CAPS Unlock Podcast

Kazakhstan has now adopted a dedicated law on artificial intelligence, a step the government has been signalling for more than a year. Parliament approved the measure in October, and President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed it into force a few days before this episode was recorded. The authorities present the legislation as a necessary foundation for developing the country’s AI sector. The stated ai...

A sudden flare-up in Ukraine’s drone war has again rattled Central Asia’s energy nerves. This episode opens with a look at how Russian refinery shutdowns are rippling across the region. When the Novokuybyshevsk plant went offline after an October 19 strike, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which are both reliant on Russia for more than 90 percent of their fuel, were left scrambling. Petrol rationing in...

This week’s episode begins in Kyrgyzstan, where a brutal killing of a 17-year-old girl has reignited public fury and led President Sadyr Japarov to call for the return of the death penalty. The case has stirred intense debate about justice, morality, and political opportunism in a country that abolished executions nearly two decades ago. We look at how Japarov’s proposal both reflects and exploits...

This week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast begins with Kazakhstan’s ongoing fixation on artificial intelligence. Ever since President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev made AI the centrepiece of his State of the Nation address, ministries and agencies have scrambled to demonstrate their own contributions. A new ministry has been promised, AI education standards announced, and schemes for agriculture, publ...

This week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast opens with a discussion about a show of diplomatic unity in Central Asia. Following Israel’s strike on Qatar, all five governments of the region quickly issued statements of condemnation. Some went as far as calling the strike an act of aggression. We examine why these unusually swift and aligned reactions matter, how they highlight the region’s growi...

In the third and final instalment of podcasts recorded on the sidelines of a major history conference at Nazarbayev University, the CAPS Unlock podcast looks at how culture grows under pressure. We speak to Irina Sinepupova (a historical researcher currently pursuing her studies at Nazarbayev University) and Leora Eisenberg (PhD candidate, Harvard University) about two very different cases that ex...

This week we continue a special series recorded on the sidelines of the international conference Toward New Transnational/Transimperial Histories of Central Asia: Sources, Directions, Interpretations, held at Nazarbayev University in Astana in August. This week we’re looking at what comes after the “nation-making” narrative and how historians are reframing the region through transnational and tran...

In this episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast we temporarily step away from our usual format for the first in a short series recorded on the sidelines of the international conference , Toward New Transnational/Transimperial Histories of Central Asia: Sources, Directions, Interpretations, which took place at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, on August 20–22. We speak to Roman Osharov, a DPh...

In this week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we break with our usual format to bring you a wide-ranging long-form conversation with Bruce Pannier, veteran Central Asia watcher and a newly minted Research Fellow at the Yorktown Institute’s Turan Research Center. Pannier reflects on three decades of reporting and analysis, from his early days gathering scraps of information in the pre-internet...

This week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast takes us from the heat-blasted plains of Turkmenistan to the mineral riches of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and then to end, back to Bishkek’s street theatre of power. We begin with a dive into the mooted trans-Afghan railway, a project once seen as fantasy that now edges closer to reality. We discuss Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan’s newly signed...

This week on the CAPS Unlock podcast, we explore a consolidating trend that could redefine Central Asia’s place on the map, not just as a post-Soviet periphery, but as a key connector to South Asia and beyond. But we open with a dispatch about CAPS Unlock activities Astana, where we just wrapped up a rule-of-law training for young professionals. Then, attention turns southward. First to a Russia–U...

This week we are looking at three very different but equally revealing stories from across Central Asia. First, we begin in Kyrgyzstan, where parliament passed a new law banning the online distribution of pornographic content. On the face of it, this may seem like a niche issue, but it speaks volumes about the evolving moral agenda of President Sadyr Japarov’s administration. Although proponents c...

This week, we focus on one major theme: China’s evolving relationship with Central Asia. The episode centres on the China–Central Asia summit held last week in Astana and features an extended interview with Temur Umarov, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a leading expert on China’s role in the region. We unpack what’s new and what’s not in Beijing’s outreach, from 35 percent trade...

This week’s CAPS Unlock takes us east, to a country often left out of Central Asia’s story: Mongolia. We speak to Chimguundari Navaan-Yunden, a former advisor to the Mongolian prime minister, about her recent article exploring Mongolia’s foreign policy realignment toward Central Asia. From efforts to expand rail and trade links, to high-level diplomacy and civic vibrancy, Mongolia offers a sharp c...

This week, an unusual edition of the CAPS Unlock podcast. I speak to Daniel Rosenblum, the recently retired U.S. ambassador to both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, about his decades-long engagement with Central Asia and the future of U.S. foreign policy in the region. We begin with Rosenblum’s personal journey, shaped by his family’s early activism for Soviet Jewry, and trace his career through labour...

This week’s episode opens with a conversation about an intensifying environmental threat in Central Asia: sand and dust storms. A major storm hit Tashkent last week, felling trees, halting flights, and triggering dangerous air pollution levels. The discussion explores long-term drivers of this trend, from climate change and Aral Sea degradation to unchecked urban construction. We examine how count...

This week’s episode opens with a look at Kazakhstan’s oil production surge and the geopolitical and economic ramifications of the country’s deviation from OPEC+ production quotas. Despite a formal commitment to restraint, Kazakhstan reached record-breaking oil output in March and remained well above quota in May. The discussion considers whether the move reflects nervousness in Astana about slowin...

This week’s episode opens with reflections on Victory Day, observed annually on May. This year marked the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II, and once again the leaders of all five Central Asian republics attended Moscow’s parade. Yet beneath the rituals of state ceremony lie increasingly contested memories and shifting sentiments. The discussion draws on historian Vicky Davis’...

This week’s episode opens with a look at an intriguing, if vague, agreement between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan to jointly manage the Amu Darya river basin. Though details remain scarce, the deal suggests a growing willingness by both countries to cooperate on the region’s most urgent environmental and water management challenges. The conversation then turns to the World Bank’s latest economic upda...

In this week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we tackled three stories that reveal the evolving pressures, and ambitions, shaping Central Asia’s future. We began in Kyrgyzstan, where authorities recently arrested a freelance employee from the Russian cultural centre in Osh on charges of recruiting mercenaries for Russia’s war in Ukraine. It is the country’s first high-profile case of this kin...

In this week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we unpack a string of developments that reveal the shifting geopolitics of sovereignty, identity and migration in Central Asia. We begin with an eyebrow-raising rebuke from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, directed at Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. In a recent interview, Lavrov questioned Tokayev’s position on territorial int...

This episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast returns to the landmark EU–Central Asia Summit held in Samarkand earlier this month, exploring the contours of Brussels’ latest overtures to the region. The summit brought together the five Central Asian presidents and top EU leadership, who jointly proclaimed a new “strategic partnership.” A headline €12 billion pledge under the EU’s Global Gateway Initiati...

In this week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we examine two separate but revealing stories that show how Central Asia is being shaped by forces well beyond its borders, be they military drones (launched by either Russia or Ukraine) or canals being built by Afghanistan. The episode opens with a discussion of the latest drone strikes on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) infrastructure in s...

In this special edition of the CAPS Unlock podcast, you will hear a frontline report and in-depth discussion of one of the most significant regional developments in Central Asia in years: the signing of a border demarcation agreement between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Partially recorded from the Al-Archa presidential complex in Bishkek, the episode opens with audio impressions from the day of the...

This week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast delves into the freshly agreed Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border treaty, which will almost have been signed by the countries’ president soon after this edition is released, and Uzbekistan’s anti-corruption shake-up. And for this week’s interview, we speak with Aizhan Alzhanova, a representative of Mama Pro, a Kazakhstan-based organisation dedicated to supp...