Afghanistan is often explained through clichés of tribalism, ethnic rivalry, foreign invasion and inevitable state failure. Political scientist Ahmad Fahim Abdullatif argues that these frames obscure the country’s more complex history of state formation. In this interview with Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, he discusses the collapse of the Afghan army in 2021, the Taliban’s emerging state, the legacy of Amir Abdul Rahman’s campaigns, British influence and why Afghanistan was never simply an isolated “graveyard of empires”.

Afghanistan has repeatedly been explained through shorthand: tribal society, ethnic fragmentation, religious conservatism, foreign interference or the supposed impossibility of building a modern state.

For Ahmad Fahim Abdullatif, these explanations are not only incomplete. They often prevent us from understanding how the Afghan state actually developed.

His research examines state formation through Afghanistan’s armed forces, coercive institutions and political organisations. Part of that interest emerged from the astonishing collapse of the Afghan security forces in 2021, which he watched unfold while his family remained in besieged Herat.

That collapse raised a larger historical question. Why did the Najibullah government survive for three years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, while the Western-backed Afghan state unravelled so rapidly after the US withdrawal more than three decades later?

From there, Abdullatif’s analysis moves both backwards and forwards: from the Taliban’s current state apparatus to nineteenth-century campaigns of consolidation under Amir Abdul Rahman, and from contemporary ethnic interpretations of Afghan politics to the colonial construction of Afghanistan as a buffer state.

Novastan: You have spent several years researching and teaching Afghanistan while seeking to move beyond exoticised or essentialist representations of the country. Was there a particular experience, encounter or intellectual frustration that led you to study the Afghan state through the history of its armed forces?

Ahmad Fahim Abdullatif: I think there is an answer on two levels, and both are rather cliché.

In terms of the armed forces, it was really the collapse of the army and security forces in 2021 that intrigued me.

I remember having discussions with my mother while she was in Herat during the summer of 2021, when the city was besieged by the Taliban. I was trying to explain to her how difficult, almost impossible, it is to take a city or fortified target without heavy artillery and air power.

After all, the Afghan government survived for three years after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, following a similar logic: the government retained control of major cities and towns, while the mujahideen controlled much of the countryside. It was only with the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself and the total cut-off of external support that the regime collapsed.

That was not what happened in 2021.

I remember my own shock and disbelief until the very last moments. How could such a thing be possible? How could such a highly equipped and numerous force unravel like that?

That curiosity pushed me to explore this puzzle in a deeper way, and also the broader questions of violence, coercion and armed force in a historical and sociological perspective. That is what led me to choose the armed forces as an angle for analysing state formation in Afghanistan.

On a broader level, my interest in state formation also comes from my own experience of growing up in Afghanistan during the early 2000s.

There was this roller-coaster of collective emotion and hope, and a desire for change and reform, but also social tensions, inequalities, vulnerabilities and uncertainty.

The country and society had already been torn apart by proxy conflict and civil war for two decades before I was born, and that legacy was inevitably still being felt.

I think I was experiencing a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder that manifests itself in many ways in a society after so much violent conflict and collective trauma. That made me curious to understand and untangle the complexity of what was going on, at the very least to make it more intelligible and navigable for myself.

As I discovered my passion for the humanities and social sciences, I tried to explore this curiosity through those disciplines.

State formation was an evident fit for all these interests and impasses. So in that sense, it is a very cliché case of an Afghan student of social sciences trying to understand what went “wrong” in his own country.

You contrast the Afghan government’s rapid collapse in 2021 with the Najibullah government’s survival for three years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. What explains that difference?

I would point to two key differences: domestic regime coherence and international support.

The army in 1989 had a more coherent bureaucracy that revolved around a corps of professionals trained along Soviet lines since the 1950s.

The army of 2021 had a much more heterogeneous composition. Former Soviet-trained professionals had been amalgamated with newer arrivals, and the criteria of patronage and proximity to ruling parties and factions were often more important than professional credentials.

Like the broader elite coalition that formed the ruling class of the country, the armed forces were heterogeneous, riddled with private interests and corruption, and lacked corporate coherence.

The second major difference was international support.

The army in 1989 was able to survive because the Soviet withdrawal did not entail an immediate and significant withdrawal of military support in terms of equipment and funding. This is why the government fell apart only after the Soviet Union itself collapsed.

By contrast, the US withdrawal entailed a much more severe disruption to the supply and maintenance of crucial equipment.

The Afghan army lost what was effectively one of its keystone elements, and soldiers and officers were well aware that military support was being drastically reduced.

I remember that in August 2021, repairs of sophisticated aircraft components were being conducted by Afghan engineers while an American contractor supervised them via Zoom.

One does not need to be a specialist to understand what an impossible task the Afghans were suddenly left with.

More broadly, after the 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban, the writing was on the wall for the ruling elites and state institutions as the drastic reduction in US support became increasingly evident.

Your course at Sciences Po was entitled Afghanistan: a nation-state not meant to be? After years of teaching and research, how would you answer that deliberately provocative question?

The question is really a way of hinting at certain assumptions about state formation in Afghanistan that need to be challenged.

The first is a Eurocentric, evolutionist and teleological view of state formation.

An evolutionist perspective treats the Western bureaucratic national state as the end point of a supposedly natural evolution for all societies, moving from the most “primitive” to the most sophisticated, rationalised and modernised.

That vision was evident in modernisation theory and still persists in contemporary discourses about state “fragility” and failure.

In reality, contemporary political science shows that the bureaucratic Weberian national state emerged in a very specific historical context in Europe.

Different dynamics shaped later colonial and post-colonial state formation elsewhere.

Even in Europe, the process was far from linear or intentional. It resulted from a complex interaction between geopolitical competition, territorial consolidation, internal mobilisation and reform.

When Afghanistan is treated simply as a deviation from that norm, another assumption often follows: because the process of Afghan state formation ended in civil war, it must always have been destined to fail because of some inherent characteristic of Afghan society or culture.

That is what the course title is meant to challenge.

At the same time, saying that Afghanistan differs from the typical Western trajectory does not mean it should be treated as a singular and exceptional case outside history, comparison or scientific explanation.

In my own research, I describe processes and dynamics that also occur elsewhere in the world and can be subjected to sociological and political analysis.

Exceptionalism often produces another problem: Afghanistan is reduced to an image of a peripheral, static, backward, tribal, fanatical and archaic society whose current condition is supposedly the inevitable result of its “natural” characteristics.

That view implicitly suggests that Afghanistan was never capable of developing institutional practices associated with contemporary states: citizenship, rights, political representation, bureaucracy, professionalisation, fiscal extraction and redistribution, democracy or accountable governance.

It denies the agency and dynamism of human collectives.

So the “not meant to be” part of the title is precisely what needs to be challenged.

The problem with many representations of Afghan state formation is that they reduce a complex interaction between social hierarchies, diverse social actors, domestic, transnational and international dynamics, bureaucratic processes and historical conjunctures to one-dimensional explanations based on Islam, tribalism, ethnicity or great-power politics.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban have inherited and transformed institutions built under previous governments while also introducing their own political and ideological structures. What kind of state is emerging?

I think it is a hybrid form.

The Taliban have chosen not to dismantle the relatively intricate bureaucracy of the fallen republic.

Instead, they have hybridised it with their own political structures.

This can be seen, for example, in the parallel structure of rule between ministries in Kabul and the leadership council in Kandahar, in their reorganisation of the judiciary, and in their appointment of their own personnel to pre-existing bureaucratic positions.

There is therefore continuity with the bureaucratic structures of the republic, and the Taliban’s current power is built, in part, upon those structures, procedures and administrative patterns.

But this should not distract us from the ideological continuity between the first and second Taliban regimes.

The existence of a more modern bureaucracy does not mean this is not a profoundly reactionary regime.

Nor does the Taliban’s use of modern military bureaucracy and intelligence apparatuses for repression make the regime less ideologically radical.

So what we are seeing is a hybrid of more bureaucratised elements inherited from the republic combined with the Taliban’s own ideological goals and organisational practices.

Northern Afghanistan is often described through ethnic categories such as Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Hazara and Pashtun. To what extent do these labels explain political and social realities?

Your question contains much of the answer.

An intersectional variety of factors such as class, locality, relations with the state, professional affiliations and social trajectories are often much more analytically useful than a reductive focus on macro-ethnic categories.

Macro-ethnic reasoning is often analytically weak and can have quasi-racial undertones.

For example, reducing the Taliban to a representative of the Pashtuns ignores both the movement’s social and historical origins and its ideological and organisational practices.

Could you give a concrete example where looking at Afghanistan primarily through an ethnic lens leads us to misunderstand what is actually happening?

A good example is the way Gilles Dorronsoro analyses the Afghan conflict in Revolution Unending, especially his criticism of what he calls the essentialist bias.

This bias became particularly evident in studies of the civil war after the Soviet withdrawal, where culturalist explanations emerged that described the conflict in non-political, exotic and reductive terms such as tribalism, ethnicity and Islam.

Explanations of the war in terms of tribalism and tribal revolts ignored the fundamental novelty of emerging political parties, as well as the participation of urban and rural populations as a whole in the conflict.

One major example of the ethnic fallacy is the interpretation of the war as a competition between macro-ethnic groups – Pashtun versus Tajik versus Hazara, and so on – and their supposed representatives, such as the Taliban representing the Pashtuns.

This ignores the fact that macro-ethnic affiliation is only one level of collective affiliation and identity among others, alongside family, religious, professional and micro-ethnic or qawm identities.

Ultimately, it was not ethnicities that made war.

As Dorronsoro puts it, it was political organisations with ideological objectives and particular institutional practices.

Reducing the conflict to ethnicity therefore fails to capture social and ideological dynamics.

The same problem applies to explanations centred entirely on Islam or religion.

Such interpretations assume that Islam inevitably produces a particular relationship between religion and politics.

But what appears mystical or culturally predetermined can often be explained more convincingly through the sociology of contending groups, such as students and the ulama, in a decidedly contemporary historical context.

That argument echoes my own goal in both my teaching and my research: to develop a more critical, complex and scientific approach to understanding Afghanistan beyond reductionist, essentialist and Eurocentric representations.

During your research, was there one historical episode that significantly changed how you understood the Afghan state?

The campaigns of Amir Abdul Rahman in Hazarajat in the 1890s were particularly horrific and revealing.

They showed how the state manipulated and instrumentalised collective identities, micro- and macro-ethnic rivalries, religious mobilisation, disorder, plunder and extreme violence in order to consolidate its authority.

They also left a profound legacy of discrimination and marginalisation for Hazara communities.

What surprised me was that these were strategies I had previously associated more with empires than with the consolidation of a nation-state.

It demonstrated that state formation in Afghanistan did not only include elements that we associate with nation-states – territorial, direct, unitary, bureaucratic and rational-legal rule.

It also contained elements of a more imperial register: indirect rule, governing through discontinuities and even the instrumentalisation of destruction and disorder.

What began in a way comparable to Abdul Rahman’s campaigns elsewhere in the north and east became especially bloody in Hazarajat because of the religious mobilisation and declaration of jihad against the Hazara, who were excommunicated because of their Shi’a faith.

This religious mobilisation was complemented by the manipulation of local rivalries between Hazaras and neighbouring communities, including in many cases Pashtuns.

The result was that Hazara communities permanently lost a substantial portion of their cultivable land and exclusive pasture rights.

The permission not only to plunder but also to enslave thousands of Hazaras attracted auxiliary militias that were not paid by the state but sustained themselves through plunder.

The state itself taxed the plunder of its military troops and took a share for itself, as it did with systematic plunder elsewhere in the country.

This was also a period in which Afghanistan was emerging as a British protectorate.

Abdul Rahman was able to focus on such violent internal campaigns partly because Britain protected Afghanistan from potential foreign aggression by Russia or Persia, while also providing the ruler with yearly subsidies, arms and access to further military purchases.

The state therefore unleashed a violent, destructive and complex process that was not entirely under its control, and consolidated its authority by instrumentalising that disorder.

The result was an immense legacy of collective trauma for the Hazara and a continuing history of marginalisation and discrimination.

There are important scholarly debates about whether these episodes constituted genocide.

At the very least, they involved mass killings, massacres, enslavement and crimes against humanity.

This episode demonstrated not only the sometimes atypical mechanisms of state consolidation in Afghanistan, but also the importance of understanding the legacy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in explaining the country’s contemporary social and political realities.

In discussing Amir Abdul Rahman’s campaigns in Hazarajat, you distinguish between “nation-state” and “imperial” forms of state-building. Were these imperial methods exceptional to Hazarajat?

This is a very good question because it goes back to my criticism of reducing everything to macro-ethnic arguments.

There was something distinctly particular about the case of the Hazaras.

There was a religious dimension to the jihad against them because they were excommunicated on account of their Shi’a faith.

There was also widespread enslavement, as well as the transfer of arable land and pasture rights to non-Hazara groups, especially Pashtuns.

Here, we do see a genuinely macro-ethnic and ethno-religious dynamic emerging from the formation of the state and its strategies.

At the same time, many imperial features were common to all the communities subjected to central rule.

These included widespread massacres and violence, systematic plunder during army deployments and the extensive use of militias.

So although communities elsewhere were not subjected to enslavement or large-scale transfers of land and pasture in the same way, they too were subjugated through a highly coercive and autocratic process and became subordinate to a distant but coercively powerful government.

An eastern Pashtun farmer in a mountain village was not subjected to the same ethno-religious discrimination as the Hazaras, but he nevertheless shared a fundamentally similar socio-political relationship of subordination to the state and incorporation into a peripheral economy through that same process.

You point out that Abdul Rahman’s campaigns took place while Britain protected Afghanistan from external aggression and provided the ruler with money and arms. How important was British support to the consolidation of the Afghan state itself?

It was very important, and it complicates the conventional image of Afghanistan as a country historically resistant to all outside control.

The image of Afghanistan as an isolated realm, a “graveyard of empires” whose mythical population has forever resisted foreign rule, is itself a colonial trope that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Before that, rule by dynasties that would later be described as “foreign” was the norm rather than the exception.

Greeks, Arabs, Indians, Turkic dynasties from Central Asia and Mongols all conquered and ruled parts of what we now call Afghanistan.

Even when we look at the Anglo-Afghan wars and their outcomes in the nineteenth century, the picture is more complicated.

Afghanistan retained internal autonomy because of undeniable societal resistance to British invasions.

But at the same time, it became a quasi-colonial construction.

Britain largely defined and safeguarded its territory, controlled its foreign relations and incorporated it into the emerging global economic order as a landlocked buffer state on the periphery.

Territorial defence is particularly revealing.

Britain imposed substantial territorial losses on the Amir through the treaties of Gandamak in 1879 and Durand in 1893.

But it was also Britain that went to war with Iran over its claims to Herat and forced Tehran to renounce those claims by treaty.

Similarly, what protected northern Afghanistan from annexation by the Russian Empire was not simply the military strength of the Amir, but the deterrent effect of the possibility of conflict with Britain.

That meant the ruler could focus his strategies on internal repression rather than interstate warfare.

So Afghanistan was peripheralised, but never isolated.

Its political constructions drew on elements from both inside and outside the country.

It was neither entirely determined by the outside world nor independent of it.

It was neither an entirely colonial construction nor untouched by colonialism.

Even in the twentieth century, we see not only state elites drawing on resources from outside the country – military patronage and international aid – but also non-state political parties and militias whose prominence during the 1980s and 1990s depended heavily on foreign patronage.

That longer history makes the “graveyard of empires” image particularly misleading.

Afghanistan has always been shaped by interaction between domestic and external forces.

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

The post Beyond the ‘Graveyard of Empires’: Rethinking the Afghan State 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.

In September 2026, Princeton University returned to life after the summer recess, with students back on its Collegiate Gothic campus and the Princeton Triangle Club holding auditions for its latest annual musical. Exactly a century earlier, the same student troupe opened Samarkand, a lavish romantic comic opera named after the Central Asian city, before a paying audience in nearby Trenton, New Jersey.

No footage of the production is known to survive, and its undergraduate performers have long since passed from living memory. But the centenary of this forgotten play offers a revealing glimpse into the American collegiate imagination of Central Asia in the 1920s, when Samarkand could serve as shorthand for a sumptuous, composite Islamicate Orient rather than for anything particularly specific to the city or the region.

Princeton’s Samarkand

Princeton’s century-old student-run Triangle Club provided the institutional setting where an Orientalist imagination of Central Asia could become the subject of a polished Ivy League theatrical production. Founded in 1891, the Club is the oldest touring collegiate musical-comedy troupe in the United States, having built its reputation by staging an original show each academic year and taking it beyond Princeton. Undergraduate students write and perform each production, while professional directors and choreographers prepare it for public performance. Samarkand, billed for the 1926-27 academic year, was the Club’s 38th annual comic opera production and was staged four years before the opening of McCarter Theatre, where the annual tradition has since been anchored.

    True to the Club’s traditions, Samarkand was a product of undergraduate authorship and performance combined with professional theatrical supervision, and its premiere brought Princeton’s Orientalist fantasy before a paying public in the Garden State’s capital. On December 15, 1926, the production opened at the Trent Theatre in Trenton, a public commercial venue twelve miles (nineteen kilometers) from Princeton. In operation from 1903 to 1972, the Trent Theatre predated McCarter and served as a temporary stage after the destruction of the on-campus Casino Theatre briefly left Princeton University without a suitable theatrical venue.

Undergraduates wrote the libretto, lyrics, music, and dialogue and filled every credited role in the cast and chorus. Because Princeton admitted only men until the 1969-1970 academic year, male students also performed the female characters. Donald Clive Stuart, a professor of dramatic literature at Princeton, directed the show, while other theatrical professionals staged its dances and arranged and orchestrated its score (no playwright or script adviser was credited).

    Samarkand presents a rather conventional comic-operatic mixture of prophecy, romance, court intrigue, and sudden acquisition of power. Act I opens in the throne room of Haroun-El-Emenope, Caliph of Ashkabad, whose court includes his daughter Shelmardeen, the magician Attar-Bey-Bey, and the ambitious wazir Raschid. A voice from a feared magic urn foretells Haroun’s death and Shelmardeen’s marriage to a vagabond. Zahirudin, a mysterious adventurer from Samarkand whose name is said to mean “Fate,” arrives in search of the renowned princess, courts her with songs about the Golden Road to his native city, and eventually departs with her.

Raschid plots the Caliph’s death, seeks Shelmardeen for himself, and directs jealousy and suspicion against Zahirudin. A dancing girl named Yasmini, two rival suitors, four conspirators, and the Djinn of the urn complete the principal cast. Act II takes place in an enchanted garden, where the prophecy is fulfilled through a convenient reversal: death claims the cruel Caliph of Samarkand instead of Haroun, after which Zahirudin is proclaimed Caliph and marries Shelmardeen.

An Orientalist Fantasy of Central Asia

    The surviving visual materials for Samarkand presented Central Asia through generalized Orientalist imagery of luxury, mystery, and theatrical exoticism. The play’s black-and-gold playbill cover features an enthroned, elaborately dressed figure before an immense peacock tail, with dense ornament covering nearly every part of the design. The play’s orange-and-black sheet-music cover presents a turbaned man and a richly costumed woman beneath a drooping tree as the man points toward a distant city of domes and minarets under a crescent moon. The program’s costume drawing of Attar-Bey-Bey depicts the court magician in a long robe, broad sash, extravagant jewelry, and elaborate headdress against a dark flame-shaped backdrop. None of these elements is distinctly Central Asian.

The most candid commentary on this imagery appears in a garment advertisement beneath the program’s setting descriptions. A cartoon turbaned figure dreams of a modern outfit while the caption declares, “All this Oriental splendor stuff reminds us we’ve some pretty splendid male wardrobings for Americans. At least Princeton undergrads and alumni tell us so.” The joke makes explicit what the covers and costume imply: the play’s Samarkand was a marketable image of “Oriental splendor,” and the advertisement addressed its theatergoers directly as American consumers, particularly Princeton students and alumni.

Samarkand on Tour

    Samarkand took Princeton’s Orientalist fantasy on a national tour that eventually encompassed twenty-four performances, and reviewers across its itinerary consistently valued the production’s humor, spectacle, and theatrical polish. After three performances in Trenton on December 15-17, 1926, the Club appeared in Washington (December 18), Baltimore (December 20), New York’s Metropolitan Opera House (December 21), Pittsburgh (December 22), Cincinnati (December 23), Nashville (December 24), and Birmingham (December 25). After a one-day interval on the day after Christmas, the tour resumed in Memphis (December 27), followed by Little Rock (December 28), St. Louis (December 29), Chicago (December 30), Indianapolis (December 31), Cleveland (January 1, 1927), Syracuse (January 3), and New York again (January 4). The Club later performed in Orange, New Jersey (February 18), Newark (February 21), and Philadelphia (February 25-26). On June 17-18, shortly after the end of the spring semester, the play was staged one last time at Princeton’s University Gymnasium (destroyed in a fire in 1944).

All twenty-four known performances occurred during the 1926-27 academic year, and no evidence has emerged of a later revival. After opening night, The Daily Princetonian declared that Samarkand “took its place among the best of recent Triangle Club plays,” although it observed some roughness in the most demanding dances. The New York Times called the Metropolitan Opera House performance “a hit” and praised its songs, jokes, dancing, costumes, and settings. Newspapers in Nashville, Birmingham, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Syracuse, and other stops repeatedly commended the catchy music, clever lines, scenic effects, colorful costumes, disciplined chorus, and professional finish. The surviving notices offered little discussion of the play’s geographic or cultural accuracy.

A City Reduced to a Dream

    In Samarkand, the city honored in its title serves primarily as a geographically and culturally distant realm whose name promises romance, wealth, happiness, and power. The program identifies the setting of Act II only as “an enchanted garden in Samarkand,” and the city receives none of the social or physical detail of an actual urban setting. In a musical sequence titled “The Pilgrimage,” the Spirit of the Urn commands the characters to travel eastward over the sand, past swaying caravans and through low shadows, along a golden road where their “fondest dreams ever come true.”

Zahirudin similarly describes the place as a “dim-mooned city of delight,” and the ballet libretto calls the Golden Road to Samarkand “the pathway that leads to the land where dreams come true.” Samarkand offers rewards at every level of the plot: the journey promises riches, joy, and power; it secures the lovers’ union; and it raises the vagabond Zahirudin to the caliphate. No streets, monuments, institutions, or ordinary inhabitants appear, as the city is reduced to sand, caravans, bells, magic, an enchanted garden, and a distant promise of fulfillment.

A Composite Orient

    The cultural setting of Samarkand is a composite Orientalist fantasy that blends Arabic, Persianate, Turkic, Central Asian, and South Asian references while offering almost nothing specific to Samarkand or Central Asian history and culture. Its Arabic materials include a caliph and wazir, a Djinn from a magic urn, and the song “We Know All About the Arabian Nights (But What About the Days?).” The cast bears Arabic- and Persianate-adjacent names, while “Come to Our Altar Fires” and the “Hymn of the Fire-Worshippers” connect it to Zoroastrianism. Samarkand and “Ashkabad” are the principal regional markers, accompanied by generic palaces, deserts, and caravans; historically or geographically specific Central Asian features are virtually absent.

The suitor Haidan Sikh even introduces a South Asian religious identity into the mixture, primarily to facilitate an English pun. The religious setting is equally unstable: subjects of a caliph chant to idols, burn incense, seek prophecy from an urn, and sing to altar fires. Even the name Ashkabad presents a chronological puzzle. The city now known as Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, officially bore the name Poltoratsk from 1919 to 1927. The coincidence was presumably inadvertent.

Inventing the East in English

    The pseudo-Islamicate names in Samarkand reveal a genuinely amusing side of the production’s Orientalism, as their foreign-sounding forms seem designed to deliver jokes in English. The rival suitors Peke Abou and Haidan Sikh are phonetic disguises for “peekaboo” and “hide-and-seek.” Haroun-El-Emenope can be heard as “around L-M-N-O-P” (an alphabetical sequence), while Attar-Bey-Bey appears to echo “attababy.” The adventurer Zahirudin seems to suggest “They hear you, Dean,” echoing the name of his eventual bride, Shelmardeen – “She’ll marry Dean.” Four conspirators named Iambad, Heezbad, Urbad, and Wirbad identify themselves as “I am bad,” “He’s bad,” “You’re bad,” and “We’re bad.” Although these puns demonstrate undergraduate ingenuity, their mechanism treats Islamicate names as decorative sounds detached from cultural context.

Before Princeton: Imagining Central Asia in the West

    The composite setting of Samarkand may be seen as part of a longer Western tradition that located Central Asia within a loosely bounded Persianate and Islamicate Orient. Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) used the wealthy Isfahani nobleman Usbek, his seraglio, and a passing allusion to the khan of Tartary as materials for a French satire of European society. Goethe’s engagement with Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Zoroastrian texts informed his own experiments in Persianate poetry and contributed to his later conception of world literature (Weltliteratur). Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) subsequently made a stylized Persian past extraordinarily popular among the English-speaking public.

More geographically explicit representations followed the routes of Arminius Vámbéry, Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shanskiy, Nikolay Przhevalskiy, Sven Hedin, and Mannerheim, whose journeys across Central Asia generated travel narratives, maps, ethnographic collections, and photographs under scientific, imperial, and military auspices. Stephen Graham’s illustrated Through Russian Central Asia (1916) carried this tradition into English travel writing only a decade before Samarkand. The Russian painter Vasiliy Vereshchagin’s Turkestan Series juxtaposed bazaars, monuments, and local figures with conquest and death, while the Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s early color photography presented Central Asian cities, architecture, rulers, and inhabitants with striking immediacy. Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, which premiered in Milan less than eight months before Samarkand, offered a contemporaneous example of cultural conflation: its Persian-derived title means “daughter of Turan,” although its title character is a Chinese princess and the opera is set in imperial China and incorporates Chinese folk melodies.

Tamerlane and the Western Imagination

    Western fascination with Tamerlane (Timur) had endowed Samarkand with much of its dramatic reputation long before 1926, although the Princeton play omitted the conqueror who had made the city his imperial capital. Christopher Marlowe’s two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587-1588) presented Timur as a Scythian shepherd whose military genius and boundless ambition carried him to dominion over vast territories. Around 1700, Andrea Celesti’s monumental Tamerlane and Bajazet portrayed the victorious ruler receiving the captive Ottoman sultan amid an invented display of Oriental magnificence. Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane (1701) offered a contrasting image of a restrained and virtuous monarch, commonly interpreted as an analog for William III, while Bajazet represented Louis XIV.

The defeat and captivity of Bayezid subsequently provided the shared historical premise for George Frideric Handel’s Tamerlano (1724), Antonio Vivaldi’s Bajazet (1735), and Josef Mysliveček’s Il gran Tamerlano (1771), all of which combined imperial conflict with captivity, dynastic romance, and suicide. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane” (1827) imagined the dying conqueror lamenting that his pursuit of power had cost him his youthful love. These works assigned Tamerlane radically different roles – insatiable conqueror, enlightened sovereign, sadistic tyrant, or tragic lover – and repeatedly used him to examine ambition, kingship, political rivalry, and unfulfilled love. By 1926, the name Samarkand therefore carried centuries of associations with imperial power, danger, magnificence, and romance, even though Samarkand detached those associations from Timur and his empire.

From Bukhara Carpets to the Golden Road

    The city of Bukhara appeared frequently in Western commercial accounts, as the city’s name became shorthand for Oriental luxury in the carpet trade. By the turn of the twentieth century, so-called “Bokhara rugs” had become fashionable furnishings in Paris, London, and other European and North American markets. Travel narratives reinforced the city’s reputation as a remote seat of Islamic tradition and monarchical wealth, and Prokudin-Gorsky’s 1911 color portrait of Emir Alim Khan, the last emir of the Emirate of Bukhara, preserved an especially vivid image of its royal splendor. The use of “Bokhara” in Western commerce closely parallels Princeton’s theatrical use of Samarkand: both place-names promised magnificence while conveying little about the cities and peoples they denoted.

    By 1926, Samarkand had become a familiar Western literary emblem of sensual abundance, imperial grandeur, distant suffering, and alluring travel. John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes (1820) invokes “silken Samarcand” amid a feast of candied fruits, spiced delicacies, gold, silver, and perfume whose imagined geography extends from Fez to Lebanon (with Samarkand nearly 2,000 miles beyond this spectrum). Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane” invites the reader to behold Samarkand as the “queen of Earth,” the supreme monument to Timur’s pride and power.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Young King” (1891) treats the city as one point in a remote Oriental panorama of splendor and catastrophe. James Elroy Flecker’s The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) was the Princeton production’s most immediate literary precedent, and the published score confirms the inspiration by printing two stanzas from Flecker above the cast list. The musical echoes Flecker’s pilgrims and caravans, desert shadows, ringing bells, “dim-moon city of delight,” and “Golden Road to Samarkand,” but turns his restless pursuit of adventure and forbidden knowledge into a promise of romance, riches, joy, and political power.

Orientalism for the Jazz Age

    The Orientalism of Samarkand bore the unmistakable imprint of the expanding consumer culture of the United States in the 1920s, most conspicuously in the material rewards promised by its songs at every stage of the journey eastward. Contemporary American life repeatedly intrudes upon the supposedly ancient court, where characters joke about “airplane rugs,” call old-fashioned dancing “déclassé,” invoke the blues and the Black Bottom, and warn that a Morris chair is no place for the decade’s newest steps. For Princeton students and audiences across the country, Samarkand became an imagined treasure trove of worldly pleasures that magnified familiar ambitions for wealth, leisure, fashion, romance, and social advancement, while the playbill’s myriad advertisements for clothing and hats marketed purchasable tokens of its splendor after the curtain fell.

A Century Later

    Princeton University’s relationship with Central Asia has changed profoundly since Samarkand, and the play’s centenary invites recognition of both the distance between the theatrical imagination of the region it invoked and the scholarship that has since emerged. The play’s cultural imprecision partly reflects the institutional setting of 1926, when Princeton had not yet established the department that would become Near Eastern Studies, sustained academic interest in Central Asia was inconspicuous, and Central Asians had little visible presence in the Ivy League. Leon B. Poullada, a former diplomat and political scientist who earned his doctorate at Princeton and became a prominent scholar of Afghanistan, helped lay the groundwork for this change: the memorial lecture series established in his honor in 1995 has repeatedly addressed Central Asian history and Islam.

His son, Peter Poullada, a 1975 Princeton graduate in Near Eastern Studies, later published a notable study of Turkmen history, while the department now hosts the Leon B. Poullada Postdoctoral Research Associateship in Central Asian Studies. As a relatively small university, Princeton still lacks a regional program devoted exclusively to Central Asia, but the region receives sustained attention through the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia and the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies within the Department of Near Eastern Studies, as well as research conducted by faculty and doctoral students in the History, Near Eastern Studies, and East Asian Studies departments.

Princeton-trained historians such as James Pickett have become leading scholars of Central Asia; the Department of History has hosted Sarah Cameron as a visiting scholar; and recent conferences and colloquia held at Princeton have featured lectures delivered by Artemy Kalinovsky and Scott Levi. Princeton Near Eastern Studies professor Michael Reynolds’s forthcoming biography, A Life Lived like a Storm, follows Enver Pasha through a final, dramatic chapter of the former Ottoman war minister’s career in Central Asia. In March 2024, Princeton’s Central Asian Student Association received formal recognition as an undergraduate organization. A century after Samarkand staged Central Asia as a playground for American fantasy, Princeton is now a leading institution in the study of the region.

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 Ivy League Orientalism: Staging Samarkand in Princeton, 1926 appeared first on Novastan English.

Uzbekistan’s Armenian community has rebuilt churches, cultural centres and schools since the end of the Soviet period. Yet as Armenian increasingly gives way to Russian in everyday life, community leaders face a more difficult question: what does it mean to remain Armenian when language is no longer the principal marker of identity?

Several years ago, an elderly woman arrived at the Armenian cultural centre in Tashkent carrying books.

She was around 80 years old and had decided to donate her Armenian-language library to the community. For Georgiy Saakov, one of the eldest figures of Uzbekistan’s Armenian community, the encounter seemed at first like an illustration of cultural continuity. Then he addressed her in Armenian.

She answered in Russian. She did not speak the language of the books she had preserved.

“A grandmother who is Armenian but does not speak Armenian – a hundred years ago, that would have been difficult to imagine,” Saakov recalls.

The episode captures one of the central paradoxes facing Armenians in Uzbekistan today. Since the late Soviet period, the community has reconstructed much of the institutional infrastructure that disappeared during the twentieth century: cultural organisations, Sunday schools, churches, publications and artistic groups. Yet the transmission of Armenian itself has become increasingly fragile.

For Saakov, who has been editing the magazine of the Armenian community in Uzbekistan and has spent decades involved in its cultural institutions, this is not simply a linguistic issue. It raises a larger question about how minority identities survive in a society where integration has been extensive, intermarriage is common and Russian often functions more naturally than Armenian within Armenian families themselves.

Uzbekistan’s Armenians are far from disappearing. But what it means to be Armenian in Uzbekistan is changing.

A community older than the Soviet Union

Armenian connections with what is now Uzbekistan long predate the establishment of modern Central Asian states.

Christian communities existed in the region centuries before the Russian conquest, and Armenian merchants, craftsmen and religious missioners travelled through Central Asian commercial centres at different moments. Historical sources also point to Armenians being moved towards Samarkand during the campaigns of Timur, although the scale and precise character of these movements are difficult to establish.

Saakov situates the community within this much longer history. He points in particular to Samarkand, one of the great crossroads of Eurasian trade, where Armenian merchants and craftsmen were among the many groups who settled over the centuries.

Yet the roots of today’s Armenian community are more recent.

Its modern formation accelerated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside the Russian Empire’s expansion into Central Asia and the construction of the Trans-Caspian railway. Armenians arrived as railway workers, merchants, craftsmen, professionals and officials, joining the increasingly diverse urban populations of cities such as Tashkent and Samarkand.

By the early Soviet period, Armenians had established their own community institutions. Saakov describes Armenian Workers’ Houses operating in cities including Tashkent and Samarkand during the 1920s and 1930s, alongside cultural activities and an Armenian theatre.

This institutional life did not survive the Stalinist period. Independent ethnic, religious and cultural organisations were suppressed or absorbed into Soviet structures, while religious institutions across the USSR came under intense pressure.

As with many Soviet minorities living outside their titular republics, Armenians in Uzbekistan remained visible as individuals but increasingly lost the autonomous institutional spaces through which language and community life had previously been reproduced.

That distinction matters. Soviet modernisation did not necessarily eliminate Armenian identity, but it changed the mechanisms through which it was transmitted.

Rebuilding after decades of interruption

The late 1980s brought a new opening.

As perestroika loosened restrictions on cultural and religious organisation, Armenians in Uzbekistan began rebuilding community structures that had disappeared decades earlier. Armenian cultural centres emerged in Tashkent, Samarkand and Andijan from 1989 onwards, part of a broader revival of ethnic and cultural associations across the Soviet Union.

The process continued after Uzbekistan became independent in 1991.

The Armenian cultural centre in Tashkent established a Sunday school in 1993. In Samarkand, the Armenian Apostolic Church of Surb Astvatsatsin, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, reopened in 1995 after decades of closure. A second Armenian Apostolic church, dedicated to St Philip, was established in Tashkent in 2007.

Since 2001, Armenian organisations have operated within Uzbekistan’s system of national cultural centres, through which recognised ethnic communities organise language classes, cultural events and other activities.

For Saakov, this institutional reconstruction is one of the most important achievements of the post-Soviet period.

Today, Armenian cultural life in Uzbekistan includes dance and musical groups, educational initiatives, religious communities and the newspaper Depi Apaga, meaning “Towards the Future”, which began publication in 2006. Saakov has served as its editor since 2008.

The idea for the publication, he says, was encouraged by an encounter connected to Charles Aznavour’s visit to Samarkand for the Sharq Taronalari international music festival in 2005. For a dispersed community without its own territorial concentration, a newspaper offered another way of maintaining a shared public space.

The community also celebrates Armenian cultural figures whose lives became closely connected to Uzbekistan.

Perhaps the best known is Tamara Khanum, born Tamara Petrosyan, the Armenian-origin dancer and singer who became one of the most celebrated performers of Soviet Uzbekistan. Others include artists, musicians, academics and public figures whose biographies reflect the degree to which Armenian and Uzbek cultural histories became intertwined.

For Saakov, this is an important part of the community’s identity. Armenians in Uzbekistan do not understand themselves simply as a diaspora temporarily residing outside Armenia. Many families have lived in Central Asia for generations.

They are both Armenian and Uzbek.

How many Armenians are there?

The size of the community is difficult to establish precisely.

The last Soviet census, conducted in 1989, recorded more than 50,000 Armenians in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Saakov estimates that around 40,000 to 45,000 Armenians may live in Uzbekistan today, with the largest concentration in Tashkent.

That figure should be understood as a community estimate rather than the result of a recent population census.

Numbers alone also reveal relatively little about participation.

As in many diaspora communities, there is a substantial difference between identifying as Armenian and regularly taking part in Armenian institutional life. Churches, cultural centres and community organisations may represent the community symbolically while involving only a fraction of those who claim Armenian ancestry.

That gap has become one of the central challenges facing community organisations.

The problem is not necessarily hostility or pressure from the surrounding society. Saakov portrays Armenians as deeply integrated into contemporary Uzbekistan and emphasises that the community is able to operate openly.

Instead, the pressures are subtler: assimilation, generational change, migration and language loss.

When Russian becomes the family language

Of these, language may be the most consequential.

Russian has long played an important role among urban Armenian communities across much of the former Soviet Union. In Uzbekistan, it became particularly significant as Armenians interacted with other minorities and with Russian-speaking urban environments.

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

Over time, Russian also entered the home.

For many Armenian families in Uzbekistan today, Russian and Uzbek languages are used to communicate with neighbours or colleagues. But Russian is mostly the only language in which parents speak to their children and children speak to their grandparents.

But the survival of Armenian has been developing by many ways while the cultural identification remains strong.

Saakov has written about the role traditionally played by grandmothers in transmitting language, customs and memory. His formulation – “Cherchez la grand-mère” – reflects his belief that identity historically survived less through formal institutions than through families.

The elderly woman who brought Armenian books to the cultural centre therefore represented something larger than an individual biography. The books had survived. The language had not.

Perhaps that is one of the most important limit the post-Soviet Armenian revival in Uzbekistan encounters.

A Sunday school can teach vocabulary. A church can preserve ritual. A cultural centre can organise many events, including dance performances and commemorations. A newspaper can remind readers of Armenian historical and cultural identity.

Identity beyond language

Yet language loss does not necessarily mean the disappearance of Armenian identity.

This is where Saakov’s understanding of the community becomes particularly interesting.

He cites the Armenian historian Claude Mutafian’s formulation: “Être Arménien, c’est un choix” – being Armenian is a choice.

For Armenians in Uzbekistan, that choice may increasingly take forms other than speaking Armenian fluently.

It may involve attending church on major holidays, sending children to a Sunday school, participating in cultural events, reading about Armenian history, maintaining family traditions or simply continuing to identify with an Armenian ancestry that has existed alongside Uzbek, Russian and Soviet experiences for generations.

The community’s cultural groups reflect this attempt to preserve identity through practice.

Organisations and ensembles such as Mer Ojakh, Arvest and DAR bring together different generations around music, dance and cultural events. Their significance is not only artistic. They create spaces where a community that is geographically dispersed can physically encounter itself.

At the same time, the reliance on organised culture raises another question: what happens when identity becomes something performed at scheduled events rather than reproduced through everyday life?

That tension is not unique to Armenians.

Across Central Asia, smaller ethnic communities are negotiating similar changes. Soviet-era migration, urbanisation, mixed marriages, Russian-language education, independence and more recent emigration have transformed the relationship between ethnicity, language and citizenship.

The Armenian experience in Uzbekistan therefore offers a broader window onto the post-Soviet evolution of minority identity.

Integration without disappearance

Saakov strongly rejects the idea that Armenian identity and integration into Uzbek society are contradictory.

He describes Armenians as participating extensively in the professional, cultural and social life of the country and points to the absence of a strong divide between Armenian and Uzbek public identities.

There is historical substance to that argument. Prominent Armenians contributed to Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbekistan in fields ranging from culture to science, while generations of Armenian families have developed ties to cities such as Tashkent and Samarkand that are as biographical as their ties to Armenia.

But integration also complicates attempts to define where one community ends and another begins.

Read more on Novastan: At home in Central Asia: the lives and identity of the Lyuli/Mughat

An Armenian family may speak Russian at home, Uzbek at work or school, retain an Armenian surname, celebrate Armenian religious holidays and regard Uzbekistan as its homeland.

The resulting identity does not fit easily into models that imagine diasporas as culturally self-contained communities looking permanently towards an ancestral state.

For younger Armenians, Armenia may be important symbolically even when they have never lived there. Uzbekistan, meanwhile, is not simply a “host country” but the country in which their families may have lived for several generations.

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

This distinction helps explain why the Armenian community’s future is unlikely to depend on preserving an unchanged version of the past.

Its challenge is instead to determine which parts of that inheritance remain meaningful.

A post-Soviet minority dilemma

The story of Uzbekistan’s Armenians is therefore not one of straightforward disappearance or revival.

The revival is real. Institutions that had vanished under Soviet rule have been rebuilt. Churches under the leadership of Ter Hovhannes Grigoryan, the spiritual mentor of the Armenian community in Uzbekistan, continues to function successfully. The Armenian National Cultural Center of Uzbekistan, led by Vladislav Safarov, along with regional cultural centers in Tashkent and Samarkand, headed by Armen Sahakyan and Armen Der-Avanesyants, are doing their best and carrying out extensive work across various fields. Cultural organisations operate openly and the Government of Uzbekistan extends full-scale assistance and support to the community organization.

Armenian history is commemorated. Children can attend community classes. Publications and artistic groups maintain a collective public presence.

At the same time, the social foundations on which those institutions once rested have changed profoundly.

The family is less reliably Armenian-speaking. Community participation is selective. Identity competes with migration, mixed backgrounds and increasingly individual definitions of belonging.

For Saakov, this makes transmission the decisive question.

The elderly woman who arrived with her books had preserved the physical objects of Armenian culture for decades. But the language connecting her directly to them had disappeared somewhere along the way.

Her story may seem melancholy, but Saakov does not present the community’s future simply in terms of decline.

If being Armenian is, as Mutafian suggested, a choice, then every generation makes that choice under different circumstances.

In Uzbekistan today, the question is no longer whether Armenian institutions can exist. They can, and they do.

The harder question is what people will choose to do with them.

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

The post Between integration and inheritance: How Armenians in Uzbekistan are redefining community appeared first on Novastan English.

Often portrayed through poverty and begging, Lyuli/Mughat communities have lived across Central Asia for centuries. Researchers and filmmakers are now drawing attention to a much richer story of language, craftsmanship, family life and belonging.

In Shakhzoda Mirakova’s documentary We Are (At) Home, the title itself carries an argument. The film was shot largely in different districts of Bukhara, where Mirakova and her team spent time with Lyuli/Mughat families and community members. For her, the idea of “home” was not simply geographical. “Despite often being treated as outsiders, Lyuli have built their lives, families and communities here,” she told Novastan. That tension – between being deeply rooted in Central Asia and still perceived as somehow outside it – runs through much of the history of the Lyuli/Mughat.

They have lived in the region for centuries and can be found across all five Central Asian republics, although the largest concentrations are generally associated with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and southern Kyrgyzstan, with smaller communities in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Their distant origins are usually linked by researchers to migrations from the Indian subcontinent, but their precise relationship with European Roma populations remains debated. Researcher Kamilla Zakirova argues that it is more accurate to understand them as a distinct Central Asian community that has often been placed within a wider Roma or “Gypsy” category, rather than simply describing them as a Central Asian branch of European Roma. Their identity today is unmistakably shaped by the societies in which they live: by Uzbek and Tajik languages, Sunni Islam, local neighbourhoods, extended families and the economic and cultural life of Central Asia.

One community, many names

Even the question of what to call the community is complicated. “Lyuli” or “Luli” is widely used in Uzbekistan and in Russian-language sources, while “Jughi” or “Jugi” is especially common in Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan. Historical names including Multoni or Multani and Ghorbat or Gurbat have also appeared in different parts of the region. “Mughat”, meanwhile, is an important self-designation for many people.

Zakirova notes that some community members prefer it precisely because names such as Lyuli or Jughi may carry derogatory stereotypes. At the same time, preferences differ by place and individual, meaning there is no single term that can be assumed to be universally accepted. For an international audience, she considers “Lyuli/Mughat” a useful compromise. The terminology reflects a broader difficulty: outsiders have often attempted to fit highly diverse communities into a single category. Different groups have developed within different linguistic and social environments, and this makes it difficult to speak of one single Lyuli language, occupation or lifestyle extending unchanged across Central Asia.

This distinction also matters when comparing Lyuli/Mughat with Russian-speaking Roma communities in the region, historically often referred to as Tsygane. Zakirova stresses that these are not simply interchangeable categories. The Lyuli/Mughat have developed within Central Asian society and have linguistic, religious and social practices shaped by that setting.

How important is the Indian connection?

The community’s distant South Asian origins are one of the most frequently mentioned aspects of its history, but they do not necessarily occupy the same place in the identity of people living in Central Asia today. During the making of We Are (At) Home, Mirakova encountered contradictory accounts. “We met several families, and their accounts were not the same,” she said. “Some people denied having a connection to the Indian subcontinent, while others claimed Indian ancestry.” One community leader the filmmakers met knew several words that he identified as coming from an Indian language and also described himself as having Indian ancestry, yet this kind of memory was not shared by everyone.

That distinction matters. A distant historical origin identified through linguistic or ethnographic research does not necessarily determine how people understand themselves generations later. For communities whose everyday lives have developed for centuries in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, India may be an ancestral reference, a family story, or something largely absent from daily identity. The more immediate cultural environment is Central Asian, and this is reflected in language, religion, settlement patterns and social life.

Speaking the languages of Central Asia

Language demonstrates this particularly clearly. Zakirova describes Lyuli/Mughat communities as generally multilingual. In Uzbekistan, Uzbek and Tajik are widely spoken, while Russian remains present, particularly among older generations. Mirakova observed much the same thing while filming in Bukhara. “The people we interviewed could speak Uzbek, Tajik and Russian,” she said. “From what we observed, Lyuli generally speak the language that is common in the region where they live, rather than using one single language across Central Asia.”

Their religious practices likewise overlap extensively with those of neighbouring communities. Most are Sunni Muslims, and celebrations and rituals associated with Ramadan, weddings, circumcision and funerals form part of the broader religious culture of Central Asia. For Zakirova, differences between Lyuli/Mughat communities are therefore often shaped less by religion than by local history, language and different levels of integration into surrounding society. Most are no longer nomadic. Communities are generally settled, often organised around extended families, neighbourhoods and local networks. The image of the permanently travelling “Gypsy” community can consequently obscure as much as it explains.

Everyday life beyond begging

The most persistent public stereotype surrounding the Lyuli is begging, and it is also the image that Mirakova most wants to complicate. “Public portrayals tend to focus on poverty and begging, which gives a very narrow picture of the community,” she said. “Spending time with people showed us that there is much more to their everyday lives, including craftsmanship, family traditions, skills and cultural practices.”

During filming in Bukhara, the team encountered families involved in forms of craftsmanship that receive little public attention. Mirakova recalls people making everyday household objects such as plates and cups, as well as carpet-making. Other people worked in waste collection, seasonal labour and work connected to pastures. The range of occupations, she felt, was becoming more diverse rather than remaining confined to only a few traditional activities. Zakirova similarly points to longer traditions of music, performance, jewellery-making, woodworking and metalworking among different Lyuli/Mughat groups, and notes that some communities have historically been associated with professional music and entertainment.

None of these occupations should be treated as universal characteristics. Mirakova’s observations relate specifically to the families she encountered around Bukhara, while the economic lives of Lyuli/Mughat communities vary considerably across the region. But they help reveal a basic problem with the dominant stereotype: economic marginalisation has often become a substitute for describing an entire culture. Craftsmanship illustrates that invisibility particularly well. “Lyuli families make plates and cups – everyday objects that people often use without knowing who produced them,” Mirakova said. The producer may remain socially invisible even when the object itself circulates widely.

School, documents and changing opportunities

The situation of Lyuli/Mughat communities has improved in some respects over the past decade, according to Zakirova, but significant inequalities remain. Education is one area where the gap is particularly visible. In the families Mirakova met, girls generally remained at school until around the ninth grade. This observation cannot be generalised to the whole population, but it reflects broader concerns about limited educational attainment and low representation in higher and vocational education.

Earlier research and official reporting have also identified problems with school inclusion, poverty and the costs associated with education. Documentation has historically posed another obstacle. Mirakova encountered people who held passports and identity documents alongside others who did not. This problem intersects with the wider legacy of statelessness in post-Soviet Central Asia. Uzbekistan’s reforms on citizenship and birth registration, including the 2020 Citizenship Law, have helped tens of thousands of formerly stateless people obtain or confirm citizenship, although these measures were not designed specifically for Lyuli/Mughat communities.

For Zakirova, that distinction is important. Broader legal reforms can still matter greatly for groups that have historically faced barriers to documentation, even when they are not targeted at a particular minority. At the same time, major challenges remain in education, poverty, housing, employment opportunities and discrimination. Representation in higher and vocational education remains particularly limited.

Integration does not mean visibility

The paradox is that a community can be deeply integrated into the language, religion and everyday life of a country without being strongly represented in its public institutions. Zakirova describes national political representation of Lyuli/Mughat people in Uzbekistan as extremely limited. She is not aware of a nationally prominent elected politician who publicly identifies as Lyuli/Mughat, nor of a major national newspaper, radio station or political organisation representing the community specifically.

This limited visibility extends to cultural representation. For decades, Lyuli communities have frequently appeared in public discourse through stories about begging, social deprivation or marginalisation. What is much less visible is ordinary life: weddings, work, religious practices, family relationships, artisanship or changing aspirations among younger generations. That is one reason Zakirova sees the appearance of younger journalists and filmmakers interested in the community as significant. She pointed specifically to Mirakova’s We Are (At) Home as an example of a younger generation beginning to explore questions of Lyuli identity and belonging from a different perspective.

Filming a community usually seen from outside

Mirakova’s documentary did not emerge from a large institutional project. Most of the filming took place locally in Bukhara partly because the filmmakers had a limited budget, and they were also able to work through people who already knew community members and helped establish contact with families. This mattered because marginalised communities are frequently documented by outsiders who arrive with pre-existing ideas about the story they expect to find. Establishing relationships through trusted contacts gave the filmmakers a different entry point.

What they encountered was not a uniform community. Neighbours responded differently to Lyuli families. Some interacted warmly with them and showed genuine curiosity about their culture and traditions, while others viewed them overwhelmingly through negative stereotypes, particularly the association with begging. Mirakova said her team did not encounter any specific state, municipal or NGO programme designed explicitly for the families they met in areas such as education, employment, housing or documentation. That does not necessarily mean no such measures exist elsewhere, but it shows how limited their visibility can be at community level.

Family, weddings and cultural life

Some of the strongest impressions Mirakova took away from the documentary had little to do with poverty. She remembers conversations about family obligations in which people described leaving or separating from their own family for the benefit or needs of another family member. The exact form of this practice varied in the accounts she heard, but she was struck by the weight placed on family duty and sacrifice.

The filmmakers also encountered tattoos or markings that some people compared visually with an Indian bindi, although Mirakova stresses that these practices varied from person to person. Such observations should not be treated as evidence of historical origin, but they reveal the kinds of cultural details that rarely appear in public representations of the community.

She would particularly like to see more attention paid to weddings and craftsmanship. “I think their wedding traditions and craftsmanship, particularly carpet-making, deserve much more attention,” she said. “These are aspects of their cultural life that are rarely visible in the way the community is usually portrayed.” That absence is itself significant. Minority communities are often made visible precisely at moments of crisis: when discussing poverty, exclusion, documentation or discrimination. Cultural life is then treated as secondary. For Mirakova, reversing that hierarchy was one of the lessons of spending time with Lyuli families.

“We are at home”

The title of We Are (At) Home ultimately returns the discussion to belonging. Lyuli/Mughat communities may have distant histories connected with South Asia. They may retain names, memories or forms of identification that distinguish them from surrounding populations. But their contemporary lives have developed over generations in Central Asia. They speak Uzbek and Tajik, practise Islam alongside their neighbours, attend the same schools, work in local economies, produce household goods and build families in the same cities and villages. Yet they can still be described as outsiders.

The contradiction is perhaps most visible in the language used about them. “Nomadic”, “Gypsy”, “beggar” and “marginalised” can all become labels through which a highly diverse population is compressed into a single social image. None of this means overlooking real inequalities. Education, documentation, housing, poverty and discrimination remain significant concerns, and representation in higher education and national public life remains limited. But reducing the community to those problems reproduces another form of exclusion.

Mirakova’s experience suggests a different starting point. “I think their skills and everyday cultural life are largely missing from public portrayals,” she said. The most revealing thing about the Lyuli/Mughat may therefore not be how different they are from Central Asia, but how thoroughly their history has become part of it.

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

The post At home in Central Asia: the lives and identity of the Lyuli/Mughat appeared first on Novastan English.

In 1890, French photographer Paul Nadar travelled through Russian Turkestan, documenting cities, landscapes and everyday life along the newly built Trans-Caspian Railway. In 2026, Spanish photographer Pablo Martínez Muñiz retraced part of his journey, using Nadar’s archive to explore how Uzbekistan – and the way outsiders see it – has changed.

Paul Nadar’s journey to Turkestan

The history of nineteenth-century photography is full of epic journeys in which adventurous photographers set off to explore distant places carrying cumbersome photographic equipment.

Their motivations varied. Some, such as Girault de Prangey, travelled east as part of a broader investigation into the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Others, such as Francis Frith, used travel to produce hundreds of photographs from around the world and build an international photographic business.

Paul Nadar’s journey to Turkestan in 1890 belongs to this tradition.

Paul Nadar (1856-1939), the son of the celebrated French photographer Félix Nadar, embarked that year on a two-month journey from Paris to Tashkent. He left Paris on 24 August aboard the Orient Express and reached Constantinople three days later. From there, he crossed the Black Sea by ship to Batumi before travelling via Tiflis to Baku.

Read more on Novastan: A condensed history

After crossing the Caspian Sea, he arrived at the Russian port of Uzun-Ada, the starting point of the recently constructed Trans-Caspian Railway. He then travelled by train through Bukhara to Samarkand, before completing the final stretch to Tashkent by horse-drawn carriage.

During the journey, Nadar took approximately 1,800 photographs. Most of the negatives are now preserved at the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie in Paris. The Getty Research Institute also holds an album entitled Photograph Album of Turkestan, 1890, containing 74 images in an unusual circular format. Other prints are scattered across private collections.

His photographs cover a remarkably broad range of subjects. He documented the Trans-Caspian Railway, its stations, workers and passengers. He photographed local rulers – emirs and beys – in portraits strongly influenced by contemporary Orientalist aesthetics. He also captured everyday scenes in the bazaars, streets and squares of Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, as well as monuments, landscapes and equestrian and falconry competitions.

Taken together, the photographs constitute an extraordinary documentary and ethnographic record of Central Asian society at the end of the nineteenth century.

Nadar travelled not only with the equipment required to make large 30 × 40 cm glass-plate photographs, but also with two innovative cameras: the Kodak No. 2 and the Express Détective Nadar. Their capacity to take instantaneous photographs had a noticeable impact on the visual character of his work.

Yet Nadar’s photographs also reflected a European gaze shaped by Orientalism and by the geopolitical context of Russian expansion in Central Asia. They contributed to an image of Turkestan associated with the Western fascination with the “Orient”.

Read more on Novastan: A mosaïc wall

These photographs were therefore not neutral documents. They participated in the construction of a particular European idea of Central Asia, linked to colonial imaginaries and the romantic representation of the East that developed during the nineteenth century.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of Nadar’s work lies precisely in this tension between documentation and cultural construction. His photographs have enormous historical and ethnographic value, but they also reveal a particular way of looking at and representing a territory, conditioned by the political and cultural context of his time.

Uzbekistan, 2026

During the first half of April 2026, with support from Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Tourism through the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Spain, I travelled to Uzbekistan to develop my photographic research and creation project, In the Country of Özbeg.

Taking Paul Nadar’s 1890 journey through Turkestan as its starting point, the project seeks to produce a contemporary reinterpretation of that experience through photography.

My aim was to return to some of the places photographed by Nadar and construct a new visual narrative about contemporary Uzbekistan. Rather than literally reproducing his historical photographs or indulging in nostalgia for an exotic past, I wanted to establish a dialogue between past and present – between two ways of looking at the same territory separated by more than 130 years of political, social and cultural transformation.

The Uzbekistan I encountered is, of course, radically different from the territory Nadar visited at the end of the nineteenth century. The Russian Revolution, the Soviet period and independence in 1991 were followed by profound urban, economic and cultural changes.

Read more on Novastan: Novastan Photo Contest 2026: the results

Infrastructure modernisation, the growth of tourism, the construction of a distinct national identity and the effects of globalisation have transformed both the physical landscape and everyday life.

Against this background, In the Country of Özbeg asks several questions. What remains today of the Orientalist imaginary constructed during the nineteenth century? How is Uzbek society represented now? How do contemporary processes of modernisation and tourism affect the visual representation of the country? And how can contemporary photography critically revisit images inherited from the past?

The project does not seek to provide definitive answers. Instead, it creates a space for visual reflection. I wanted to build a complex and open representation of Uzbekistan, avoiding exoticisation and focusing instead on tensions between tradition and modernity, memory and transformation, heritage and globalisation.

I worked in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva – the latter being the only city among the four that Nadar did not visit.

Nadar’s archive remained a conceptual reference throughout the process. Some of my photographs establish direct relationships with his images, while others focus on aspects of contemporary Uzbekistan that have no direct nineteenth-century equivalent. Through this dialogue between historical archive and contemporary production, I wanted to reflect both on the transformation of the country and on the mechanisms through which photography itself constructs representations.

From Orientalism to spectacle

The nineteenth-century European Orientalist imagination perceived Central Asia as a world of madrasas, mosques and bazaars.

Today, however, there are other forms of architecture that can produce a comparable sense of visual estrangement while belonging to an entirely different historical and cultural context.

These include the striking examples of Soviet modernist and brutalist architecture found across Tashkent, from the city’s metro stations to Hotel Uzbekistan. But there are also more recent forms of architectural spectacle.

At Magic City in Tashkent, for example, an enormous fairy-tale castle reminiscent of Walt Disney architecture forms the centrepiece of an entertainment and commercial complex. It is a very different kind of exoticism from the one imagined by nineteenth-century Europeans, but one that is equally constructed through image and spectacle.

It is also significant to observe the Uzbek government’s construction of large cultural and religious complexes inspired by Timurid architecture.

This process of recovering and monumentalising the past creates new architectural icons intended both to project a national identity and attract cultural and religious tourism.

At the same time, these buildings reveal a tension between the recovery of tradition and the creation of genuinely contemporary architecture. Reproducing historical forms can produce an architecture close to scenography or pastiche, in which the past itself becomes an image used to represent the present.

Yet this tension becomes more interesting at the decorative level. Colours, geometries, latticework and motifs inherited from Central Asian traditions are being reinterpreted through new materials and technologies, producing a contemporary visual identity grounded in architectural memory.

The two images show the continuity and transformation of a characteristic Central Asian ornamental vocabulary.

Traditional combinations of brick and glazed ceramics in turquoise, blue and earth tones coexist with contemporary interpretations using glass, metal and modern construction techniques.

The same visual resources – colour, stars, diamonds and geometric grids – are rationalised into more regular patterns that not only decorate buildings but filter light and structure space.

This is therefore not simply a literal reproduction of the past. It is an aesthetic translation of heritage, in which historic forms and colours are abstracted and adapted to the present.

The Registan: from urban centre to global icon

Samarkand’s Registan is one of the places that most clearly illustrates the changes Uzbekistan has undergone over the past 130 years.

When Nadar photographed the square in 1890, it remained a centre of urban life: a place of commerce and movement, surrounded by madrasas that still served their original functions.

The buildings were in poor condition, but the space remained embedded in the everyday life of Samarkand.

Today, the Registan has become one of Uzbekistan’s most recognisable visual icons and a centre of the country’s booming tourism industry. Its monumental buildings have been extensively restored, while many of the cells that once accommodated madrasa students now contain souvenir shops.

The transformation is striking. The architecture survives, but the social function of the space has profoundly changed.

Representing Uzbek women

These photographs create a powerful visual contrast between two representations of Uzbek women separated by more than a century.

In Nadar’s photograph, the woman appears almost elusive, heavily covered and anonymous within the surrounding landscape. My photograph from 2026 presents a very different encounter: a grandmother and her granddaughter look directly at the camera with confidence and complicity.

The older woman’s traditional textile patterns coexist naturally with the younger girl’s pink sweatshirt. Their clothing, expressions and relationship suggest both continuity and change, while resisting the tendency to reduce contemporary Uzbek women to a single image of either “tradition” or “modernity”.

A globalised Uzbekistan

For me, these images capture Uzbekistan as a kind of living palimpsest, in which global modernity is written over layers of history without fully erasing them.

In the first photograph, a young Uzbek man poses in an FC Barcelona shirt. The club crest and Spotify logo form unmistakably contemporary symbols against a background of traditional brick architecture, illustrating the extent to which global mass culture has become part of local identity.

In the second, a balloon seller walks beside the historic brick walls of Bukhara’s Ark carrying a dense cluster of bright red heart-shaped balloons.

The plastic, ephemeral colour of the balloons stands in sharp contrast to the monumental architecture of a city that Nadar himself photographed in 1890.

Both photographs show how the symbols of the twenty-first century occupy the same spaces as the physical traces of historic Turkestan.

The road and the destination

These final two images bring the visual journey to a close by connecting movement with destination.

Nadar’s photograph documents the Trans-Caspian Railway, whose construction began in 1879. I find it fascinating to think that this infrastructure made his journey through the region – and therefore his photographic work – possible.

In his image, the railway appears fragile as it cuts across the desert landscape. To me, it evokes the epic quality associated with the early history of photography in this part of the world.

My photograph of Khiva’s walls represents the end of my own journey through Uzbekistan.

Read more on Novastan: In Khiva’s Old Town

Where Nadar’s image captures the infrastructure that enabled movement across the region at the end of the nineteenth century, my own gaze comes to rest on the solidity of Khiva’s adobe walls, glowing in the evening light at the final stop on my itinerary.

In placing these two photographs together, I wanted to connect the historical infrastructure that enabled Nadar’s exploration with the architecture that marked the conclusion of my own.

Epilogue

Travelling through Uzbekistan in Paul Nadar’s footsteps has helped me understand that photography documents not only space, but time.

In the Country of Özbeg was not conceived as an exercise in Orientalist nostalgia, but as a visual dialogue with a territory that is constantly being rewritten.

By confronting the photographic archive of 1890 with my own images from 2026, Uzbekistan emerges not as a static landscape, but as a society in which Timurid memory, the traces of the Soviet era and the symbols of globalisation coexist in everyday life.

My physical journey ended at the walls of Khiva, but the question of photographic representation remains open.

Looking at the present through the reflection of the past is, ultimately, one way of understanding how we construct our own identities in the mirror of history.

By Pablo Martínez Muñiz.

Pablo Martínez Muñiz is a Spanish photographer, university professor and researcher specialising in the history of nineteenth-century photography. He holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, where his doctoral research examined Orientalism in nineteenth-century photography and the relationship between photography, travel and representations of the East. His work combines artistic practice, academic research and teaching, with a particular focus on photography, territory, representation and Orientalist visual cultures. He is a professor and academic director of the Master’s Degree in Artistic Photography at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and a member of the Iranian Peoples Studies Group (GEPI) at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is also part of the research project “Crossed Perspectives between the Iranian and Hispanic Worlds: Narratives and Representations in the Contemporary Era”, funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Reference: PID2023-1502740A-100).

The post In the Country of Özbeg: Photographing Uzbekistan 136 Years After Paul Nadar appeared first on Novastan English.

Kazakhstani feminist and LGBTI rights activist Zhanar Sekerbayeva was convicted of battery after a confrontation in Astana in November 2025. She says the prosecution was retaliation for her activism and part of a wider deterioration in the rights of LGBTI people in Kazakhstan.

“They said to me, ‘It will be hooliganism. Don’t worry, Zhanar. We just want to get rid of you,’” says Zhanar Sekerbayeva, a Kazakhstani feminist and LGBTI rights activist, and co-founder of the feminist initiative Feminita.

She was describing to Amnesty International what police officers allegedly told her after she and fellow LGBTI rights activists were harassed at a café in Astana in November 2025.

What Sekerbayeva initially understood would be treated as an administrative case instead became a criminal prosecution against her.

“Somebody decided it would not be an administrative offence, but a criminal one, because I think it was some kind of last opportunity for them before the amendments [to the so-called LGBTI propaganda law] came into force,” she says. “They needed a public lesson, a public lesson to everybody.”

On 22 April 2026, a criminal court in Astana found Sekerbayeva guilty under Article 109-1, Part 1 of Kazakhstan’s Criminal Code of “battery or other violent acts causing physical pain but not causing minor injury to health”.

She was fined around 178,000 Kazakhstani tenge, approximately US$380.

From harassment to prosecution

On 22 November 2025, Sekerbayeva and several friends and fellow activists gathered for a private lunch on the second floor of a café in Astana.

For security reasons, the venue’s exact address had been withheld publicly and shared only in private messages with trusted guests.

Yet a woman who had disrupted an expert roundtable on gender issues organised by the Education Community in Astana the previous day found the group there. Accompanied by several unidentified people, she began filming those present without their consent and loudly accused them of spreading “LGBT propaganda”.

When Sekerbayeva and her companions tried to leave, the woman blocked the staircase. After they eventually reached the exit, she obstructed their path again. Witnesses, including diners at nearby tables, later described how the woman physically prevented the group from leaving.

Sekerbayeva had previously survived two violent attacks in Shymkent and Qaragandy in 2021. She says the Astana confrontation left her in severe shock.

But it was Sekerbayeva, rather than the woman who had confronted the group, whom police subsequently pursued.

According to Sekerbayeva, officers followed her from one café to another and then to a shop, where she locked herself in a restroom. She says officers threatened to break down the door.

Sekerbayeva and her colleague Temirlan Baimash were eventually taken to a police station and held for around three hours before being released without formal charges.

Three days later, Sekerbayeva filed a written complaint describing the incident as unlawful stalking.

Police opened a preliminary inquiry but closed it only a few days later, characterising what had happened as no more than a “verbal conflict” that had caused no “substantial harm”.

A second complaint filed by Sekerbayeva on 12 February 2026 was rejected on similar grounds.

By contrast, a complaint against Sekerbayeva’s group was pursued and became the basis of a criminal case for battery.

From witness to sole defendant

By February 2026, Sekerbayeva had gone from being a witness to an accused person and ultimately became the sole defendant in the case.

An indictment approved on 27 March repeatedly described her and her companions as “persons disseminating information prohibited from dissemination on the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan”.

That language reflected provisions contained in Kazakhstan’s March 2026 law banning so-called “LGBT propaganda”, although the law had not yet entered into force when the café incident took place in November 2025.

The proceedings initially involved three members of Sekerbayeva’s group, but the case eventually narrowed until she was the only person facing prosecution.

At trial, the prosecution relied largely on the complainant’s testimony, which Sekerbayeva says changed in detail over the course of the proceedings, as well as testimony from two witnesses.

According to the case material reviewed for this article, none of the available recordings – including footage from the complainant’s phone and from phones belonging to people accompanying her – show Sekerbayeva striking anyone. Sekerbayeva says the café itself had a surveillance camera, although without audio, and that police relied on only a short segment that did not show the complainant entering or the beginning of the confrontation.

The prosecution’s forensic medical report documented a single bruise on the complainant’s upper arm, which was classified as falling below the threshold of “light harm to health”.

“I should be equal in this case. I should be investigated equally with [her]. No, it was never equal. Never,” Sekerbayeva says.

Her lawyers argued that the prosecution amounted to retaliation for her human rights work and her sexual orientation.

The court rejected this interpretation.

“The defendant’s arguments about alleged persecution on political motives, as well as on the basis of her belonging to LGBT, are a method of defence and are refuted by the case materials,” the judgment stated.

The case materials nevertheless contain explicit references to Sekerbayeva’s LGBTI activism. In statements to police, the complainant repeatedly described her as an activist engaged in “LGBT propaganda”.

A conviction upheld on appeal

On 22 April 2026, the court found Sekerbayeva guilty.

She appealed, but on 2 June the Astana City Court upheld the conviction in full, finding that the original verdict had been “comprehensively, fully and objectively” substantiated.

The decision took effect immediately.

Sekerbayeva had anticipated the outcome.

“We believe the appeal court will likely uphold the lower court’s ruling,” she said before the decision. “We want to exhaust all avenues for defending our rights at the local level before moving to the international stage.”

LGBTI rights under growing pressure in Kazakhstan

The case has unfolded against a broader deterioration in conditions for LGBTI people and human rights defenders in Kazakhstan.

In late 2025, following a 2024 petition signed by 50,000 people demanding restrictions on public LGBTI representation, Kazakhstan’s parliament passed legislation banning the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual orientation and paedophilia” in the media and online.

The law was signed in December 2025 and entered into force in March 2026.

Read more on Novastan: Queer life under pressure in Kyrgyzstan

The legislation has drawn comparisons with Russia’s 2013 anti-LGBTI “propaganda” law, which international human rights bodies have repeatedly found incompatible with fundamental rights.

Amnesty International warned before the Kazakhstani legislation was adopted that such restrictions would further entrench stigma, fear and censorship.

The measure followed earlier discriminatory changes. In 2024, for example, Kazakhstan barred LGBTI people from adopting or mentoring orphans.

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

Further restrictions were incorporated into the new Constitution adopted on 15 March 2026, which defines marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman.

Critics also argued that the constitutional process lacked inclusive public consultation and meaningful participation by independent civil society.

The Constitution permits broader restrictions on freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly on the basis of concepts including “constitutional order” and “public morality” – terms human rights advocates fear could be interpreted expansively.

Feminita under pressure

The case file identifies Sekerbayeva as director of Feminita, the feminist initiative for lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans women that she co-founded with fellow activists.

Feminita is one of the few organised LGBTI groups operating openly in Central Asia.

Kazakhstani authorities have repeatedly refused to register the organisation since it first applied for legal recognition in 2017.

Days before the November 2025 confrontation in Astana, Feminita had organised, funded and hosted a strategic meeting in Almaty bringing together LGBTI activists from across Kazakhstan to discuss how their work could continue under the impending “propaganda” law.

“Feminita was one of the organisers who found money, who rented a hotel and actually found the platform,” Sekerbayeva recalls. “We invited everybody, even the people who are in conflict with us.”

She says the organisation’s visibility has made both her and her colleagues targets for years.

In 2018, Sekerbayeva was arrested and convicted of “petty hooliganism” for taking part in a photoshoot challenging stigma surrounding menstruation.

In 2021, a Feminita event in Shymkent was violently disrupted by a group of men. Sekerbayeva says she was dragged by the hair and punched in the face.

She also served ten days of administrative detention following a 2025 protest against femicide.

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

During the hearings in her latest case, Sekerbayeva says anonymous and newly created social media accounts repeatedly portrayed her as guilty and deserving of punishment.

Her mother, a paediatrician in Astana, has told her that she is too afraid of possible professional repercussions to attend the hearings.

Adapting activism under the new law

Rather than suspending its activities altogether, Feminita has adapted its public presentation.

We work on the protection of LGBT women’s rights and researchers, mobilisation of community, while also integrating feminist business ideas and eco-feminist activities into our strategic framework.”

“I just want people to see it was a political case”

Asked what justice would mean to her, Sekerbayeva says she is not seeking revenge.

“For now, for me, justice would mean reopening the case and showing that it was not correct to charge me,” she says.

“They should hold to account not only the provocateur, but also the police, the prosecutor’s office, the Committee of National Security and the akimat [local council]. Everybody should be named for how they did this provocation.”

“I don’t need apologies from them. I just want people to see it was a political case, and to see how it was created.”

Her expectations stretch beyond the immediate legal process.

“Even if I will not be alive,” she adds, “I think there will come a time when everything will be reinvestigated again. And I really believe that time will come.”

It would not be the first time Sekerbayeva has turned the label of “hooligan” back on the authorities.

Speaking to Amnesty International in 2019 after an earlier conviction for hooliganism, she said:

“Being a woman human rights defender is much more important – even if that makes me a ‘hooligan’ in the eyes of the authorities.”

By Vahid Aliyev, Global Civic Space Fellow at Amnesty International.

The post “A public lesson to everybody”: Kazakhstan convicts feminist and LGBTI rights activist Zhanar Sekerbayeva appeared first on Novastan English.

From horse archers and traditional dress to carefully staged portraits, Mongolian photographer Ganzorig Miimaa draws on the country’s nomadic heritage to create a contemporary visual language. The 500px Photographer of the Year 2025 speaks to Novastan about looking at Mongolia differently, the new generation transforming tradition, and why a childhood question about Mortal Kombat still shapes his work.

Mongolian photographer Ganzorig Miimaa spent the early years of his career looking outward.

Like many young photographers, he drew inspiration from images circulating internationally. He wanted the Mongolian people he photographed to appear “international, modern, fashionable, or classical”. Gradually, however, he began to realise that some of his strongest subjects were already around him: Mongolia’s nomadic life, history, people and cultural heritage.

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

The shift has come to define his photography.

Based in Ulaanbaatar and with more than fifteen years of professional experience, Ganzorig works across portrait, documentary, commercial and staged photography. In 2025, he was named Photographer of the Year at the 500px Global Photography Awards. His portrait Queen, inspired by the elaborate hairstyles worn by Mongolian women historically, also received the competition’s Judges’ Choice award in the Portrait category. In 2026, his Ornamented Identity took second place in the professional division of the reFocus Black & White Photo Contest.

Yet Ganzorig’s work is not primarily an exercise in documenting disappearing traditions. His photographs often reconstruct them. Historical clothing, horses, archery, hunting practices and other elements of Mongolia’s visual heritage are placed within carefully controlled compositions, where lighting, colour, pose and environment become as important as the subjects themselves.

It is an approach that reflects something he sees happening more widely in contemporary Mongolia. A younger generation of artists, he argues, is increasingly treating cultural heritage not simply as something inherited and protected, but as material from which something new can be created.

Novastan English Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine spoke with Ganzorig Miimaa about photography, cultural identity and what it means to make Mongolia visible to the outside world.

Novastan: Your recent work often explores Mongolian identity, heritage and the relationship between tradition and contemporary life. What does “Mongolian identity” mean to you visually, and how has your understanding of it changed through photography?

Ganzorig Miimaa: It is difficult for me to define exactly what makes Mongolian identity unique, because I have not studied other cultures deeply enough to make that kind of comparison. But I do believe that Mongolia’s vast history, and the nomadic way of life that continues to this day, are something very special.

When I first started photography, I tried to make images similar to the ones I saw on international photography platforms. I wanted to make Mongolian people look more international, modern, fashionable, or classical.

Read more on Novastan: Central Asia through the lens of… Behzod Boltayev

Over time, I began to realise that rather than following what everyone else was doing, it was more important to find and bring out things around me that others had not yet noticed or seen.

Mongolia’s history, nomadic life, people and cultural heritage gradually became some of the closest and strongest sources of visual inspiration for me.

When you photograph subjects that outsiders strongly associate with Mongolia – horses, eagle hunters, traditional dress, the steppe – what do you look for that makes the image feel personal rather than expected?

Because my background is in advertising photography, I pay a great deal of attention not only to the idea or content of an image, but also to its visual and aesthetic qualities.

I would probably divide this kind of work into two categories.

The first consists of photographs I make while researching a subject, meeting people and travelling – images that come from real situations and events as they happen.

Read more on Novastan: Central Asia through the lens of… Kamila Rustambekova

The second consists of fully staged photographs, where I already have an image in my mind of how I want something to look. With these photographs, I work much more deliberately with lighting, colour, composition, environment and the positioning of the subject, and I try to introduce a degree of artistic interpretation and abstraction.

So when I photograph subjects that are already strongly associated with Mongolia, it is less about trying to find a completely different subject and more about finding a way to show it through my own visual language.

What usually comes first for you when making a photograph: a face, a gesture, a landscape, a colour, a story or an idea?

Ideas can come from many different things, and very often they eventually intersect.

For example, I might see someone and think, “I would really like to photograph this person.” Then, sometime later, I might witness an event and suddenly think, “This could be an interesting way to photograph that person.” Later still, I might see a location or an object and think, “This would be the right place for it.”

Things that originally had no connection to one another gradually come together in a single photograph.

But there is no fixed order. Sometimes the location comes first, sometimes the person, sometimes a story, or simply an image that appears in my mind. For me, a photograph often develops through connections between things I have noticed at completely different times.

In projects such as Ornamented Identity, you work with carefully constructed portraits and visual symbolism. How do you decide when to stage an image and when to work more observationally or documentarily?

Honestly, there is not a particularly deep philosophy behind that decision. If it were possible, I would probably stage almost all of my photographs and control every element of the image myself.

But in reality, sometimes the most practical option is to photograph something while it is actually happening. Recreating an event later might require coordinating the schedules of many people, as well as arranging costumes, horses, locations, transportation and many other things. The cost of the shoot can also increase very quickly.

So some of my observational or documentary photographs are not necessarily the result of a deliberate artistic principle. Sometimes they are simply about making the best use of the opportunity that exists at that moment.

When circumstances allow, I prefer to plan an image carefully and construct it.

Where in Mongolia do you personally find the strongest artistic inspiration? Are there particular regions, landscapes or communities that continue to draw you back?

One of the places that gives me the most inspiration and material for research is the Nomads Festival.

Cultural heritage practitioners from Mongolia’s 21 provinces gather in one place and present their ways of life, customs, crafts, clothing, traditional knowledge and skills out on the open steppe.

For me, it is an opportunity to encounter an enormous amount of information about the cultures of different regions of Mongolia in a very short period of time.

I might notice a person’s appearance, a small detail of clothing, an object, a custom or a particular skill, and that can lead me towards a new subject that I later research in much greater depth.

So for me, the festival is not only a place to make photographs; it is also a major source of research and ideas for future work.

If someone were visiting Mongolia for the first time and wanted to understand the country beyond the usual tourist itinerary, what would you tell them to do?

I have travelled abroad both with tour companies and independently.

With a tour company, you generally see a prepared itinerary and the things they have chosen to show you. Travelling independently gives you more freedom, but sometimes you have no idea where things are, what you should see, or even what you should and should not do.

So the next time I visit somewhere new, if possible, I would rather get to know a local photographer with similar interests and visit them. A local person sees the place where they live very differently from someone following a tourist itinerary.

In the same way, rather than giving a first-time visitor to Mongolia a list of famous places, I would suggest visiting a herder family and, if possible, spending some time with them and observing their everyday life.

I think getting even a little closer to how people actually live can tell you more about a country than simply visiting a list of places you are supposed to see.

What excites you most in Mongolia’s cultural scene today? Are there photographers, filmmakers, musicians, designers, writers or other artists whose work you think international audiences should know?

What I find exciting is seeing a younger generation of Mongolian artists learning from global culture and artistic practices, but instead of simply imitating them, translating their own heritage and sensibilities into forms that can reach the rest of the world.

One of the clearest examples for me is The HU. They have managed to translate elements of their own cultural heritage and sensibility through the language of contemporary global music and bring it to an enormous international audience.

There are interesting artists working in many different fields in Mongolia, but the list would become very long, so I would rather mention a few people from photography, which is the field I know best.

In nature photography, I would mention Erdenebulgan and Batsukh. In documentary photography, Davaanyam Delgerjargal and Injinaash Bor. And in fine art photography, Suniko B.

I would be very happy to see their work reach wider international audiences.

Do you see younger Mongolian artists engaging with heritage differently from previous generations?

Very differently. I think you can see this particularly clearly in music videos being made in Mongolia today.

In the past, cultural heritage and tradition were often represented more directly. The younger generation, however, is increasingly combining these elements with contemporary music, fashion, photography and new visual languages, and reinterpreting them from their own perspective.

What interests me most is that heritage is not being seen only as something that needs to be preserved, but also as something alive – material that can be used to create something new.

Are there traditions, symbols or aesthetics being reinterpreted in ways that particularly interest you?

There is one image that particularly fascinates me, inspired by historical accounts written by chroniclers of the 13th century, as well as artworks from that period: a mounted archer, carrying his bow and arrows, accompanied by his Taiga dog, with a falcon perched on his arm.

I would nominate this horseman for “the coolest guy of all time.” [Laughs]

The horse, the hunting dog, the falcon and the bow and arrows all come together in a single figure, and I find that visually incredibly powerful.

Although the image comes from centuries ago, I think it can still feel strikingly contemporary when reimagined through today’s visual language.

You have spoken about looking abroad for inspiration before realising that some of the strongest stories were around you in Mongolia. Was there a particular moment or project that changed the way you looked at your own country?

It is difficult to point to one particular moment when my thinking completely changed. Many different experiences and circumstances gradually came together to shape the way I think today.

But there is one funny memory that probably planted the first seed.

I remember playing Mortal Kombat and thinking, “Why isn’t there a Mongolian character in this game?”

And then the answer seemed quite simple: “Because you haven’t shown that character to the world enough.”

That thought stayed with me.

When you grow up inside a culture, it is easy to assume that other people know its history, characters and visual world because they are so familiar to you. But from the outside, they may hardly be visible at all.

I think part of what I do today has its roots in that thought.

Of course, as someone living inside the culture, my way of seeing my own country has been shaped by many overlapping influences – people, travel, photographs, experiences and research.

So I would not describe it as one dramatic turning point, but perhaps as one of the earliest ideas that set me on this path.

When someone outside Mongolia encounters your work, what do you hope stays with them after they stop looking at the image?

Maybe somewhere in my subconscious I want them to think, “Wow, he’s a really good photographer.” [Laughs]

But more importantly, I hope they come away with a positive impression of Mongolia.

It does not really matter whether they knew much about Mongolia beforehand. If one of my photographs makes them even a little more curious and gives them the desire to learn more about the people, history, culture and life of this country, that is enough for me.

Finally, Ornamented Identity took second place in the professional division of the 2026 reFocus Black & White Photo Contest, a year after you were named 500px Photographer of the Year. What is it about this photograph that best represents where you are creatively today?

I would probably choose that photograph.

Of course, receiving the award is important to me, but that is not the main reason I would choose it.

It is a completely staged photograph. I thought through and planned every element – the character, clothing, environment, lighting and composition. At the same time, I tried to incorporate elements of Mongolian tradition, history and cultural heritage through my own visual language.

For that reason, I think it brings together what I most want to do creatively at this point: to begin with real cultural heritage, but rather than simply documenting it, to reconstruct and reinterpret it through my own imagination and photographic language.

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

The post “Heritage is something alive”: Ganzorig Miimaa reimagines Mongolia through photography appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can educational cooperation achieve things that traditional diplomacy cannot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more on Novastan: The Lexicon of Kazakh Decolonisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no single model for younger Koryo-Saram.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural preservation and exchange

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

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

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

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

Economic and business cooperation

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

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

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

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

Education and research

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

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

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

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

Tourism and heritage tourism

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

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

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

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

Policy and diaspora engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Koryo-Saram story is one of endurance with dignity, adaptation with pride and the belief that heritage can remain alive even when the ancestral homeland is far away.

It is also a call to recognise and honour such histories, not as isolated curiosities, but as vital threads in the global story of human resilience.

Interview conducted and edited by Mathieu Lemoine.

Photographs courtesy of Hana Sexton.

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

The post From Central Asia to America: The Koryo-Saram Diaspora Finds a New Voice appeared first on Novastan English.

In Tashkent’s Seoul Garden, a train marked “1937” runs across the background of a bronze memorial. In the foreground, a Korean family arrives with children and bundles. An Uzbek elder extends a hand of welcome.

The monument, erected for the 80th anniversary of the resettlement of Koreans to Uzbekistan, carries inscriptions in Uzbek, Korean and Russian. It thanks the Uzbek people for their warmth and kindness toward the Korean diaspora. The scene compresses the Koryo-Saram story into a single image: forced movement, uncertainty, survival and the later memory of Central Asia as both a place of exile and a place of refuge.

Read more on Novastan: « Nous sommes plus Russes que Coréens » : biographie d’une Coréenne au Kazakhstan

The Koryo-Saram are often described as the Korean diaspora of Central Asia. The phrase is accurate, but incomplete. Their history begins in Korea, passes through the Russian Far East, is violently reshaped by Stalinist deportation, and continues in the cities, collective farms, theaters, newspapers, kitchens and families of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

For many Koryo-Saram, Central Asia is not only the place to which their ancestors were sent. It has become home.

From Korea to the Russian Far East

The ancestors of the Koryo-Saram began moving from Korea to the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Some were fleeing poverty, famine or social instability. Others crossed into the Russian Far East in search of land and security. Later, Japanese colonial domination of Korea added another layer to this movement.

In the Russian Far East, Korean communities took root. They farmed, built villages, created schools and organized cultural life. After the 1917 revolution, they became part of the Soviet Union’s complex nationality system, developing a distinct Soviet Korean identity.

The name Koryo-Saram can be roughly understood as “Korean people,” with “Koryo” referring to an older name associated with Korea. By the 1930s, Soviet Koreans had become a visible community in the Far East. But their position near the border with Korea and Manchuria, at a time of growing tension with imperial Japan, made them vulnerable to suspicion. Soviet authorities increasingly viewed them through a security lens, despite the fact that most had no connection to Japanese power.

In 1937, that suspicion became mass punishment.

The train to Central Asia

In the autumn of 1937, Soviet Koreans were forcibly deported from the Russian Far East to Central Asia. Around 172,000 people were moved, mainly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Families were loaded onto trains and sent thousands of kilometers away from the region where many had lived for generations.

The deportation was not an orderly transfer of population. For those who lived through it, it began not with policy language, but with a knock at the door. Families were told to gather what they could carry and leave. Most had no clear idea where the trains were going.

The journey across the Soviet Union could last weeks, in crowded wagons where people slept, cooked and relieved themselves in the same confined space. Children, elderly people and the sick were the first to die. Others arrived in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan weakened by hunger, cold and disease, only to be placed in barracks, warehouses or unfinished settlements.

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

In official documents, this was “resettlement.” In family memory, it was something else: the moment an entire people was torn from one landscape and forced to begin again in another.

The deportation of the Koreans was one of the earliest Soviet deportations of an entire ethnic group. It prefigured later mass deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, Volga Germans and others under Stalin. But unlike some of those cases, the Korean deportation remains less widely known outside specialist circles.

The official justification was security. In practice, it meant the removal of an entire population from a borderland because of their ethnicity and because of the geopolitical anxieties of the Soviet state.

Yet the deportation did not erase them. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram rebuilt.

Survival in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Central Asia was not an empty stage on which the Koryo-Saram simply appeared. It was already a complex region of Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Russian, Tatar, Ukrainian, Jewish, German and other communities. The arrival of deported Koreans added another layer to the Soviet remaking of the region.

Koryo-Saram families adapted quickly, often under harsh conditions. Many became associated with agriculture, including rice cultivation and vegetable production. Korean collective farms became known in parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Over time, Koryo-Saram also entered education, science, engineering, medicine, administration, culture and trade.

Their integration was shaped by Soviet structures. Russian became the main language of public life and, increasingly, of many Korean families. Soviet education opened pathways into professional careers. At the same time, the trauma of deportation and the pressure of assimilation weakened the transmission of Korean language and customs.

The result was not simple disappearance. Instead, a new identity emerged: Korean by ancestry, Soviet by experience, Russian-speaking in daily life, and Central Asian by geography, memory and belonging.

This hybridity is central to the Koryo-Saram story. They did not remain a sealed diaspora, separate from the societies around them. Nor did they fully dissolve into the Soviet majority. They became one of the many communities through which Central Asia’s multiethnic reality was lived.

A culture of adaptation

The most visible traces of Koryo-Saram culture are often everyday ones: food, family names, markets, holiday tables, memories of grandparents, and stories told about deportation.

Food is especially important because it shows how identity can survive through adaptation. In the Russian Far East, Korean cuisine had already been shaped by migration. In Central Asia, ingredients and conditions changed again. Dishes were adjusted to what was available.

The most famous example is morkovcha, the carrot salad now known across the former Soviet Union as “Korean carrot.” Made with carrots, garlic, coriander, vinegar and oil, it is not traditional Korean food in the narrow sense. It is a Soviet Korean invention, born from displacement and improvisation. Like the Koryo-Saram themselves, it belongs to more than one world.

Other dishes, such as kuksi and pigodi, also carry family memories. Yet for many younger Koryo-Saram, food may be one of the few remaining links to an older cultural world. A person may no longer speak Korean or Koryo-mar, but still recognize certain dishes as part of home.

This partial inheritance can be intimate and painful. It reminds younger generations that something was preserved, but also that much was broken by deportation, Soviet assimilation and decades of linguistic change.

Language, memory and silence

Language is one of the most sensitive parts of the Koryo-Saram story. Older generations preserved varieties of Korean, often referred to as Koryo-mar. But over the Soviet decades, Russian became dominant for many families. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, younger Koryo-Saram often grew up speaking Russian as their first language, while also navigating Kazakh, Uzbek or other local languages depending on their environment.

For some, this language shift is experienced as loss. For others, it is simply part of the reality of being Koryo-Saram. Identity is not always carried through fluent language. It may be carried through food, surnames, family stories, photographs, rituals, or the memory of an old village in the Russian Far East that descendants have never seen.

The Soviet period also shaped what could be said publicly. Like many deported peoples, Koryo-Saram families often lived with memories that were painful, fragmented or only partly transmitted. Grandparents might speak of the train journey, the first winters, the hunger, or the difficulty of beginning again. But the political meaning of deportation could remain difficult to discuss openly.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became easier to revisit these histories. Yet memory remains uneven. Some younger Koryo-Saram know the story of 1937 in detail. Others know only fragments. Some feel a strong desire to reconnect with Korean language and culture. Others feel that their identity is primarily Central Asian or post-Soviet.

This is not a contradiction. It is the normal result of a history marked by migration, coercion and adaptation.

For younger Koryo-Saram, reconnecting with Korean roots is often a search through fragments. In many families, the language has faded. What remains may be a surname, old photographs, a family story about deportation, or a few dishes prepared at home.

This makes contemporary reconnection with Korea both meaningful and complicated. South Korea may represent ancestry, opportunity and cultural pride, but also distance. The Korean Wave, language classes or migration to Seoul do not simply restore a lost identity. They reveal how much that identity was transformed in Central Asia.

For many Koryo-Saram, the question is not whether they are Korean or Central Asian, but how to live with an inheritance made of both memory and absence.

Institutions of memory

Koryo-Saram culture was never only domestic. Institutions mattered too.

One of the most important is the Korean Theater of Kazakhstan. Founded in Vladivostok in 1932, it was relocated after the deportation and eventually became a major cultural institution in Kazakhstan. Its survival tells a larger story: a community uprooted by force continued to produce art, performance and collective memory in a new land.

The newspaper Koryo Ilbo also became a key institution for Soviet Koreans in Kazakhstan. Together with theaters, associations and cultural circles, it helped maintain a public Koryo-Saram identity even as language use shifted and generations became increasingly Russian-speaking.

These institutions complicate any simplistic narrative of loss. Deportation was devastating, but it also generated new forms of cultural production. Koryo-Saram identity did not remain frozen in the past. It was remade in Almaty, Tashkent, Kyzylorda and other Central Asian spaces.

The Koryo-Saram story also reaches far beyond the communities usually associated with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Viktor Tsoi, the legendary frontman of Kino and one of the defining voices of late Soviet rock, had Koryo-Saram roots through his father, whose family came from Kyzylorda in Kazakhstan after the 1937 deportation. Tsoi himself was born in Leningrad, and his public image was shaped above all by the Soviet rock scene of the 1980s. Yet his family history also linked him to the deported Korean communities of Central Asia.

Read more on Novastan: « Igla » : plongée dans le Kazakhstan sombre de la perestroïka avec le mythique Viktor Tsoï

Others left their mark in sport, art, scholarship and popular culture: Olympic gymnast Nellie Kim, historian German Kim, playwright and filmmaker Lavrenti Son, designer Jenia Kim, singer Anita Tsoy and Uzbekistani painter Nikolai Shin all point, in different ways, to the breadth of Soviet Korean experience.

Their lives show that the Koryo-Saram story is not only one of victimhood or preservation, but also of cultural production, mobility and influence across the post-Soviet world.

Tashkent’s Korean traces

In Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram story is not only preserved in official histories or family memories. It also appears in the quieter figures of urban life.

In 2023, our media partner Gazeta.uz profiled Yuri Kim, a second-hand bookseller in Tashkent known to customers and fellow sellers as “Uncle Yura.” The article presented him as a guardian of printed heritage, the owner of a large book collection and a familiar presence in the city’s book culture.

His story offers another way of seeing the Koryo-Saram place in Uzbekistan. Beyond the collective farms, deportation records and demographic categories, there are individual lives woven into the everyday fabric of Tashkent: booksellers, teachers, engineers, doctors, artists and neighbors. Through figures like Kim, the history of a deported community becomes part of the city’s cultural memory.

That memory is also visible in Seoul Garden. Its gate, pavilion, bell and memorial create a deliberately Korean space in the Uzbek capital. Yet the story they tell is not simply one of return to Korean tradition. It is a story of transplantation, rupture and reconstruction.

The memorial’s inscription thanking the Uzbek people reflects a common way in which the history is remembered in Uzbekistan: the deportation itself was a Soviet act of violence, but the local population is remembered as having helped the deportees survive and rebuild.

This narrative of gratitude should not obscure the brutality of 1937. But it helps explain why many Koryo-Saram families came to see Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan not only as places of exile, but also as places where life became possible again.

After 1991: new borders, old identities

The end of the Soviet Union changed the Koryo-Saram world again. Communities that had once lived within a single Soviet space suddenly found themselves divided between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine and other newly independent states. New national languages, citizenship regimes and economic realities reshaped daily life.

For some Koryo-Saram, the post-Soviet period brought emigration. Russia, South Korea, Europe and North America became destinations. South Korea, in particular, acquired new importance. It was no longer only an ancestral reference point, but also a place of study, work, migration and cultural imagination.

Yet the relationship with South Korea can be complicated. Koryo-Saram may be ethnically Korean, but many do not speak standard Korean. Their food, history and family memories were shaped in the Soviet Union and Central Asia, not on the Korean Peninsula. In South Korea, some discover that they are seen as foreigners despite their Korean ancestry.

This creates one of the central paradoxes of Koryo-Saram identity: the ancestral homeland can feel foreign, while Central Asia, the land of deportation, can feel like home.

The global popularity of Korean culture has added another layer. K-pop, Korean dramas and South Korean soft power have made Korea more visible among young people across Central Asia. But Koryo-Saram history is not the same as the Korean Wave. It is older, more painful and more deeply embedded in the Soviet and Central Asian past.

For younger Koryo-Saram, this can produce a complex self-understanding. They may be proud of Korean ancestry, attached to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, Russian-speaking in daily life, curious about Seoul, and conscious of a deportation history that does not fit neatly into national narratives.

From deportation to partnership

Today’s relationship between South Korea and Central Asia is visible far beyond monuments. Korean universities recruit students from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Korean dramas and pop culture circulate widely. South Korean companies are present in energy, automobiles, technology and infrastructure. In Tashkent, even a sign for KOGAS, the Korea Gas Corporation, outside Seoul Garden hints at a larger transformation.

In 1937, Koreans arrived in Central Asia in forced trains, uncertain whether they would survive the journey. Nearly 90 years later, South Korea has become one of Uzbekistan’s important Asian partners. Between those two moments lies the story of the Koryo-Saram: a community transformed from victims of forced displacement into an integral part of Central Asian society and, increasingly, a bridge between two regions that history once separated.

This bridge should not be romanticized. The Koryo-Saram are not simply intermediaries between Seoul and Tashkent, or between Korean capital and Central Asian markets. They are a community with their own history, losses and forms of belonging. Their experience cannot be reduced to diplomacy, business or soft power.

But their story does reveal something important about Central Asia itself.

The region is too often described through empires, borders, energy routes or great power competition. It is also a region made by movement: voluntary migration, forced deportation, labor mobility, exile and return.

Koryo-Saram history belongs to this larger story. It reminds us that Central Asia was not only the homeland of Turkic and Persian-speaking peoples, nor only the destination of Russian settlers. It was also a place where deported communities were forced to rebuild their lives, sometimes under terrible conditions, and where new forms of belonging emerged over time.

In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram are not simply a remnant of Soviet nationality policy. They are part of the social and cultural fabric of the region. Their story can be found in theaters, newspapers, apartment blocks, family kitchens, markets and cemeteries. It is present in the popularity of Korean salads, but also in quieter memories of trains, collective farms and grandparents who started again in a land they had not chosen.

To call Central Asia home after deportation is not to erase the violence of 1937. It is to recognize the strength of those who survived it, and the generations who turned exile into belonging.

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

The post How Central Asia became home for the Koryo-Saram appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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

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

Also read on Novastan: In Paris, an Uzbekistani NGO’s fight against human trafficking recognised with the French Republic Human Rights Prize

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read on Novastan: In Kyrgyzstan, one in four families lives below the poverty line

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

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

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

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

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

Also read on Novastan: Between Extended Family and Personal Boundaries: How Parenting is Changing in Kazakhstan

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

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

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

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

Divorce rarely begins with leaving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family as the interpreter of what is right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The words that stay after

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From city to region: different experiences of visibility

Participants consistently distinguished between urban and rural experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A society between two models of marriage

Many participants compared their experiences with those of previous generations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every year on June 1st, Kazakhstan celebrates International Children’s Day. In many cities, it is marked with concerts, theater performances, and free activities for children. For families, it is a day of celebration. At the same time, a broader question arises: What does it mean to protect a child today? Is it simply about ensuring safety, education, and health, or also about taking their feelings, boundaries, and their own voice seriously?

Anyone who talks about parenting in Kazakhstan quickly encounters contradictions. Children often grow up in a strong family network, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older siblings. At the same time, they are under immense pressure to succeed in school, to be multilingual, to be independent, and to thrive in a globalized world. Alongside the traditional notions of obedience and respect, a new language is gradually emerging: that of emotional closeness, personal boundaries, and dialogue.

Parenting in Kazakhstan thus exists at the crossroads of several worlds: the Kazakh extended family, Soviet-influenced educational ideals, urban performance pressures, global anxieties about the future, and a growing psychological sensitivity towards children.

Experts note that in Kazakhstan, love for children is not changing. What is changing is the language of that love. Previously, care was primarily expressed through actions – feeding, clothing, and educating a child, perhaps later helping them find housing. Today, another question is increasingly being added: What does the child themselves feel?

Family as a sanctuary – and as a source of pressure

One of the most enduring characteristics of Kazakh parenting is the significant role of the extended family. A child often grows up not only with their mother and father, but amidst a wide circle of relatives. Sometimes this includes neighbors, family friends, or people from the neighborhood.

Anar Kakimova, mother of four, founder of the parenting community “Parentsclub” and the children’s club “Readkids,” describes such a family as a “holistic organism.” In this model, a child learns early on that they are supported not just by one adult, but by an entire network. In Kazakh society, she says, many feel that they are not alone in this world. Ayana Tokeyeva, a psychologist, lecturer, and mother of three with 15 years of experience in school and preschool education, sees a key strength of Kazakh upbringing in the continuity between generations. Values ​​are conveyed less through direct instruction than through example, atmosphere, and relationships between generations.

The saying that it takes a village to raise a child therefore sounds almost literal in the Kazakh context. But Maiya Li, an art therapist and psychological counselor with international experience, points to a change: In the cities, this “village” no longer always exists in its former form. Young families often live far away from grandparents, one parent works long hours, and mothers are often left to care for small children largely on their own.

However, the extended family also has another side. It can provide support, but it can also exert pressure. Children grow up in a dense web of expectations: how they should behave, whom they should respect, how they should learn, what profession they should choose, what constitutes a “good son” or a “good daughter.”

Tradition and Modern Psychology

In Kazakh culture, there is a well-known principle: Until the age of five, a child is considered a khan; from five to fifteen, they are educated; and from fifteen onward, they are to be respected like an adult. Ayana Tokeyeva sees in this not only tradition but also a connection to modern psychology. In the first years of life, a child primarily needs love, acceptance, gentleness, and emotional security. From this, a fundamental trust in the world develops.

This idea shows that a gentle approach to children is not simply a Western import. Kazakh educational concepts have long included the idea that young children need protection, closeness, and acceptance. Only later are they gradually introduced to responsibility and independence.

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Gender roles are also being renegotiated. While boys were traditionally seen more as future pillars of the family and girls as guardians of warmth and security, younger parents today are more frequently asking how caregiving can be combined with education, career choices, and self-realization. Maiya Li points out that in some families, the expectation persists that a girl’s primary life path must lead primarily through marriage and motherhood. This issue is sensitive for Kazakhstan: The country is modernizing, women are gaining more educational and career opportunities, but traditional views remain.

From Obedience to Dialogue

For a long time, parental care in Kazakhstan was primarily practical. Parents invested in their children’s education, helped with their studies, provided financial support, and often remained heavily involved even into their children’s adult lives. Love was expressed less through words than through responsibility.

However, according to Anar Kakimova’s observations, communication with children in many families still revolves heavily around daily life and school: Is the homework done? Has the child eaten? Why did they get that grade? What assignments were given? Parents do a lot for their children, but they don’t always know what’s going on inside them: what they’re afraid of, what they like, what they dream about, what’s troubling them.

During her time in the United States, Kakimova noticed how naturally many parents there talk to their children about feelings, experiences, and wishes – and how visibly fathers are involved in everyday life. In Kazakhstan, the role of fathers is also being discussed more openly, but the daily responsibility for school, food, clothing, leisure activities, and the emotional atmosphere often still rests with mothers.

Maiya Li describes this shift with the term “conscious parenting,” often called “gentle parenting” in English-speaking countries. According to her, more and more parents in Kazakhstan are moving away from a strictly authoritarian model in which an adult’s word is never questioned. This isn’t about making the child the center of the family. Parents still establish boundaries. But they try to be more considerate of the child’s needs, feelings, and age, and to explain rules instead of simply demanding obedience.

This change isn’t uniform. In some families, physical punishment, psychological pressure, or discipline through fear remain part of everyday life. At the same time, Ayana Tokeyeva observes a change: parents are more aware of the consequences of pressure and are seeking help from child psychologists more often – especially during periods of high academic pressure, before final exams, or when transitioning to new educational levels.

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A new parenting culture thus begins not with the child, but with the adult: with the willingness to question their own experiences, not to automatically repeat old patterns, and to communicate with children differently.

Education as a springboard for social mobility

In Kazakhstan’s major cities, especially Astana and Almaty, parenthood is increasingly linked to investments in education. English courses, private schools, enrichment centers, sports, music, programming, creative programs, international exams, and preparation for studying abroad are part of the new strategy for many families.

English is no longer just a school subject. It represents mobility, the future, and access to a wider world. Rufina Adeleva, a mother of two and a master’s student in education and psychology, connects this interest to globalization: The digital world has reduced distances, children are exposed to people and opportunities outside of Kazakhstan earlier, and foreign languages ​​broaden educational and life paths.

Maiya Li adds that multilingualism has become a key to competitiveness – not only internationally, but also domestically. Besides English, Chinese, Korean, and other languages, Kazakh is also gaining importance for families who envision their children’s future in Kazakhstan. Multilingualism is therefore not just a path abroad, but a key to participation within the country.

Ayana Tokeyeva emphasizes that education has long been considered a central value in Kazakhstan. What is new, however, is the anxiety with which parents now view it. Artificial intelligence, technological upheavals, and the disappearance of familiar professions intensify the worry that their child will not be able to keep up in the future. The desire to give them “the best” therefore stems not only from ambition, but also from fear.

Anar Kakimova’s experience as a mentor in the “iQanat” project [a social education project launched by Kazakh entrepreneurs to support rural schoolchildren, author’s note] shows how unequally these opportunities are distributed. For young people from rural areas, international exams, career guidance, or the possibility of studying abroad represent not only motivation, but also financial, organizational, and informational hurdles. For a child from the city, an English course might be part of the weekly schedule. For young people from rural areas, the same language can be a rare opportunity to leave the predetermined path.

When Pressure for the Future Displaces Childhood

The image of the successful child in Kazakhstan is still often clearly defined: good grades, a scholarship, a prestigious profession, a secure job, and later perhaps a car, an apartment, and social status. A child’s success is often seen as a reflection of parental success.

Today, this image is becoming even more demanding. According to Maiya Li’s observations, a modern, successful child is not only expected to excel in school. They attend several courses, learn foreign languages, play sports or music, participate in competitions, have long-term goals, consider studying abroad, are comfortable navigating the digital world, and simultaneously maintain respect for family, society, and country.

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The pressure thus rests not only on the children but also on the parents. Many parents want to do everything right and, in doing so, end up controlling too much. The central question of modern parenting is therefore: How do you give a child a future without robbing them of their childhood?

City and Countryside, Freedom and Supervision

The difference between city and country remains pronounced in Kazakhstan. In cities, parents can structure a child’s childhood very carefully: A child’s weekly schedule can be almost as full as an adult’s work calendar.

In rural areas, there are fewer such opportunities. Rufina Adeleva, who herself grew up in the countryside, describes the difference this way: In the city, the focus is often on intellectual and cultural development, while in the countryside, it’s more on work and everyday life skills.

Anar Kakimova also observes that young people from rural areas often have a better understanding of the value of money, time, and opportunities. They are more cautious, more modest, and more careful with their resources. At the same time, families in rural areas often lack access to information about scholarships, international programs, career counseling, and educational pathways.

Another distinctive feature is the early independence of many children. In Kazakhstan, it’s not uncommon for elementary school children to walk to school alone, play in the yard, go to small shops, or stay at home unsupervised for periods of time. For many families, this is considered normal: A child should become independent step by step. But the line between freedom and lack of supervision is thin.

Digital Media as a New Boundary in Parenting

Over the past 10 to 15 years, parenting in Kazakhstan has been transformed by digital media. Smartphones, social networks, online games, cyberbullying, and cybersecurity are now among the everyday concerns of families.

Ayana Tokeyeva confirms that many current inquiries from parents are related to digital media. Excessive screen time can be associated with restlessness, aggression, emotional withdrawal, tantrums, school refusal, or a general lack of energy. The devices themselves are not always the problem. Often, these issues also reflect family tensions, communication problems, difficulties with peers, or the child’s inner turmoil.

This highlights the central conflict: technologies are changing everyday life faster than families can adapt their parenting models.

A New Formula for Parenting

Modern parenting in Kazakhstan is neither entirely traditional nor simply Western. Perhaps this is precisely where the new formula for parenting in Kazakhstan lies: preserving the strength of the family without increasing its pressures; enabling children to receive an education without depriving them of their childhood; fostering independence without leaving them alone; and respecting traditions without ignoring the child’s voice.

Nurgul Adambayeva for Novastan

The post Between Extended Family and Personal Boundaries: How Parenting is Changing in Kazakhstan appeared first on Novastan English.

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

In Tajikistan’s patrilocal households, many young brides enter a world where obedience, unpaid labour and constant surveillance are expected. Through the stories of four women, this article explores how control by in-laws, economic dependence and social pressure can turn marriage into a system of domination that remains largely invisible in public discussions of domestic violence.

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In Tursunzade, 25-year-old Zarkhol Mustonova took her own life after reportedly facing psychological pressure from her mother-in-law. In Khatlon region, 27-year-old Sanat Ghafforova threw herself into a river with her two children after five years of abuse from her husband’s relatives. In Fayzabad, Manora Abdufattoh died from self-inflicted injuries, reportedly unable to endure “cruel treatment from her in-laws.”

In Tajikistan, such cases are rarely described as domestic violence. When the perpetrators are not husbands, but relatives, abuse is often explained away as “tradition” or as part of the “duty” of a kelin, a daughter-in-law. In this context, marriage binds a woman not only to her husband, but to his entire family.

“I never understood what my fault was”: A system of control

Surayo remembers the day after her wedding with painful clarity. She was asked to knead dough, a routine duty for any kelin. What felt unusual was not the work itself, but the attention.

Her mother-in-law, sister-in-law and several other relatives sat around her, carefully watching every move.

“They kept watching me the whole time,” Surayo recalls. “And I noticed them whispering to each other from the side.”

In Tajikistan, many households remain patrilocal: after marriage, the bride moves into her husband’s parental home. In this system, the kelin usually occupies the lowest position in the family hierarchy. She is expected to perform hizmat: cooking, cleaning and caring for her husband’s relatives. For a new bride, these tasks are not only chores. They become a probation period during which every movement is observed and every word noted.

Surayo lived in a large household. Her parents-in-law lived there, while her sister-in-law, who lived nearby, came over almost every day with her children. The house was rarely empty. By lunchtime, it was often filled with guests. Surayo cleaned up after them, washed the dishes and repeated the same routine with every new arrival.

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“I didn’t let my mother-in-law do anything around the house, and I always spoke to her respectfully,” she says. “I didn’t allow myself to do anything that might upset her or create tension.”

And yet her sister-in-law closely observed every detail and reported it. “She was like a second mother-in-law to me,” Surayo says.

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Surayo had almost no freedom. Every action required permission. “I didn’t do anything by myself. If I went somewhere, they would ask: ‘Where are you going? Why? With whom?’”

Even her job did not give her autonomy. Instead, it intensified the surveillance. In the mornings, she cleaned up after everyone. Only once everything had been done properly did she leave for work. Yet her job displeased the family.

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No one explicitly told her to stop working. The pressure came through constant remarks: “Oh, how late she came.” “Her children are waiting for her, and she is still coming home late.” “You could go early in the morning so you can come back earlier in the evening.”

Most of these comments came from her sister-in-law. “Just for not arriving home from work exactly at five, she would tell my father-in-law. He would tell my husband, and we would end up arguing again.”

Over time, even conflicts between Surayo and her husband stopped being private. During one argument, her mother-in-law called Surayo’s parents and told them: “These two don’t match at all.”

Surayo left and lived with her parents for three months. While there, she found out that she was pregnant. A few weeks later, the pregnancy stopped developing. She had a miscarriage.

“Maybe it was because of too much humiliation,” she says, remembering those days as some of the hardest of her life.

Later, her in-laws came back for her. Leaving her husband’s home only two months after the wedding was considered shameful. When she returned, no one believed she had had a miscarriage. Her sister-in-law asked: “Why didn’t you call me when you went?” as if forgetting that they had been the ones to call her parents to take her away.

There was no support, no compassion, only blame. Despite devoting herself entirely to her husband’s household, Surayo felt like an outsider. As her father-in-law once told her: “You’re the black sheep. A daughter-in-law will always be talked about.”

“You start to feel like a slave”: Economic dependence

“I almost forgot what I was like,” Fatima says with a hesitant laugh. She used to be carefree and restless, constantly in motion. She had never imagined that her life would be limited to the walls of one house. Yet after marriage, this is exactly what happened.

“I was domesticated,” she says plainly.

She did everything expected of her: cooking, cleaning and even washing her brother-in-law’s clothes. “Since he had no wife, I had to wash his clothes. I washed everything, even his socks,” Fatima recalls.

But housework was not considered enough. Money also mattered, and Fatima did not have enough of it.

She started working as a teacher, but her salary was extremely low. “I could only buy a pack of tea, nothing more.” Her low income became another source of conflict. “I was working, but it was as if no money was coming in.”

Since teachers worked part-time, Fatima sometimes had free time. But even that did not belong to her. “If I ever just sat down and rested, they would tear me apart.” If others were watching a film, she could only sit for a few minutes before being told to return to her chores.

Her mother-in-law had raised her children alone. Without a husband, she had worked, earned money and supported the family. This gave her an authority that everyone in the household accepted.

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“My mother raised us alone, so whatever she says, we do,” Fatima’s husband told her on the first day.

From the beginning, there was no equal relationship. Her mother-in-law expected more from her. “She wanted me to be more hardworking, but I was not hardworking enough for her. She wanted me to be wealthier, and somehow I was not to her liking.”

Power in the household did not belong only to the mother-in-law. “Her daughter was the main figure,” Fatima says. Her sister-in-law was educated and had medical training, but she did not work. “She stayed at home and did the housework. But from me, they expected money.”

The pressure came from all sides. The wife of her eldest brother-in-law, her mijad, also had a say in Fatima’s life. “In front of everyone, she would say: ‘You can’t give birth to a son. You don’t have a son.’”

Fatima had three daughters. That was enough for her mijad to criticise her constantly. “A real child is a son. A daughter will be beaten. She won’t be allowed to hold her head high.”

In Tajik society, a son is often seen as the continuation of the family line. He is expected to become the main breadwinner, stay in the family and care for his parents. A daughter is raised to leave for her husband’s home and devote herself to his family.

After giving birth to three daughters, Fatima was told not to have more children. “Stop having children. You always give birth to daughters.”

In patrilocal families, kelins often lose control over their own bodies. Infertility is treated as shameful, while the number and timing of children may be shaped by elders in the household. “The pressure was huge, and I was struggling,” Fatima says.

“They were jealous”: A husband’s attention as a problem

“I was 19 when I got married,” says Nargiz. She had just started college. She had her studies ahead of her, a career to build and a husband by her side. He was attentive and caring.

She moved into a large family. At first, Nargiz felt accepted. A week after the wedding, her mother-in-law asked her to cook for the family. “Let’s see if you can cook,” she said. Nargiz was only 19, and her mother-in-law did not expect much. But Nargiz cooked well. From that moment, the relationship between them slowly began to change.

For the first eight months, she did not visit her parents once. “They were against it,” she recalls. Her mother-in-law worked at the bazaar all day. At home, Nargiz was the only adult woman, and all the responsibilities fell on her: cooking, cleaning, day after day. She simply could not leave.

“They wanted me to stay at home all the time and do housework.”

Her studies became the next source of pressure. First, she was not allowed to attend classes. Then she was not allowed to take her exams. “Don’t go,” they told her. “Just give us your student record book, we’ll handle everything.” Nargiz obeyed. But no one handled anything. In the end, she was expelled.

Such restrictions are common in extended families in Tajikistan. Kelins are particularly vulnerable because they often find themselves in a position where they cannot make decisions for themselves. Education may be perceived as a threat, not necessarily because families oppose knowledge, but because an educated woman is more likely to want to work, be independent and question family expectations.

Official data for the 2023-2024 academic year shows that women account for only 41% of students in Tajikistani universities. In other words, for every 100 male students, there are about 69 female students. Behind these figures are stories like Nargiz’s: a young woman who wanted to study, and a family that decided it was unnecessary.

Things got worse when she became pregnant. Her husband became even more attentive. “It was as if they were jealous,” she says.

In extended households, the attention of the man, both son and husband, can become a source of competition. “There is a clash between two roles: being a good husband and being a good son,” says Rustam Samadov, a masculinity researcher. According to him, the family may fear that the son will distance himself by shifting his focus to his wife. This creates tension, and that tension can become a source of conflict.

Nargiz believes her mother-in-law’s interventions were deliberate. After Nargiz’s brother found her a job, she returned home from a job interview to find her husband unexpectedly there. Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain: out of nowhere, her husband began beating her.

“I am pregnant, don’t do this,” was all she could say.

He replied: “I don’t give a damn about it.”

Her mother-in-law heard everything, but did not intervene. “She was there,” Nargiz says. “I will leave this house. I won’t live here anymore,” she whispered in desperation. “His mother called him home from work. I have no idea what she told him.”

Eventually, Nargiz gave her husband an ultimatum: either they would move out and live separately, or she would divorce him. They began living apart, and her life changed. Her husband started supporting her. There were no constant remarks, and far fewer conflicts.

Her mother-in-law still tries to intervene and insists that “if a woman works, she will develop inappropriate habits.” But Nargiz no longer reacts. “I don’t listen to her anymore. I don’t live with them, and I don’t even talk to them.”

Shattered promises

Aziza got married in her second year of university. She was 20 years old. Before the wedding, her husband promised her two things: she would continue her studies, and they would live separately from his family.

She was in love, and she believed him. For the first month, everything was as he had promised. Then things began to change. Later, she discovered that he had been spending his time and money at a computer club. Aziza became worried. She could not bring herself to speak to him directly, so she decided to talk to her mother-in-law, hoping she would raise the issue with her son indirectly.

Instead, her mother-in-law repeated everything to him word for word. Without explanation, he took Aziza and drove her to his mother’s home.

“Since you’re complaining to my mom, then live with her,” he said. “You’re staying right here and not leaving the house without my permission.”

Aziza spent three days there without changing her clothes. She had no clothes with her. “I just smelled so bad,” she recalls. No one intervened. No one even paid attention. Her mother-in-law simply said: “Go take a shower, I will give you my clothes.”

Aziza lived with her husband, his grandmother, his mother, his uncle and his brother. Six people shared a tiny apartment. Aziza waited for her mother-in-law to return from work. She mopped the floors, cooked dinner and set the table so that everything would be ready when she arrived. But when her mother-in-law came home, she would take a rag and mop the floors again, muttering: “I come home tired, and this is how it is.”

Aziza asked her husband why. “My mom has her own ways,” was all he said.

The same happened with food. Aziza cooked and left the meal on the stove. No one touched it. They simply threw it away. But her mother-in-law would still say: “I come home from work exhausted, and no one even cooks for me.”

Aziza did not understand. No matter what she did, it was never enough.

Her husband left for Russia to work. The distance did not change anything. Even thousands of kilometres away, he found ways to control her every move. “When you go out, you will call me and ask for permission,” he would say. She could not even go to the shop without his approval.

Sometimes her mother-in-law encouraged her: “Go to the shop. How would he know?” Aziza would give in and go out. Every time, her husband would call and interrogate her. Somehow, he knew.

“She never interfered, but she turned out to be a real snake all along,” Aziza says. “She just watched and reported everything to her son.”

Month by month, things piled up. Eventually, her body gave in. “I had nervous breakdowns many times.” Then two cysts appeared in her left breast. They pressed on her heart and left arm. Her arm went numb. Aziza is left-handed, so she could not write or even cook.

She had a successful surgery and was discharged the same day. Days later, still with stitches, her husband demanded that she fly to Moscow. She could barely lift her hand. Her stitches had not yet been removed. She refused.

“I was fed up. The surgery hurt, but he just kept yelling and yelling.”

Her refusal made him furious. He called his mother. Soon, Aziza received a message from her mother-in-law: “Why do you always ruin my mood?” She did not ask how Aziza was feeling. Then came message after message:

“Once, at least say nice things to him. Congratulate him. Tell him everything is fine.”

“Can’t you find a way to your husband’s heart?”

“He’ll understand you if you explain it properly. Tell him calmly: ‘I can’t do anything right now, I can’t even lift my hand.’”

“If he calls, pick up the phone. Do not ignore him!”

Aziza lay there reading the messages, overwhelmed. She was recovering from surgery, while her mother-in-law was telling her to “find a way to her husband’s heart.”

Aziza left many times and returned many times. Each time, she convinced herself that things would be different. They were not. During another conflict, her brother-in-law discussed taking out a bank loan in her name. Aziza describes the atmosphere in the family as chaotic and unbearable.

Aziza fled. Her in-laws searched for her and pressured her to return. Eventually, she filed for divorce. Her husband did not appear in court. He went back to Russia.

“We don’t know, we didn’t see. When she went to get her things, she took those documents with her,” his mother said in court in his defence. She called Aziza ungrateful. “How could you do this to my son?” Then she added something she had never said openly before: “I never liked you from the very beginning.”

Not individual cruelty, but a system

These are not only the stories of four women. They are part of everyday reality for many kelins across Tajikistan. After marriage, a woman is expected to become a “well-domesticated bride”: obedient, self-sacrificing and unwilling to question the system. Any failure to comply with these norms may be perceived as a threat to family honour, a concept deeply shaped by patriarchy.

The mother-in-law in this system is not only a source of pressure. She is also a product of it. When she first enters her husband’s house, a bride often has no voice, no independence and no status. The only path to power lies through her sons, years of obedience and proving her worth through hard work.

This is why some mothers try to keep their sons loyal to them. It is a way to preserve the limited power they have gained. A daughter-in-law may be perceived as a threat to that bond. Controlling her becomes a way to maintain authority earned through years of oppression. Without necessarily realising it, the mother-in-law repeats the same patterns because they feel like the only available way to survive.

This is not simply a matter of individual cruelty. It is a structural problem. The oppression is not always intentional, but the result is real: the system gives women very limited routes to power and few alternatives.

Family psychologist and cognitive-behavioural therapist Qimatgul Davlatbekova explains it this way: “This behaviour is often not driven by bad intentions, but by deeply held beliefs about what is ‘right’, or by the idea that ‘this is how I was raised’. However, even without any intent to harm, it can still cause serious psychological trauma for the kelin.”

From early childhood, girls in Tajikistan are taught what a “good kelin” should be like. This creates an intergenerational cycle in which norms are not only imposed from the outside, but internalised by women themselves. According to surveys, 97% of men and 72% of women in Tajikistan believe that women should tolerate violence to preserve the family.

The consequences go far beyond discomfort. “Constant control and a lack of boundaries certainly lead to chronic stress. I would describe this as emotional burnout. In this state, self-esteem drops. Often, it eventually leads to depression and a strong sense of helplessness,” Qimatgul says.

In extreme cases, the pressure becomes fatal. According to data presented by the Committee on Women’s Affairs, 212 women took their own lives in 2025 alone. Among the main reasons cited were domestic violence by husbands and their relatives, depression, emotional distress, conflicts and social isolation.

Why women do not leave

Even when they know what is happening to them, many women stay. Around 70% of Tajikistan’s population lives in rural areas, where cultural attitudes and customs are often stricter. There, divorce is not seen as a purely personal decision. A woman who leaves her husband may be labelled benomus, or shameless.

According to the Demographic and Health Survey for 2023, only 16% of women in urban areas sought help. In rural areas, the figure was even lower: only 9%. Domestic violence remains taboo in Tajikistan, which is one reason many women choose not to tell anyone what is happening to them.

This system persists across Central Asia not because people are unwilling to change, but because specific conditions keep it in place: women’s economic dependence on their husband’s family, weak legal protection and victim-blaming. Women may be blamed simply for speaking openly about family problems, which reduces their willingness to seek help or leave a harmful environment.

Culture is not fixed. It changes when legal, economic and institutional conditions change. Until that happens more fully across the region, the gap between formal gender equality and the lived reality of kelins will continue to grow.

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Article by Kibriyo Qudratbekova, Journalism student at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA)

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

and Maya Ivanova, Contributor at Novastan

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

The post In Tajikistan, daughters-in-law face a hidden system of control appeared first on Novastan English.

Originally from Uzbekistan, conductor Aziz Shokhakimov has been leading the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra since 2021. At 38, this first Uzbekistani conductor in Strasbourg, passionate about French music, has followed an impeccable path. Interview.

In Strasbourg, Aziz Shokhakimov has been Music and Artistic Director of the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra since September 2021. In this role, he also works closely with the Opéra national du Rhin, as the orchestra regularly performs opera there. He already knew the Strasbourg ensemble well, having conducted it as a guest from 2014 before taking up its leadership.

Born in Uzbekistan and trained in the capital Tashkent, Aziz Shokhakimov did not so much choose conducting as grow up within it. At just eleven years old, in a children’s and then school orchestra, he learned the profession through practice, sometimes compensating for missing instruments by playing certain parts himself. This early start nurtured a visceral relationship with the collective: the orchestra as a living organism, made of listening, discipline and trust.

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In Strasbourg, a border city whose Franco-German fusion he admires, his presence is particularly visible in the orchestra’s major popular events. For the 2026 New Year’s Eve and New Year concerts, the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra brought together more than 3,800 spectators in a full Erasme Hall, around a programme entitled Florilège lyrique, which Novastan attended. Under the direction of Aziz Shokhakimov, the evening celebrated the voice, with two international soloists: Uzbekistani soprano Barno Ismatullaeva and tenor René Barbera. The Choir of the Opéra national du Rhin also took part, in a festive atmosphere greeted by long ovations.

Beyond the Strasbourg stage, Aziz Shokhakimov also appears in the documentary O’zbekistonlik, produced by Uzbekistan’s Club. The episode devoted to him, available on YouTube with English subtitles, is part of a series highlighting Uzbek personalities who have faced obstacles but managed to make their way to the highest level: a way of offering concrete role models and nurturing a positive collective narrative around Uzbekistanis abroad. From France, Aziz Shokhakimov sometimes describes himself as an “informal cultural ambassador”: someone who, through encounters, makes people want to look at Central Asia differently. Interview.

Novastan : To begin with, could you introduce yourself and look back at the major stages, the turning points, that shaped your artistic and professional path?

Aziz Shokhakimov : I am a conductor. I was born and grew up in Uzbekistan, and I received my musical training in Tashkent.

A decisive turning point in my professional life came in 2010, when I won second prize at the Gustav Mahler International Conducting Competition in Bamberg. It is one of the most prestigious competitions for conductors. From that moment on, I began receiving invitations in Europe, the United States and Japan. One could say that my international career really began with that competition.

Looking back, what were the moments that most clearly shaped you as an artist and as a conductor?

Honestly, I never felt that I consciously chose this profession. Becoming a conductor happened very naturally.

I began conducting at a very young age, when I was eleven. At first, it was a kind of experiment suggested by my teacher, Vladimir Borisovich Neymer. I first worked with a children’s orchestra, then with a school orchestra. We often lacked instruments: if there were no percussion instruments, I played the parts myself; if other instruments were missing, I would go to the piano.

In reality, I literally grew up inside the orchestra. Of course, later I received academic training at the conservatory, but my training as a conductor began in childhood, in contact with real musicians.

Has your artistic centre of gravity evolved over time?

Yes, absolutely. Over time, many things change: repertoire priorities, working methods, the way one achieves a result…

But I feel that since childhood, I have had an inner ear, a musical energy that has never left me. The tools evolve, experience deepens, but that inner drive, my fundamental relationship with music, has remained the same.

What was your first formative contact with music?

Music was part of my life from early childhood, because both my parents are musicians.

But a truly decisive moment came later, when I was playing viola in a youth symphony orchestra in the Volga region of Russia. There, I saw young people of different nationalities, religions and countries making music together, sharing the same scores, the same sound, with joy and commitment.

It made a deep impression on me. I was probably quite idealistic as a child, but that experience confirmed something important: music really has the power to unite people.

Which teachers, mentors or institutions most influenced your discipline and musical imagination?

All my teachers influenced me, each in their own way. But above all, Vladimir Borisovich Neymer, who was like a second father to me.

Good and bad teachers alike shape you: good ones show you how to work and how to treat others; bad ones mainly teach you what not to do.

I am convinced that one never stops learning. There is an Indian proverb I like very much: “No one is your friend, no one is your enemy – everyone is your teacher.” I try to approach every encounter as an opportunity to learn.

Do you still play an instrument? And have you sung or worked on your voice?

Yes, today I mainly play the piano. I played the viola for a long time, but the piano has become my main working instrument.

I also studied singing. First at school, then seriously at the conservatory. Not because I wanted to become a singer, but to understand vocal technique, breathing and how the voice works. For a conductor who works with opera and choirs, this knowledge is essential.

For readers who do not know Ortasaray, how would you describe the place where you grew up?

Ortasaray, when I was growing up there, was surrounded by nature. There was a lot of greenery, birds, fishing trips, mushroom picking in spring. From my home, we had a magnificent view of the mountains.

This connection with nature deeply influenced me. I still love mountains just as much, and whenever possible, my family and I try to spend our holidays there, whether in the Black Forest or in the Alps.

Unfortunately, the region has changed a lot since then, and much of that natural environment has disappeared.

Did the mountain landscape and the multicultural environment have a lasting impact on your sensibility?

Absolutely. The mountains shaped my relationship with space and silence, while the multicultural environment shaped my relationship with others.

In Ortasaray, I grew up among Kazakhs, Koreans, Russians and Turks. From childhood, I lived among several languages and cultures, and that seemed completely natural to me. I think that is also why it later became easy for me to adapt to different countries, without cultural conflict or inner resistance.

You move between several linguistic and cultural worlds. How do languages “live” in you, personally and professionally?

For me, language is not just a tool for communication: it is a way of thinking, a cultural framework and even, in a certain sense, part of music.

To understand German music, for example, knowledge of German is extremely important. Phrasing in Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart or Haydn often follows a linguistic logic. This influences articulation, structure and above all phrase endings.

In German, endings carry particular weight. In Russian or French, they function differently, and this can sometimes influence the way musicians intuitively feel form.

In rehearsal, language therefore often becomes an element of musical explanation. More broadly, I believe that the more languages one speaks, the more one opens up and develops culturally, both as a musician and as a person.

Before moving to Strasbourg, what image did you have of the city?

I already knew Strasbourg quite well before moving here. I had been conducting here since 2014, almost every two years, so I had time to discover the city, its architecture, its musical life, and I already had friends here.

I really like this city. You can feel the fusion between French and German cultures, which creates a very special atmosphere. Geographically, it is also a unique place: Germany and Switzerland are just nearby.

That is why I am sincerely happy to live here.

What surprised you most here, and what do you miss from home?

I am fascinated by the combination of French freedom and German precision. That is what makes Strasbourg so distinctive.

On a personal level, I miss my family most, even if I am not particularly sentimental. With technology, distance is less restrictive today, and I try to go to Tashkent regularly.

How do people perceive Uzbekistan?

Some people know Central Asia well, while others know almost nothing about it. But often, after meeting me, they become curious and start reading, searching, learning. In that sense, I sometimes feel like an informal cultural ambassador for my region.

And yes, Uzbekistan is more visible than before. The country seems more culturally open, and that changes the way it is perceived.

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Through your international engagements, which orchestras have made the strongest impression on you?

Every orchestra leaves something behind: a sound, an atmosphere, a human connection. But this season, I was particularly impressed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. I worked with them very recently, and I was struck by their enthusiasm, professionalism and commitment.

What piece of advice would you give to young musicians?

First, be honest with yourselves: are you really ready to devote your life to music? Music requires immense commitment and sacrifices: time, stability, sometimes even one’s personal life. You can never stop progressing; the moment you stop, you begin to fall behind.

There is a saying: “Choose a job you love, and you will never feel like you are working a day in your life.” There is some truth in that, but musicians work enormously hard. Love simply makes that work meaningful.

If you could correct one illusion about success in music, what would it be?

The illusion of quick success. Real success in music is not a single moment: it is a long process, built on daily work, doubts, mistakes and gradual progress. And for me, that is precisely what makes music so precious.

Interview by Mathieu Lemoine,
Contributor for Novastan

Edited in French by Anaïs Boulard

Translated by Maya Ivanova

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

The post From Uzbekistan to Strasbourg: Aziz Shokhakimov, a conductor between cultures and languages appeared first on Novastan English.

In 2025, the Uzbekistani NGO Istiqbolli Avlod received the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic. For its director, Nodira Karimova, this distinction is both an honour and a heavy responsibility. In an interview with Novastan, she discusses her fight to eradicate human and sexual exploitation affecting the most vulnerable populations, particularly in Uzbekistan.

On 10 December 2025 in Paris, the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH) awarded the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic “Liberty – Equality – Fraternity” to the Uzbekistani NGO Istiqbolli Avlod. Alongside four other international organisations, the association was recognised for its commitment to fighting the exploitation and trafficking of children, whose number of victims continues to rise according to the latest United Nations data.

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Istiqbolli Avlod has been fighting human trafficking since 2001, with a particular focus on children and women. Its founder and director, Nodira Karimova, emphasises that irregular labour migration, especially to Russia, Kazakhstan and Türkiye for Uzbekistani citizens, is a gateway to human trafficking.

Observing that young victims of sexual exploitation are afraid of law enforcement and distrust the justice system, the association launched the project “Child-friendly justice – Do not fear the court” to promote a fair, caring and child-sensitive judicial system.

Interview.

Novastan : In December 2025, you received the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic. What does this mean for you and your work?

Nodira Karimova : This recognition is particularly important for us. First of all, it confirms that our long-standing work in the field of human rights protection, especially children’s rights, is visible and valued not only nationally, but also internationally.

It is also a sign of trust in the principles and values on which our organisation’s work is based: protecting human dignity, access to justice and support for the most vulnerable people. It may also help strengthen the confidence of partners, state institutions and the international community in our organisation. In short, it broadens our opportunities while placing a great responsibility on us.

Does human trafficking remain a serious problem in Central Asia today, particularly in Uzbekistan?

Uzbekistan is one of the most densely populated countries in Central Asia and one of the youngest in terms of demographic composition, with a predominantly young population. While this represents significant potential for the country’s development, it is also a major challenge: according to available estimates, more than 600,000 young people enter Uzbekistan’s labour market every year, and this figure could approach one million in the coming years.

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However, employment opportunities within the country do not always make it possible to provide jobs for all young people, especially outside the capital. Under these conditions, labour migration becomes one of the main ways for many people to earn a living. In the current situation, migration is largely unavoidable for Uzbekistan.

Despite the state’s efforts to expand access to employment, some young people without a profession or sufficient information continue to leave for work abroad informally, relying on advice from acquaintances.

Irregular migration often becomes an entry point into human trafficking and directly increases the risks of sexual exploitation for girls and women who are precarious and lack legal status abroad. Under these conditions, girls and women more often trust acquaintances or intermediaries who promise to find them a job, establish the necessary contacts and “solve all problems”, without realising the possible consequences of such offers.

It is also important to note that the risks of sexual exploitation do not exist only abroad. Sexual exploitation within the country, including the involvement and exploitation of underage girls in prostitution, also remains a serious problem and requires particular attention.

How do you interact with the authorities to combat this phenomenon? Do you consider the measures and policies adopted by the state to be effective?

Our organisation has established cooperation with state structures for more than 25 years, which has made it possible to build lasting partnerships and practical interaction. We submitted more than 20 proposals during the drafting process of the law on combating human trafficking, most of which were taken into account and included in the final version of the law.

In cooperation with the Ministries of Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs, a referral mechanism for victims of human trafficking was created, particularly regarding their return to their country of origin and the legal assistance provided to them. We also often organise joint events, such as roundtables and conferences.

Also read on Novastan : Bilan de 30 ans de défense des droits de l’homme en Asie centrale

This cooperation is based on a series of memoranda of understanding and partnership agreements signed with key public institutions. These include the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Migration Agency and the Children’s Ombudsperson.

In addition, our organisation is one of the few non-governmental organisations to have signed a cooperation agreement with the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Republic of Uzbekistan. This makes it possible to establish more systematic and institutional cooperation in the areas of prevention, response and protection of victims’ rights.

It is important to note that the NGO Istiqbolli Avlod is part of the National Commission on Combating Human Trafficking and Decent Work, which enables us to take part in discussions on public policy, make proposals and raise issues based on our field experience. This helps establish dialogue between the state and civil society.

Do you consider the measures and policies adopted by the state to be effective?

The adoption of several legal documents, including the law on combating human trafficking, has been very important because they provide a normative basis. However, adopting laws is only the first step. The main challenge today is to move from regulation to the effective implementation of decisions, especially at the regional and local levels. In other words, the laws exist, but it is essential that they actually work in practice.

To what extent do geopolitical tensions and recent conflicts influence human trafficking?

From our organisation’s perspective, geopolitical tensions and armed conflicts have a direct impact on migration and, consequently, on the dynamics of trafficking. One of the most significant factors in recent years has been the war in Ukraine, which has changed traditional labour migration routes from Central Asia to Russia, including for Uzbek citizens.

Also read on Novastan : En Ouzbékistan, l’origine des transferts de fonds depuis l’étranger se diversifie

We are seeing more and more migrants choosing Türkiye as an alternative destination, for several reasons, including cultural, religious and linguistic proximity, as well as the possibility of visa-free stays for 90 days. However, many arrive without knowing the existing legislation on employment and the legality of their stay, and continue working informally after their permitted stay expires. Under these conditions, migrants often find themselves without legal protection and become vulnerable to exploitation, including sexual exploitation. The risk is particularly high for women.

What are the main profiles of victims?

In cases of sexual exploitation, the victims are often women aged between 25 and 35. Many of them are divorced women with children, who are also responsible for elderly parents. Economic pressure increases their vulnerability.

Their level of education is usually fairly modest. Women with higher education are very rare among the victims.

As for minors, many come from socially vulnerable families. It often happens that their parents are themselves abroad as labour migrants, or that the children have grown up without parental support.

For men who are victims of labour exploitation for economic purposes, they are generally men aged between 19 and 45, often from large families and rural areas, with little vocational training. They go abroad to provide for their families and may find themselves in situations of forced labour, restrictions on their freedom or debt bondage.

Are people in Central Asia more exposed to trafficking within the region or abroad?

Cases within countries also exist, particularly in terms of sexual exploitation involving minors, but they remain difficult to measure because many remain hidden. The phenomenon is both internal and transnational, but the risks linked to international migration are the most frequent.

Has the withdrawal of foreign funding from the United States and support for official development assistance, decided by President Donald Trump in early 2025, affected you?

Yes, these changes have had a significant impact. For many years, the US Department of State and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were among the main donors supporting the fight against trafficking in Uzbekistan. These funds were used, for example, to finance the hotline and legal assistance for victims. Today, the reduction in international funding has made it more difficult to maintain these services.

Also read on Novastan :Les conséquences de l’arrêt de l’USAID en Asie centrale

The annual US report on human trafficking also played an important role in encouraging states to improve their policies. Unfortunately, today there are no longer any major active international projects in this field in Uzbekistan, which forces our organisation to seek new sources of funding.

How is regional cooperation evolving in Central Asia?

In recent years, Central Asian countries have shown greater cooperation and regional partnership. However, in practice, migration and human trafficking issues do not yet seem to occupy a central place on the common agenda.

From the point of view of NGOs, concrete cooperation remains limited and has often been linked in the past to projects run by international organisations.

Which achievements are you most proud of?

We are particularly proud to have publicly raised the following issue: a child must not be alone during an investigation or trial. We have shown that legal and psychological support for child victims is not only possible, but necessary.

This practice has become an integral part of our work and can be considered a good practice at the international level.

One of the most memorable moments was when, after a trial, a minor said: “This is the first time I feel that I am being believed”. At that moment, it became clear that our work is not only about legal protection, but also about restoring dignity and a sense of safety.

Why are children afraid to speak out?

This fear often results from a combination of factors: the family’s reaction, social stigmatisation, distrust of the police and threats from exploiters.

In some families, the police are perceived as a threat rather than as protection. Children grow up with this fear, while exploiters also use blackmail and the victims’ sense of shame to maintain control over them.

Also read on Novastan :La souffrance silencieuse des belles-filles en Ouzbékistan

A genuinely child-sensitive pathway begins with the family’s reaction. Adults must respond with support and seek to protect the child. From the first contact with the authorities, the child must be accompanied by a lawyer and a psychologist. Interviews should never take place without these specialists.

How do you identify children at risk when exploitation is hidden?

Identifying children at risk is one of the most difficult aspects of our work, especially when exploitation is concealed, for example through online recruitment, informal networks or cross-border movements.

We regularly organise information activities in neighbourhoods, known as mahallas in Uzbekistan, where we meet parents, teenagers and representatives of local communities. Particular attention is paid to the hotline, and we widely disseminate information about it so that children and families know where to seek help.

Also read on Novastan : En Ouzbékistan, une justice clémentes sur les violences sexuelles

We also distribute information materials in busy places, such as schools, medical facilities and public spaces. We hand out flyers and cards with the organisation’s contact details and organise information meetings and prevention discussions. But given the scale and hidden nature of the problem, we know that these efforts remain insufficient.

We also organise training for law enforcement agencies. However, there is an objective difficulty: high staff turnover. Officers often change and information work has to start again.

In practice, one of the most effective mechanisms remains word of mouth. Often, it is former beneficiaries or their families who pass on the information.

What kind of support is needed beyond the trial?

The trial is only one stage. After it, the child’s life continues, and this is where comprehensive support is essential. The first priority is to ensure the child’s own safety, which means not leaving them in an environment where there remains a risk of violence or pressure. In some cases, temporary accommodation in a safe place is necessary.

The second key element is psychosocial support, with long-term psychological assistance: working on self-esteem, guilt, feelings of shame and rebuilding trust.

Work with the family is also essential. Parents themselves may be in a state of shock or confusion. Then come the return to school, post-trial legal assistance, for example to obtain compensation, protect personal data or avoid further proceedings.

The main difficulty concerns the funding of long-term psychosocial support. A trial has clear timeframes, but rebuilding a child’s life can take years. Yet this type of support is the most difficult to finance and coordinate.

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After this prize, what are your priorities?

It is difficult to identify a single priority, because protecting children requires a comprehensive approach: prevention, legal support, training of professionals and interinstitutional coordination.

In the current context, one of our priorities is to find sustainable sources of funding in order to maintain and develop the mechanisms already in place.

If we had to name one reform we would like to see progress over the next 12 months, it would be the implementation of a mandatory interinstitutional protocol for cases involving child victims, with the guaranteed participation of a lawyer and a psychologist.

At the same time, we believe it is necessary to strengthen public information: to explain clearly that a child must never be alone in court. The mandatory participation of a lawyer and a psychologist must be seen not as an additional measure, but as a fundamental guarantee of children’s rights.

Emma Collet and Mathieu Lemoine,
Contributors for Novastan

Translated from French by Maya Ivanova

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

The post In Paris, an Uzbekistani NGO’s fight against human trafficking recognised with the French Republic Human Rights Prize appeared first on Novastan English.

Faced with archaic social expectations, Tajik women are expressing their exhaustion through a new coded language on social media. Built around the phrase “I am Tajik”, many personal testimonies have circulated in recent years.

“I am a Tajik woman and I have an unbreakable strength of spirit that allows me to overcome all of life’s difficulties,” says Madina Nigmatova, who took part in the movement.

With the aim of deconstructing stereotypes deeply rooted in Tajik society, a growing number of women and girls across the country are regularly joining this movement, celebrating a strong image of women through traditional clothing and jewellery.

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Beyond imposed roles

Far from limiting themselves to the domestic roles traditionally imposed on women – cooking, cleaning and caring for the household – which some movements, such as “tradwives” in the United States, are now bringing back into fashion, Tajik women are using the digital sphere to give voice to feminist struggles. Madina Nigmatova, a social media marketing specialist and trainer, says that women not only have the right but also the duty to be visible, fulfilled in their careers, creative and fully active in the business world.

“We know our traditions, we respect them, we pass them on to future generations. But we want to live in our time, as educated and independent women. The modern Tajik woman has learned to combine several roles: taking part in competitions, pursuing any career, while also looking after her children and managing the home,” she says.

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This movement is taking place in a context where women and married girls in Tajikistan have limited access to electronic devices and the internet, often because of family control. In households where men work abroad, for example, mothers may receive smartphones instead of wives, thereby limiting the latter’s digital autonomy.

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A subtle deconstruction of prejudice

In her version of “I am Tajik”, Madina Nigmatova draws attention to the widespread stereotype of the accomplished woman who, in Tajik society, is often perceived as a divorced woman.

Modern women easily combine family life, professional achievement and personal fulfilment: some make pastries, others create and run online businesses, while others work as makeup artists.

Also read on Novastan : Contrôle de l’habillement des femmes au Tadjikistan : entre tradition et répression

“When the videos were shared in different groups, many comments said that, to reflect the true image of the Tajik woman, they should have shown how to cook, sweep the yard or milk cows. The Tajik woman, the kelinka, is not limited to the role of servant. She is a full person who seeks fulfilment and balance between private life and career. I feel immense admiration for them,” says Madina Nigmatova.

A long-standing trend

This trend emerged last year, when several bloggers shared a joint video in which they said they were Tajik women and that this did not prevent them from “building a career”, “living separately from their parents”, “dressing as they wish”, “running a blog”, “not being married at 32”, “doing business”, or “creating a company”.

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The video sparked fierce controversy and a wave of hatred, particularly because the young women spoke in Russian while presenting themselves as Tajik. Yet the negative reactions did not manage to put an end to the trend. On the contrary, the more malicious comments multiplied, the more they increased the feeling of exhaustion with social injunctions. What women once kept silent out of shame, they now express more freely.

Multiple demands

“I am Tajik, I am 26 years old and I am postponing marriage because I am afraid of drastic changes in life; the institution of marriage frightens me because I have seen few successful examples around me,” Leila writes on her page.

“I am Tajik: I got married at 37. My only daughter is four and a half. I am 43. I lived and continued my studies in Italy, in the south to be precise. I have lived in Russia for 18 years. Before becoming an eyebrow specialist, I worked for 12 years as a stylist, buyer and merchandising department manager in major companies in Moscow,” Zarina says.

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“I am a Tajik woman who finished a Russian school in Tajikistan and I did not get married straight away. I am Tajik and I grew up in a traditional family and no, I was not scolded, we never argued before I left. On the contrary, I was truly supported,” writes Omina.

“I am Tajik and I do not allow myself to give unsolicited advice, such as: ‘One child is not enough, you need to have another one. It is not in your plans? Then your husband will end up leaving you,’” says Shakhzoda.

“I am Tajik, and I deliberately chose to marry a Kazakh, simply because that is what I wanted. When I want something, I refuse to forbid myself from having it,” says Bargigul.

Backlash and masculinist reactions

These posts regularly receive thousands of views and hundreds of comments. Women tend to leave positive and inspiring replies.

By contrast, fuelled by underlying misogyny, comments from men are generally far from encouraging. They include: “your eyes are not those of a Tajik woman”, “you dishonour the nation”, and “marrying a foreigner destroys the Tajik gene”. Many other comments in the same vein seek to discredit the activities and positions taken by many women in Tajikistan.

A simple format

The phrase “I am Tajik” can be personalised by adding something for which one has been criticised, felt shame, or which is, on the contrary, a source of pride.

Examples include: “… and I earn much more than men”, “… and I do not know how to make plov, and that is perfectly fine”, “… and I speak five languages”.

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The video is often filmed in a pleasant setting where the women feel safe, with a posture intended to appear authentic. Traditional elements of Tajik culture in clothing or decor are often highlighted, because promoting cultural heritage and traditions is not incompatible with feminist emancipation.

The hashtags #iamtajik, #tajikgirlpower and #ihavetheright often accompany these messages and help them spread more widely.

“We are different, but we are all Tajik”

Many Tajik girls have also taken part in the “duxtari tojik” trend, meaning Tajik girl. In these videos, they embody women from different regions of the country, challenging the boundaries of regionalism — a phenomenon that remains very present in Tajik society.

Accompanied by a song by Tajik singer Nobovar Chanorov, which evokes girls from different regions, the emphasis is placed on cultural richness and regional identity rather than geographical division.

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“I did not know there were so many styles of traditional clothing in our country,” Bahora says in one of her videos. Several moved internet users responded by highlighting friendship between all regions of Tajikistan.

The message is regularly shared in several languages. At the request of her followers, makeup artist Farangis offers looks inspired by different regions of Tajikistan, accompanied by brief explanations in Tajik, Russian and English. The movement goes beyond the country’s borders and more broadly inspires women from neighbouring countries. This is notably the case of an Uzbek blogger who also joined the movement, presenting the wedding dresses of Tajik women from different regions.

This trend unites Tajik women across the continent: from Iran to China, each video brings its own personal touch.

The post Tajik women reveal themselves through the “I am Tajik and…” trend appeared first on Novastan English.

Local historian Gafur Chermatov details how the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic contributed to the war effort during the Second World War, known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War.

Victory in the Second World War was achieved at the cost of immense suffering for millions of people of different nationalities. During the most difficult trials, both at the front and in the rear, the peoples of the USSR were united and bonded as never before – and probably as never again afterwards.

“We never had a single case of defection to the enemy. The Tajiks were always distinguished by their modesty, courage and unconditional respect for the commander’s combat orders. I will always keep the best memories of my Tajik comrades-in-arms,” recalled Lieutenant General Andrei Vedenin, who took part in the Battle of Rzhev, in his memoirs.

The 118th Rifle Division, which he commanded, was made up of almost 80% Central Asian fighters, mainly Tajiks.

Volunteering in the name of victory

On 22 June 1941, the terrible echo of war reached Tajikistan. One of the first reactions of Tajiks to the announcement of the war was to volunteer en masse to go to the front. In June-August 1941 alone, more than 5,857 applications to volunteer for the front were submitted to the Tajik military committee. By August 1945, more than 200,000 people from Tajikistan had been mobilised into the active army during the war. More than 15,000 other Tajiks served in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army between 1938 and 1940.

More than 45,000 conscripts from Tajikistan were assigned to the defence industry and military construction sites. As a result, the total number of conscripts in the army and industry stood at 245,000. Tajik workers worked in defence industry enterprises in the Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions.

At the beginning of the war, 8,874 motor vehicles, 1,115 tractors, 19,326 horses, 1,791 carts and the necessary equipment were transferred from Soviet Tajikistan to Red Army units and formations. During the war years, versatile military specialists were trained in Tajikistan for the Red Army and Navy. Female specialists were also trained: snipers, telephone operators and radio operators, while 3,000 nurses and military nurses were trained in a short period of time.

Thousands of riflemen, tank crews, machine-gunners, paratroopers and others were trained. Later, tens of thousands of workers, representatives of the collective-farm peasantry and intellectuals who had undergone military training in the republic were mobilised into cavalry divisions and other military units formed on the territory of Tajikistan.

For the defence of Stalingrad

On 17 July 1942, the Battle of Stalingrad, now Volgograd, began. It was one of the most important and fiercest battles of the war, and radically changed its course. For six and a half months, bloody and intense fighting raged relentlessly across the vast steppes of the Don and the Volga.

In May 1942, the formation of the 104th Cavalry Division was under way in Tajikistan. Conscripts came from all corners of the republic. In the shortest possible time, thousands of horses, guns, mortars, hundreds of carts, vehicles, ammunition, engineering equipment, food and fodder were loaded onto wagons at railway stations near Stalinabad, now Dushanbe.

The defenders of Stalingrad offered firm and persistent resistance to German troops, showing unparalleled courage. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers distinguished themselves there, including many Tajiks. More than 7,000 soldiers recruited in Tajikistan later received the medal “For the Defence of Stalingrad”.

A reliable reserve for the front

Having rapidly shifted towards the production of military goods, Tajikistan had already been rebuilt on a wartime footing by the end of 1942. The republic supplied the front primarily with light industry and food products, as well as non-ferrous and rare metals needed for the production of military equipment.

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In total, during the war years, agricultural workers delivered 500,000 tonnes of raw cotton, more than 100,000 tonnes of meat, and tens of thousands of tonnes of vegetables and fruit to the state. Thanks to their selfless labour, in 1944 the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic became one of the first in the Soviet Union to fulfil the grain procurement plan and, in addition, handed over thousands of quintals of grain to the Red Army.

Huge funds were collected in the republic for military equipment. During the war years, Tajikistan’s workers contributed more than one billion roubles to the defence fund and the weapons construction fund, including in the form of loans and cash lotteries.

An aircraft repair plant

In June 1943, the USSR People’s Commissariat of the Aviation Industry decided to create an aircraft repair plant in the village of Novobad, located in Tajikistan’s Hissar Valley, on the basis of the existing military airfield.

For this purpose, the 217th stationary aviation workshop arrived in Hissar. Construction of production buildings and workshops immediately began at the new site. By December 1943, the repair of aircraft and engines had multiplied compared with October. By January 1944, the number of employees had also increased severalfold compared with October.

The workshops supplied 12 aviation regiments during their formation and deployment to the front, as well as almost all aviation schools in the district, including those evacuated from the front line.

In total, 468 aircraft, 1,219 aircraft engines and 352 vehicles were repaired during the war. Thousands of units of complex combat and navigation equipment were returned to the front after repair: cannons, machine guns, radio equipment and measuring instruments.

Seeking shelter

Fleeing the enemy, residents of the western regions of the USSR found shelter in Tajikistan. From August 1941 to September 1942, more than 140,000 Soviet citizens evacuated from Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Moscow and Leningrad arrived in the republic. The war did not only deprive these people of shelter. Most of them, fleeing the invaders, left their homes without even taking the most basic household items. In Tajikistan, they were welcomed with warmth and care.

The construction of new houses began. In Stalinabad, 3,600 square metres of housing were built for evacuees in just eight months. More than 12,000 families were housed. To help the evacuees, money in addition to that allocated by the state, warm clothes, necessary furniture and kitchen utensils were collected.

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In the summer and autumn of 1941, a contingent from 14 orphanages arrived in Tajikistan. Among them were two orphanages for Polish children. The republic’s leaders faced the extremely difficult task of developing a network of orphanages in towns and villages. Collective farmers in the Shahrinav district of the Stalinabad region took the initiative to create orphanages for 20 to 30 children on collective farms.

Gafur Chermatov
Historian, for Asia-Plus

Translated from Russian by Sophie Combaret and from French by Mathieu Lemoine

The post Tajikistan’s contribution to the war effort during the Second World War appeared first on Novastan English.

The short story collection Hold Me in Your Arms, by Hafiz Saifullaev, has been nominated for the Sadriddin Ayni Literary Prize.

The book Hold Me in Your Arms (Moscow, 2024), by Tajik writer Hafiz Saifullaev, was nominated by the Sughd branch of the Writers’ Union of Tajikistan for the Sadriddin Ayni Literary Prize. This undoubtedly represents an important milestone in the landscape of contemporary Russian-language Tajik literature.

At first glance, the writer’s short stories may evoke a sense of ambivalence. Some find them highly personal, intimate and linguistically simple, yet complex in terms of perception and the depth of thought they convey. Others see in them a rather cerebral, rational form of writing, driven by the need to express the words of the soul, emotional fractures. In any case, by grasping the subtleties of the subtext, it becomes clear that a prosperous future awaits this Russian-language writer, a true sculptor of words.

Tajik media outlet Asia-Plus has read Hold Me in Your Arms, published in 2024 by Pero publishing house in Moscow, and has drawn the following conclusions.

A lyrical writer

Hafiz Saifullaev is a lyrical writer, in whom East and West intertwine naturally. His prose is imbued with the world around him. Trees, mountain rivers and high peaks all appear in his work in a philosophical and poetic form.

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The most essential feature of his short stories is the absence of any distortion in his ideas about the world, people and their lives. Hafiz Saifullaev expresses his thoughts and feelings with such sincerity that his words seem to emerge in a moment of pure truth, without any artifice:

“I was sitting on a bench in the park. In the orange flames of autumn, wrapped in my black jacket, I looked like a piece of coal that had not yet caught fire. I had opened my laptop and was staring at the screen. I was searching for the Word. A cat distracted me from these useless ramblings, having crept up close without my noticing. It was grey, speckled with white, almost transparent. Floating, perhaps…”

Stories imbued with sincerity

The writer is fully aware that the loss of sincerity and inner truth is fatal to literature. And yet Hafiz Saifullaev’s short stories are not limited to a simple account of what he has seen or experienced: they take the form of philosophical meditations, reflections on life and death, the past and the future, the irreconcilable struggle between good and evil, joy and sorrow, the moment and eternity:

“Seeing my mother lying in bed, strangely stern, I went up to her and took her cold hand in mine. Her chin was held up by a bandage. ‘It’s over,’ I told myself, ‘Mama is dead.’ I looked at her, trying to imprint her features in my memory. But instead, her young face came back to me, her laughter. I stayed like that until I placed the pillow back under her head. Under the pillow was a folded velvet waistcoat, the one I loved. I could not hold back my sobs and leaned towards her, taking her in my arms. It was then that I heard her voice: ‘Do you love me?’ I began breathing again. My mother’s light flowed into my chest. No one saw it. It remains a secret between my mother and me.”

Like a return to childhood

Hafiz Saifullaev’s prose stands out for the richness of its vocabulary and the variety of its rhythm.

The language of his works is rich, metaphorical and simple, “almost materially tangible”, according to critic Sanoat Azizova. His thought is both visual and philosophical. The absence, in his miniature stories, of grandiloquence or declarative tone, often characteristic of more conventional prose writers, reveals the combination of genuine artistic talent and deep intelligence.

Reading Hafiz Saifullaev’s miniatures gives rise to a poignant feeling of nostalgia: the memory of one’s own childhood. In many of his stories, the colours are more vibrant, the snow whiter, the sky more azure and unfathomable. In the short story Hold Me in Your Arms, this is exactly the case: one’s breath is taken away by the brilliance of its wonderful, colourful epithets.

It is a rare thing to read a text of such coherence and density, written in a single breath, to the point that one almost regrets that the memories of childhood come to an end, that they are interrupted…

Music and thought

These are only a few sketches of impressions born from reading, or listening to, these musical stories by a talented writer who has brilliantly established himself in Tajikistan’s Russian-language literature. Reading his miniature stories, the reader perceives both music and thought, wrapped in the garment of his poetic imagination:

“There is the Word. The one whose function is to awaken man. And there it suddenly appears in the context of a sentence, of a story.”

This is exactly what happens in the short stories of the collection Hold Me in Your Arms.

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Hafiz Saifullaev is moving through literature seriously and confidently. He must continue to remain always close to people, to live events fully alongside his characters. For this is what matters most for a writer, a poet, a creator. And there is no greater happiness than to be understood by those for whom one creates.

A sculptor of words

As the Kabardino-Balkar poet Tanzilia Zumakulova writes:

“And to dry someone’s tears,
To soften pain, O poet, you must be
Not an actor playing a role,
But shed bitter tears yourself,
And not suppress true suffering.”

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To conclude these reflections on Hafiz Saifullaev’s book Hold Me in Your Arms, a work that can rightly be described as poetic prose, it is possible to say that its author, a true sculptor of words, undoubtedly deserves to be awarded the prestigious Sadriddin Ayni Literary Prize.

His prose, as poet Nizom Kosim states, “brings together all that is best: the pull of plot and imagery, the brilliance of imagination and fantasy, the subtlety of themes and characters, a rich and vivid language. How could one not appreciate such prose?”

Azim Aminov and Kamila Mulloyeva
Journalists for Asia-Plus

Translated from Russian by Lisa D’Addazio and from French by Mathieu Lemoine

The post “Hafiz Saifullaev’s prose marks a fruitful turning point in Russian-language Tajik literature” appeared first on Novastan English.