CoMoDe

Last Tuesday on the 8th of July, the CoMoDe group hosted a workshop organised by our dear fellow Bermet Borubaeva. We had a quite diverse number of participants with very various backgrounds in presence and online. In the beginning Bermet shared her year-long experience of resisting a debt-driven sustainable transition in Bishkek’s public transport system, which ultimately resulted in the city having no sustainable transport. We discussed various ways of organising protests, mapped all the relevant stakeholders, and brainstormed novel ways of presenting the issue. The event went very well, and Bermet cooked us a fabulous plov for dinner afterwards.

Read more about the developments in Bishkek and local activist structures on: https://bishkeksmog.info/2025/06/05/ifl/

During the 6th annual CASNiG Conference (Central Asian Studies Network) in Bishkek, organised by the American University in Central Asia and the French Institute for Central Asian Studies, Wladimir Sgibnev and Egor Muleev presented a new, upcoming book with the name “Appreciation of Marshrutkas”. It is a collection of articles originally published in English as part of the Marshrutka project, which have now been translated into Russian. The book contains five papers by Cholpon Turdalieva, Lela Rekhviashvili, Wladimir Sgibnev and Tonio Weicker. Egor Muleev translated and edited the papers, and wrote an introduction. The day before the launch at the conference, the Bishkek-based publishing house “Books for Development” held a similar event in their bookstore. So there were two launches, and both went really well. 

Tuesday 8 July, 16:00, room 407.
Schongauerstraße 9, Leipzig
Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde

Visiting Fellows Programme –  2025
The CoMoDe project, ‘Contentious Mobilities: Rethinking Mobility Transitions through a Decolonial Lens (CoMoDe)”

The IfL Visiting Fellowship Programme, ‘Mobility Transition in Central Asia: Sustainability, Power and International Financial Institutions (IFIs)’, will focus on the case of Bishkek’s wasted trolleybus system, which was once the most sustainable form of transport in the city. In recent years, public concern has grown over rising levels of air pollution in Bishkek. According to IQAir, an air quality information platform, Bishkek often ranks among the world’s most polluted cities. In an attempt to address this issue, Bishkek City Hall, in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank (ADB), intends to purchase 120 electric buses to replace the trolleybuses that were financed by a loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

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