CAPS Unlock

🤗Join us for a relaxed and thoughtful English-language book club session designed for young readers, students, and emerging thinkers interested in the culture, society, and history of Central Asia.

📅 19.06.2026
⌚️4 pm
📌1000 kitap, 101/1 Kazhymukan str., Almaty

🛤️This session will center on The Railway (1999), one of Hamid Ismailov’s best-known novels. Born in what is now Kyrgyzstan and writing primarily in Uzbek and Russian, Ismailov is widely regarded as one of Central Asia’s leading contemporary writers.

Set in the fictional town of Gilas, the novel explores the social and political transformations that reshaped Central Asia during the 20th century.

☕️This is a participatory session — coffee, conversation, and collective thinking in a relaxed bookshop setting.

Let’s meet, read together, and talk openly. See you there!

Register and find the reading material via the link in bio.

🇹🇲In this week’s CAPS Unlock podcast, 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 migration policies: Reshaping economy and society, published as part of CAPS Unlock’s The Argument series.

Chmaisse explains why official data badly understate Turkmenistan’s dependence on remittances, how informal transfer networks and the black-market exchange rate shape household survival, and why Turkey has become the main destination for Turkmen labour migrants while Russia remains important for students.

♻️The conversation also explores the feminisation of Turkmen migration. As men face greater scrutiny at borders and through military-linked restrictions, women increasingly migrate independently and become primary earners abroad, especially in domestic and care work. That shift brings new economic agency, but also legal insecurity, family separation, exploitation, and trafficking risks.

Listen to the episode via the link in bio:

Substack: https://havli.substack.com/p/turkmenistans-migration-trap
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/turkmenistans-migration-trap/id1781868199?i=1000770772949
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3MHm33H5CnGz1SgCPPRXH1?si=h9Ma07kGQAaKFwF1Fk5u8g

Listeners can find Gulshat Chmaisse’s paper at CAPS Unlock’s website: https://capsunlock.org/