CAPS Unlock Podcast

Uzbekistan’s strategic outlook continues to evolve. This week we examine President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s landmark state visit to Georgia, the first by an Uzbek president in more than two decades. Beyond the diplomatic symbolism, we discuss what was actually agreed: plans to deepen cooperation on the Middle Corridor, new logistics infrastructure centred on Georgia’s Black Sea ports, and a growing ec...

Russia’s fuel crisis is no longer just Russia’s problem. As Ukrainian strikes continue to disrupt refinery capacity, shortages are spreading across the country, forcing Moscow to manage supplies and raising difficult questions for its neighbours. We examine what this means for Kazakhstan, whose own refining capacity remains limited despite its vast oil reserves, and for Kyrgyzstan, which depends h...

This week’s episode begins with Uzbekistan’s historic World Cup appearance, the first by any Central Asian country. The opening match against Colombia did not deliver the result Uzbek fans wanted, but it did produce the country’s first ever World Cup goal and a striking display of regional support. From fan zones in Bishkek to messages of solidarity from neighbouring countries, Uzbekistan’s campai...

This week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast is devoted to a conversation with Luca Anceschi, Senior Lecturer in Central Asian Studies at the University of Glasgow, about his newly published book, Pandemic Politics in Central Asia. The book examines how three Central Asian governments, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Anceschi argues that the pandemic...

This week’s CAPS Unlock podcast does something different. Instead of our usual regional round-up, 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 migra...

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, arguing that the...

This week’s episode begins 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 language was theatrical, but the substance was less silly. The visit showed how broad the China–Tajikistan relationship has become, spanning infrastructure, energy, artificial intelligence, e...

This week on the CAPS Unlock podcast, we begin in Kazakhstan, where a new political party has appeared just ahead of parliamentary elections expected later this year. The party is called Adilet, meaning “justice,” and its sudden emergence has already raised familiar questions about how political competition works in Kazakhstan. Its leader, Aibek Dadebay, was until very recently head of President K...

In this week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we begin with a novelty in the European Union’s sanctions campaign toward Russia. For the first time, Brussels has applied what it calls an anti-circumvention mechanism at the level of an entire country: Kyrgyzstan. The measure is narrow but consequential. It targets specific categories of industrial equipment and financial channels that the EU be...

This week on the CAPS Unlock podcast, we examine two sharply different but ultimately connected economic stories from Central Asia, before turning to a revealing interview on Kazakhstan’s changing business landscape. We begin in Kazakhstan, where official data show a roughly 20 percent year-on-year drop in oil production in the first quarter. The decline reflects a convergence of disruptions: a fi...

In this week’s edition of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we turned our attention to one country that rarely gets the scrutiny it deserves: Turkmenistan. Despite its strategic location, vast gas reserves, and sensitive position between Iran, Afghanistan, and the rest of Central Asia, it remains one of the hardest states in the region to read clearly. Access is limited, reporting is constrained, and much...

This week’s episode looks at two structural pressures shaping Central Asia’s future: food insecurity in Tajikistan and energy strategy in Kyrgyzstan, before turning to the wider regional impact of the war in Iran. We begin in Tajikistan, where President Emomali Rahmon has warned of unprecedented food price rises. His explanations point outward, to climate change and global instability, but the dom...

This week, we return to the political soap opera unfolding in Kyrgyzstan in the wake of the February removal of security chief Kamchybek Tashiyev. The pressure on Tashiyev’s family continues to mount. His brother, Shairbek, who surrendered his parliamentary mandate after a first police interrogation earlier in March, has now been called back in for a second round of questioning. His son, Tai-Muras...

This week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast departs from the usual format for a single in-depth conversation with journalist Joanna Lillis, whose new book Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan draws on more than two decades of reporting to examine the country’s evolution since independence. Lillis traces Uzbekistan’s trajectory from the repressive system built under Islam Karimov...

In this week’s very packed episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast we cover a busy news week across two countries, and speak with a researcher whose work offers a fascinating lens on how Central Asian states construct national identity through their museums. We begin with Kazakhstan, where citizens went to the polls to approve a new constitution, the country’s third since independence. With official fi...

In this episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we speak with Eldaniz Gusseinov, head of research at Nightingale Int., about what the war between the United States, Israel and Iran could mean for Central Asia. Rather than dwelling on battlefield events, the conversation looks at the wider regional consequences of the conflict, particularly for trade routes, strategic connectivity and Central Asia’s ab...

Operation Epic Fury has forced every government in Central Asia to signal where it stands. And just as importantly, how carefully it intends to stand there. We began this week’s CAPS Unlock podcast with the U.S.–Israeli military campaign against Iran and the varied responses across the five Central Asian republics. Tajikistan, the region’s only Persian-speaking state, issued unusually warm condole...

This week’s edition of the CAPS Unlock podcast moves across three very different but interconnected storylines shaping Central Asia’s political and economic trajectory. We begin with the European Union’s stalled 20th sanctions package against Russia and, most relevantly for us, the likely inclusion of Kyrgyzstan. Although Hungary and Slovakia blocked the package for now, Kyrgyzstan had been earmar...

This week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast plunges directly into political shifts unfolding across Central Asia. Developments in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan are each highly specific, rooted in their own institutional histories and elite dynamics. Yet taken together, they point to a deeper and more persistent anxiety: how personalistic political systems manage transition. The entire...

This week’s episode of the Caps Unlock Podcast opened with a discussion of a major shift in Central Asia’s external economic orientation: China has overtaken Russia to become the region’s largest trading partner. Drawing on newly published trade data for 2025, the conversation examined what it means for China-Central Asia trade to surpass the $100 billion mark for the first time, and why that figu...

This week’s episode opened with a discussion of Kazakhstan’s provisional landmark arbitration victory against foreign oil majors over disputed costs at the Karachaganak oil and gas field. We unpacked why the ruling matters not only for the billions of dollars potentially at stake, but also for what it signals politically. Drawing on reporting by Reuters and Bloomberg, the conversation explored how...

The CAPS Unlock podcast returns after a long New Year break to track how an unsettled global agenda is pulling Central Asia into the fray. We began with U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly launched Board of Peace, an initiative that started life as a Gaza oversight mechanism but quickly hardened into something broader: a leader-centric club with an unusually vague mandate and an unusually personal...

This end-of-year episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast is longer than usual, deliberately so. As our final instalment of 2025, it takes stock of a year that reshaped Central Asia in ways that are still coming into focus. To help make sense of it, we were joined by CAPS Unlock co-founder and senior fellow and director of the Program on Central Asia at Harvard University’s Davis Center, Nargis Kassenov...

This week’s episode opens on the frontier of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, where two late-November attacks on Chinese workers killed five people and injured several others at a gold mine and road-building site. With both incidents allegedly involving fire from Afghan territory, almost no independent reporting, and only terse official statements to go on, the discussion probes what can be said with c...

This episode departs from our usual format. Instead of the standard three-segment structure, it’s a single extended conversation with Agnieszka Pikulicka , the journalist behind Turan Tales , a long-form newsletter and podcast examining underreported stories from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Her premise is straightforward but oddly rare: Central Asia should be...