Turan Research Center Analysis

Central Asian governments are willing to summon Russia’s ambassadors. Over the past two years, Bishkek has done so over a police raid on a Moscow bathhouse that left Kyrgyz migrants beaten; Tashkent over the nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin’s public musing about “annexing” Uzbek territory; Dushanbe over the murder of a […]

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. The recent Hudson Institute study on the growing Iranian influence in Georgia has drawn significant attention to Georgian-Iranian relations. Following this investigative study, global media, including Persian-speaking groups, have actively published critical articles about Iranian penetration in Georgia. The Washington Post published an opinion piece titled

Uzbekistan’s World Cup debut is no longer a prospect but a fact. In its first match at football’s biggest tournament, it lost 3–1 to Colombia in Mexico City — a defeat, but not an empty one. Abbosbek Fayzullaev scored the country’s first World Cup goal, briefly leveling the match before

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. The 2026 war involving Iran has drawn attention to Iranian military-technological activity well beyond the Middle East. Tajikistan, the only Persian-speaking state in Central Asia, is a natural focus: it has sharply deepened its security, military-technical, and logistical cooperation with Tehran in recent years. The clearest

Armenians went to the polls on June 7 in a parliamentary election that drew extraordinary outside attention — deservedly so. The vote was, in effect, a referendum on the country’s trajectory: whether Armenia stays the course of the past several years or reverses it and returns to a pro-Russian line.

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. In a recent farewell interview, Peter Fischer, Germany’s outgoing ambassador to Georgia, cautioned against overstating the importance of the Middle Corridor. His remarks answered a narrative the Georgian government has promoted with growing insistence: that the corridor is strategically indispensable to Europe, and that because it

Kazakhstan has fewer westbound oil export routes today than at any point since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On May 1, Moscow closed the northern leg of the Druzhba pipeline to Germany, citing “technical” reasons and eliminating a channel that carried more than 2 million tons of Kazakh crude in

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. The Saudi and Emirati strikes on Iranian territory during the past two months mark a turning point in the evolution of Gulf security doctrine. For decades, the Arab Gulf states cultivated an image of cautious pragmatism, relying on diplomacy, alliances, and deterrence-by-proxy to manage their fraught

Russia has spent the past several years expanding its nuclear footprint across the Middle East. While most attention has focused on Rosatom’s projects in Iran and Turkey, the state corporation has also pushed deeper into other major regional markets. The result is a layered web of strategic interdependencies that gives

When the heads of state of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) convene on May 15 in Turkistan under the theme “Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development,” the central deliverable will be exactly what the title suggests: a coordinated push to build out Turkic cooperation around AI. The venue fits. Turkistan