In this episode, Paolo is speaking to Edward Lemon and Bradley Jardine, the authors of Backlash: China’s Struggle for Influence in Central Asia (Hurst 2025).

Edward is an Assistant Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on Central Asia, particularly Tajikistan, with interests spanning security, authoritarianism, and academic freedom.

Bradley is the Managing Director of the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs. He previously studied at Xinhua University in China, and his research examines China's growing role across Central Asia and the wider Eurasian region.

Their data analysis and all-encompassing research spanned more than a decade and their fieldwork was conducted across multiple countries in the region.

In our conversation, we talk about the image of China in Central Asia, anti-Chinese protests, soft power and surveillance.

In this episode, Paolo is speaking to Dr. Franco Galdini, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham.

A political economy scholar, Franco is the author of “Rise of the Surplus Population? Land Decollectivization, Class Stratification, and Labor Precarization in Uzbekistan,” an article published by International Labor and Working Class History, a leading journal in labor studies, in a 2023 special issue [available in open access].

His fieldwork experience in Uzbekistan helped him track the transformation from full employment and low migration during Soviet times to the mass informalization of economic activity and rural outmigration after independence – a phenomenon he has written extensively about.

Franco is also a co-editor, together with Eugenia Pesci, of What’s in a Job? – Rethinking Labour, Gender, and Precarity in Central Asia – an edited volume that will be published in July by Springer.

In our conversation, we talk about the effects of decollectivization, which created a new class of landless peasants that are often employed as day laborers. As we’ll hear, the economic consequence was the class stratification of Uzbek society, especially in rural areas.

In this episode, Paolo is speaking to Dr. Malika Bahovadinova, lecturer in International Studies at Leiden University.

Malika is an anthropologist who conducted extensive fieldwork in Tajikistan during her doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships focusing on global migration management practices. For her ethnographic research, she did participant observation, embedding herself for extended periods of time with the International Organisation for Migration.

She is the author of a new book published this year by the University of Pennsylvania Press, titled Making Migrants: International Migration Management in Tajikistan. Malika has also authored a number of academic articles, and in this episode we will discuss one in particular, Subaltern citizenship: naturalization and belonging for New Russian citizens from Central Asia, published in 2024.

In our conversation, we try to unpick one of the main focuses of both the article and the book: the politics of representation involving migrants from Central Asia, that is, how the social group of migrant workers gets classified, and then how that classification is produced and reproduced over time. As we’ll hear, these questions of representation are often entangled in geopolitical and postcolonial power relations.