prominent Anglophone media outlets’ reporting on the dire human rights situation of the Uyghurs.

    The Silk Road paradigm often entails a teleological interpretation of Eurasian history by projecting the modern concept of globalization onto premodern exchanges. Conventional accounts describe a network of routes linking China with Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean from the period when the Han and Roman empires coexisted to the mid- or late fifteenth century, before the Age of Discoveries fundamentally reshaped global connections. Replacing a single road with a plurality of routes leaves largely intact the presumption that these exchanges constituted a coherent and enduring trans-Eurasian system. The term itself was a nineteenth-century coinage, appearing in Carl Ritter’s work in 1838 before the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen gave it greater scholarly prominence in 1877. The existence of exchanges between distant regions does not establish that the people involved shared a conception of a unified system joining Eurasia’s eastern and western extremities. Treating their activities as successive stages of globalization risks attributing a common direction to interactions shaped by distinct local circumstances and changing sociopolitical realities. The conventional fifteenth-century endpoint similarly obscures the continuation of overland exchange across the Eurasian landmass into the modern period.

    The Silk Road has also acquired a geographical scope that encompasses entire regions of Central and Inner Eurasia. In this usage, Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia fall under a common designation derived from their association with routes connecting China with Europe. The term consequently covers the political, social, religious, and cultural histories of these territories, including developments whose significance extends well beyond commercial or cultural transmission. This usage conflates the history of connections among regions with the histories of the regions themselves. Establishing that a society participated in a network of exchange provides limited justification for treating that network as the principal framework for interpreting its historical development.

Between China and Europe

    The Silk Road paradigm presents China and Europe as the principal cultural and commercial centers of premodern Eurasia, relegating the intervening lands and peoples to an intermediary position within a linear rather than territorial conception of space. This hierarchy obscures the development of local political institutions and intellectual traditions, assigning historical importance primarily according to a society’s contribution to exchanges between the two endpoints.

The mathematical scholarship of al-Khwarazmi, the philosophical and medical writings of Avicenna, the musical theories of al-Farabi, the astronomical discoveries of al-Biruni, the linguistic and ethnographic works of Mahmud al-Kashgari, and the poetry of Ferdowsi, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Ahmad Yasawi, Yusuf Balasaguni, and Ali-Shir Nawa’i exemplify contributions whose significance exceeds the transmission of ideas between distant centers and deserves consideration in its own right. Even when exchange remains the principal subject of inquiry, emphasizing these two endpoints understates India’s importance. During the Roman period, Mediterranean commerce with India, often through Central Asia, was considerably more voluminous than commerce with China. The Seleucid Empire and the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms had sustained earlier political and cultural connections, whose Hellenistic legacies persisted beyond their rule.

    The Silk Road paradigm’s Sino-centrism and Euro-centrism often obscure the cultural agency of vernacular communities in Central Eurasia. Communities selectively adapted and appropriated cultural imports, changing their forms and significance before they circulated further. Scholars such as al-Khwarazmi elaborated the Indian system underlying Arabic numerals before it reached Europe. Chess acquired new rules, pieces, and social meanings as it spread from India through Persia and onward to Europe, with “checkmate” being a Persian loan. Christian communities adapted Syriac script to write Sogdian and Old Uyghur. Regional variants of instruments such as the zurna, qanun, and kamancha differ in construction and performance practice, reflecting the musical traditions and preferences of the communities that developed them. Regional preparations of noodles (laghman, lamian), dumplings (chuchvara, manti), fried dough (çäkçäk, tush, sachima), and fruit leathers (lavashak, guodanpi) also require attention to local specificities.

Exchange Beyond Trade

The Silk Road paradigm’s emphasis on commerce often obscures the role of conquest, pastoral mobility, and permanent migration in facilitating cultural exchange across Eurasia. Scythian expansions and the Arab, Mongol, and Timurid conquests intensified cultural contacts through military service, imperial rule, and population displacement, frequently under conditions of extreme violence. Timur’s deportation of artisans from conquered cities to Samarkand made forced migration a major source of the Timurid capital’s architectural and artistic achievements. Similar developments followed Shah Abbas I’s deportation of Armenians from Nakhichevan to Isfahan, where churches combined Armenian and Safavid architectural characteristics. Nomadic communities sustained other forms of exchange through seasonal movement and recurrent encounters with settled populations.

Research on mountain routes through Inner Asia suggests that pastoral mobility helped establish some of the connections subsequently used by long-distance traders. The migrations of Qypchaqs, Seljuks, Kalmyks and other Oirat groups, and Alans carried military practices, oral literature, and material culture into new settings, where interactions with settled populations encouraged further adaptation. Jewish diasporic communities across Central Eurasia maintained connections through kinship, religious institutions, and scholarship, sustaining exchanges that extended beyond the activities of merchants, best exemplified by the Moroccan-born rabbi Yosef Maimon’s efforts to promote religious education and Sephardic liturgical practices among Bukharan Jewish communities in Central Asia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Commerce itself often depended on the routes and social relationships established through these movements.

Silk Without China

The history of silk production further undermines the Silk Road paradigm’s Sino-centrism. Sericulture had spread into Central Asia and Iran well before the thirteenth century, and tenth-century geographical accounts describe silk production across much of Iran. Communities developed their own practices of silkworm breeding and textile manufacture, while Shaki and Shamakhi in modern-day northern Azerbaijan became important centers of silk production and trade in the Caucasus. Before Azerbaijan took control of the city in late 2023, one of the main streets of Stepanakert (Khankandi), the de facto capital of Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh, was called Silk Weavers’ Street (Metaqsagorts’neri poghots).

The smooth, colorful khan atlas (“royal silk”), produced most famously in the ancient city of Margilan in the Ferghana Valley, is widely regarded as a national symbol of Uzbekistan. The expansion of production diversified the sources of silk entering regional and distant markets while sustaining its commercial importance. Raw silk remained a major export of Safavid Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Iranian workshops produced luxury fabrics for domestic consumption and foreign buyers. In Shaki, wealth from silkworm breeding and cocoon sales supported urban development in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as reflected in the magnificent summer palace of the Shaki khans. These economies depended on local agricultural conditions and commercial institutions and could sustain production and exchange without continuous input from China. The association of silk with China, therefore, provides little justification for assigning a subordinate historical role to societies that became substantial producers and exporters themselves.

From Historical Metaphor to Geopolitical Strategy

    The Silk Road paradigm’s retrospective Sino-centrism also lends historical legitimacy to the Chinese government’s contemporary geopolitical ambitions. China’s position among the largest premodern economies provides an insufficient basis for assuming comparably extensive political influence, cultural ties, or transit connections with the principal centers of Central Eurasia and beyond. The extent and character of these connections varied considerably across periods, depending on changing political arrangements and networks sustained by communities and Eurasian land empires with their own interests and institutions.

Read more on Novastan: China in Central Asia: Fact-checking and myth-busting

Official Chinese presentations of BRI invoke the pluralized historical Silk Roads to portray contemporary transit investments as the renewal of historical connections. This presumed continuity frames the expansion of Chinese interests as restoring a lost position, encouraging acceptance of Beijing’s ambitions to reshape Eurasia’s political and economic development. Central Asia and South Caucasus states embrace the same framework to attract Chinese investment, promote transit infrastructure centered around China, and secure greater international recognition. Their self-presentation as intermediaries risks making that recognition contingent on their usefulness to larger powers, while reinforcing a historical hierarchy that privileges China’s geopolitical objectives.

Read more on Novastan: China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway: Who wins from Central Asia’s new trade route?

Marco Polo and the Politics of Eurasian Space

    The Silk Road paradigm’s anachronistic Sino-centrism also appears in bestselling American author Robert Kaplan’s use of Marco Polo’s travels to interpret contemporary geopolitics. In The Return of Marco Polo’s World, Kaplan uses the Venetian traveler’s itinerary to explain the strategic significance of China’s expanding connections across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. The itinerary of a single traveler offers limited grounds for establishing either the density of historical exchange or a common geopolitical orientation among the societies he encountered. Polo’s journeys depended on Mongol imperial arrangements and networks maintained by merchants, religious communities, and local authorities, whose activities served numerous purposes beyond connecting Europe with China.

Kaplan explicitly presents Kublai Khan’s empire as a guide to contemporary Chinese strategy, encouraging the interpretation of Mongol-era connections as precedents for China’s present ambitions, although Chinggisid imperial domains encompassed much of Eurasia and included political centers well beyond China. This analogy risks attributing a continuous geopolitical agenda to distinct political entities and subordinating other Eurasian societies to a narrative of Chinese resurgence. Kaplan’s advocacy of a sustained American naval presence also exposes a tension in his emphasis on Chinese centrality: American naval power helps sustain the maritime trading system on which China depends, while US military positions and alliances along the First and Second Island Chains constrain China’s pursuit of predominance in the western Pacific.

What the Eurasian Frame Leaves Out

    The Silk Road paradigm’s Eurasian frame also erases the Western Hemisphere when used to interpret contemporary global power dynamics. The United States, which emerged from the Cold War as the sole superpower, lies outside this paradigm’s geographical space. The postwar economic order still depends on financial arrangements shaped by American power, with the US dollar retaining its central role in international transactions, banking, and reserve holdings. The scale of the US economy and the global operations of US corporations sustain commercial relationships that cannot be adequately represented through routes joining China and Europe. American corporations, especially those based in Silicon Valley, occupy leading positions in the global high-technology industry. US military deployments and alliances, including a naval presence along major shipping routes, remain integral to the security arrangements within which much of this commerce occurs. Interpreting Chinese infrastructure expansion primarily through a Eurasian historical frame risks overstating China’s capacity to displace American dominance by discounting the United States’ pivotal role on the global stage.

When Influence Ran East

    The history of China’s Tang dynasty (618–907) challenges Sino-centric accounts of Eurasian exchange that portray China primarily as a source rather than a recipient of cultural influence. Conventionally celebrated as an apogee of Chinese cultural achievement, the Tang period coincided with extensive political and cultural engagement with Central Asia. The Tang capital, Chang’an (Xi’an), maintained close ties with the region, where Tang campaigns and protectorates established a substantial, though uneven, presence. Turkic soldiers and commanders contributed significantly to Tang military power, while Uyghur allies provided crucial assistance during the eighth century. Central Asian music and dances shaped Tang court entertainment, notably through Sogdian dances, while the pipa, often called the Chinese lute, developed from Middle Eastern and Central Asian prototypes. Elite men and women adopted Central Asian clothing and equestrian fashions; Crown Prince Li Chengqian dressed as a Turkic khan, established a tent camp within the palace grounds, and ate mutton cut with his sword. Sogdian communities in Chang’an and other urban centers contributed to commercial, artistic, and religious life, with manuscripts recovered from the caves of Dunhuang preserving evidence of their activities and beliefs. Imported fruit varieties, vegetables, and livestock, including peaches from Samarkand and prized Central Asian horses, further demonstrate the material significance of these contacts.

Christianity and Manichaeism reached Tang China through networks connecting Iran and Central Asia. Translations of Buddhist and Christian scriptures expanded Chinese religious literature, while Buddhist translation continued an earlier process of incorporating Sanskrit terms into Chinese. Li Bai (Li Bo), among China’s most celebrated poets, may have been born in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. Popular narratives about the battle of Talas in 751, fought between the Tang dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate, often obscure the political agency of Central Eurasian communities by crediting the Abbasid victory with bringing Chinese westward expansion to a definitive end. The conflict emerged from regional rivalries involving Ferghana and Chach, whose ruling families sought allies to advance their own interests. Karluk forces played an important part in the Tang defeat, with Chinese accounts attributing the outcome partly to their defection to the Abbasid side. Tang expansion depended heavily on Turkic troops and commanders and alliances with Sogdian rulers. Tang garrisons remained in the Tarim Basin after Talas, while An Lushan’s rebellion in 755 and subsequent Tibetan advances led to Tang’s decline. An Lushan (Rokhshan in Sogdian), a general of Sogdian and Turkic ancestry, captured two Tang capitals and forced the emperor to flee, while the prolonged conflict severely weakened the dynasty.

Beyond the Silk Road

    Prominent historian of Central Asia Scott Levi has advocated the scholarly embrace of the Silk Road paradigm despite its conceptual laxity. However, its acceptance in Western academia would inevitably lend greater legitimacy to the expansive agenda of an authoritarian dictatorship whose repressive policies have actively destroyed the communities and cultural legacies that have long formed the backbone of Western imaginations of the Silk Road.

By Diego Benning Wang.

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

The post The Silk Road Paradigm and the Dilemma of In-Between appeared first on Novastan English.

Why Soviet borders do not make Central Asian statehood artificial

In January 2026, Russian state television commentator Vladimir Solovyov did what a small but persistent chorus of Russian nationalists has done regularly since the invasion of Ukraine: he described Central Asia as part of a natural Russian sphere of power and suggested that Moscow could extend its military operations there if it judged this necessary. The remark prompted a sharp response from Uzbek politician Alisher Qodirov, who dismissed it as propaganda and stressed that the states of Central Asia are sovereign and capable of defending their interests. The exchange was brief, but the argument behind it is familiar. Russian nationalist commentators periodically suggest that Central Asian sovereignty is somehow contingent – an accidental product of Soviet administrative borders rather than the outcome of a deeper political history. Western coverage often treats such statements primarily as geopolitics: another expression of Russia’s post-imperial anxiety or its competition with China for influence in the region. Recent analysis of Russian-Central Asian relations has documented the growing frequency of such irredentist rhetoric. That interpretation is not wrong, but underneath it lies a historical claim that deserves to be addressed on its own terms. The idea that Moscow simply “invented” the nations of Central Asia is misleading.

Soviet rule profoundly reshaped Central Asian nationhood. It territorialised identities, codified languages, built national institutions and created republics whose borders later became international frontiers. But that is very different from saying that Central Asian political identities appeared out of nothing in 1924. The process drew on pre-existing communities, political movements, religious institutions and local elites, and it was negotiated, appropriated and contested by Central Asians themselves. Modern Central Asian nations are therefore neither timeless entities that survived unchanged from antiquity nor arbitrary creations handed down fully formed by Moscow. They emerged from a much longer interaction between local political life, Russian imperial rule, indigenous reform movements and Soviet nationality policy.

Political life before the Bolsheviks

Central Asian nationhood cannot be understood by starting the clock in either 1917 or 1924. Pre-Soviet Turkestan was not an empty political space waiting for Bolshevik ethnographers to give it shape, although it would be equally anachronistic to imagine that the region already possessed mass national movements corresponding neatly to today’s five republics. Society was overwhelmingly rural, literacy remained limited, and modern political ideas about nationhood circulated mainly among relatively small urban and educated circles. Adeeb Khalid’s study of Jadidism and colonial society provides the key background for this pre-revolutionary political and intellectual landscape. Russian imperial rule had also transformed the region’s social and political structure well before the Bolshevik Revolution, particularly through settler colonisation, the creation of new administrative centres and the expansion of a Russian-speaking bureaucracy whose influence was disproportionate to the size of the settler population in many parts of the region.

The empire restricted indigenous participation in imperial politics while preserving a degree of local administration. At village and volost level, Muslim communities could manage taxation, minor judicial disputes and communal affairs, but their authority remained subordinate to Russian officials. Elections could be annulled, administrative decisions required approval, and Muslim political participation was constrained by the colonial state’s suspicion of wider political mobilisation. This system was therefore neither simple exclusion nor meaningful self-government. Russian rule combined political marginalisation with the selective preservation of indigenous elites deemed useful or reliable. The Emirate of Bukhara, for example, survived as a nominally sovereign protectorate under Russian domination, retaining its court, treasury and Islamic establishment. The Khanate of Khiva remained under a similar arrangement, while Kokand, regarded as less manageable and more threatening to imperial control, was annexed outright in 1876. Local political authority thus survived, but in fragmented and highly constrained forms determined by the priorities of empire.

Read more on Novastan: Bukhara Before the Border: Aini and the Politics of Tajik-Uzbek Memory

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the most important new expressions of indigenous reform was Jadidism. The Jadids – their name derived from the usul-i jadid, or “new method”, of education – were Muslim modernists who founded schools, newspapers and theatres and sought to reform education, religious life and society in cities including Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. Education stood at the centre of their programme. Some Jadid reformers advocated or experimented with education for girls well before the Soviet state later presented women’s emancipation as one of the defining achievements of socialist modernisation. Khalid’s work remains a foundational source on Jadid reform, education and indigenous intellectual life. This does not make the Jadids straightforward proto-nationalists in the modern sense, nor were they politically unified. But it matters because it demonstrates that debates over reform, identity and political authority already existed before Soviet power consolidated itself across the region.

The Jadids were not the only indigenous source of authority. The ulama – Muslim scholars, judges and teachers – represented another deeply rooted social and religious establishment. Some opposed Jadid reform, while others adapted to the changing political environment after 1917. Their authority was neither uniform nor uncontested, but it long predated the Bolsheviks and remained socially significant across much of Turkestan. A 2024 study of the Tashkent Ulama society documents how religious scholars organised politically during the revolutionary opening of 1917. By the time Soviet leaders began reorganising Central Asia, they were therefore not working on an empty political map. They were intervening in a region where multiple forms of authority, identity and reform were already competing, and where Muslim intellectuals, religious figures and local elites had their own ideas about how political life should develop.

What Moscow actually did in 1924

The decisive Soviet intervention came with the national-territorial delimitation of Central Asia beginning in 1924. The process reorganised the former territories of Russian Turkestan, the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic and the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic into new territorial units associated with particular nationalities. Yet the familiar image of Moscow drawing five modern states in a single bureaucratic exercise is misleading. The Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics emerged in 1924, but Tajikistan initially became an autonomous republic within the Uzbek SSR before becoming a union republic in 1929. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan followed different territorial and constitutional trajectories, with their status continuing to evolve during the following decade. The map that ultimately became contemporary Central Asia was therefore produced through a process of repeated administrative and political decisions rather than one act of Soviet cartography.

Historian Francine Hirsch has shown that Soviet nationality policy was rooted in a particular Marxist understanding of historical development. Bolshevik officials believed societies moved through identifiable stages and that nationhood itself could be a necessary phase on the path towards socialism. This gave ethnography, census-taking and classification enormous political significance. Soviet experts attempted to identify populations, languages and national categories and then give them institutional and territorial form. The process was not simply descriptive: by deciding which languages would be codified, which categories would appear in censuses and which populations would become titular nationalities of republics, the Soviet state helped create the administrative reality it claimed merely to be recording.

Arne Haugen and other historians have placed greater emphasis on the political context in which delimitation occurred. Soviet leaders were wary of broader Turkestani, Muslim or Turkic political projects that might provide an alternative focus of mobilisation to Moscow, particularly after years of armed resistance and instability. The resulting territorial divisions therefore served both ideological and political purposes. But neither interpretation supports the simplistic idea that Central Asian nations were arbitrary inventions imposed on passive populations. Local elites participated extensively in delimitation debates, arguing over borders, cities, linguistic communities, economic resources and the status of particular populations. Their influence was constrained by Soviet power, and Moscow retained ultimate authority, but the process was not simply one of Russian cartographers drawing lines across a blank map.

This distinction matters because the argument that Soviet borders were politically constructed is true but insufficient. Nearly every modern state is the product of political construction, conflict and institutionalisation. The relevant question is not whether Soviet authorities drew borders but how those borders acquired political meaning and why they proved durable. Territorial delimitation nationalised space, but it did not by itself create fully formed nations. That required decades of institutional work carried out within the new republics themselves.

Nation-building was not a one-way process

Creating republics was only the beginning. Languages had to be standardised, alphabets repeatedly reformed, schools and publishing systems expanded, universities and academies established, literary canons assembled and histories written. New bureaucracies had to be staffed and new political elites trained. A central element of this process was korenizatsiya, or indigenisation, through which Soviet authorities sought during the 1920s to increase the presence of local nationalities in party structures, courts, ministries and other institutions. The policy was intended to make Soviet rule more legitimate and effective, but it also created cadres whose political careers, institutional interests and cultural projects became increasingly tied to the republics themselves.

Read more on Novastan: “Islands of Soviet power on the steppes”

Faizulla Khodjaev illustrates the complexity of this process. Born into a wealthy Bukharan family and active in the Young Bukharan movement before the consolidation of Soviet rule, he became one of the leading political figures of Soviet Uzbekistan. His career shows how pre-Soviet reformist politics could be absorbed into the institutions of the new republic. Similar processes occurred across the region as local teachers, writers, administrators and intellectuals entered Soviet structures and helped determine what Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik or Turkmen national culture would mean in practice. Their room for manoeuvre was never unlimited, but they were not merely passive executors of instructions produced in Moscow.

Soviet nation-building in Central Asia was therefore neither a unilateral imposition from the centre nor a freely chosen indigenous project. It is better understood as a process of co-production under profoundly unequal conditions. Soviet institutions provided the territorial framework, controlled the political boundaries within which nation-building could occur and possessed the coercive power to decide which political projects were permissible. Central Asian intellectuals, teachers, bureaucrats and political cadres nevertheless played indispensable roles in giving those institutions substance. The Soviet state did not merely classify nationalities; it also created institutional spaces in which local actors could standardise languages, construct national histories, develop cultural institutions and train republican elites whose interests increasingly became inseparable from the republics themselves.

This is why saying that Soviet rule shaped modern Central Asian nationhood is historically accurate, while saying that Russia “created” Central Asian nations and therefore somehow owns them is not. The institutions were Soviet, but Soviet was not synonymous with Russian. The Union itself depended on tens of thousands of Central Asian officials, writers, teachers and administrators who transformed republican institutions from bureaucratic categories into lived political and cultural structures.

The contradiction at the heart of Soviet nation-building

The same Soviet system that promoted national institutions also destroyed many of the people who had helped build them. This contradiction is essential to understanding the period and prevents the story from becoming either a celebration of Soviet modernisation or a simple narrative of national emancipation. The hujum, launched in the late 1920s, sought to transform women’s lives through a state-directed campaign against veiling and seclusion. The policy was presented as emancipation, but it also turned women’s bodies into symbols of a wider struggle over modernity, religion and political authority. The backlash was frequently violent, and women who unveiled could become targets of intimidation or murder. Soviet social transformation could therefore simultaneously expand certain forms of opportunity and impose them through profoundly coercive means.

A decade later, the Great Terror devastated the intellectual and political elites of the region. Many Jadids, former reformers and local Soviet cadres who had participated in building national schools, administrations and cultural institutions were arrested, purged or executed. Faizulla Khodjaev himself was executed in 1938. Adeeb Khalid’s work on Uzbekistan captures this contradiction particularly well: Soviet national institutions were built in part by a generation that the Soviet state later decimated. The system had encouraged local intellectuals to construct republican cultures, only to accuse many of those same intellectuals of nationalism once the political environment changed.

The republics, however, survived the people who had helped construct them. That fact complicates both Soviet triumphalism and the idea that the institutions of Central Asian nationhood were merely artificial shells. A school system remains a political reality even after its founders are purged; a standardised language continues to shape generations after the intellectuals who codified it have disappeared. By the middle of the twentieth century, the republics had become institutional ecosystems with ministries, universities, artistic establishments, party hierarchies and administrative borders that organised the lives of millions of people.

The republics outlived the Soviet Union

The political significance of those institutions became unmistakable in 1991. Central Asian republics did not generally campaign for independence with the intensity seen in the Baltic states, Georgia or parts of Ukraine. Kazakhstan was the last Soviet republic to declare independence, in December 1991, and its population had earlier voted overwhelmingly in favour of preserving a reformed union. Yet when the Soviet Union disappeared, the Central Asian republics did not dissolve into one another, and they did not surrender their sovereignty back to Moscow. Instead, each inherited national administrations, education systems, territorial borders, political elites and institutional cultures that had developed over decades. Their post-Soviet governments then reworked these inheritances to construct national narratives of their own.

This does not mean that Russian influence disappeared with the Soviet flag. Economic dependence, labour migration, Russian-language media, security arrangements and institutional ties kept several Central Asian states closely connected to Moscow for decades after 1991. Russia remained particularly important to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, while millions of Central Asian citizens continued to live and work in the Russian Federation. Political elites often maintained strong personal and institutional links with Moscow, and Russian remained an important language of administration, education and regional communication. The post-Soviet story was therefore not one of clean geopolitical separation.

But influence is not the same thing as ownership. The states of Central Asia continued to function as distinct political units because the republics created in the Soviet period had become much more than temporary administrative conveniences. Their borders structured economic life and political careers; their education systems created national publics; their cultural institutions produced literature, historical narratives and symbols that people increasingly understood as Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik or Turkmen. Post-Soviet elites had every incentive to strengthen these identities, because their own legitimacy depended on the continued existence of the states they governed. They did not need to invent national institutions from scratch. Much of the infrastructure of statehood was already there.

Why the argument matters today

This is where the historical debate becomes contemporary geopolitics. When Russian commentators describe Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or other post-Soviet states as “gifts” from Russia, they rely on a particular reading of history: Soviet borders were bestowed by Moscow, and states created through those borders therefore possess less historical legitimacy than Russia itself. The implication is that sovereignty may be conditional, particularly when it conflicts with what Moscow defines as its historical sphere of interest. Recent FPRI analysis documents how this kind of irredentist rhetoric has increasingly targeted Central Asian states. That rhetoric echoes a broader revisionist understanding of the post-Soviet space in which Russia appears as the principal historical subject while its neighbours are reduced to administrative products of Soviet decision-making.

The war against Ukraine has made the political implications of such arguments impossible to dismiss. This does not mean that every provocative statement by a Russian television commentator signals imminent territorial ambition in Central Asia, and treating every rhetorical outburst as evidence of an approaching invasion would itself distort the political situation. But rhetoric matters because it helps normalise a hierarchy of sovereignty. Once some states are described as historically authentic while others are treated as accidental creations, territorial integrity becomes easier to present as negotiable.

Read more on Novastan: The Lexicon of Kazakh Decolonisation

Central Asian responses increasingly reject that hierarchy. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other states have diversified diplomatic, economic and security partnerships, expanded ties with China, Turkey, the European Union and Gulf states, and strengthened cooperation with one another. These policies are not necessarily anti-Russian. In many cases, governments continue to seek workable relations with Moscow while simultaneously reducing excessive dependence on it. What has changed is the growing willingness to articulate sovereignty as something inherent rather than something granted by participation in a Russian-led political space.

The history of Soviet nation-building helps explain that confidence. Modern Central Asian statehood was profoundly transformed by Soviet rule, and the republics, borders and institutions of the twentieth century remain central to the countries that exist today. But the region was not politically empty before the Bolsheviks arrived, and nation-building after 1924 was not carried out by Russians alone. It involved Muslim reformers, religious authorities, intellectuals, teachers, bureaucrats and political cadres from Central Asia itself – people who adapted to Soviet institutions, shaped them, resisted them and, in many cases, were eventually destroyed by them.

The historical reality is therefore more complicated than either nationalist myth allows. Moscow did not simply invent Central Asia, but neither did Soviet rule merely impose artificial borders on fully formed ancient nations. Modern Central Asian nationhood emerged from the interaction between older identities, imperial rule, indigenous reform movements, Soviet nationality policy and decades of local institution-building. The states that survived the Soviet Union are products of that history. That does not make their sovereignty artificial. It makes it historical.

By Shakhzoda Khusankhodjaeva. Shakhzoda is a researcher focused on conflict, gender, and regional politics, with a particular interest in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia.

The post Who Made the Nations of Central Asia? appeared first on Novastan English.

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.