CoMoDe

Wladimir Sgibnev and Egor Muleev applied for the modest funding provided by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundation for a study of informal and shared mobilities in Central Asia and South-East Europe. And they won! They are now working to establish collaboration between different scholars in order to prepare the report by the end of the year.

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.