CAPS Unlock

🤗Join us for a relaxed and thoughtful English-language book club session designed for young readers, students, and emerging thinkers interested in the culture, society, and history of Central Asia.

📅 19.06.2026
⌚️4 pm
📌1000 kitap, 101/1 Kazhymukan str., Almaty

🛤️This session will center on The Railway (1999), one of Hamid Ismailov’s best-known novels. Born in what is now Kyrgyzstan and writing primarily in Uzbek and Russian, Ismailov is widely regarded as one of Central Asia’s leading contemporary writers.

Set in the fictional town of Gilas, the novel explores the social and political transformations that reshaped Central Asia during the 20th century.

☕️This is a participatory session — coffee, conversation, and collective thinking in a relaxed bookshop setting.

Let’s meet, read together, and talk openly. See you there!

Register and find the reading material via the link in bio.

🗞️From Almaty’s polluted air to the remote Tajik villages in the Yagnob valley: four projects from Central Asia were published in the GoGreen case report series with support from CAPS Unlock.

💡The publication of those four cases in the GoGreen case report series is a result of CAPS Unlock’s work in helping Central Asian organizations to use their knowledge and share it globally. Last year, CAPS Unlock hosted an in-person training seminar in Almaty for representatives of three partner organizations working on environmental issues in Central Asia.

🌏The GoGreen research project is a global initiative led by Roskilde University (.ruc) and funded by the Danish Independent Research Council. The project’s objective is to identify the constellation of governance factors driving the successful co-creation of green transitions. GoGreen includes 41 case studies across 32 countries.

Learn more about the publications here:
https://gogreen-project.com/publications/

🌱Central Asia is investing heavily in solar parks, wind farms, hydropower and even nuclear energy. But there is a less visible problem that is receiving far less attention: how do you actually get all that electricity to the people who need it?

At a CAPS Unlock roundtable organized with the support of FES Central Asia .centralasia and FES Just Climate in Almaty this week, experts from across the region discussed a challenge that sits at the heart of the energy transition. New generation capacity is expanding rapidly, but electricity grids, transmission networks and regulatory frameworks are often struggling to keep pace.

⚡️The discussion was built around Aruzhan Meirkhanova’s new paper, Powering the Transition: Rebuilding Central Asia’s Electricity Grids for Regional Resilience, published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Her central argument is straightforward: the success of Central Asia’s energy transition may depend less on how much electricity the region can generate than on whether it can move, balance and trade that electricity effectively.

As one participant observed, billions of dollars are flowing into new generation capacity, while investment in grids remains only a fraction of that amount.

Read our roundtable summary: https://capsunlock.org/roundtable-the-missing-link-in-central-asias-energy-transition/

Read Meirkhanova’s paper: https://justclimate.fes.de/topics/energy-policy-fast-forward-to-renewables/powering-the-transition-rebuilding-central-asias-electricity-grids-for-regional-resilience.html

🇹🇲In this week’s CAPS Unlock podcast, we devote the full episode to Turkmenistan, a country too often left at the margins of Central Asia analysis, or reduced to caricature.

🎙We speak with Gulshat Chmaisse, a PhD candidate at the Australian National University’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, about her new paper, Turkmenistan’s migration policies: Reshaping economy and society, published as part of CAPS Unlock’s The Argument series.

Chmaisse explains why official data badly understate Turkmenistan’s dependence on remittances, how informal transfer networks and the black-market exchange rate shape household survival, and why Turkey has become the main destination for Turkmen labour migrants while Russia remains important for students.

♻️The conversation also explores the feminisation of Turkmen migration. As men face greater scrutiny at borders and through military-linked restrictions, women increasingly migrate independently and become primary earners abroad, especially in domestic and care work. That shift brings new economic agency, but also legal insecurity, family separation, exploitation, and trafficking risks.

Listen to the episode via the link in bio:

Substack: https://havli.substack.com/p/turkmenistans-migration-trap
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/turkmenistans-migration-trap/id1781868199?i=1000770772949
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3MHm33H5CnGz1SgCPPRXH1?si=h9Ma07kGQAaKFwF1Fk5u8g

Listeners can find Gulshat Chmaisse’s paper at CAPS Unlock’s website: https://capsunlock.org/

🇹🇲Turkmenistan’s migration regime has produced a paradox.

💲The state depends on outmigration. Remittances have become a de facto welfare system, sustaining household consumption amid inflation and limited state support.

And yet, the state restricts outmigration, tightening controls via passport delays and opaque administrative rules, pushing migrants toward irregular routes.

How does a state simultaneously depend on and obstruct the thing it depends on?

❓In the second edition of The Argument, Gulshat Chmaisse tries to answer this question. She also sheds light on how this paradox has created a phenomenon of the feminization of migration. Understanding this issue is essential for Turkmenistan’s labor mobility and social protection, as well as Central Asia’s migration governance.

Read the full paper here: https://capsunlock.org/publications/turkmenistans-migration-policies-reshaping-economy-and-society/

📩CAPS Unlock has a monthly newsletter that informs you about our work and brings together the ideas, debates, and developments we believe matter most right now — from fresh research and sharp commentary to upcoming events and expert discussions.

💡Subscribers get more than just a roundup of our website and social media — you’ll also receive exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox. In next week’s edition, read a new essay by our senior advisor, Hugh McLean, exploring the role of youth in climate change education across Central Asia.

Subscribe here and get your first letter next week:

https://capsunlock.org/subscribe-to-our-newsletter/

🇺🇦This week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast begins with the legal and political dispute around Gazprom and Naftogaz in Kazakhstan. A court at the Astana International Financial Centre recognised a Swiss arbitration award of around $1.4 billion in favour of Ukraine’s Naftogaz against Russia’s Gazprom. But Kazakhstan’s justice minister later said the ruling would not be enforced. We discuss why the case exposes a tension between the centre’s international commercial-law ambitions and the Kazakh state’s political caution.

🌐We then turn to new figures from the Eurasian Development Bank showing that trade between Central Asian countries has nearly doubled since 2020, reaching $12.3 billion in 2025. Kazakhstan remains the largest intra-regional exporter, followed by Uzbekistan, while Turkmenistan’s role has grown sharply. The numbers are encouraging, but the baseline remains low. We discuss why intra-regional trade matters, how it differs from Central Asia’s raw-material exports to outside markets, and why barriers such as customs friction, poor infrastructure, and border corruption still hold the region back.

🇸🇪In our interview slot, we speak with Johan Engvall, Deputy Research Director at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, about his new report, Forming a New Central Asia: How Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan Build Regional Order Under Multipolar Pressure. We discuss the Kazakhstan–Uzbekistan axis, Uzbekistan’s post-2016 regional opening, the role of consultative meetings, the Middle Corridor, and whether Central Asia is becoming more capable of acting as a region rather than merely reacting to Russia, China, and the West.

Listen to the episode here🎧:

Substack: https://havli.substack.com/p/gazprom-naftogaz-and-kazakhstans

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/central-asia-tries-to-become-a-region/id1781868199?i=1000769637571

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3VBN9Fj9MUqcoAcnrBwLtk?si=RDCHSwE3QcOAK1njAXrNPg

📍In this milestone 50th episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we begin with Tajik President Emomali Rahmon’s state visit to China, a trip that produced 31 agreements and a conspicuously grand treaty of “eternal friendship and good-neighbourliness.”

🇹🇯🇨🇳The discussion focused on why Beijing invests so much political energy in Tajikistan, a small economy with relatively modest trade volumes compared with Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan. The answer lies less in market size than in geography. Tajikistan matters because of connectivity, its border with Afghanistan, and its role in China’s wider westward transport ambitions.

🤝The episode then turned to the informal summit of the Organization of Turkic States in Turkestan, Kazakhstan. Officially, the summit focused on artificial intelligence and digital development. More broadly, it raised the question of whether the OTS is evolving from a cultural forum into a more serious geopolitical platform. The OTS is becoming more relevant, but its members still avoid choices that would force them into open alignment against Russia or China.

🎙For this week’s interview, Ablay D. (Ablay Dosmaganbetov) of the University of Central Asia discussed his paper, co-authored with Bakhytzhan Kurmanov, on the EITI (Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative). The paper asks whether transparency really creates accountability in authoritarian systems. Its answer is sceptical: in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, EITI often works less as a watchdog mechanism than as a signalling tool that helps governments appear reform-minded without ceding real political control.

Listen to the episode here:

Substack: https://havli.substack.com/p/why-china-cares-so-much-about-tajikistan

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-china-cares-so-much-about-tajikistan/id1781868199?i=1000768564534

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5QgutmQafhElxJKL0DxUVA?si=d8537a00afc540e9