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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are the composers represented on the album?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why has Uzbek classical music remained relatively unknown internationally?

There are several interconnected reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would success for this project ultimately mean to you?

For me, this project is already a success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In rural Uzbekistan, access to irrigation water is formally guaranteed but often determined by informal power, money and social position. Field research in the Fergana Valley shows that women – especially those heading households alone – are pushed towards risky strategies that deepen their exposure to poverty, stigma and violence.

At two o’clock in the morning, when male farmers guarding the irrigation outlets have gone to rest, some women in rural Uzbekistan quietly open the gates and divert water towards their household plots. They describe the practice as “stealing” water. It may be the only opportunity they have to save their crops.

The risks are considerable. A woman discovered at the outlet can face confrontation or harassment. Merely being outside at night and speaking directly with male farmers can damage the reputation of a widow or divorced woman in her village. Yet without irrigation, household gardens fail, food supplies shrink and women lose one of their few reliable sources of income.

These accounts emerged from qualitative fieldwork conducted in September and October 2023 in Yazyavan district, in Uzbekistan’s densely populated Fergana region. Interviews and two focus-group discussions involved women managing farms or household plots, alongside experts working with rural communities and women in agriculture. The research examined why men and women obtain different access to irrigation water and how women negotiate both formal and informal channels.

Equal rights on paper, unequal access in practice

Uzbekistan’s legislation provides for equitable access to irrigation water by farms, dehkan farms and household producers. At community level, Water Users Associations and local water distributors, known as mirabs, play central roles in allocating water. In practice, however, access is shaped by land ownership, wealth, location, marital status and the ability to participate in male-dominated networks.

Women are a minority among registered farm owners, but they carry much of the responsibility for household plots and kitchen gardens. These plots are crucial to rural food security and household survival. Labour migration has also left more women responsible for agricultural work and irrigation, even though local norms continue to treat water negotiation as men’s work.

The fieldwork showed that women are not affected in the same way. A woman managing a larger commercial farm with a husband or male relative may receive scheduling information, pay Water Users Association fees or finance a well. Even then, she may be excluded from real decisions. Single women managing small household or dehkan plots have far fewer resources and almost no formal bargaining power. They are frequently the last users in the irrigation chain.

Water follows power

Irrigation schedules are often unreliable or inaccessible. Several women said they did not know when water would arrive. Those whose land lies far from a canal may receive only a weak flow after upstream farms have irrigated, or no water at all. In dry seasons, some respondents reported being unable to irrigate even once.

Money and informal influence further distort distribution. Interviewees and experts described bribery of mirabs as a common way to obtain water earlier or in greater quantities. Farmers with stronger financial and social networks can guard outlets, negotiate directly and pay additional costs. Poor women, particularly those heading households alone, cannot compete on the same terms.

The physical work of securing water is itself demanding. One interviewee described the distance, expense and constant vigilance involved:

“One has to travel 15 to 25 kilometres to open the gate in the channel, and while doing so, one needs to pay the mirabs. After that, one needs to follow the water flow to prevent other farmers from using it and engage in negotiations or conflicts if necessary. Furthermore, one needs to go upstream every two or three hours to make sure there is sufficient water and that nobody else is diverting it. This involves staying out at night and walking along deserted, dusty roads.”

For many women, this is not only physically exhausting but also dangerous and socially difficult, particularly when irrigation requires them to remain outside alone at night.

Formal participation offers little protection. Women who belonged to Water Users Associations said they attended meetings without being able to influence decisions. Important discussions may also take place informally in chaykhanas, social spaces generally reserved for men. The result is participation without meaningful voice: women may pay fees and fulfil obligations while remaining excluded from the networks that determine actual distribution.

Informal solutions create new dangers

When formal routes fail, women improvise. Some negotiate with male neighbours. Others wait for drainage water released from nearby farms, although it may be scarce or contaminated with agricultural chemicals. A private well can provide an alternative, but installation and pumping costs are beyond the reach of most smallholders and can be prohibitive even for larger farms.

For single women, clandestinely opening water outlets at night may be the only remaining option. Women described waiting for hours in darkness, wind and dust, then fleeing if farmers or workers appeared. This strategy exposes them not only to physical danger but also to gender-based stigma. Widowed and divorced women already face social marginalisation; being seen outdoors at night can intensify gossip and exclusion.

Competition over water can also become violent. Respondents reported that male farmers guard outlets and may use force when defending their turn. One expert recalled a case in which an older woman farmer was beaten during a dispute. Although water conflicts affect men as well, women face an additional layer of vulnerability because they have less physical, financial and institutional power with which to respond.

From failed harvests to deeper poverty

The consequences extend beyond a single irrigation season. Women who receive water only once or twice cannot maintain reliable harvests. Trees and gardens dry out, and farmers producing priority crops may be reprimanded by local authorities or risk losing their land because they have failed to meet production expectations.

For household farmers, crop failure immediately affects food security. Some women reduce the variety of crops they plant or abandon cultivation altogether. To compensate, they seek poorly paid informal work as mardikors, day labourers hired for agricultural or cleaning work. Some respondents said they brought their children with them.

One participant in the focus-group discussion described the conditions they faced:

“We plant, weed and cultivate other farmers’ land. We also go to the mardikor bazaar, the labour market for daily workers, with our children. After finishing work on one plot, we go to another the following day with nothing to eat but one loaf of bread and tea. We also go to the city to clean streets or wash windows, whatever the weather. It can feel as hot as 60 degrees outside.”

These accounts show how inadequate access to irrigation can push entire households towards precarious labour and may also increase children’s exposure to informal work. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Lack of water reduces yields and income. Lower income makes it harder to pay for pumps, wells, transport or informal payments. Women then become even less able to negotiate access during the next season. As water stress intensifies, this pattern is likely to become more severe.

Water policy must recognise gendered realities

Improving infrastructure and water efficiency is essential, but technical solutions alone will not resolve unequal access. A system can be formally neutral while still reproducing inequality when information, decision-making and informal influence remain concentrated among men.

Water schedules should be transparent, reliable and accessible to all users, including women managing household plots. Oversight of mirabs and local distribution should be strengthened, with clear complaint mechanisms and safeguards against corruption. Water Users Associations must move beyond nominal female attendance and give women a meaningful role in decisions over allocation, maintenance and fees.

Support should focus particularly on single women and female-headed households. This could include targeted access to water-saving technology, affordable financing, advisory services and practical community arrangements that remove the need to irrigate alone at night. Local women leaders and community activists can help represent users who are currently excluded from formal negotiations.

More broadly, agricultural and climate policies must recognise women as farmers and water managers, even when their work takes place on household plots and is absent from official production statistics. Their gardens are not marginal to Uzbekistan’s rural economy: they sustain families, provide income and strengthen food security. Improved access of female farmers to water will lead to increased food security in rural areas. According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization, subsistence farming is not only a source of income for rural households but also contributes to 80% of agricultural production in Uzbekistan.

Women in Yazyavan are already demonstrating considerable agency in adapting to scarcity. But resilience should not mean forcing them to navigate corruption, contamination, violence and shame simply to obtain a resource to which they are legally entitled. Equitable water governance requires not only more efficient irrigation, but institutions capable of seeing who reaches the canal gate – and who is compelled to wait until the middle of the night.

Author’s note: This article is based on qualitative research conducted in Yazyavan district, Fergana region, in September and October 2023. The study included 2 focus-group discussions with farmers and several expert interviews. It was originally developed as the policy brief “Negotiating access to water: the study of practices of female farmers in rural Uzbekistan”.

By Gulnoza Akhmedova.

The post When irrigation becomes a nightly struggle for Uzbekistan’s women farmers appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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

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

The reality is more complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

A region greener than its reputation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many parks does Central Asia have?

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

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

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

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

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

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

When ecotourism becomes mass tourism

Kazakhstan illustrates the contradiction particularly clearly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New parks, old capacity problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fire as the test of protection

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is supporting conservation?

Central Asian states are not dealing with these pressures alone.

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

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

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

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

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

Protection with people, not against them

Forests are rarely empty spaces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The river changes character repeatedly along the way.

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

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

Before the Amu Darya: mountain water

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

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

The landscape is almost the inverse of what waits downstream.

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

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

The Vakhsh: turning water into electricity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the mountains recede.

Termez: Afghanistan across the water

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

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

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

It is physically across the water.

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

That shift is visible a short distance away at Airitom.

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

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

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

Afghanistan returns to the river

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

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

That asymmetry is now becoming much harder to ignore.

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

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

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

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

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

It reinforces the central fact of the Amu Darya basin:

Everyone has reasons to use more water.

Nobody can manufacture another river.

Turkmenabat: engineering the desert

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

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

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

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

And physically, they succeeded.

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

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

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

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

Khorezm: a civilization built by canals

Few landscapes make that clearer than Khorezm.

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

What they do not encounter is the Amu Darya itself.

Khiva does not stand on the modern riverbank.

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

The city exists because the river was brought to it.

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

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

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

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

The lower river itself has never been completely stable.

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

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

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

Nukus: downstream of everyone

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

Upstream reservoirs regulate it.

Afghanistan is constructing new irrigation infrastructure from it.

Agricultural regions in Uzbekistan depend upon it.

Turkmenistan diverts part of it westwards.

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

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

Nukus is downstream not simply geographically, but politically.

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

That reality remains highly contemporary.

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

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

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

Muynak: a port without a sea

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

Fishing boats sit in sand.

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

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

Water.

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

For Muynak this was not simply an environmental statistic.

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

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

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

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

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

The sea that did not entirely disappear

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

The reality is more complicated.

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

That distinction matters.

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

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

One river, competing futures

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

That would also be incomplete.

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

Tajikistan wants electricity.

Afghanistan wants irrigated farmland.

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

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

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

All of these demands are understandable.

The difficulty is that they exist simultaneously.

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

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

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

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

But none can make the Amu Darya infinite.

From ice to sand – and water again

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

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

Along the Panj, it separates Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

On the Vakhsh, it becomes electricity.

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

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

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

At Muynak, ships remain stranded where water once stood.

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

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

Another history runs beneath all of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This workshop, located at the Yangiabad flea market in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is brimming with locks and keys. The Yangiabad bazaar, teeming with all manner of goods, is known for its attractive prices and its traditional atmosphere, which remains largely untouched by tourists.

Credit: Madina A’zam (Uzbekistan @madinaazam_photography)

Find all of our photos of the day. You can buy some of these and receive them at home: here is the list! If you can't find your picture in the list, mail us to photo@novastan.org.

The post A conscientious job appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parliament is the easiest place to count

Parliamentary representation provides the clearest evidence of change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What quotas can – and cannot – change

Quotas matter because political recruitment rarely corrects its own inequalities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women ministers – but in which ministries?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside local government, but rarely at its head

The divide becomes even clearer at the local level.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How political parties imagine women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prominent women – and different paths to influence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond counting seats

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

A fuller assessment must ask whether women:

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

It must also take account of the political environment itself.

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

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

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

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

But the gains are distributed unevenly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Queens, a few words can contain the history of an entire community. A guest may be welcomed with xush omaded, an expression immediately recognisable to Tajik speakers. At the table may be osh, the regional rice dish better known internationally as plov, while grandparents move between Bukhori and Russian and their grandchildren answer in English.

The scene belongs unmistakably to New York. Its vocabulary, food and social rhythms, however, lead back to Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Dushanbe.

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

Over the final decades of the Soviet Union and the turbulent years that followed its collapse, most Bukharan Jews left Central Asia. Large communities developed abroad, most visibly in the New York neighbourhoods of Forest Hills and Rego Park. Others took root in Vienna, Toronto and a number of smaller centres. The result is an unusual geographical reversal: a culture bearing the name of Bukhara now has some of its most dynamic institutions thousands of kilometres away from the city itself.

Novastan has previously explored the debated origins of the Jewish presence in Central Asia and the historical importance of Bukhara and Khwarezm. The contemporary story begins where those histories leave off. How does a community remain Bukharan after leaving Bukhara? And what links do Bukharan Jews still maintain with the Central Asian societies from which they emerged?

A community whose centre moved

Despite their name, Bukharan Jews did not come exclusively from Bukhara. Communities developed across the territories that today constitute Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with important centres in Samarkand, Tashkent, Kokand, the Ferghana Valley and Dushanbe. “Bukharan” gradually became a collective designation for a wider Central Asian Jewish civilisation shaped by Persian-speaking urban culture, Jewish religious traditions and long interaction with Uzbek, Tajik and other neighbouring populations.

Migration began well before the Soviet collapse, but accelerated dramatically from the 1970s onwards. By the 1990s, the economic uncertainty accompanying independence, the weakening of Soviet-era professional and social structures, and the opportunity to reunite with relatives abroad encouraged much of the remaining population to depart.

The community did not simply disperse. In several cities, Bukharan Jews recreated dense networks of synagogues, schools, businesses, newspapers, restaurants, cultural organisations and family associations. Queens became the most visible North American example: a place where Central Asian food, music and communal life remained present not only inside private homes, but in streets, shops, banquet halls and religious institutions.

Bukhara had not been reproduced exactly. The new community was increasingly American, urban and outward-looking. Yet it retained practices and relationships that distinguished it from both the surrounding population and other Jewish communities.

Bukhori: a Central Asian language abroad

Perhaps no element expresses this complicated identity better than Bukhori, also called Bukharian or Judeo-Tajik.

Bukhori belongs to the Iranian family of languages. It is closely related to Tajik and, more distantly, to modern Persian. It developed among the Jewish communities of Central Asia, incorporating Hebrew and Aramaic terms associated with religion and communal life, while also absorbing vocabulary and influences from Uzbek and, during the Soviet period, Russian.

To a Tajik speaker, much of Bukhori may sound familiar. Words connected with everyday life, hospitality and family reflect a shared Persian linguistic environment. But religious vocabulary, pronunciation, expressions and the historical experience carried by the language make it distinct.

Read more on Novastan: Les Juifs de Boukhara : comment sont-ils arrivés en Asie centrale ?

Everyday Bukhori contains many words immediately recognisable to Tajik and Persian speakers. A guest may hear xush omaded, “welcome,” while osh evokes both the wider Central Asian rice tradition and specifically Bukharan Jewish dishes such as oshi sabo. Such vocabulary reflects the community’s roots in a Persian-speaking Central Asian environment. Its specifically Jewish dimension is more apparent in religious terminology derived from Hebrew and Aramaic, although the precise vocabulary and pronunciation vary between speakers and communities.

Bukhori’s alphabets tell another story. It was traditionally written in Hebrew characters. Soviet language reforms subsequently introduced Latin and then Cyrillic scripts. Today, the language may appear in Hebrew, Cyrillic or adapted Latin spelling, depending on the speaker, country and intended readership.

Each script points towards a different cultural horizon: Hebrew towards Jewish religious and literary life, Cyrillic towards the Soviet experience, and Latin increasingly towards younger generations living in English-speaking countries. The lack of a single universally accepted contemporary spelling system also complicates efforts to teach the language.

Bukhori remains spoken, particularly among older and middle-aged members of the community. But it is considered endangered. Migration has strengthened Bukharan communal identity in some respects while weakening the transmission of its traditional language. In Queens, children may grow up surrounded by Bukharan food, weddings, religious institutions and family networks without becoming fluent Bukhori speakers. Russian may remain the language used with parents and grandparents, while English dominates education, work and friendships.

This produces one of the central paradoxes of the modern diaspora: Bukharan identity may be surviving more successfully than Bukhori.

Language loss does not automatically mean the disappearance of the community. A person can identify strongly as Bukharan through family, religion, food, music and social relationships. Yet language carries forms of humour, intimacy and memory that are difficult to reproduce through translation. When grandparents speak Bukhori but grandchildren understand only fragments, more than vocabulary is lost. A particular way of describing Central Asian Jewish life begins to recede.

The question is therefore not simply whether Bukhori will survive. It is also what being Bukharan will mean if it does not.

Queens: a new Bukhara?

Forest Hills and Rego Park are sometimes described as a “new Bukhara.” The expression is evocative, but incomplete.

Queens did not preserve Bukharan culture in a frozen form. It transformed it. Religious practices changed in contact with other Jewish traditions. Businesses adapted to the opportunities and demands of New York. Young people combined family expectations with American education and professional life. Community institutions became more formalised, visible and politically engaged.

Nevertheless, the density of Bukharan life remains remarkable. Synagogues and schools coexist with restaurants, food shops, newspapers, wedding halls and social organisations. Weddings and religious celebrations bring together extended families and reinforce connections that can also support professional advancement, philanthropy and mutual assistance.

The community’s economic visibility has sometimes encouraged outsiders to describe Bukharan Jews principally through wealth or influence. Such language requires caution. It can reproduce old stereotypes about Jews, money and hidden power while obscuring the ordinary work through which immigrant communities build stability.

The more interesting story is institutional. Bukharan Jews in Queens developed strong family and community networks, created businesses, funded religious and cultural organisations and became active in local civic life. Their prominence is less a mystery than the result of geographic concentration, entrepreneurship, mutual support and sustained investment in communal institutions.

Elements of Central Asian social organisation also travelled with them. Family reputation, obligations between relatives, elaborate hospitality and neighbourhood-based mutual assistance recall aspects of the mahalla, the local community structure found across Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. These practices have inevitably changed in New York, but they have not disappeared.

Queens is therefore not a replica of Bukhara. It is a new diaspora city in which selected elements of Central Asian life have been reorganised to meet American conditions.

Vienna: a Central Asian Jewish crossroads

Vienna offers a different version of the Bukharan Jewish journey.

The Austrian capital became an important transit point for Jews leaving the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Many continued towards other destinations, but some Bukharan Jewish families remained. Over time, they created one of the most substantial and active Bukharan communities in Europe.

The city now contains Bukharan synagogues, religious and social organisations, businesses and cultural initiatives. Bukhori and Russian continue to be used among parts of the community, while German increasingly dominates among younger generations. Research on Bukharan Jews in Vienna describes a community shaped simultaneously by Central Asian origins, Soviet migration, Jewish religious life and integration into a German-speaking European city.

Vienna’s experience resembles Queens in some respects, but differs in scale and urban setting. Its community is smaller and exists within a European Jewish landscape marked by its own historical sensitivities. It also remains geographically closer to the former Soviet world, potentially facilitating travel and continued personal connections.

Here too, language is an indicator of generational change. Older residents may move between Bukhori and Russian. Their children and grandchildren increasingly use German. The community remains visible, but the balance between religious affiliation, family heritage and specifically Central Asian culture is continually renegotiated.

Toronto: preserving culture through organisation

Toronto represents a third model.

Its Bukharan Jewish population is smaller and less geographically concentrated than that of Queens. The Jewish Bukharian Community of Toronto was formally established in 2003, building on earlier efforts to bring together families dispersed across the Greater Toronto Area. Cultural preservation was explicitly presented as part of its mission.

A smaller community cannot rely on neighbourhood concentration alone. Maintaining cultural life requires deliberate organisation: religious services, family gatherings, youth programmes, celebrations and spaces in which people can meet others with the same background.

This may make cultural preservation simultaneously more fragile and more conscious. In Queens, Bukharan identity can be reinforced through daily proximity. In Toronto, it may depend more heavily on people choosing to participate.

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

Vienna and Toronto therefore broaden the story beyond a simple journey from Uzbekistan to New York. They show that there is no single Bukharan diaspora experience. The survival of language and culture depends on community size, urban geography, religious institutions, migration history and the language of the surrounding society.

Is Central Asia still a homeland?

For the first generation of migrants, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan may remain associated with childhood, education, neighbours and professional life. For their descendants, Central Asia is more likely to be encountered through family stories, food, music, photographs and occasional journeys.

Diaspora visits to Bukhara and Samarkand often include former homes, synagogues, schools and cemeteries. These are not always journeys towards a place of possible return. They are journeys towards evidence: proof that the family history described by parents and grandparents belonged to real streets and neighbourhoods.

Read more on Novastan: Khwarezm et Boukhara, deux foyers anciens des Juifs d’Asie centrale

This raises a subtle distinction. Central Asia can remain emotionally important without functioning as a contemporary homeland. Bukhara may be remembered as a place of coexistence, hospitality and belonging, even when the family’s departure was driven by uncertainty or the conviction that its future lay elsewhere.

The process can also idealise the past. Nostalgic accounts may emphasise close relationships with Muslim neighbours and minimise discrimination, political restrictions or the difficulties of late Soviet and post-Soviet life. Other families may remember exclusion and see departure as liberation rather than loss.

There is no single Bukharan Jewish memory of Central Asia. The diaspora contains different generations, migration routes and political experiences.

A living community or a heritage landscape?

Jewish life has not completely disappeared from Uzbekistan. Synagogues and small communities remain, including in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. But the demographic contrast is striking: the historic centres now contain only a fraction of the population found in diaspora cities.

This creates a risk that Jewish life in Central Asia becomes treated principally as heritage.

The old Jewish quarter of Bukhara, its synagogues, cemeteries and traditional houses attract visitors and preservation initiatives. The city’s Jewish houses form part of Bukhara’s distinctive architectural landscape, although many have changed ownership or function. Some have become guesthouses, workshops or tourism businesses.

Preservation is necessary, but it raises difficult questions. Who determines how the history of a departed community is presented? Do restored buildings communicate the complexity of Jewish life, or merely provide an attractive setting for tourism? What remains of a neighbourhood when its architecture survives but most of its former inhabitants live abroad?

The remaining Jewish residents should not be reduced to guardians of monuments. Their lives, concerns and choices are part of the contemporary story. Their relationship with the diaspora may include family contacts, religious support, philanthropy and visitors, but it may also contain differences of perspective. Those who stayed did not experience the same transformation as those who rebuilt their lives abroad.

Uzbekistan rediscovers its diaspora

The relationship is not maintained only through private memory. Uzbekistan has increasingly engaged Bukharan Jewish communities abroad as part of its cultural diplomacy.

Official and academic initiatives have highlighted the historical contribution of Jews to Central Asian society. A major conference on Bukharan Jewish heritage was held at Samarkand State University in September 2025. In February 2026, another conference examined the role of Bukharan Jews in the region’s socioeconomic and cultural life, including diaspora investment, tourism and educational exchange.

For Uzbekistan, the diaspora offers several potential advantages. Bukharan Jews can promote the country as a tourist destination, support heritage projects, facilitate business contacts and reinforce an international narrative of religious coexistence.

For the diaspora, official recognition may validate a history that was sometimes marginalised. It may also create opportunities to protect cemeteries, synagogues and family heritage.

But the relationship should not be romanticised. State-sponsored celebration of Jewish history can serve contemporary political objectives. It allows Uzbekistan to present itself internationally as tolerant, open and connected to a successful global diaspora. The decisive question is whether this engagement also supports the remaining local community and permits complex discussion of the past.

Bukharan Jews may be approached as former citizens, cultural ambassadors, investors, tourists or intermediaries. They may see themselves in all of these roles – or reject some of them.

Can Bukhara survive outside Bukhara?

The Bukharan Jews remain a meaningful community. Their institutions are active, their family and religious networks are visible, and their cultural traditions continue to distinguish them across several countries.

But what is being preserved is changing.

Bukhori is weakening even where Bukharan identity remains strong. Central Asia is becoming, for many younger members of the diaspora, an inherited landscape rather than a lived one. Cuisine, weddings and family solidarity may survive more easily than language. Religious identity may grow stronger even as specifically Central Asian knowledge recedes.

The Bukharan Jewish story is therefore not simply one of disappearance or successful preservation. It is a story of selection. Every generation decides, consciously or otherwise, which elements of Bukhara to carry forward.

In Queens, Vienna and Toronto, the answer is still being negotiated – between Bukhori and English, Russian and German, memory and modernity, inherited obligations and individual choices.

Most Bukharan Jews no longer live in Central Asia. Yet they remain one of Central Asia’s most distinctive communities abroad. Their global journey has not ended their relationship with the region. It has transformed Bukhara from a place into a language, a family memory, a social world – and a question passed from one generation to the next.

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

The post From Bukhara to Queens: The Global Journey of the Bukharan Jews appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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

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

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

From Korea to the Russian Far East

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

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

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

In 1937, that suspicion became mass punishment.

The train to Central Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survival in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

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

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

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

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

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

A culture of adaptation

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

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

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

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

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

Language, memory and silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Institutions of memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tashkent’s Korean traces

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

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

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

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

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

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

After 1991: new borders, old identities

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

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

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

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

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

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

From deportation to partnership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For most citizens, the state is not first encountered through laws, strategies or official speeches. It is encountered in practical moments of need: registering a birth, obtaining a passport, opening a business, receiving a certificate, applying for social support, connecting to utilities or correcting an administrative error. These ordinary interactions shape whether people see the administration as predictable or arbitrary, helpful or humiliating, accessible or distant.

In Uzbekistan, this everyday relationship between citizens and the state has changed significantly since 2017. Public service reform has been one of the most visible parts of the country’s broader modernization agenda. Public Service Centers, online portals, digitized records and simplified procedures have made many interactions faster and less burdensome. According to the Ministry of Justice data used in a recent UNDP-supported analysis, Uzbekistan now has 1,040 public services in its Unified Register, of which 780 are delivered through the Unified Interactive Public Services Portal, 507 through Public Service Centers, and more than 150 licenses and permits through the “License” information system. The number of services available through Public Service Centers has increased almost fourteen-fold since 2017, while more than 60 million civil registry records have been digitized.

These are not marginal changes. They reflect a real shift away from the older model in which citizens often had to move from one office to another, carrying documents between agencies, seeking information from officials and navigating unclear procedures. In the Uzbek context, where bureaucratic discretion has long affected both citizens and entrepreneurs, public service reform has an importance that goes beyond administrative convenience. It touches trust in institutions, the business climate, corruption risks and the state’s ability to use digital transformation for public benefit.

Read more on Novastan: Uzbekistan to invest in its digital infrastructure

Yet Uzbekistan’s reform story is now entering a more difficult phase. The country has already modernized much of the visible “front office” of the state: the counters, portals, kiosks and service centers through which people interact with public administration. The harder challenge lies behind the counter. It concerns the digital, legal and institutional infrastructure that allows agencies to exchange data securely, recognize electronic decisions, reduce unnecessary paperwork, protect personal information and make administrative action accountable.

In other words, the next stage of Uzbekistan’s public service reform will be decided less by the number of services available online than by the quality of the digital state behind them.

From paperwork to platforms

The first phase of reform focused on access. Public Service Centers created a recognizable front door to the state, while the national portal offered citizens and businesses a way to access services online. Requirements to submit many types of certificates and documents have been abolished. Some services have been simplified under the “three-step” principle. Birth-related procedures have been bundled, while some utility-related services have become proactive, meaning that citizens no longer need to initiate every administrative step themselves.

This matters because public services are among the few areas where state reform becomes immediately tangible. A citizen may not read a public administration strategy, but he or she will notice whether a birth certificate can be obtained more quickly, whether a passport can be delivered, whether a license can be requested online or whether a business can be registered without visiting multiple offices.

For businesses, the same logic applies. The quality of the business climate is not determined only by tax rates or investment laws. It is also shaped by routine interactions with the administration: permits, licenses, inspections, utility connections, property registration, tax administration and access to official information. The old World Bank Doing Business ranking may no longer exist in its previous form, but the underlying question remains central: can entrepreneurs rely on predictable, transparent and timely administrative procedures?

In this sense, public service reform is also business-climate reform. When licensing procedures are digital, deadlines are clear and documents are not repeatedly requested, businesses face fewer informal costs. When application status is traceable, officials have less room to delay or bargain. When data can be verified directly between agencies, citizens and entrepreneurs no longer have to act as messengers inside the state.

But digitalization alone does not solve the problem. It can also reproduce old bureaucracy in a new form. A paper form can become an online form without the procedure itself becoming simpler. A citizen may still be asked for information that another agency already holds. A business may still face delays if the back-office systems of the responsible institutions are not connected. The real reform, therefore, is not simply to put services online. It is to redesign the relationship between citizens, data, agencies and responsibility.

The invisible infrastructure of reform

One of the most important ideas in modern public service reform is the “once-only” principle: citizens and businesses should not be required to provide information that the state already possesses. In practical terms, this means that if a person’s identity, residence, family status, property record or business registration data already exist in a public registry, another agency should be able to verify that information lawfully and securely.

This sounds simple. In reality, it is one of the most difficult parts of digital government. It requires reliable registries, shared technical standards, secure data exchange, legal rules for data reuse, clear institutional mandates and staff who trust digital verification. It also requires cybersecurity. The more the state relies on digital identity, automated services and inter-agency data exchange, the more public service delivery becomes part of national digital resilience.

In the old bureaucracy, citizens carried paper between agencies. In the digital bureaucracy, data must move instead – securely, lawfully and with accountability.

This is where Uzbekistan’s reform agenda becomes more complex and more interesting. The country has already built many of the visible elements of a modern service system, including Public Service Centers, an expanding online portal, digitized civil registry data and early proactive services. But the next phase, as the UNDP-supported report argues, is about consolidation and depth: clarifying legal and institutional foundations, deepening interoperability and lawful data reuse, simplifying high-volume services, embedding accountability and ensuring that digital progress does not widen gaps for people with limited connectivity, digital skills or documentation.

That is a very different reform agenda from simply launching another platform. It is about who controls data, who is responsible when data are wrong, who can access which records, whether electronic decisions are legally valid, how citizens can appeal mistakes and whether agencies are obliged to rely on shared systems rather than maintaining their own isolated channels.

Why comparison matters

Uzbekistan is not alone in facing this transition. Estonia and Denmark show that digital public services only become transformative when the state treats digital identity, secure data exchange and authoritative registries as core public infrastructure. Georgia and Kazakhstan, closer to Uzbekistan in administrative heritage, demonstrate the political value of one-stop service centers: they make reform visible, reduce face-to-face discretion and create a clearer front door to the state. France offers a different lesson: digitalization must be balanced with physical access points and assisted services, especially for rural areas and citizens who cannot easily navigate online procedures. Singapore and South Korea, meanwhile, show how mature digital states use service data, feedback systems and cross-agency platforms not only to deliver services, but to manage performance and detect bottlenecks.

These examples matter not because they offer models to copy, but because they clarify the choices Uzbekistan now faces. The countries that have modernized public services most successfully did not do so only by introducing new technologies. They also rethought the rules, institutions and incentives behind every counter and every online form. Their reforms became sustainable when they combined digital access with service standards, feedback channels, legal recognition of electronic decisions and visible mechanisms for redress.

For Uzbekistan, the comparison is especially useful because the country is not starting from zero. It has already built public-facing infrastructure and achieved meaningful simplification. The more difficult question is whether it can now create the institutional discipline needed for genuine interoperability. Agencies must be willing, or required, to share data through common systems. Ministries must accept common service standards. Digital and legal reform must move together. Cybersecurity, data protection and administrative accountability must be treated as part of the same reform ecosystem.

Corruption moves, it does not disappear

Public service reform also has a direct anti-corruption dimension. In paper-heavy systems, corruption often thrives at the point of contact between citizen and official: unclear fees, unpredictable deadlines, unnecessary certificates, repeated visits and discretionary refusals. One-stop shops and online procedures can reduce these risks by standardizing processes, limiting face-to-face interactions and making cases easier to track.

This is one reason why Public Service Centers have been politically powerful in several post-Soviet states. They offer a visible break with the image of the fragmented, discretionary administration. Clear counters, queue management, published fees and predictable timelines send a message: the citizen should not have to know someone inside the system to obtain a routine service.

But digitalization does not automatically eliminate corruption. It can change where discretion sits. Instead of the desk officer, discretion may move to the database, the algorithm, the access right, the procurement contract or the agency that controls the platform. If digital systems are opaque, poorly audited or controlled by institutions with weak oversight, new forms of manipulation become possible.

This is why cybersecurity, data privacy and anti-corruption cannot be treated as separate agendas. A service platform that is not secure can be manipulated. A database without audit trails can be abused. A system that allows officials to access personal data without clear justification can undermine trust. An automated decision without explanation can reproduce arbitrariness under a digital label.

For citizens, the promise of digital government is not simply speed. It is predictability, traceability and the ability to challenge mistakes. For businesses, the promise is not only convenience. It is a more reliable operating environment in which permits, licenses and registrations do not depend on informal negotiation. For the state, the promise is a more efficient administration that can detect bottlenecks, reduce duplication and allocate resources more intelligently.

The remaining bottlenecks

Uzbekistan’s progress is significant, but the system remains uneven. Ninety-seven agencies and organizations still provide public services, often under their own procedures and information systems. More than 220 services remain paper-based, and more than 180 are delivered through isolated internal platforms. Many processes still require excessive documents and multiple steps, while only around 100 services have been fully simplified under the “three-step” principle.

These figures are important because they show that the problem is no longer only access to a front office. It is the fragmentation of the back office. If agencies maintain parallel systems, citizens will continue to face repeated documentation requests. If registries are incomplete or not treated as authoritative, officials will continue to rely on paper. If legal deadlines are unrealistic, digital platforms will not prevent delays. If staff lack digital skills or fear responsibility for electronic verification, they may continue to reproduce old procedures.

Monitoring data cited in the report also show persistent performance problems in several sectors. Uzsuvta’minot alone registered more than 175,000 violations, mainly related to delays in connecting customers to water networks or replacing meters. The Cadastre Agency recorded more than 50,000 violations, while other agencies reported tens of thousands of cases, many linked to delays and, in some cases, unjustified refusals.

This does not mean that reform has failed. It means that public service delivery is entering the stage where the easy improvements have already been made and the harder institutional problems are becoming more visible. The first wave could reduce queues and digitize records. The next wave must address mandates, data quality, staff capacity, cybersecurity, appeal mechanisms and the incentives that shape agency behavior.

Data privacy and the citizen

The same interoperability that makes services faster also creates new risks. When agencies exchange more data, the state can reduce paperwork and improve service quality. But it also gains a more complete picture of citizens’ lives. Civil status, property, residence, business activity, education, benefits, utilities and health-related administrative data can become increasingly connected.

This is not a reason to reject digital government. It is a reason to govern it carefully.

A trustworthy service state needs privacy safeguards, access controls, audit trails, correction rights and clear rules on who can use which data for which purpose. Citizens should know when data are being reused, how decisions are made and what they can do when information is incorrect. The more services become proactive or automated, the more important it becomes to ensure that people can challenge errors and that vulnerable groups are not excluded by inaccurate records or inaccessible digital channels.

This is also where inclusion matters. “Digital by default” should not become “digital only.” Rural residents, elderly people, persons with disabilities, low-income households and people with limited digital skills may benefit greatly from simplified services, but only if assisted channels remain available. Public Service Centers, kiosks, mobile units, postal delivery and community-based support are not leftovers from the pre-digital era. They are part of an inclusive digital state.

France’s experience is useful here: even a highly centralized and digitally advanced administration has had to invest in physical access points and assisted services to address territorial inequality and digital exclusion. For Uzbekistan, with its regional disparities and uneven administrative capacity, this lesson is particularly relevant.

A Law on Public Services as a test

Uzbekistan’s forthcoming Law on Public Services could become the cornerstone of the next reform phase. Its importance will depend on whether it is conceived narrowly or strategically.

A narrow law would simply list existing services and formalize current arrangements. A more ambitious law would define what citizens and businesses can expect from the administration: clear deadlines, transparent fees, valid electronic decisions, fewer unnecessary documents, access through several channels, secure data reuse, protection of personal information, and meaningful remedies when the system fails.

The law could also clarify who does what. The Ministry of Justice already plays a central role in legal reform, service standards and Public Service Centers. The Ministry of Digital Technologies leads on digital infrastructure, interoperability and cybersecurity. Line ministries remain responsible for the substance of decisions in their sectors. The challenge is to align these roles so that public service delivery becomes a coherent system rather than a collection of institutional islands.

This is not only a legal issue. It is a governance issue. If Uzbekistan wants citizens to stop carrying paper between agencies, then agencies must be required to trust shared data. If the state wants businesses to rely on digital licensing, then electronic procedures must be legally valid and technically resilient. If public services are to reduce corruption, then deadlines, refusals, complaints and appeals must be traceable. If digital government is to build trust, then cybersecurity and data privacy must be visible parts of the reform, not hidden technical details.

From administrative simplification to a service state

Uzbekistan’s public service reforms are therefore more than an administrative modernization story. They are a window into the country’s broader transformation: how the state organizes information, manages discretion, interacts with citizens and creates conditions for economic activity.

The next test will not be whether Uzbekistan can launch more portals or add more services to existing platforms. It will be whether the state can connect its institutions in a secure and accountable way, so that public services become faster without becoming opaque, more digital without becoming exclusionary, and more efficient without weakening rights.

The most important reform may be the least visible one. It will take place not at the counter, but in the connections between agencies; not in the app, but in the rules governing data; not in the number of services online, but in whether citizens and businesses can trust the digital state behind them.

If Uzbekistan succeeds, public service delivery could become one of the clearest indicators of a new phase in the country’s modernization: a move from paperwork to platforms, and from administrative simplification to a more predictable, secure and citizen-centered service state.

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

The post Beyond the Counter: Uzbekistan’s Public Service Reforms and the Hidden Infrastructure of the Digital State appeared first on Novastan English.

As Uzbekistani President Shavkat Mirziyoyev prepares to travel to Minsk on 8-9 July, the visit is expected to produce another series of agreements on trade, industry and regional cooperation. At first glance, it may appear to be just another bilateral meeting between two post-Soviet states. In reality, it illustrates one of the most overlooked geopolitical developments in Eurasia.

Read more on Novastan: Kazakhstan’s gradual divorce from Russia

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Belarus has become increasingly isolated from Europe. Political dialogue with the European Union has largely frozen, Western sanctions have multiplied, and Minsk’s dependence on Moscow has deepened. Yet while much of Europe has turned away from Belarus, Central Asia has not. On the contrary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and especially Uzbekistan have continued to strengthen political dialogue, industrial cooperation, educational exchanges and trade with Minsk.

This apparent paradox reveals much about both Belarus and Central Asia. For Brussels, Belarus has become primarily a sanctions problem and Russia’s closest ally. For Tashkent, Astana or Dushanbe, however, Belarus remains something rather different: a producer of tractors, buses and mining equipment, an engineering partner, an educational destination and a familiar interlocutor with decades of technical expertise. That difference in perception lies at the heart of Belarus’s enduring relevance across the region.

The war that changed everything – but not everything

The war in Ukraine undoubtedly transformed Belarusian foreign policy.

Before 2022, Minsk balanced relations between Russia and the West while simultaneously cultivating long-standing ties across the former Soviet space. Afterwards, its room for manoeuvre narrowed dramatically. Unable to restore normal political relations with Europe in the foreseeable future, Belarus increasingly looked east.

If the first phase after 2022 was one of survival, the second has become one of adaptation.

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

Central Asia has emerged as one of the principal beneficiaries of this strategic reorientation. Unlike Europe, the five Central Asian republics never sought to isolate Belarus politically. None endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and several – particularly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – carefully defended the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Yet they also chose not to sever relations with Minsk.

Instead, they compartmentalised them.

Political disagreements over Ukraine did not prevent cooperation in agriculture, heavy industry, transport, education or food security. This pragmatic approach reflects the increasingly confident multi-vector diplomacy that has characterised Central Asia over the past decade.

Belarus’s comparative advantage

Unlike China, Belarus cannot finance billion-dollar infrastructure projects.

Unlike Russia, it does not provide security guarantees.

Unlike the European Union, it does not offer grants, regulatory convergence or accession prospects.

Its comparative advantage lies elsewhere.

Belarus remains one of the few post-Soviet states that preserved much of its industrial base after 1991. Companies such as MTZ, MAZ, BelAZ, Gomselmash, Bobruiskagromash and Amkodor continue to manufacture tractors, buses, heavy trucks, harvesters, mining equipment and construction machinery that remain highly competitive across Eurasia.

For Central Asian governments seeking to modernise agriculture, develop mining industries or improve municipal transport, Belarus offers something few other partners can provide: reliable industrial technologies adapted to post-Soviet realities and available at competitive prices.

In that sense, Belarus has become Eurasia’s overlooked industrial power.

Uzbekistan: from friendly relations to strategic partnership

Nowhere has Belarus’s eastern strategy been more successful than in Uzbekistan.

The relationship began to accelerate after Shavkat Mirziyoyev came to power in 2016 and launched sweeping economic reforms. Successive presidential visits – including Alexander Lukashenko’s trips to Tashkent and Mirziyoyev’s visits to Minsk – have transformed bilateral relations from cordial political dialogue into an increasingly comprehensive economic partnership.

Trade has expanded dramatically, approaching one billion US dollars annually, while both governments openly discuss reaching two billion dollars over the coming years.

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More importantly, cooperation has moved beyond exports.

Belarusian and Uzbek partners are developing industrial projects valued at around 800 million dollars, spanning agricultural machinery, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and food processing. Hundreds of enterprises involving Belarusian capital now operate in Uzbekistan, making the country Belarus’s fastest-growing economic partner in Central Asia.

Preparations for Mirziyoyev’s current visit have themselves demonstrated the depth of the relationship. Belarusian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Shuleiko and Uzbekistan’s Minister of Investment, Industry and Trade Laziz Kudratov have spent recent weeks coordinating the agenda, with discussions focusing not only on bilateral trade but also on investment projects and preparations for the next Forum of Regions.

Beyond presidential diplomacy

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Belarus-Uzbekistan relations is that they are no longer centred exclusively on presidents.

The Forum of Regions, launched in 2019, has become an institutional mechanism linking provinces, municipalities, universities, chambers of commerce and businesses. Belarusian regions now cooperate directly with counterparts in Samarkand, Bukhara, Fergana and Tashkent, creating relationships that continue independently of high-level political visits.

This gradual institutionalisation distinguishes Belarus from many other external partners in Central Asia. Rather than relying solely on summit diplomacy, Minsk has invested in long-term cooperation between local authorities, universities and companies.

Kazakhstan: industrial integration

Kazakhstan remains Belarus’s largest economic partner in Central Asia.

Bilateral trade reached approximately 1.1 billion dollars in 2024, while industrial integration has become increasingly sophisticated. Rather than merely exporting machinery, Belarus has helped establish fourteen joint industrial projects worth nearly 280 million dollars, eleven of which are already operational.

Assembly plants now manufacture MTZ tractors, MAZ trucks and Gomselmash agricultural equipment within Kazakhstan itself. More than one thousand enterprises involving Belarusian participation operate across the country, supported by around 170 official Belarusian dealers.

These figures illustrate an important evolution. Belarus is no longer simply exporting products to Central Asia. Increasingly, it is participating directly in local manufacturing and industrial development.

Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan: smaller economies, growing ambitions

Belarus’s engagement is no less significant in the region’s smaller economies.

In Tajikistan, cooperation has progressively shifted from trade towards manufacturing. In the Hisor district near Dushanbe, Belarusian companies assemble MTZ tractors, Gomselmash harvesters and Bobruiskagromash agricultural equipment, allowing Tajik farmers to access machinery adapted to local conditions while supporting domestic production. More than thirty Belarusian distribution companies now operate in the country, reflecting Minsk’s long-term commitment to the Tajik market.

Kyrgyzstan has likewise sought to deepen economic ties. Both governments have adopted ambitious roadmaps to increase bilateral trade, focusing on agriculture, food processing, machinery and logistics. As fellow members of the Eurasian Economic Union, Minsk and Bishkek also benefit from institutional frameworks that facilitate commercial cooperation.

Turkmenistan presents a somewhat different picture. While economic relations remain constrained by Ashgabat’s relatively closed economy, education has emerged as one of the strongest pillars of the bilateral relationship. Around 4,000 Turkmen students are estimated to study in Belarus, particularly in engineering, medicine and technical disciplines. These graduates often return home with professional networks that strengthen long-term cooperation between the two countries.

Soft power without ideology: Tradition as State Legitimacy

Unlike Russia, Türkiye or China, Belarus has never projected influence through grand geopolitical narratives.

Its soft power is considerably quieter.

It is found in universities rather than television channels, engineering schools rather than cultural institutes, and technical cooperation rather than ideological messaging.

Belarusian State University, Belarusian National Technical University and Belarusian State Medical University continue to attract students from across Central Asia, offering Russian-language education, recognised technical qualifications and comparatively affordable tuition.

For many Central Asian families, Belarus represents a practical alternative. It offers a familiar academic environment outside Russia, while maintaining close links with industries that remain highly relevant to Central Asian development.

Education therefore performs several functions simultaneously. It generates revenue for Belarusian universities, strengthens professional networks and creates generations of engineers, doctors and public officials familiar with Belarusian institutions and technologies.

This represents a distinctly Belarusian model of soft power: practical, technocratic and long-term.

Beyond tractors: exporting institutions

Tajikistan follows a different path.

Belarus is also seeking to export institutions alongside industrial products.

One telling example is the growing role of the Belarusian Universal Commodity Exchange (BUCE). In 2025, BUCE signed a cooperation agreement with Kazakhstan’s Caspiy Commodity Exchange, aiming to improve commodity trading, develop electronic trading platforms and facilitate commercial exchanges between Belarus and Central Asia.

While less visible than presidential summits, such initiatives illustrate Minsk’s efforts to integrate itself into the region’s economic architecture.

Belarus has also promoted specialised business forums, including the Belarus-Central Asia Economic Forum held in Brest in 2026, bringing together companies interested in expanding into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Such initiatives demonstrate that Belarus’s eastern engagement is becoming increasingly institutionalised rather than remaining dependent upon political goodwill alone.

A different understanding of Eurasia

Ultimately, however, this story is not simply about Belarus.

It is about Central Asia.

For more than three decades, the region has refined what is often described as a multi-vector foreign policy. Rather than aligning exclusively with one geopolitical centre, Central Asian governments seek productive relations with multiple partners simultaneously.

Russia remains indispensable in security matters.

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

China has become the region’s principal economic partner and infrastructure investor.

Türkiye has significantly expanded its cultural, educational and political presence.

The European Union offers investment, regulatory cooperation and connectivity through initiatives such as the Global Gateway.

Japan and South Korea remain valued partners in technology and industrial development.

Belarus occupies a different niche.

It neither competes with these actors nor seeks to replace them. Instead, it provides industrial expertise, engineering education, agricultural technology and manufacturing partnerships that complement rather than challenge Central Asia’s broader foreign policy strategy.

This helps explain why relations have continued to deepen despite the war in Ukraine.

Central Asian governments have not ignored Belarus’s international isolation. They have simply concluded that practical cooperation remains in their national interest.

Looking east

As Shavkat Mirziyoyev arrives in Minsk, observers will understandably focus on the agreements signed, the trade figures announced and the diplomatic symbolism of the visit.

Yet its broader significance lies elsewhere.

The visit reflects the emergence of a Eurasia whose political geography no longer corresponds neatly to the map of sanctions.

While Europe has largely distanced itself from Belarus, Central Asia has continued to engage it through industry, education, agriculture, regional diplomacy and technical cooperation.

This does not mean that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or their neighbours have chosen Belarus over Europe, or Russia over the West. Quite the opposite. Their continued engagement with Minsk illustrates the essence of multi-vector diplomacy: the refusal to view international relations as a zero-sum choice between competing blocs.

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

For Belarus, Central Asia has become an increasingly important diplomatic and economic outlet at a time when options elsewhere have narrowed. For Central Asia, Belarus remains a useful partner whose industrial capabilities, educational institutions and technical expertise continue to meet concrete national needs.

The geography of sanctions, it turns out, is not the geography of diplomacy.

Belarus did not escape isolation after 2022. But it has worked to avoid irrelevance. By looking east, Minsk has found not a substitute for Europe, but a region willing to judge it less by geopolitical alignment than by practical cooperation. And in an increasingly fragmented international order, that may prove to be one of the most consequential shifts in Eurasian diplomacy that few outside the region have noticed.

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

The post Minsk’s Eastern Bet: Why Central Asia Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Novastan English.

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

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

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Increasingly, however, another vocabulary is emerging.

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

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

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

Beyond Imported Models

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

Central Asia is increasingly doing the same.

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

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

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

Kazakhstan: The Kurultai and the Listening State

Kazakhstan perhaps best illustrates this evolution.

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

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

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

Also read on Novastan: Manas and the Making of Kyrgyzstan

Uzbekistan: The Mahalla Between Community and State

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

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

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

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

Kyrgyzstan: Contesting the Meaning of the Kurultai

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

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

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

Turkmenistan: Tradition as State Legitimacy

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

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

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

Tajikistan: Statehood, Unity and the Persianate Legacy

Tajikistan follows a different path.

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

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

A Region Reimagining Its Past

Taken together, these examples suggest a broader regional phenomenon.

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

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

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

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

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

More Than Words

The emergence of this vocabulary reflects deeper transformations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, temperatures usually exceed thirty degrees in summer. A refreshing break is particularly welcome. The summery colours of the young girl’s outfit in the photograph complement the façades of the houses perfectly.

Credits :  Daria Novikova (Uzbekistan, @dasha.novasha)

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In Khiva, one of Uzbekistan’s most popular tourist destinations, visitors flock to enjoy a panoramic view of the entire city.

Photo credits : Salomé Aldeguer-Roure (France)

Find all of our photos of the day. You can buy some of these and receive them at home: here is the list! If you can't find your picture in the list, mail us to photo@novastan.org.

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Uzbekistan’s first World Cup appearance is often told through the players who carried the national team there: Eldor Shomurodov, Abbosbek Fayzullaev, Abdukodir Khusanov, Oston Urunov and the rest of a generation that made Uzbek football visible far beyond Central Asia. But national teams do not emerge from nowhere. They are built from clubs, cities, stadiums, academies, rivalries and local football cultures.

Over the past three decades, Uzbekistan’s domestic game has developed through several different models. There are old Soviet-era institutions, post-independence regional powers, prestige projects, industrial clubs, state-company teams, academy-driven structures and smaller provincial sides that rarely dominate the headlines but help give the league its geography. Together, they form the football map behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream.

The most famous point on that map is still Pakhtakor Tashkent. No club carries more symbolic weight in Uzbek football. Its name evokes cotton, Soviet Uzbekistan, the capital and one of the deepest tragedies in the country’s sporting memory: the 1979 air disaster that killed the team. Pakhtakor is not only a club with trophies. It is a national institution, a vessel of memory and the historic reference point against which other Uzbek clubs have often measured themselves.

If Pakhtakor is memory, Nasaf Qarshi is one of the clearest examples of regional achievement. Based in Kashkadarya, away from the capital and the Fergana Valley, Nasaf showed that a club outside Tashkent could build patiently, compete seriously and win internationally. Its 2011 AFC Cup victory remains one of the most important achievements in Uzbek club football. Nasaf’s story matters because it is not built around glamour. It is built around structure, continuity and the idea that a regional club can become more than a local project.

Navbahor Namangan represents something different again: popular passion. In the Fergana Valley, football is not only a sport but a form of civic identity. Navbahor’s name, meaning “spring”, gives the club a softer and more poetic image than many of its rivals, but its supporter culture is intense. Namangan’s Markaziy Stadium has become one of the emotional centres of Uzbek football, and Navbahor’s fan base has helped make the club a symbol of regional pride. If Uzbek football has a popular heartland, much of it beats in the Valley.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

Neftchi Fergana adds another layer to that same geography. Where Navbahor expresses Namangan’s football passion, Neftchi represents Fergana’s industrial memory. Founded as Neftyanik and linked to the oil-refining world of Fergana, the club dominated the early years after independence. It shared the first Uzbek league title with Pakhtakor in 1992, then won the championship outright in 1993, 1994 and 1995. Under Yuriy Sarkisyan, who coached the club from the late Soviet period into the post-Soviet era, Neftchi became the first great provincial power of independent Uzbek football.

Bunyodkor Tashkent belongs to another category entirely. Founded in 2005 and rapidly transformed into a prestige project, it tried to make Uzbek football visible through money, infrastructure and global names. Rivaldo came. Zico coached. Luiz Felipe Scolari followed. Samuel Eto’o did not sign, but even the rumour was enough to make international media look at Tashkent. Bunyodkor’s story is brilliant and excessive, but also fragile. It showed both the attraction and the limits of football spectacle in late Karimov-era Uzbekistan.

These five clubs explain much of Uzbek football’s recent history. Pakhtakor is memory. Nasaf is regional achievement. Navbahor is passion. Neftchi is early independence power. Bunyodkor is ambition. But the map does not end there.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

Lokomotiv Tashkent is the most obvious next point. Founded in 2002, the club is closely associated with Uzbekistan Railways, and its nickname, the Railroaders, gives it one of the clearest institutional identities in the country. Lokomotiv became especially important in the mid-2010s, when it broke through as a serious domestic force. After several seasons as runner-up, it won the Uzbek league in 2016, 2017 and 2018, turning a railway-backed club into one of the strongest teams of the period. If Bunyodkor was the glamour project, Lokomotiv was the state-company model in a more disciplined form: less spectacular, but highly effective for several years.

AGMK, from Almalyk, shows another version of the industrial club. Its name comes from the Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Combine, the company that has been central to the club’s identity and sponsorship. Almalyk itself is one of Uzbekistan’s major industrial towns, associated with mining, metallurgy and copper. AGMK therefore belongs to the same broad family as Neftchi and Lokomotiv: clubs whose football identity is inseparable from a major economic institution. Its importance is not only sporting. It shows how Uzbek football has often developed through the relationship between local industry, company patronage and regional visibility.

Sogdiana Jizzakh gives the map a historical and regional dimension. Founded in 1970, the club takes its name from Sogdia, the ancient region that once connected Central Asia to wider Eurasian trade, culture and empire. In football terms, Sogdiana has rarely dominated Uzbekistan, but it has mattered as a durable provincial club. Its 1992 bronze medal in the first season of the independent Uzbek league and its 2021 runner-up finish show that Jizzakh has periodically produced teams capable of challenging the established hierarchy. Sogdiana is not a giant, but it gives Uzbek football one of its strongest historical names.

Mash’al Mubarek represents yet another kind of provincial football. Based in Mubarek, a town located in Kashkadarya associated with the gas industry, the club’s name means “torch”. That symbolism matters: in a football landscape full of cotton, oil, railways, metallurgy and construction, Mash’al carries the image of gas, flame and energy. Its greatest domestic achievement came in 2005, when it finished second in the Uzbek league behind Pakhtakor and qualified for the AFC Champions League. Mash’al has not become a permanent national power, but it remains a reminder that even smaller industrial towns have produced important chapters in Uzbek football.

Andijan brings the map back to the Fergana Valley. The club has not had the same national success as Navbahor or Neftchi, but it gives the Valley another emotional football centre. In many countries, football geography is not only shaped by champions. It is also shaped by cities whose clubs carry local loyalty through difficult seasons, relegations and returns. Andijan belongs to that category: a club whose importance is regional, social and emotional more than trophy-based. In the wider story of Uzbek football, it helps show why the Fergana Valley is not one football identity, but several competing city identities.

Surkhon Termez pushes the map south. Termez, on the Afghan border, occupies a very different place in Uzbekistan’s geography and imagination from Tashkent, Namangan or Qarshi. Surkhon’s role in Uzbek football is not primarily about trophies. It is about representation. A league that includes Termez is a league that reaches the country’s southern frontier, connecting football to a borderland city shaped by trade, military routes, religion, archaeology and proximity to Afghanistan. Surkhon gives Uzbek football a southern edge.

Also read on Novastan: Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map

There are others too. Metallurg Bekabad (Tashkent region) reflects another industrial city and another metallurgy-linked identity. Kokand 1912 carries one of the oldest and most evocative city names in Uzbek football, rooted in the history of the Kokand Khanate and the Fergana Valley’s cultural geography. Qizilqum Zarafshon adds the mining landscape of the Kyzylkum desert and the gold-producing world of Navoi Region. Turon Yaypan (Fergana region) and other smaller clubs show how the football map continues to expand and contract as money, promotion, relegation and local support shift from season to season.

This diversity matters because Uzbek football is sometimes reduced to a national-team story or to a few famous names abroad. Shomurodov in Italy, Khusanov in England, Fayzullaev in Russia and other players in foreign leagues are now the most visible symbols of the country’s rise. But behind them stands a domestic structure that is more complicated than a simple talent pipeline. It includes Soviet legacies, regional pride, industrial sponsorship, state-company backing, academy projects, local administrations and fan cultures that vary sharply from city to city.

That structure has not always been stable. Uzbek clubs have often depended on powerful sponsors, state-linked companies or regional authorities. Budgets can rise and fall. Ownership can be opaque. Teams can surge quickly and decline just as quickly. Bunyodkor’s rise and fall showed the risks of spectacle. Neftchi’s long decline after its golden age showed how difficult it is to maintain dominance. Lokomotiv’s mid-2010s success showed how quickly a well-supported club can become a domestic force, but also how hard it is to turn a strong cycle into permanent mythology.

Yet this instability is also part of the story. Uzbek football has been built through experimentation. Some clubs have relied on memory. Some on fans. Some on factories. Some on railways. Some on academies. Some on local government. Some on the charisma of a coach or the ambition of a sponsor. The result is uneven, but it is not empty. It has produced institutions, rivalries and football environments that helped prepare the ground for the current generation.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

The World Cup moment gives this domestic map new meaning. For years, Uzbekistan was one of Asian football’s nearly teams: technically strong, competitive, respected, but repeatedly falling short of the final step. Qualification changes the story. It allows the country to look back and ask not only which players made history, but which clubs, cities and football cultures helped make those players possible.

In that sense, the road to the World Cup did not begin only in national-team camps. It passed through Pakhtakor’s memory, Nasaf’s discipline, Navbahor’s crowds, Neftchi’s industrial Fergana, Bunyodkor’s academy fields, Lokomotiv’s railway-backed structure, AGMK’s metallurgical city, Sogdiana’s Jizzakh, Mash’al’s gas-town football, Andijan’s Valley loyalty and Surkhon’s southern frontier.

Uzbekistan’s football map is therefore not a straight line from Tashkent to the World Cup. It is a network. It runs through cotton, oil, gas, railways, mining towns, ancient cities, border regions and stadiums where local pride is turned into football identity. That is what makes the country’s first World Cup appearance more than a national-team success. It is the result of a football culture built across many Uzbekistans: capital and province, industry and academy, memory and ambition, spectacle and patience.

The next question is whether this moment can strengthen the clubs themselves. World Cup qualification can inspire young players, attract more attention to the domestic league, and make football more attractive to sponsors and families. But it can also widen the gap between the national team’s global visibility and the domestic league’s everyday realities. The challenge for Uzbekistan will be to use the World Cup not only as a celebration, but as a catalyst: better academies, better coaching, stronger governance, more transparent club structures and stadium cultures that can grow beyond occasional big matches.

If that happens, the clubs behind the World Cup dream will not remain only background stories. They will become part of Uzbekistan’s next football chapter. The country has reached the World Cup. Now its domestic game has to decide what kind of football nation it wants to become.

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

The post Beyond the big clubs: the football map behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream appeared first on Novastan English.

Special series – The Clubs Behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup Dream

As Uzbekistan plays in its first-ever FIFA World Cup after a historic qualification campaign, Novastan looks at the clubs that shaped the country’s football identity. From Soviet-era Pakhtakor Tashkent to regional powerhouses such as Nasaf Qarshi, Navbahor Namangan and Neftchi Fergana, this series explores how club football helped build the foundations of the White Wolves’ rise.

In 2008, Uzbek football briefly became one of the strangest stories in the global game. A young Tashkent club, only three years old, claimed it was close to signing Samuel Eto’o from Barcelona, actually signed Rivaldo, hired Zico, and then brought in Luiz Felipe Scolari, Brazil’s 2002 World Cup-winning coach. Its name was Bunyodkor, meaning “creator” or “builder”, and for a few years it seemed to offer a new idea: that Uzbek football could force its way into international visibility through money, infrastructure and famous names.

Bunyodkor is unlike the other clubs in this series. Pakhtakor Tashkent carries Soviet memory and national tragedy. Nasaf Qarshi represents regional achievement and Asian success. Navbahor Namangan embodies popular passion in the Fergana Valley. Neftchi Fergana recalls the early years of independent Uzbek football. Bunyodkor belongs to a different category. It was not an old community club or a regional football institution. It was a project: fast, ambitious, spectacular and deeply tied to the political economy of late Karimov-era Uzbekistan.

The club was founded on 6 July 2005 as Neftgazmontaj-Quruvchi, usually shortened to Kuruvchi, meaning “builder”. The name reflected its origins in construction and energy-linked structures. In 2008, after rapid sporting success, the club was renamed Bunyodkor. The new name, often translated as “creator” or “builder”, suited its self-image. This was a club built quickly, with the aim of doing quickly what most football institutions take decades to achieve.

Its rise was immediate. After starting in the lower divisions, Bunyodkor moved rapidly through Uzbek football. It finished second in the 2007 Uzbek League, then won the championship in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013. It also won the Uzbek Cup four times, in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, and the Uzbek Super Cup in 2014. In less than a decade, it became one of the most decorated clubs of independent Uzbek football.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

But domestic success alone was not what made Bunyodkor famous. The turning point came in 2008, when the club tried to place itself in the global football conversation. The first episode was Samuel Eto’o. Kuruvchi publicly claimed that it had signed the Barcelona striker on a short-term contract. Eto’o travelled to Tashkent and gave a skills session, but the transfer never happened. Barcelona denied that a completed deal existed, and Eto’o remained in Europe. The episode mattered less because Eto’o played for the club – he did not – than because it showed Bunyodkor’s new method: using global football names to make the world look at Tashkent.

Rivaldo was different. He actually came. In August 2008, the Brazilian World Cup winner and former Ballon d’Or winner left AEK Athens for Bunyodkor. Reports described the contract as one of the most lucrative ever offered by a Central Asian club. For an Uzbek club, this was extraordinary. Rivaldo’s arrival gave Bunyodkor instant global recognition. For the first time, a club from Uzbekistan was not being discussed only in Asian football circles, but in the international sports press.

His presence was more than symbolic. Rivaldo played for Bunyodkor between 2008 and 2010, scored regularly and became the club’s international face. He brought glamour, but also credibility. The idea of an Uzbek club employing a player who had won the World Cup with Brazil and starred for Barcelona would have sounded impossible only a few years earlier. Bunyodkor made it real.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

The club then added another Brazilian legend, this time on the bench. Zico arrived as head coach in September 2008. His stay was brief, but successful. Under him, Bunyodkor won the Uzbek league and cup double and reached the semi-finals of the AFC Champions League. That continental run was important because it showed that the project was not only spectacle. Bunyodkor could also compete seriously in Asia.

In 2009, the club went further by appointing Luiz Felipe Scolari. Scolari had led Brazil to the 2002 World Cup and had recently left Chelsea. In Tashkent, he was reunited with Rivaldo, one of the stars of his World Cup-winning Brazil side. His contract was reported to make him one of the world’s best-paid football managers at the time. Bunyodkor’s domestic dominance continued, but the experiment did not last. Scolari left in 2010, less than a year into his contract, and Rivaldo also departed that year.

The money behind this period remains central to the story. Officially, Bunyodkor’s early sponsors were linked to construction and oil-gas structures, and later to state-linked companies such as Uztransgaz. During the Rivaldo and Scolari years, international reporting connected the club’s big-spending model to the opaque political economy of Karimov-era Uzbekistan, including companies and elite networks close to the presidential family. The precise ownership and financing arrangements were never fully transparent, and that opacity is part of the club’s history. Bunyodkor was not only a football club with rich sponsors; it was a product of a specific political moment, when energy money, elite business networks, international branding and football spectacle briefly came together.

When the money became less reliable, the illusion of unlimited ambition faded quickly. Rivaldo later pursued unpaid wages. Scolari left. Zeromax ran into serious trouble. Bunyodkor remained an important Uzbek club, but the era when it could plausibly attract Brazil’s biggest football names was over.

The club’s stadium tells a parallel story. Bunyodkor initially played at smaller Tashkent venues, including the MHSK and JAR stadiums. In 2012, the new Bunyodkor Stadium opened in Tashkent with a capacity of around 34,000 spectators. Later renamed Milliy Stadium, although the Bunyodkor name has remained closely associated with the venue, it became one of Uzbekistan’s main football arenas and an important home for the national team. The stadium gave the club a physical monument to its ambitions: modern, large and clearly designed to project national football confidence.

Bunyodkor’s nicknames also reveal how it wanted to be seen. The club is commonly known as Qaldirg‘ochlar, “the Swallows”, a nickname that gives it a more elegant and modern identity than the industrial or regional names of many older Uzbek clubs. It has also been called the “Asian Barcelona”, a label linked to the club’s attempted relationship with Barcelona, its Brazilian stars and its dream of becoming a stylish continental power. These labels matter because Bunyodkor was always more than a team on the pitch. It was also a brand, a projection of ambition and a claim that Uzbek football could belong in a wider global conversation.

Also read on Novastan: Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map

Yet Bunyodkor’s fan identity is more complicated than that of clubs such as Navbahor or Neftchi. Navbahor has the emotional weight of Namangan. Neftchi has Fergana’s industrial memory and early independence dominance. Pakhtakor has generations of Soviet and post-Soviet supporters. Bunyodkor is younger and more constructed. Its fans are mostly Tashkent-based and linked to a newer football culture: urban, stadium-centred, and associated with the club’s years of success rather than with decades of inherited loyalty.

This does not mean the club lacks supporters. Bunyodkor’s rise, stars, stadium and trophies gave it visibility, especially among younger fans in Tashkent. But its supporter culture has never carried the same mythology as Pakhtakor’s tragedy, Navbahor’s packed stands in Namangan or Neftchi’s Sarkisyan-era memory. Bunyodkor’s fan base is a product of modern Uzbek football: newer, more media-driven, and shaped by success, branding and academy football.

The club’s place in popular culture is also different. Pakhtakor has been celebrated in songs and public memory. Navbahor’s culture lives strongly through supporters, fan pages and stadium chants. For Bunyodkor, there does not appear to be a clearly documented famous pop song comparable to Pakhtakor’s songs by well-known Uzbek performers. Its pop-cultural footprint comes instead from spectacle: the astonishing arrival of Rivaldo, the Eto’o episode, Scolari in Tashkent, the “Asian Barcelona” label, and the image of a club that briefly made Uzbekistan visible in global football gossip.

That may be Bunyodkor’s most distinctive cultural role. It did not enter Uzbek popular culture mainly through music or folklore. It entered it through headlines. For a few years, the club made people ask: how could Rivaldo be in Tashkent? Could Eto’o really come? Why was Scolari coaching in Uzbekistan? Bunyodkor became a football story that sounded almost unreal, and that unreality was part of its appeal.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

There were also real footballers behind the spectacle. Mirjalol Qosimov, one of Uzbekistan’s great football figures, coached the club before and after the Brazilian era and helped give it a domestic football identity. Server Djeparov, one of the best Uzbek players of his generation and a two-time Asian Footballer of the Year, played for Bunyodkor. Rivaldo brought global fame, but players like Qosimov and Djeparov connected the club to Uzbek football’s own hierarchy of talent and authority.

Bunyodkor also became part of the careers of players who now define Uzbekistan’s World Cup generation. Eldor Shomurodov played for Bunyodkor from 2015 to 2017 before moving to Rostov in Russia, the transfer that opened the path to Serie A and later to his role as Uzbekistan’s captain. Abdukodir Khusanov, now one of the most internationally visible Uzbek players after his move to Manchester City, also passed through Bunyodkor’s academy before leaving for Belarus and then moving through Lens to English football. In this sense, Bunyodkor’s future may be more important than its past glamour: not as a club that buys stars, but as a club that helps produce them.

This is where the hope for the future lies. Bunyodkor is unlikely to repeat the Rivaldo-Scolari moment. That period belonged to a specific political and financial environment that no longer exists in the same form. But the club still has assets that matter: a recognised name, a major stadium environment, an academy tradition, experience in Asian competitions and a place in the capital’s football ecosystem. If it builds from youth development rather than spectacle, Bunyodkor can remain important to Uzbek football in a more sustainable way.

The club’s recent position suggests a more modest but potentially healthier phase. It is no longer the overwhelming force of 2008-2013, and it no longer looks like a club trying to buy global attention. But that may not be a weakness. Bunyodkor’s next chapter could be less glamorous and more useful: developing young players, competing domestically, returning to Asian relevance and contributing to the national team’s talent pipeline.

That would also change the meaning of its name. “Bunyodkor” means builder. In the late 2000s, the club tried to build international prestige from the top down, with money, names and spectacle. In the future, it may have to build differently: from academy fields, coaching structures, scouting and patience.

This is why Bunyodkor belongs in a series about the clubs behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream. Not because it is the deepest-rooted club in the country, and not because its big-money years offer a model to copy. It matters because it shows one of the boldest and most contradictory experiments in Uzbek football history. It brought global attention to Tashkent. It produced real trophies. It reached the AFC Champions League semi-finals. It revealed the risks of opaque money and prestige politics. And, through players such as Shomurodov and Khusanov, it still connects to the generation carrying Uzbekistan onto the World Cup stage.

Pakhtakor is memory. Nasaf is regional achievement. Navbahor is passion. Neftchi is early independence power. Bunyodkor is ambition – brilliant, excessive, fragile, and still unfinished.

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

The post Bunyodkor Tashkent: the prestige project that tried to put Uzbek football on the world map appeared first on Novastan English.

Special series – The Clubs Behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup Dream

As Uzbekistan plays in its first-ever FIFA World Cup after a historic qualification campaign, Novastan looks at the clubs that shaped the country’s football identity. From Soviet-era Pakhtakor Tashkent to regional powerhouses such as Nasaf Qarshi, Navbahor Namangan and Neftchi Fergana, this series explores how club football helped build the foundations of the White Wolves’ rise.

In the first years after Uzbekistan’s independence, the strongest club in the country was not always Pakhtakor Tashkent. For much of the 1990s, Uzbek football revolved around Fergana, where a team born from the oil industry became the first great provincial power of the new national league.

That team was Neftchi Fergana. Founded in 1962 as Neftyanik and renamed Neftchi after independence, the club carried the world of Fergana’s industrial economy into football. Its name means “oil worker” or “oilman”, a direct reference to the city’s refinery, chemical production and working-class sporting culture. If Pakhtakor’s name evokes cotton and Soviet Uzbekistan, Neftchi’s evokes oil, labour and the industrial pride of the Fergana Valley.

The club’s importance lies above all in what it achieved after 1991. Neftchi shared the first independent Uzbek league title with Pakhtakor in 1992, then won the championship outright in 1993, 1994 and 1995. It added another title in 2001. In the formative decade of Uzbek football, Neftchi was not an outsider challenging the hierarchy. It was the hierarchy.

The roots of that dominance go back to the Soviet period. Neftyanik Fergana spent years in the Soviet lower leagues, developing within sports structures linked to the region’s oil industry. In 1990, it won its Soviet Second League zone and reached the Soviet First League. In 1991, the final year of Soviet football, it finished seventh in that division. When Uzbekistan became independent, Neftchi entered the new national championship with organisation, confidence and a squad already used to competitive football.

The figure who connected these eras was Yuriy Sarkisyan. Born in Yerevan, Sarkisyan made his football life in Uzbekistan. He joined Neftyanik as a player in the 1970s, finished his playing career in Fergana, and later became head coach. From 1987 to 2013, he led the club for more than a quarter of a century, an almost unimaginable tenure in post-Soviet football.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

Sarkisyan was more than a successful coach. He became the face of Neftchi’s golden age. Under his leadership, the club won five Uzbek league titles, two Uzbek Cups and nine silver medals. Local football media often called him the “Uzbek Ferguson”, a comparison to Sir Alex Ferguson that reflected not only his trophies, but his longevity, authority and ability to build a club culture over decades.

His approach also shaped Neftchi’s identity. Sarkisyan relied heavily on domestic and local players rather than building the team around foreign signings. That made Neftchi feel like a Fergana club in a deeper sense: not only based in the city, but built from its football environment. At a time when many post-Soviet clubs were unstable, changing names, sponsors, budgets and squads, Neftchi had a recognisable structure and a coach who became an institution.

The 1990s side became the foundation of the club’s legend. Neftchi’s early champions were not only title winners; they helped define the new Uzbek league. The club’s squads included players who would become important figures in Uzbek football, including Andrey Fyodorov, later one of the country’s best-known defenders and coaches, and Oleg Shatskikh, who passed through Neftchi before becoming associated with other major clubs. The team also relied on players from Fergana and the wider valley, reinforcing its regional character.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

For supporters, Neftchi’s strength was not only about results. It was about the feeling that Fergana could stand at the centre of national football. The early years after independence were a moment of reordering, when cities, institutions and regions were looking for their place in a new state. Neftchi gave Fergana a football voice at precisely that moment.

The club’s home today is Istiqlol Stadium, opened in 2015 with a capacity of around 20,500 spectators. The name means “independence”, which suits Neftchi better than almost any other Uzbek club. Its greatest period came when independent Uzbekistan’s football institutions were being born. The stadium is therefore not only a modern arena, but a reminder of the era that made the club famous.

Fergana itself gives the team much of its meaning. The city is one of the main urban centres of the Fergana Valley, long associated with oil refining, chemicals, textiles and regional production. Around it lies one of Central Asia’s richest cultural landscapes: Margilan and its silk traditions, Rishtan and its ceramics, Kokand and the memory of the khanate. Neftchi belongs to that setting: industrial, regional, confident and deeply connected to the valley.

This identity sets it apart from the other clubs in this series. Pakhtakor Tashkent carries Soviet memory and national tragedy. Nasaf Qarshi represents regional ambition and Asian success. Navbahor Namangan expresses popular passion and supporter culture. Neftchi represents the first post-independence football order: disciplined, industrial, local and built around a coach who became part of the club’s mythology.

Its rivalries reflect that history. Matches against Pakhtakor were among the defining fixtures of the early Uzbek league, opposing the capital’s historic club to Fergana’s rising power. Matches against Navbahor Namangan carry the internal geography of the Fergana Valley. Navbahor represents Namangan’s emotional football culture; Neftchi represents Fergana’s industrial memory and early dominance. Their rivalry is not only about points, but about prestige between neighbouring cities.

Yet Neftchi’s story is not one of uninterrupted glory. After the 2001 title, the club gradually lost ground. Pakhtakor reasserted itself. Bunyodkor became the prestige project of the late 2000s. Nasaf developed its own regional model and won the AFC Cup. Neftchi, once the symbol of the new Uzbek league, began to look like a club living more on memory than on present success.

Also read on Novastan: Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map

The decline became severe enough for the club to spend time outside the top flight, a painful fall for a team that had once shaped the championship. That is why its recent revival matters. Neftchi’s return to the top of Uzbek football in 2025 was not simply another sporting success. It restored one of the original names of the independent Uzbek league to the centre of the domestic game.

The 2025 championship ended a 24-year wait. In Fergana, it was received as more than a trophy. It was the return of a club that had once made the city central to Uzbek football. Local media and regional officials presented the achievement as a source of pride, linking it to a wider ambition to strengthen football in the region. The title showed that Neftchi was not only a nostalgic reference to the 1990s. It could again shape the present.

The institutional context also remains important. Neftchi has long been closely connected to Fergana’s industrial and regional structures, above all through the oil-refining economy that gave the club its name and identity. Like many Uzbek clubs, it sits at the intersection of sport, local administration, industrial support and regional prestige. Its story is therefore not only about football results, but also about the way regional institutions, industries and local pride have helped shape club football in Uzbekistan.

Its present-day squad also gives it a link to the wider national-team environment. Goalkeeper Botirali Ergashev, who has been called up by Uzbekistan and plays for Neftchi Fergana, connects the club to the country’s current football generation. But Neftchi’s deeper contribution is historical rather than symbolic. The club helped create the competitive domestic culture from which Uzbek football developed.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

That is why the club deserves a central place in any account of Uzbekistan’s football rise. It was there at the beginning of the independent league. It gave Fergana a national football voice. It had one of the longest and most successful coaching eras in post-Soviet football. It rose, declined, rebuilt and returned. Few Uzbek clubs offer such a complete football biography.

Neftchi’s story contains several layers of modern Uzbek football: the Soviet legacy, the first years of independence, regional ambition, industrial sponsorship, coaching continuity, collapse and revival. It is not only a club of the past, nor simply a revived champion of the present. It is a bridge between both.

As Uzbekistan steps onto the World Cup stage, Neftchi reminds us that national football identities are built over decades, often far from the spotlight. They are built in cities like Fergana, through clubs that give local pride a structure, a history and a stadium.

The road to Uzbekistan’s first World Cup passed through many places: Tashkent, Qarshi, Namangan, foreign leagues and national-team camps. But it also passed through Fergana, through Neftchi, and through the long shadow of Yuriy Sarkisyan, the coach who turned an oil-workers’ club into one of the founding powers of independent Uzbek football.

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

The post Neftchi Fergana: the oil-workers’ club that dominated early Uzbek football appeared first on Novastan English.

Special series – The Clubs Behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup Dream

As Uzbekistan plays in its first-ever FIFA World Cup after a historic qualification campaign, Novastan looks at the clubs that shaped the country’s football identity. From Soviet-era Pakhtakor Tashkent to regional powerhouses such as Nasaf Qarshi, Navbahor Namangan and Neftchi Fergana, this series explores how club football helped build the foundations of the White Wolves’ rise.

If Pakhtakor Tashkent carries Uzbek football’s memory and Nasaf Qarshi represents its modern regional ambition, Navbahor Namangan explains why the game has such emotional depth outside the capital. Based in one of Uzbekistan’s largest cities and one of the main centres of the Fergana Valley, Navbahor is not only a football club. It is Namangan’s public football identity: a club of local pride, strong support and regional self-confidence.

As Uzbekistan plays in its first-ever FIFA World Cup, attention naturally falls on the national team’s most visible stars: Eldor Shomurodov, Abdukodir Khusanov, Abbosbek Fayzullaev and Fabio Cannavaro, the Italian World Cup winner now leading the White Wolves. But behind the national team’s breakthrough lies a domestic football culture built in cities and regions across the country. Namangan is one of those places, and Navbahor is one of the clubs that explain why Uzbek football is not simply a Tashkent story.

The World Cup link is direct. Goalkeeper Utkir Yusupov, one of the players named in Uzbekistan’s 2026 World Cup squad, has been associated with Navbahor and returned to the club after playing abroad. His presence connects Namangan to the national-team story at a moment when the White Wolves are stepping onto the global stage for the first time. But Navbahor’s importance goes beyond one player. It lies in what the club represents: the idea that football in Uzbekistan is rooted in regional cities, local loyalties and stadium cultures that have developed far from the administrative centre.

Navbahor was founded in 1978 under the name Tekstilshchik, a name that reflected the Soviet-era connection between football clubs, local industries and institutions. The club later became Navbahor, a name usually understood as “new spring”. In the years before and after independence, the club also appeared under names such as Avtomobilist and Novbahor before settling into its current identity. The changes say something about the post-Soviet world in which Uzbek football developed: clubs were not only sporting teams, but institutions shaped by industry, administration, city identity and national transition.

Navbahor is not just a popular regional club. It is one of the historic names of post-Soviet Uzbek football. Since the creation of the independent Uzbek league in 1992, it has remained one of the few clubs, alongside Pakhtakor and Neftchi, to have played every season in the top division. This continuity matters. It means that Navbahor is not a passing regional enthusiasm, but one of the permanent structures of Uzbek football.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

The club quickly became one of the leading sides of the independent era. It won the Uzbek Cup in 1992, 1995 and 1998, became national champion in 1996, and won the Uzbek Super Cup in 1999. In Asia, Navbahor reached the semi-finals of the Asian Cup Winners’ Cup in the 1999-2000 season, one of the club’s strongest continental results. These honours gave Navbahor a firm place in the early history of independent Uzbek football.

The 1996 league title remains a key moment. It showed that Uzbek football’s post-independence order was not fixed only around Tashkent or Fergana. Namangan, too, could produce a champion. For supporters, the title became part of a local memory of pride and possibility. For the national football map, it helped establish the Fergana Valley as one of the country’s strongest football regions.

Namangan itself gives the club much of its meaning. It is one of Uzbekistan’s largest cities and one of the main urban centres of the Fergana Valley, a densely populated region where local identities are especially strong. The city is known for gardens, flowers and public celebrations, especially the Namangan International Flower Festival, which has become one of its most recognisable events. It is also associated with crafts, trade, light industry and a strong sense of local identity within the valley. In this context, Navbahor is more than a football team: it is one of the ways Namangan becomes visible to the rest of Uzbekistan.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

Namangan’s cultural profile also helps explain why the club’s identity feels larger than sport. The city is associated with figures such as the poet Usmon Nosir, one of the important voices of twentieth-century Uzbek literature, and with popular singers including Samandar Hamroqulov and Muhriddin Xoliqov. These references matter not because they are directly linked to the club, but because they show that Navbahor comes from a city with its own cultural confidence, not from a peripheral football town waiting to be defined by Tashkent.

Navbahor’s home is Markaziy Stadium in Namangan, one of the important regional football arenas in Uzbekistan. Originally built with a larger capacity, it was renovated in the early 2010s and reopened in 2014 as an all-seater stadium with around 22,000 seats. The renovation matters because it gave the club a modernised regional stage at a time when Uzbek football was becoming more professional and more media-visible. In a city where local pride is strong, the stadium is not only a sports venue; it is one of the places where Namangan presents itself nationally.

That supporter culture is one of the reasons the club stands out. Markaziy Stadium is often described as one of the most attended football venues in Uzbekistan, and Navbahor’s home matches have a reputation for drawing full or near-full crowds. In a national league where not every club can rely on a large match-going public, this makes Navbahor distinctive: the club is not only followed, it is physically present in the city’s weekly life.

Around Uzbek stadiums, football is also part of a wider social ritual, with food stalls, local snacks and the familiar smells of plov, samsa, manti, lagman and fresh bread forming part of the matchday environment. For Navbahor, this should not be understood as an official tradition, but as part of the social setting of football in the Fergana Valley: a match is a public gathering as much as a sporting event.

Navbahor’s identity is also carried by its symbols. Supporters often refer to the club as Lochinlar or Sapsanlar – the Falcons, or Peregrine Falcons. The image fits the club’s reputation: fast, proud, regional and difficult to domesticate. Rather than a single widely documented official mascot, Navbahor’s symbolic world is built around this bird imagery, the red-and-white colours, the city of Namangan and the energy of its supporters.

The club’s cultural presence is therefore more fan-based than celebrity-based. Unlike Pakhtakor, which has entered Uzbek pop culture through songs by well-known performers, Navbahor’s soundscape is closer to the stadium: chants, supporter videos, fan pages and the repeated use of falcon imagery. The club’s culture is produced less by national pop stars than by the crowd itself.

Also read on Novastan: Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map

Navbahor’s rivalries give the club further weight. Its matches against Neftchi Fergana and Andijan are part of the “Derby of the Valley”, a rivalry between the main football centres of Namangan, Fergana and Andijan. These games matter because they are not only sporting contests. They express the internal geography of the Fergana Valley, where neighbouring cities are close enough to share a regional identity but distinct enough to compete for prestige.

Games against Pakhtakor Tashkent, meanwhile, oppose the emotional force of a regional club to the prestige of the capital’s historic institution. In recent years, matches against Nasaf Qarshi and other ambitious regional clubs have also reflected a broader shift in Uzbek football: the challenge to Tashkent’s long-standing centrality.

Navbahor’s institutional structure also reflects the way many Uzbek clubs operate. Publicly available reporting presents the club less as a privately owned Western European-style football company than as an institution linked to regional administration, local football structures and sponsors. In 2021, Namangan Pravda reported that Otabek Samatov had become president of FC Navbahor, adding that the post had traditionally been held by the hokim of Namangan city. In 2025, Zamin.uz reported that Anvarjon Tojimirzayev, hokim of Namangan’s Davlatabad district, had been appointed club president at a meeting attended by the hokim of Namangan Region, who also headed the regional football association. In February 2026, Tribuna.uz again described Tojimirzayev as both Davlatabad district hokim and president of Navbahor during a meeting on club and stadium management changes. This gives Navbahor a public-regional character rather than the profile of a purely private club.

The club has also relied on sponsors and public support. In February 2024, Namangan Pravda reported that the electronic trading platform E-AUKSION had become Navbahor’s title sponsor for the season. A few weeks earlier, Gazeta.uz reported that Namangan regional hokim Shavkatjon Abdurazzoqov had allocated 2.5 billion soums (about €181,003) to the club from the reserve fund of the regional budget. Kursiv, citing the same public decision-making trail, reported that the money was allocated in two tranches, 500 million (about €36,201) and 2 billion soums (about €144,803), for football development in the region and the restoration of Navbahor’s financial position. Together, these sources show how Navbahor sits at the intersection of sponsorship, regional administration and local football prestige.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

The clearest sign of Navbahor’s attempt to professionalise is its new partnership with Ajax. In June 2026, Ajax announced that Navbahor had joined its international football network, with the Dutch club supporting the development and coordination of Navbahor’s youth academy through Ajax’s football philosophy and methodology. Uzbek reporting presented the agreement as a step toward aligning the Navbahor academy with international standards and bringing Ajax’s training approach to young players in Namangan. For a club often described through passion and local pride, the Ajax partnership adds another layer: Navbahor is trying to turn regional energy into a more structured development model.

Navbahor’s history is also linked to several important players and coaches. In the 1990s, the club’s title-winning period was associated with coaches such as Viktor Jalilov and Sharif Nazarov, while players from that era helped establish Navbahor as one of the first serious challengers in the independent Uzbek league. More recently, goalkeeper Utkir Yusupov connected the club to Uzbekistan’s first World Cup squad. The appointment of former Uzbekistan international Timur Kapadze as head coach also gives Navbahor a current national-team resonance: the club is not only a historical name, but part of the country’s contemporary football conversation.

Navbahor’s story also says something about the relationship between football and demography. Namangan is one of Uzbekistan’s major cities, and the Fergana Valley is one of the most densely populated regions of Central Asia. A strong club there is not just a sporting asset. It is a social institution, giving local identity a public form. When Navbahor plays, it is not only a team on the pitch. It is a city and a region seeing themselves represented.

This is why Navbahor deserves its own place in this series. Uzbekistan’s World Cup qualification is often told through elite players abroad, through Shomurodov in Türkiye, Khusanov in England, Fayzullaev’s rise and Cannavaro’s global name. But the emotional depth of Uzbek football comes from places like Namangan. It comes from supporters who built attachments to clubs long before the national team reached the World Cup.

Navbahor also helps explain why Uzbek football has national resonance. A football culture cannot be built only through academies, transfers and professional leagues. It also needs places where people care. Namangan is one of those places. Navbahor gives that care a colour, a name and a stadium.

As Uzbekistan steps onto the World Cup stage, Navbahor’s role is therefore symbolic as much as sporting. It reminds us that the White Wolves’ rise is not only the result of a golden generation or an imported coach. It is also the product of regional football cultures, local pride and stadiums where supporters learned to see football as part of who they are.

This is why Navbahor is more than the “passionate club” of Uzbek football. It is the football expression of a major regional city. Namangan has population, cultural confidence, public festivals, economic activity and a strong sense of place. Navbahor gives all of that a weekly form. When the club plays, it is not only competing for points; it is representing a city that wants to be seen, heard and respected within Uzbekistan’s national football map.

If Pakhtakor is the memory of Uzbek football and Nasaf is its modern regional proof, Navbahor is its heartbeat. It is the club that shows why Uzbek football matters not only in the capital, but in the valley, in the city, in the stands and in the emotional geography of the country.

The road to the World Cup did not begin only in Tashkent, Qarshi or Europe’s professional leagues. It also passed through Namangan, through Markaziy Stadium, through the red and white of Navbahor, and through a city that has long made football part of its identity.

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

The post Navbahor Namangan: the Fergana Valley’s football heartbeat appeared first on Novastan English.

Just like their human owners, domestic cats have their own distinctive characteristics in every region of the world. Genetic analyses have revealed that the domesticated species (Felis catus) most likely spread from the Near East to Asia through trade along the Silk Roads. It did not finally reach China until around the 8th century AD. Khiva, Uzbekistan.

Credit : Margaret Bullich (Germany)

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Special series – The Clubs Behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup Dream

As Uzbekistan plays in its first-ever FIFA World Cup after a historic qualification campaign, Novastan looks at the clubs that shaped the country’s football identity. From Soviet-era Pakhtakor Tashkent to regional powerhouses such as Nasaf Qarshi, Navbahor Namangan and Neftchi Fergana, this series explores how club football helped build the foundations of the White Wolves’ rise.

If Pakhtakor Tashkent carries Uzbek football’s memory, Nasaf Qarshi represents its modern regional ambition. The club from Qarshi, in the southern region of Qashqadaryo, has become one of the clearest examples of how Uzbek football moved beyond the capital and built a wider national geography.

As Uzbekistan makes its first appearance at the FIFA World Cup, attention naturally falls on the national team’s most visible names: Eldor Shomurodov, Abdukodir Khusanov, Abbosbek Fayzullaev and Fabio Cannavaro, the Italian World Cup winner now leading the White Wolves. But behind that national breakthrough lies an ecosystem of clubs that developed players, created competitive pressure and gave Uzbek football its domestic foundation. Nasaf is central to that story.

The World Cup may be new for Uzbekistan, but Nasaf’s role in the country’s football rise is not. Current national-team goalkeeper Abduvohid Nematov and defender Umar Eshmurodov both connect the club directly to Uzbekistan’s first World Cup squad, while Nasaf has also become known for developing and giving responsibility to Uzbek players at a high competitive level. In a football culture long associated with Tashkent’s dominance, Nasaf showed that a club from Qarshi could win at home, compete in Asia and become a national reference point.

Nasaf was founded in 1986 under the name Geolog, a reminder of the Soviet and industrial context in which many clubs across the region were created. Like other post-Soviet teams, its early identity reflected local institutions, economic structures and regional life as much as sport itself. The club later became known as Nasaf, a name linked to the historical name of the Qarshi area, connecting the team to a deeper local geography.

That geography matters. Qarshi is not Tashkent. It is not the political, administrative or media centre of Uzbekistan. Located in Qashqadaryo, in the south of the country, it sits in a region associated with energy, agriculture, industry and routes towards the wider south. For a club from Qarshi to become one of Uzbekistan’s leading football institutions means that Uzbek football cannot be understood only through the capital.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

Nasaf’s home is Markaziy Stadium, also known as Nasaf Stadium, in Qarshi. Built in the 2000s and holding around 21,000 spectators, it became one of the most important football arenas outside Tashkent. Its most famous night came on 29 October 2011, when Nasaf hosted the AFC Cup final against Kuwait SC. For one evening, the centre of Uzbek football was not the capital. It was Qarshi.

That final remains the defining moment in Nasaf’s history. Playing at home, the club beat Kuwait SC 2-1 and became the first Uzbek side to win the AFC Cup. The goals came from Ilkhom Shomurodov and Andrejs Pereplotkins, before Kuwait SC reduced the score. The result did more than add a trophy to the cabinet. It proved that an Uzbek club from outside Tashkent could win a major Asian competition and make the country visible beyond the domestic league.

The symbolism was powerful. Pakhtakor had carried Uzbek football through Soviet visibility, post-independence dominance and repeated Asian ambitions. Bunyodkor would later become associated with money, international names and prestige projects. But Nasaf offered something different: regional consistency, continental seriousness and a sense that football development could come from outside the capital.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

Nasaf’s main symbol is the dragon. The club is widely nicknamed The Dragons, or Ajdarlar in Uzbek, and its official social-media identity has used the hashtag #FireDragons. The image suits the club’s modern identity. Unlike Pakhtakor, whose name evokes cotton and Soviet Uzbekistan, Nasaf’s dragon symbol suggests force, regional pride and a more contemporary football brand. For supporters in Qarshi, the dragon is not only a nickname; it is a way of turning a regional club into a recognisable national and Asian football image.

Nasaf’s popular culture is less nationally mythologised than Pakhtakor’s, but the club has its own fan identity. Online fan material includes songs such as Nasaf Ajdaholari – “Nasaf’s Dragons” – a title that draws directly on the club’s nickname. This is different from Pakhtakor’s place in Uzbek pop music: Nasaf’s cultural image is more regional and supporter-driven, tied to Qarshi pride, the dragon symbol and the memory of the 2011 AFC Cup victory.

Unlike Pakhtakor, Nasaf does not appear to have generated the same publicly visible literature of tragedy, memory and commemoration. Its story is preserved more through match reports, AFC retrospectives, fan media, club archives and the memory of decisive games, especially the 2011 AFC Cup final. This also says something about the club’s identity: Nasaf is less a monument to the past than a symbol of regional football ambition and institutional work.

Nasaf’s 2011 AFC Cup victory was not an isolated emotional moment. It became a reference point for the club’s identity. Nasaf returned to the AFC Cup final in 2021 and continued to appear regularly in Asian competitions. In recent years, it has also participated in the continent’s higher-level tournaments, showing that the 2011 win was not only a memory, but part of a longer process of institutional consolidation.

Domestically, Nasaf long carried a paradox. It was one of Uzbekistan’s strongest and most respected clubs, but for many years it had not won the national league. It collected cup titles, challenged the leading sides and built a strong reputation, yet the league crown remained elusive. That changed in 2024, when Nasaf finally won the Uzbekistan Super League. The title was more than another honour. It confirmed the club’s place as one of the country’s major football powers.

Nasaf has now won one Uzbek league title, four Uzbek Cups and four Uzbek Super Cups, alongside its 2011 AFC Cup triumph. This trophy list is not as large as Pakhtakor’s, but it tells a different story. Pakhtakor’s honours speak of dominance and hierarchy. Nasaf’s speak of persistence, regional ambition and gradual consolidation.

Also read on Novastan: L’Ouzbékistan savoure sa première participation à la Coupe du monde de football

The club is often associated with stability. Since the early 2010s, Ruziqul Berdiev has been one of the central figures in Nasaf’s modern identity. Long coaching cycles are rare in football, especially in post-Soviet leagues where clubs often change direction quickly. Nasaf’s relative continuity has helped shape its image as a structured club rather than only a spending project or temporary force.

Nasaf’s player history is closely linked to its 2011 breakthrough and to the current national-team cycle. Ilkhom Shomurodov, who scored in the AFC Cup final against Kuwait SC, remains one of the names most strongly associated with the club’s greatest night. Latvian international Andrejs Pereplotkins, who scored Nasaf’s second goal in that final, added an international dimension to the team. In the following years, players such as Turkmenistan international Artur Gevorkyan helped keep Nasaf competitive in the Berdiev era. Today, goalkeeper Abduvohid Nematov and defender Umar Eshmurodov connect the club directly to Uzbekistan’s first World Cup squad, showing that Nasaf’s role in the national team is not only historical, but current.

This is one of the reasons Nasaf matters for understanding Uzbek football today. It has not been built only around glamour, foreign stars or sudden ambition. Its image is closer to that of a working institution: a club that competes, develops, returns to Asian tournaments and gives Qarshi a permanent place on the football map.

What makes Nasaf distinctive is not only one trophy, but the kind of club it became. It is famous as the first Uzbek club to win the AFC Cup, after its 2-1 victory over Kuwait SC in Qarshi in 2011. It is famous as the club of Ajdarlar, the Dragons, a symbol that gives Nasaf a sharper modern identity than many post-Soviet teams. It is also famous for offering a regional counterweight to Tashkent: a club from Qarshi that could win in Asia, challenge domestically, develop players and eventually become national champion in 2024. In that sense, Nasaf is less a club of nostalgia than a club of proof – proof that Uzbek football could be built outside the capital.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

The club’s importance also lies in what it says about the geography of Uzbek football. Tashkent remains central, and Pakhtakor remains the historic institution. But Uzbekistan’s football identity is broader: Qarshi, Namangan, Fergana, Samarkand, Bukhara, Almalyk and Termez all form part of the national map. Nasaf is the strongest argument that this map has become more balanced.

This regional dimension matters even more in the World Cup year. Uzbekistan’s qualification is often presented through the national team’s stars abroad, from Shomurodov to Khusanov. That is understandable. But the deeper story is domestic. Before players reach Istanbul, Manchester, Lens, Rome or other foreign clubs, they emerge from a football environment shaped by local teams, regional competitions, youth systems and national rivalries. Nasaf is one of the clubs that made this environment stronger.

The club also shows how Uzbek football has professionalised. Its Asian results, domestic trophies and ability to remain competitive over time suggest that success no longer depends only on capital-city prestige. Nasaf’s rise helps explain why Uzbekistan could build a national team with greater depth, stronger defensive organisation and players accustomed to competitive continental football.

For supporters in Qarshi, Nasaf’s success is also a matter of local pride. Football gives the city visibility in a country where Tashkent often dominates politics, media and national attention. When Nasaf won the AFC Cup in 2011, the victory was not only Uzbek. It was also Qarshi’s victory. It showed that the south of the country could host a continental final, win it, and make the rest of Asia look towards Qashqadaryo.

That is why Nasaf is the natural second chapter in this series. Pakhtakor explains where Uzbek football’s memory begins. Nasaf explains how Uzbek football became more geographically ambitious. One is the capital’s historic institution; the other is the regional club that turned consistency into continental success.

As Uzbekistan steps onto the World Cup stage, Nasaf’s role is therefore both practical and symbolic. It is practical because the club contributes players and competitive experience to the national ecosystem. It is symbolic because it represents the expansion of Uzbek football beyond Tashkent. If the White Wolves’ World Cup debut is a national achievement, Nasaf reminds us that the national story is built from regional foundations.

The road to the World Cup did not begin only in the stadiums of Europe, the Middle East or North America. It also ran through Qarshi, through Markaziy Stadium, through the night Nasaf beat Kuwait SC, and through the long work of a club that proved Uzbek football could be ambitious far from the capital.

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

The post Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map appeared first on Novastan English.

Special series – The Clubs Behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup Dream

As Uzbekistan plays in its first-ever FIFA World Cup after a historic qualification campaign, Novastan looks at the clubs that shaped the country’s football identity. From Soviet-era Pakhtakor Tashkent to regional powerhouses such as Nasaf Qarshi, Navbahor Namangan and Neftchi Fergana, this series explores how club football helped build the foundations of the White Wolves’ rise.

As Uzbekistan makes its first appearance at the FIFA World Cup, attention naturally falls on the national team’s stars: Eldor Shomurodov, Abdukodir Khusanov, Abbosbek Fayzullaev and Fabio Cannavaro, the Italian World Cup winner now leading the White Wolves. But behind the historic debut lies a longer football story, one that begins not in North America, but in Tashkent.

That story begins with Pakhtakor.

Founded in 1956, Pakhtakor Tashkent became the main football symbol of Soviet Uzbekistan, later the dominant force of the independent Uzbek league, and above all the bearer of a national sporting trauma after the 1979 air disaster that killed much of its team. Today, as Uzbekistan enters the World Cup for the first time, Pakhtakor remains part of the national-team ecosystem. Current squad members such as Khojiakbar Alijonov, Sherzod Nasrullaev, Akmal Mozgovoy and Dostonbek Khamdamov play for the club. The World Cup may be a new stage for Uzbekistan, but the roots of Uzbek football’s visibility run through Pakhtakor.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

Pakhtakor was created in Tashkent on 8 April 1956, at a time when football in the Soviet Union was not only a sport, but also a system of representation. Clubs carried the identities of cities, factories, ministries, military institutions and republics. Pakhtakor carried Uzbekistan. Its name means “cotton grower” or “cotton picker”, a direct reference to the crop that defined the Uzbek SSR’s place in the Soviet planned economy.

The name matters. Cotton was not simply an agricultural product in Soviet Uzbekistan. It was a political and economic identity imposed on the republic, shaping landscapes, labour and the way Uzbekistan was imagined from Moscow. Pakhtakor’s name therefore linked football to a broader Soviet story: the republic that produced cotton now had a club that could represent it on the all-Union sporting stage.

The club’s identity is also visible in its Uzbek nicknames. Pakhtakor is known as Paxtakorlar, the Cotton Growers; Sherlar, the Lions; and Xalq jamoasi, the People’s Team. Together, these names capture three layers of meaning: labour and cotton, strength and pride, and the idea of a club that belongs not only to Tashkent, but to Uzbek football as a whole.

Also read on Novastan: A hundred years of Kyrgyz football

The club’s home, Pakhtakor Central Stadium, also became part of that identity. Built between 1954 and 1956 in central Tashkent’s Shaykhantahur district, it opened the same year as the club and became one of the main sporting arenas of Uzbekistan. Today it holds around 35,000 spectators after several renovations, but its symbolic weight is larger than its capacity. From 1992 until 2012, it was also the main home of the Uzbekistan national team, before the national side moved mainly to Milliy Stadium. For generations of supporters, Pakhtakor Central Stadium was not just a club ground, but one of the places where Uzbek football imagined itself nationally.

On 11 August 1979, Pakhtakor stopped being only a football club. The team was travelling to Minsk for a Soviet Top League match against Dinamo Minsk when its plane was involved in a mid-air collision over Soviet Ukraine. For many supporters, the first sign that something was wrong was not an official announcement, but an absence: the match did not appear among the day’s results. What followed became one of the deepest tragedies in Soviet and Uzbek sporting history.

The disaster matters because Pakhtakor had already become more than a team. In the Soviet Union, Moscow considered it desirable for each Soviet republic to be represented in the top football tier. Pakhtakor became the first Central Asian club to play at that level in 1959. It remained the only Uzbek club to appear in the Soviet top league and the only Central Asian club to reach a Soviet Cup final. For supporters in Tashkent and across Uzbekistan, Pakhtakor was proof that Uzbek football could appear on the all-Union stage.

The 1979 crash transformed that symbolism into memory. The team lost players and staff, including figures such as Mikhail An and Vladimir Fedorov, and the club’s tragedy became part of Uzbekistan’s collective football identity. In later decades, Pakhtakor would rebuild, win, dominate and represent the independent country abroad, but the memory of the lost generation remained central to how the club was understood.

Pakhtakor’s importance also extends beyond football. Few clubs in Central Asia have entered popular culture in the same way. The team has been celebrated in songs by well-known Uzbek performers, including Shahzoda, Bojalar, Rustam Gaipov, Kvartet and Ummon. Shahzoda released a music video titled Paxtakor, while Bojalar’s song Paxtakor turned the club into a pop refrain, with lyrics built around supporters, goals and collective confidence in the team. This musical presence matters: Pakhtakor is not only watched in stadiums; it has been sung as part of Uzbek urban and popular culture.

The 1979 tragedy also gave Pakhtakor a place in memorial culture. The lost team is remembered through monuments, annual commemorations, articles, documentaries and public storytelling. The memory of “Pakhtakor-79” is often compared to the Munich air disaster of Manchester United’s Busby Babes: a football team turned into a national symbol of loss, youth and interrupted promise.

Also read on Novastan: L’Ouzbékistan savoure sa première participation à la Coupe du monde de football

This is why Pakhtakor is different from most football clubs. It is a sports institution, but also a cultural reference. Its name evokes cotton and Soviet Uzbekistan; its stadium evokes Tashkent’s football geography; its songs evoke popular pride; and its tragedy evokes collective memory. To write about Pakhtakor is therefore to write not only about football, but about how Uzbekistan remembers, celebrates and narrates itself.

Pakhtakor’s history is also a history of players who shaped Uzbek football across different periods. Berador Abduraimov, one of the greatest footballers produced by Uzbekistan, became a Soviet Top League top scorer while playing for Pakhtakor and later coached independent Uzbekistan to its 1994 Asian Games title. Gennadi Krasnitsky, another legendary Pakhtakor striker, became so closely associated with goalscoring that Uzbekistan later created a scorers’ club in his memory. In the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods, names such as Gennadi Denisov and Igor Shkvyrin connected Pakhtakor to continuity and renewal.

In the independent era, players such as Server Djeparov and Odil Ahmedov helped link the club to the modern national team and to Uzbekistan’s growing football presence abroad. Djeparov became one of the country’s most decorated footballers, while Ahmedov’s later career in Russia and China showed how Uzbek players could move into larger football markets. Today, Dostonbek Khamdamov offers another link between Pakhtakor and the current national-team story: once one of Asia’s most promising young players, he returned to the club and entered the World Cup cycle as part of Cannavaro’s squad.

After independence, Pakhtakor became the powerhouse of the new Uzbek league. The club has won 16 Uzbek league titles, 14 Uzbek Cups and 2 Uzbek Super Cups, making it the most decorated side in the country’s post-Soviet football history. This domestic dominance, especially during the 2000s, made Pakhtakor the reference point against which other clubs were measured. The club became associated with professionalism, hierarchy and expectation: the team everyone wanted to beat, and the team expected to represent Uzbekistan abroad.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

That dominance also created rivalries. In the Soviet period, Pakhtakor’s most symbolic opponent was Kairat Almaty, then the leading club of Kazakhstan. Their meetings were remembered as a kind of Central Asian derby, a football expression of the broader Uzbekistan-Kazakhstan rivalry within the Soviet Union. After independence, Pakhtakor’s rivalries became more domestic. Matches against Bunyodkor Tashkent developed into a capital derby, especially after Bunyodkor’s rise in the 2000s. Games against Neftchi Fergana became one of the classic rivalries of the Uzbek league, linking Tashkent’s historic powerhouse with one of the strongest clubs of the early independence period. More broadly, matches against clubs such as Navbahor Namangan, Lokomotiv Tashkent and Nasaf Qarshi have often carried the weight of regional pride and competition against Pakhtakor’s capital-city dominance.

Pakhtakor’s history is also a story of ownership and state power. Like many post-Soviet clubs, it has never been only a private sporting institution. In 2017, SFI Management Group was reported to have acquired an 80 percent stake in Pakhtakor under investment obligations, with a commitment to invest in the club’s infrastructure. Later, the club became associated with businessman and former Tashkent mayor Jahongir Artikkhodjayev, who has been listed as club president and described in Uzbek media as the club’s owner. In January 2024, Uzbekistan’s State Assets Management Agency put 100 percent of the state share in Pakhtakor Football Club LLC up for sale, before temporarily suspending the privatisation process after public reaction.

This makes Pakhtakor not only a football institution, but also a case study in how Uzbek sport sits at the intersection of public assets, private capital and national prestige. These ownership debates show why Pakhtakor still matters in 2026. It is not a museum club remembered only for Soviet history or the 1979 tragedy. It remains a living institution in Uzbek football: a producer of national-team players, a target for rivals, a symbol of Tashkent’s football power and a club whose future reflects wider questions about investment, privatisation and the role of the state in Uzbek sport.

In Asian competition, Pakhtakor came close to a larger breakthrough. It reached the AFC Champions League semi-finals in 2003 and 2004, showing that Uzbek club football could compete beyond the domestic league. In more recent years, the club has remained part of Uzbekistan’s continental presence, including participation in Asia’s elite club competitions. Yet Pakhtakor never quite turned continental visibility into an Asian title. That absence is important, because it shows both the club’s strength and the limits of Uzbek football’s capital-centred model.

That is why the story of Uzbek club football cannot end in Tashkent. Pakhtakor carries the memory, prestige and institutional weight of the game. But the first major Asian club title won by an Uzbek side would come from elsewhere: from Nasaf Qarshi. If Pakhtakor is the memory of Uzbek football, Nasaf is the beginning of its modern regional ambition.

As Uzbekistan steps onto the World Cup stage, Pakhtakor’s role is therefore double. It is present in the squad through current players, but it is also present as history. Before Shomurodov, Khusanov and Fayzullaev carried the White Wolves into the global spotlight, Pakhtakor had already carried Uzbek football into Soviet stadiums, through tragedy, into independence, and towards Asia. The World Cup is new. The dream behind it is not.

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

The post Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory appeared first on Novastan English.