Turan Research Center Analysis

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. Kyrgyzstan stages the SCO summit and the World Nomad Games in the same week that it manages a fuel crisis partly of its own making — the first real test of the system that emerged after the Japarov–Tashiev tandem broke apart. Over the week beginning 31 […]

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. Five years after the Taliban returned to power, Afghanistan looks increasingly different from the country Pakistan expected to emerge in 2021. The Taliban remains firmly in control, but its relationship with Islamabad has deteriorated into something much more serious than a dispute over the border or

On August 14, 2026, Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed a constitutional law giving Uzbekistan’s Presidential Administration a statutory identity for the first time. The text reads as administrative housekeeping. It is better understood as the peace treaty that ended a war inside the president’s own family — and as the instrument that

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. A Recalibration Already Under Way Central Asian governments began repricing Iran before they said so. Within weeks of the opening of the American and Israeli strike campaign in February 2026, Uzbekistan, which moved a large share of its European and Turkish transit through Iranian territory, instructed

Though Afghanistan was never a primary focus for Moscow, the country’s profile has grown in importance for Russia following the return of the Taliban to power in 2021. The rapprochement between the two began as soon as US troops left. Initially characterized by cautious engagement, the bilateral ties settled into

The standard account blames post-Soviet Uzbekistan’s religious conservatism and radicalization on external forces — Gulf money, imported ideology, the collapse of the Soviet order. That account is incomplete. Today’s radicalism cannot be explained by the Soviet past alone, but that past matters and is worth naming. The Soviet state did

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sanctions, political risk, and logistical disruption have pushed governments and shippers to look for routes to Europe that do not cross Russian territory. The chief beneficiary has been the Middle Corridor—the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR)—which runs from China through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian,

  Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. How Astana went from a handshake at the United Nations to the front of the line in Trump’s Washington — and why the rest of Central Asia stands to gain from it On July 10, Donald Trump and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev spoke by phone. The Kazakh

The ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran are being watched closely across the South Caucasus. Regional actors understand that the outcome will shape more than just the security architecture of the Middle East — it will directly affect a region that borders Iran and depends on it for

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. Two powers locked in global rivalry rarely end up invested in the same piece of infrastructure. On the Middle Corridor, the United States and China now are. The route across Kazakhstan, the Caspian, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey is, for Beijing, the last dependable land path to