Dr Juraev, Co-Founder and President of Crossroads Central Asia and a former Deputy Director of the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, took part through the Academy’s participation in the PoSIG network, with travel supported by an Erasmus+ KA171 mobility grant from the University of Salzburg.

His presentation traced the teaching of politics in Kyrgyzstan to three underlying conditions. First, Kyrgyzstan is a post-Soviet state whose public universities have changed less than the state itself. Curricula are still treated as plans to be delivered rather than designs open to debate and revision. Second, the country’s early opening to the outside world brought American, Turkish and Russian models of higher education, followed more recently by Chinese and Gulf-based initiatives. Each is coherent on its own terms, and they remain largely disconnected from one another. Third, unlike Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan is outside the European Higher Education Area. European influence therefore arrives through individual projects, partnerships and short-term mobility rather than through membership in a shared framework.

The consequences are visible in how students and staff behave. Students often choose departments by language of instruction and the international value of the degree more than by the substance of the programme. Heavy teaching loads at public universities leave little room for research, so courses transmit established knowledge rather than engage students in producing it, and researchers tend to pursue their work outside the university.

Some of the strongest political science teaching is concentrated in small, English-medium, externally supported programmes. The larger public universities, where most students study, remain largely untouched by this international engagement. Research capacity has shifted towards independent institutes, consultancies and international organisations. International funding, the presentation argued, has built individuals but not institutions capable of retaining them.

The presentation concluded with two proposals for European partners. Joint supervision is considerably easier to establish than joint degrees, which can take years to accredit when one partner is outside the European Higher Education Area. International programmes should also support the less visible work of curriculum development, including the months required to redesign a course. For Kyrgyz universities seeking to bring research into teaching, the main constraint is the teaching load rather than the mobility budget.

The post Teaching politics in Kyrgyzstan: reflections from the PoSIG Teacher Academy first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

Crossroads Central Asia hosted the first school in Bishkek in September 2025. The second was held in Almaty in March 2026 by Kazakh-German University, and the third is convened by TU Dortmund University with Tbilisi State University and the University of Georgia. The series is supported by the Volkswagen Foundation and coordinated by Nora Becker at TU Dortmund with Serik Beimenbetov, Shalva Dzebisashvili and Shairbek Juraev.

The Dortmund programme runs across seven panels of participant research, covering social capital and digital trust in post-Soviet Eurasia, informal work and labour migration, gender and inclusion in public policy, donor requirements and civil society, and polarisation in the face of international structures. Keynotes address social cohesion in contemporary societies, international missions and public policy, welfare states and informality, and corporate social responsibility. The programme moves to The Hague mid-week for a visit to the International Criminal Court before returning to Dortmund for the closing discussion.

The post Final summer school on social cohesion opens in Dortmund first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

The remarks treated the Middle Corridor as one part of a broader process that combines closer links within Central Asia with the region’s integration into global transport networks. Among the many connectivity initiatives of recent decades, it stands out because it connects the region to its two largest economic partners, China and Europe.

For Central Asia, diversification was a necessity. The region inherited transport and energy infrastructure built almost entirely towards Russia, and for years alternative routes were costly, of limited interest to China or Europe, and open to veto from the north. China’s overland push from 2013, Europe’s search for routes avoiding Russia and, most consequentially, Russia’s war against Ukraine changed that calculation. Equally important was the region’s own opening since 2016–2017, led by Uzbekistan, which reopened borders and eased freight movement across Central Asia.

For China and Europe the corridor remains a marginal channel, and Central Asia should be realistic about the limits of its indispensability. For the region itself the stakes are larger: usable connections in every direction and an end to dependence on a single northern route. Within Central Asia, however, the Middle Corridor runs essentially through Kazakhstan. For Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, what matters is feeder links into the trunk routes. The China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway is the clearest case: its value for Kyrgyzstan lies in ending a long position at a transport dead end more than in any role in China–Europe transit.

Looking ahead, the remarks argued for building domestic and intra-regional links first, including the border crossings between the five states. The binding constraint is now soft infrastructure. Harmonised tariffs, joint customs and digital data exchange attract far less financing than ports and railways, because they cross sovereignty and no single government owns them. External partners, the UK among them, could contribute most on this less visible layer, including insurance, arbitration and workable financing frameworks, rather than through further corridor strategies or feasibility studies.

The post The Middle Corridor and Central Asia’s connectivity: CCA at the Central Asia–UK Think Tank Forum first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

The 31 July gathering of Central Asian and Azerbaijani leaders at Cholpon-Ata in Kyrgyzstan raised few eyebrows. The event was explicitly billed as an informal edition of the Consultative Meeting of the Heads of State of Central Asia, itself a fairly informal annual gathering of the region’s leaders. Kyrgyzstan combined it with two high-level bilateral visits, from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, each producing an Allied Relations treaty, and with a showcase of Issyk-Kul and its expanding leisure infrastructure. Why the informal summit needed to be convened at all was never entirely clear. Unless the leaders held substantive discussions behind closed doors, the public proceedings offered little explanation of why the meeting had been convened.

Three observations nonetheless stand out.

First, in 2026 the five Central Asian states completed the Treaty on Friendship, Good-Neighbourliness and Cooperation for the Development of Central Asia in the Twenty-First Century, with Turkmenistan acceding in June as the final signatory. The original text was signed at Cholpon-Ata in 2022, and marking its completion in the same town made good sense. Except that the treaty was barely mentioned last week. The Kazakh president was the exception, drawing attention to the occasion and proposing that the parties move to practical implementation.

Relegating the treaty to a footnote probably had a reason. The summit was the first at which Azerbaijan’s president participated not as an invited guest but as part of the standing group. Celebrating a treaty that excludes Baku would have made little sense. That small tension, between what now counts as Central Asian and what does not, will run through the region’s diplomacy for years to come.

Second, Azerbaijan’s accession duly became the main headline of the commentary. Observers read it as confirmation of the primacy of the Middle Corridor and of the transport routes that make Azerbaijan and Central Asia partners. The architectural shift is real, and there is no deficit of remarks on the subject. One point, however, somehow evades most coverage.

Too many commentaries referred to Baku’s accession as “C5 becoming C6”. This is a misnomer. A five-party summit did admit a sixth member, but the consultative meetings were never referred to as C5. No equivalent of the term exists in Kyrgyz, Uzbek or even Russian political vocabulary. C5 is found only inside the formula C5+1, where it denotes arrangements in which the five Central Asian states engage an external partner. Japan pioneered the five-plus-one structure, followed by South Korea. The designation C5, however, became widely used only after the United States launched its C5+1 format at Samarkand in 2015. It was subsequently applied across a growing range of dialogues with the European Union, China, India, Germany, Italy, Russia and others.

The Consultative Meetings of the Heads of State of Central Asia were, by contrast, a refreshingly home-grown platform, launched at Astana in 2018 on Uzbekistan’s initiative. There was no outside partner and no external agenda. The participants were the leaders of the Central Asian states, and nobody called the event C5.

The temptation to carry C5 across from the C5+1 formula is understandable. But doing so imports the vocabulary of externally convened formats into a platform created by the Central Asian states themselves. More importantly, it misleads: C5+1 summits over the coming months may continue to include only the five Central Asian states.

Whether C5+1 turns into C6+1 is an open question. It is not unlikely, since at least some external partners will prefer to meet Aliyev alongside the Central Asian leaders while transport routes remain the leading item on the agenda. That will happen when it happens. In the meantime, on 16-17 September the five Central Asian presidents are due to meet President Lee Jae Myung in Seoul for the inaugural Central Asia–Republic of Korea summit. Azerbaijan took no part in the senior officials’ meeting that prepared the summit in April and is not included in the format. So, six weeks after Cholpon-Ata, Central Asia will again be represented internationally by five states.

The third observation concerns the future of Central Asian regionalism. Since the early 1990s it has remained elusive – attractive, yet difficult to achieve. At various points the obstacles included the Tajik civil war, Turkmen neutrality and Uzbekistan’s first president, each preventing the emergence of an all-five platform. The best iteration, the four-party Central Asian Cooperation Organization of the early 2000s, disappeared into the larger EurAsEC in 2005, a year after Russia’s accession. It took thirteen years for a new regional platform to emerge, bringing together all five leaders. Although institutionally light and centred on an annual presidential meeting, it revived the hopes of those who take Central Asia seriously as a political region.

Azerbaijan’s accession today is plainly different from Russia’s accession then. But in one respect the implication is the same. There is no longer a Central Asia-only format at the highest level. Should the five need to meet and talk among themselves, they retain ample opportunity on the margins of C5+1 gatherings in Beijing, Brussels and other capitals. What has disappeared is a dedicated table reserved for them.

The consultative meetings succeeded in normalising regular presidential dialogue, but the five governments showed little appetite for turning them into a more institutionalised regional body. Widening the format therefore proved more achievable than deepening it.

The post Wider, not deeper: Cholpon-Ata and the limits of Central Asian regionalism first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

Shairbek Juraev, Co-Founder and President of Crossroads Central Asia, spoke on the panel. Complementing the financial expertise represented at the webinar, his remarks focused on the political conditions that would determine whether the bank could become a credible operating institution.

The SCO has remained workable partly by avoiding binding commitments. Members with unresolved rivalries, different levels of exposure to sanctions and distinct foreign-policy orientations cooperate selectively while retaining considerable freedom of action. A development bank would alter that logic. It would require long-term capital commitments and common rules, bringing forward questions that the organisation has so far been able to postpone.

The experience of existing lenders points in the same direction. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank built credibility through professional risk management, open procurement and cooperation with established multilateral banks. These standards helped it secure strong credit ratings and broad membership. The New Development Bank demonstrates both progress and limitations. Member currencies accounted for roughly a quarter of its cumulative portfolio by the end of 2024, while the bank suspended new transactions in Russia after 2022.

With Russia and Iran as full members of the SCO, a future bank would need to determine how far it intended to rely on international capital markets. Rating agencies and correspondent banks would price compliance risks regardless of individual members’ positions on sanctions.

Local-currency settlement presents additional constraints, including unbalanced trade flows, limited currency convertibility and concern among some members that a renminbi-centred system could replace one form of currency dependence with another. Juraev argued that the bank should begin with corridors where trade volumes are already substantial and expand in response to demonstrated commercial demand.

For smaller member states, meaningful participation would depend on four conditions: a focused mandate; governance arrangements that give smaller shareholders a genuine voice; lending that creates sustainable domestic value; and a clear distinction between projects that build productive capacity and those valued primarily for political visibility. Project preparation is another frequently overlooked need. A dedicated preparation facility could be as valuable to smaller economies as an additional lending window.

Juraev concluded that SCO members face a choice between two broad models. One would be a modest bank with a limited mandate and high operating standards, working alongside the AIIB and other established lenders. The other would be an ambitious political project positioned as a cushion against sanctions and an alternative to the dollar-based financial system. The first could plausibly be established within a few years. The second may remain beyond the organisation’s institutional capacity.

The post A political test before a financial one: CCA on the SCO Development Bank first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

The event brought together European policymakers, researchers, and media practitioners to examine FIMI dynamics in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It was opened by Irène Mingasson, Head of Unit at the European Commission’s Service for Foreign Policy Instruments.

The study — conducted by ENC the EU-funded CARAVAN project of Internews, with Dr. Juraev as lead researcher — draws on AI-assisted analysis of over 581,000 social media posts alongside expert interviews and regional consultations.

The findings contribute to ongoing European policy discussions on countering FIMI by providing region-specific evidence on narrative patterns, amplification dynamics, and structural vulnerabilities in the information environment. The study underscores that effective responses must be country-specific, as conditions and intervention strategies differ significantly between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The post Dr. Shairbek Juraev presents FIMI research in Brussels first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

Astana hosted over 1,500 delegates, five heads of state, representatives from eighteen UN agencies, and a trade exhibition that generated $2.3 billion in signed memorandums. By any institutional measure, the Regional Ecological Summit held on 22–24 April 2026 was a success. Kazakhstan, once again, got its moment as a convening power. The region got a Joint Declaration, a five-year action plan, and a new entry on the multilateral calendar.

What it did not get was a conversation about why water governance in the region has failed.

That omission matters, because water — how it is generated, stored, allocated, and priced across five countries with fundamentally different interests — is the defining strategic variable in Central Asia’s environmental future. And water in Central Asia cannot be separated from energy. The two are bound together in a system whose governance architecture is now approaching the real test.

The outlines of the problem are well known. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan sit at the headwaters. They hold the glaciers, the rivers, and — through Toktogul and Rogun — the hydropower capacity that could cover their energy needs year-round. Downstream, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan depend on those same flows to irrigate agriculture that feeds tens of millions of people. The informal arrangement that kept this system functional during the Soviet period — upstream states release water in summer for irrigation, receive energy in winter in exchange — has never been replaced with anything durable. It runs on bilateral deals, seasonal negotiations, and a level of mutual restraint that climate change is now systematically eroding.

The region does have institutions designed to manage this. The Interstate Commission for Water Coordination (ICWC), established in 1992, is mandated to approve annual water withdrawal limits and manage reservoir regimes across all five states. The International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS), founded in 1993, provides the broader political umbrella. Both are active. Both have been active for over thirty years. And neither has proven capable of resolving the core upstream-downstream tension when national interests diverge sharply.

On February 20, two months before the summit, the ICWC held a regular session. The agenda was urgent: reservoir levels across the region were critically low, with significant shortfalls projected for the summer growing season. No unified response emerged. The session exposed, rather than bridged, the structural fault line between upstream and downstream states — the same fault line that has defined regional water politics since 1991. Kazakhstan, which in April would host the summit and sign declarations of environmental solidarity, used the occasion to propose replacing the existing framework altogether. Calling for a new body under a Central Asian Framework Convention on Water Management with real enforcement powers, Astana was tacitly acknowledging what three decades of regional cooperation had not resolved: that existing mechanisms can coordinate but cannot compel. Eurasianet, reporting on the session, noted that the ICWC’s “tactical paralysis” was on full display. The upstream-downstream divide was equally visible in who was sitting at the table. Kyrgyzstan — which holds a substantial share of the region’s glacier and river resources — has suspended its full membership and now attends as an observer, signalling that it no longer considers the commission’s allocation framework compatible with its interests as an upstream state.

RES 2026 touched all of this — but carefully, from a distance. Kyrgyzstan’s President Japarov used the summit to argue for a compensation mechanism for upstream water generation. Tajikistan’s Rahmon floated a regional carbon market. Turkmenistan proposed yet another regional council on water use. These are not frivolous proposals. Several have been on the regional agenda for years, however, without the institutional follow-through that would distinguish them from their predecessors.

The summit’s media coverage made the underlying reality visible in a different way. Each country’s press reported through a strictly national lens — Kazakhstan as generous host, Kyrgyzstan as climate victim owed compensation, Uzbekistan as agenda-setter, Tajikistan as water statesman, Turkmenistan as neutral institution-builder. Read together, those five narratives describe five countries using the shared platform to advance incompatible positions while projecting regional solidarity. This is a fairly accurate reflection of where Central Asia actually stands.

The environmental stakes are real and not in dispute. Glaciers are retreating faster than global averages. The Aral Sea basin remains a slow-motion disaster. Dust storms are intensifying. Urban air quality in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan is among the worst in the world. Climate change is compressing the seasonal water cycle that the entire regional economy depends on.

Looming over the entire regional water calculus is a factor none of the five governments controls: Afghanistan’s Qosh Tepa Canal, now nearing completion, is projected to divert up to 20 percent of the Amu Darya’s flow — a river on which Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan depend for the bulk of their agricultural water — with no binding agreement or regional mechanism in place.

What is contested is who pays, who gets, and who decides. RES 2026 did not answer those questions. It gave the region a shared vocabulary and a diplomatic framework — both useful — while the operational body responsible for actual water coordination has been struggling. The real test is the next dry season. Reservoir levels across the region do not respond to declarations.

A region that cannot agree on water allocations for the coming summer has nonetheless agreed on a five-year programme for environmental solidarity. The gap between them is where Central Asia’s real environmental politics lives.

The post Central Asia’s water: solidarity on paper, shortage on the ground first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

On 8 December 2024, Bashar al-Assad fled Syria to Moscow, ending the Assad family’s 53-year rule. The collapse was the culmination of the Deterrence of Aggression offensive led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. The new government, led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, has established a five-year transitional period until 2030, while foreign governments watch closely for signs of a slide into strict Islamist governance given HTS’s origins as al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra.

For Central Asia, the fall of Assad has reshaped a long-standing concern: the fate of Central Asian foreign fighters who travelled to Syria during the Civil War. These fighters can now be divided into two categories — those who fought with HTS and are being integrated into the new Syrian army, and those held in increasingly untenable ISIS detention camps in the Kurdish-controlled northeast. Both carry significant implications for regional security.

Integration into the Syrian Army

While exact numbers are unclear, reports suggest that at least 2,000 foreign fighters from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan went to fight in the Syrian Civil War — this figure excludes families. Estimates more generally suggest 8,000 to 18,000 foreign fighters and families are being held in detention centres in the Kurdish-controlled north. Around 3,500 of those who supported al-Sharaa have since been integrated into the new Syrian army’s 84th Division.

Given the green light from the United States, al-Sharaa’s government has chosen to integrate foreign fighters into the new Syrian army’s 84th Division, in a deeply risky strategy of “pragmatic normalisation”, or rather the “least bad option.” Out of almost 50 new military roles that have been announced, at least six have gone to foreigners. Most notably for Central Asia, Tajik national Saifiddin Tojiboev was reportedly appointed head of operational headquarters in the Ministry of Defence. The logic behind this comes from a global approach to terrorism which understands that expelling foreign fighters to their countries of origin would destabilise an even bigger geographical region, particularly as foreign fighters are often noted to be even more radical than Syrian and Iraqi soldiers in HTS.

On the one hand, if Central Asians choose to stay in Syria and be integrated into the army and society, it reduces the burden on Central Asia to process and rehabilitate every one of its citizens. Those who choose to return, already a self-selecting group, can be given more attention for a more successful chance of full rehabilitation. Keeping their job and pay ensures that extremists are occupied by a cause other than ISIS, and avoids the disastrous consequences seen by the American blacklisting of all Baathist party members during the invasion of Iraq, which partially led to the creation of ISIS itself.

On the other hand, Central Asian Islamic extremists are being legitimised through acceptance by the Syrian government. This reduces the visibility of punishment for Islamic extremism, which could lead to increased support for such movements. Moreover, established Central Asian extremists in Syria could turn into a source of advice and support for local cells in Central Asia, leading to regional instability through increased terrorist activity.

In balance, however, given that foreign fighters choosing to stay in Syria are less likely to be successfully deradicalised, integration into the Syrian army appears the better option for Central Asia itself, on the condition that greater funding is allocated for anti-terrorism and regional security to anticipate a potential surge. The immediate danger of a new regime expelling these fighters back to Central Asia has been averted — but this could change. Sectarian violence and the growth of an opposition movement could fragment the new government, and the opposition may increasingly view the integration of foreign fighters as the international community exporting its problem onto Syria. “Syria is free, non-Syrians must leave,” protesters said after the burning of a Christmas tree in a Christian neighbourhood of Damascus by foreign fighters in December 2024. Central Asian countries would be wise to plan for this likelihood, making the most of al-Sharaa’s delay of a jihadist exodus to develop policy on a sudden influx of highly radicalised fighters.

The Danger of ISIS Detention Camps

The ISIS detention camps in northern Syria present a separate and arguably more pressing challenge. The “powder-keg” prison camps are the most unstable factor in Central Asia’s repatriation challenge, particularly due to their potential for sudden collapse. Around 50,000 ISIS fighters and their families remain spread across 27 prisons and detention centres, 8,000 to 18,000 of whom are foreign fighters. A UN report in 2023 described open sewers, inadequate housing, limited access to basic necessities, routine violence, and sexual assault. While these camps restrict the ISIS terrorists of today, they simultaneously radicalise and unite a new generation of extremists — 60 percent of detainees at al-Hol and 63 percent at Roj are children, exposed to only ISIS ideology.

The Trump administration’s decision to cut all funding for Blumont, an NGO providing $117 million in essential camp services and security, has heightened the risk. In the first half of 2025 alone, ISIS carried out 149 attacks in northeastern Syria, killing 63 and targeting military outposts. The Syrian government’s relationship to these camps remains unclear, and HTS’s integration of foreign fighters into the army complicates matters further, as it is unclear to what extent HTS considers detained fighters potential allies.

Central Asia’s Repatriation Record

Central Asian countries must prepare for the possibility of these camps’ collapse. Fortunately, the region is in a much stronger position than many other countries. While UN Security Council Resolution 2178 (2014) called for states to develop prosecution, rehabilitation, and reintegration strategies for returning foreign terrorist fighters, most countries have been reluctant to repatriate — the UK’s removal of citizenship in the case of Shamima Begum is emblematic. Central Asian countries, by contrast, are world leaders in repatriation. By March 2024, over 2,100 individuals had been repatriated through humanitarian missions: Kazakhstan welcomed back 754 of its citizens, Uzbekistan 531, Kyrgyzstan 511, and Tajikistan 334.

Rehabilitation programmes differ from country to country, but share a common three-stage structure: (1) adaptation in supervised environments with psychological and medical attention; (2) rehabilitation; (3) reintegration into familiar environments alongside social support. Uzbekistan’s programme can be considered one of the most developed, integrating NGO support, supervised work placements, and the inclusion of otin-oyi (religiously literate women), as well as an imam, to help returning women adapt to local traditional forms of Islam. However, it should be noted that these programmes have largely catered for women and children who have voluntarily returned. The harder challenge of dealing with male fighters who personally committed crimes for ISIS remains largely unaddressed.

Looking Ahead

An in-depth report from the United States Institute of Peace advised, among other measures, the development of specific action plans for reintegration, reduction of stigmatisation of returnees, and building capacity at initial processing centres. These recommendations should now be developed to include emergency capacity — frameworks to rehabilitate those returned to Central Asia involuntarily, and methods focused on male fighters. A dual system of rehabilitation and imprisonment may be better suited to forced returnees from detention camps, considering the extremist organisation by ISIS loyalists seen in al-Hol camp. The simplified gendered view of women “fraudulently taken to this crisis-stricken country, where they were held hostage by terrorists” does not match the reality in all cases.

Al-Sharaa’s provisional government offers Central Asia a grace period to dramatically increase the capacity of rehabilitation programmes. The integration of Central Asian fighters into the Syrian army is, on balance, beneficial for regional stability, though greater attention to bonds between regional radical groups and new players in the Syrian army must be given. Efforts to repatriate Central Asians in untenable detention camps must be continued, and existing rehabilitation processes should be improved. Most crucially, Central Asian governments must plan for scenarios that would impact the region far more than al-Sharaa’s government currently does: civil war, an opposition that expels foreign fighters, or the collapse of ISIS detention centres could all trigger a sudden influx of radicalised individuals still loyal to ISIS.

Central Asia’s determination over a decade to repatriate its citizens from Syria is a positive, world-leading policy. If Europe is eventually forced to change its position on repatriation due to the imminent collapse of detention camps, Central Asia can offer advice and time-tested frameworks. The benefits would extend beyond regional security to improved international relations and the growth of Central Asia into a global leader on the issue of post-conflict rehabilitation.

This report is part of Crossroads Central Asia’s series highlighting analytical work by emerging scholars working on the region.

The post Central Asia’s foreign fighter dilemma in post-Assad Syria first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

Originally published in German as “Depolitisierte Politik: Die Parlamentswahlen 2025 in Kirgisistan,” Zentralasienanalysen, No. 171, 20 February 2026. The English version reproduced with permission.

Kyrgyzstan’s snap parliamentary elections of November 2025 passed with remarkably little public drama. There was no nervous anticipation or widespread political tension. In a country where parliamentary elections twice led to regime overthrow, this contest unfolded as a largely procedural event. For that very reason, it is analytically significant. Rather than marking a step toward regime consolidation, the elections served as a clear demonstration of how consolidated the current political system already is.

Three broader takeaways stand out. First, the 2025 vote confirmed one of the few enduring features of Kyrgyz politics: electoral rules change at every parliamentary cycle. This time, party-list proportional representation was abandoned in favor of a single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system in multi-member districts. Second, the elections effectively closed Kyrgyzstan’s long-running experiment with party-based parliamentary politics. While party competition once promised institutionalized politics, it rarely produced parties resembling those found in model parliamentary systems. For much of society, the abandonment of party-list elections registered as little more than a footnote. Finally, the political context of the elections underscored Kyrgyzstan’s alignment with a broader regional, and arguably global, trend toward the strengthening of the executive at the expense of checks and balances.

New parliament by new rules

The 2025 elections confirmed a defining feature of Kyrgyzstan’s political trajectory: parliamentary elections are rarely held under unchanged rules. Since independence, Kyrgyzstan has never conducted two consecutive parliamentary elections using the same rules governing either the parliament’s structure or the electoral system (see Table 1). The only exception – the 2020 elections – ended with the annulment of the voting results.

The November 2025 elections represented yet another major redesign: a full transition to a majoritarian electoral model based on multi-member districts. In one sense, this marked a return to familiar territory – district-based majoritarian elections were used in 1995, 2000, and 2005. At the same time, the reform introduced an important novelty: the adoption of the SNTV system, under which each of 30 constituencies elected three parliament members.

Table 1. Changes in Kyrgyzstan’s Parliamentary Electoral System, 1995–2025

Under the new system, voters cast ballots exclusively for individual candidates, not for parties. Political parties were formally permitted to nominate candidates, but in practice only one party, Yntymak, did so. This outcome was not mechanically predetermined by the electoral formula. In other contexts, parties can and do dominate even under candidate-centered electoral rules. The marginal role of parties in the 2025 elections therefore reflects not only the design of the system, but also the broader irrelevance of parties as meaningful political institutions in Kyrgyzstan.

What do the elections mean institutionally?

The institutional implications of the 2025 elections become clearer when examining how the new electoral design reshapes incentives and outcomes.

First, multi-member districts introduce a stabilizing logic into electoral competition. By allowing more than one candidate to win in each constituency, the system reduces zero-sum outcomes and lowers the likelihood of narrow defeats. In theory, this can reduce political tension by ensuring that multiple resourceful local elites are incorporated into parliament. Such an arrangement helps blunt post-electoral tension, at least compared to the winner-takes-all systems.

Second, the multi-member format made it possible to integrate gender requirements into the electoral framework. The gender quota, first introduced in 2007, proved difficult to implement under proportional representation and would be virtually impossible under single-member districts. The current system requires the presence of both genders among elected candidates in each district, effectively reserving at least one seat for women or men. The gender quota may appear at odds with the country leadership‘s nationalist and socially conservative rhetoric. In practice, however, its enforcement reflects institutional inertia rather than genuine conviction. The quota carries low political cost – certainly lower than the reputational cost the government would incur by attempting to remove it.

Third, the new electoral system structurally sidelines political parties as collective actors. Although parties are formally permitted to nominate candidates, none except one chose to do so. Within days of the parliament’s first session, newly elected deputies organized themselves into so-called “deputy groups.” These groupings reflect residual provisions of parliamentary regulations. They allocate specific roles and resources to deputy groups – a mechanism originally introduced under the 2021 mixed system to allow majoritarian deputies to mirror party factions. These groups function as equivalents of party factions, giving individual deputies collective bargaining power, staff and office resources, and formal rights in legislation, oversight, and nominations that they would not have individually. The composition of these groups offers little evidence of coherent political alignment and does not suggest that they function as substitutes for parties as collective actors.

The end of the party experiment

The November 2025 elections abandoned the party-list electoral system. This came as the culmination of a long-term process rather than a sudden break. Moreover, rather than imposing new rules of politics, it formalized what had already become a reality: the irrelevance of parties on the ground.

While first parties emerged in the early 1990s, the origins of the current phase of party politics lie in 2010: the adoption of a new constitution with a loud rhetoric of building a parliamentary republic. While the 2010 constitution indeed expanded the powers of parliament, the system neither legally nor in practice evolved into a parliamentary model. Within two to three years, the presidency, under Almazbek Atambaev, successfully reasserted its de facto dominance.

Party-list proportional representation quickly revealed serious deficiencies in implementation. Under the closed-list system, voters had little influence over which individuals ultimately entered parliament. Party leadership retained extensive discretion over the ordering of lists and, crucially, over post-election substitutions. The practice of prominent figures withdrawing from party lists shortly after elections, allowing lower-ranked candidates to take their seats, was widely perceived as misleading voters and became a powerful symbol of “party corruption.” Over time, party lists came to be associated less with representation than with transactional politics.

The shift to open party lists in the 2021 elections was intended as a corrective. By allowing voters to cast ballots both for a party and for a preferred candidate within that party, the reform sought to introduce an element of accountability and restore public trust. In practice, however, open lists produced unintended effects: electoral competition shifted inward, with individual candidates competing against one another. As candidates turned to mobilizing personal networks in specific localities to secure preference votes, proportional representation with national party lists devolved into a de facto district-based contest.

By the time of the 2025 elections, party-based parliamentary politics had already lost much of its legitimacy. Political parties had never evolved into durable institutions of political competition; instead, they remained ad hoc and short-lived alliances formed for electoral access. Party switching by the same political figures across electoral cycles had become routine. Against this backdrop, the abandonment of party-list representation did not dismantle a functioning institutional arrangement but formalized the way politics already operated in Kyrgyzstan.

Conclusion

If the electoral outcomes themselves offer limited analytical insight, the broader context in which the 2025 elections were held is more revealing. Some analyses have interpreted the vote as a further step toward regime consolidation. Such readings, however, risk attributing undue causal weight to the elections themselves. The 2025 elections did not deepen consolidation so much as demonstrate it. The muted public reaction to the change in the electoral system, together with the swift and voluntary self-dissolution of the outgoing parliament, exposed a political environment largely devoid of political debate, let alone open dissent.

The resulting system is a centralized and personalized regime that enjoys a relatively high degree of public approval and faces limited international pressure – at least by standards of Kyrgyzstan’s previous governments. Such a configuration may offer stability and predictability, but it also carries an inherent risk of losing the capacity for self-correction in the absence of effective institutional counterweights. Kyrgyzstan’s political history serves as a reminder that a predictable and loyal parliament remains such only until it does not. The central question for the country’s political trajectory is therefore not electoral stability as such, but whether the governing system retains the capacity to reassess its own limits and adapt to recurrent social, political, and geopolitical pressures.

* The article was drafted in January 2026 and does not reflect subsequent developments.

The post Depoliticized politics: Kyrgyzstan’s 2025 parliamentary elections first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.

The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 and the rapid consolidation of power by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) marked one of the most consequential political shifts in the Middle East in over a decade. While regional and global actors, most prominently Turkey, Gulf states, the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, moved quickly to position themselves vis-à-vis the new authorities in Damascus, one group of states stood out for their restraint: the countries of Central Asia.

More than a year after Assad’s departure, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have largely avoided formal statements, bilateral initiatives, or clear diplomatic signalling toward the new Syrian government. This silence is striking not only because of Syria’s renewed geopolitical relevance, but also because developments in the Middle East often intersect indirectly with Central Asia’s own security and foreign-policy considerations.

This article argues that Central Asia’s muted response is not the result of indecision or neglect, but a deliberate and calculated strategy. At its core lies the uncomfortable positioning of post-Assad Syria within the broader Russia–Ukraine confrontation. As Moscow and Kyiv compete, both directly and symbolically, for influence in Damascus, any overt engagement with the new Syrian authorities risks being interpreted as a geopolitical alignment. For Central Asian states that remain economically and politically entangled with Russia, strategic silence – much like their approach to the Russia-Ukraine war itself – has emerged as the least costly option.

By examining how Russian and Ukrainian involvement in Syria has shaped Central Asian calculations, this article discusses the logic behind this restraint, the differences in approach among Central Asian states, and the conditions under which silence may eventually give way to cautious engagement.

PATTERNS OF CAUTION IN CENTRAL ASIAN RESPONSES

Public engagement between Central Asian governments and the new Syrian authorities has so far been minimal, confined to large international conferences. However, Central Asian ministers sharing a room with new Syrian officials has not always resulted in public interaction. The search “Syria” on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan’s website is blank. Tajikistan’s last formal interaction was on September 26, 2024 during the 79^th session of the UN General Assembly. In Kyrgyzstan’s case, the most recent entry on its MFA’s website mentioning Syria, published on December 10, 2024, focuses on the 22^nd Doha International Forum held on December 7-8, 2024. Despite the regime change unfolding on December 8, 2024, during the conference, the summary lists Syria only midway in a series of conflicts, an avoidant formulation that chooses to ignore Assad’s flight to Moscow on that very day.

In contrast to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have made limited public references to Syria since December 2024. The 51^st Session of the OIC Ministerial Council was the vehicle used by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for discussions with Syria outside of official bilateral diplomatic meetings, which would require a formal acknowledgement of regime change. Baxtiyor Saidov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Uzbekistan, held talks on the side of the session with Foreign Minister of Syria Asaad Hassan Al-Shaibani, during which “prospects for close cooperation were discussed”. Kazakhstan’s then Foreign Minister Murat Nurtleu similarly participated in the session and mentioned the necessary “stabilization of the situation in Syria” and “taking into account the interests of the Syrian people”.

This report is part of Crossroads Central Asia’s series highlighting analytical work by emerging scholars working on the region.

The post Central Asia’s calculated silence on Syria first appeared on Crossroads Central Asia.