The CAPS Unlock podcast returns after a long New Year break to track how an unsettled global agenda is pulling Central Asia into the fray.

We began with U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly launched Board of Peace, an initiative that started life as a Gaza oversight mechanism but quickly hardened into something broader: a leader-centric club with an unusually vague mandate and an unusually personalised governance model. The striking Central Asian angle is that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan did not just endorse the concept; their presidents travelled to Davos last week to sign the charter as founding members.

We looked at what each government said publicly, what it carefully avoided saying, and why joining could be read as low-cost insurance with a highly personalised U.S. administration, even if the move sits awkwardly with both countries’ recent emphasis on multilateralism and institutional predictability.

Next, we turned to a more familiar but still unsettling signal: the recent burst of openly imperial rhetoric from prominent Russian nationalist voices. Vladimir Solovyov, a well-known TV political talkshow presenter, publicly mused about extending “special military operations” to Central Asia and Armenia. A week later, Russia’s foreign ministry tried to wave it away as private opinion. Then Alexander Dugin went further, questioning the legitimacy of sovereign states across Central Asia and the South Caucasus altogether. We discussed why that official distancing rings hollow, what this kind of talk does even when it is not backed by action, and how it narrows the space for trust in the region’s already fragile security environment.

For our interview segment this week, we spoke with Juan Carlos Leunissen, an independent researcher who interned with CAPS Unlock last year, about his new essay for the CAPS Unlock website on the six narratives the European Union uses to justify its investment in the Trans-Caspian (Middle Corridor) route and why the story the EU tells about connectivity may matter as much as the infrastructure itself.

LINKS

• Juan Carlos Leunissen essay: The six stories the European Union tells about Trans-Caspian transport https://capsunlock.org/the-six-stories-the-european-union-tells-about-trans-caspian-transport/

• Abdulaziz Kamilov comments on Uzbekistan’s rationale for joining https://www.gazeta.uz/ru/2026/01/23/abdulaziz-kamilov/

• CAPS Unlock LinkedIn page https://www.linkedin.com/company/capsunlockorg

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