The Karakum Brief

Editor’s note

From the Karakum

Around 170 kilometres northwest of Turkmenabat, on the left bank of the Amu Darya, a square of fired brick sits alone in the desert. Daýahatyn began in the ninth century as a fortress built by Tahir ibn Husayn, and in the eleventh century it was rebuilt as a caravanserai on the road between Amul and Khorezm. Its walls run 53 metres to a side. The main gate faces the river, positioned so the sand wind would pass it by. It is the best preserved medieval caravanserai in Turkmenistan, and it was built for one purpose: to receive camels.

Source: Daýahatyn along the Great Silk Road, turkmenistan.gov.tm

I spent three days in August thinking about that building without once mentioning it. I was at a conference in Ulaanbaatar on the rights of mobile peoples, presenting a paper on the Turkmen camel, and the thing I kept circling was how much infrastructure a society will build for an animal it later stops counting. Daýahatyn is a hotel for camels that outlived the traffic. The question this edition keeps asking is what else outlived it, and who is still keeping the record.

The Lead

The Lead

Context. From 19 to 21 August 2026 the International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations, under the auspices of UNESCO, hosted Nomadic Futures: Cultural Rights, Knowledge Systems, Climate Resilience in Ulaanbaatar. It ran alongside UNCCD COP17 and the United Nations International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, and it answered the 2024 report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on the situation of mobile Indigenous peoples. More than 60 scholars and practitioners from 20 countries attended. Importantly, this was not a nomadic studies conference in the narrow sense. Fully nomadic, semi nomadic and settled pastoral systems were all in the room, with Mongolia's herding heritage as the centrepiece and the explicit purpose of moving ideas across livelihoods that look nothing alike.

Observation. The pattern that surfaced repeatedly, in country after country, was a gap between presence and recognition. Herders are unmistakably on the land and almost entirely absent from the instruments that govern it. One slide put it in numbers: a household survey from the Hindu Kush measured rotational grazing, collective gathering, departure to the pastures, the tending of ancestral graves and the local vocabulary for landscape across 39 households, and found substantial loss in most of those domains. The instrument had a column for graves and for landscape words. The state's instrument has a column for goats.

Analysis. Turkmenistan sits squarely inside that gap, and my own paper was an attempt to describe its shape. Mongolia's coaxing ritual for camels has carried a UNESCO inscription since 2015 and the international standing that follows. Turkmen camel pastoralism, of comparable depth, has nothing close. Türkiye offers the harder version of the same story: a national camel herd of 118,211 in 1937 fell to roughly 970 by 2009, a decline of 98.5 percent since 1960, and Sarıkeçili families in full transhumance went from about 1,500 in the 1990s to about 150 today, still walking 350 to 450 kilometres a season on foot. Anatolia was among the world's most densely nomadic landscapes for a millennium and is nearly absent from the international pastoral rights literature, largely because the research exists only in Turkish. Different country, identical mechanism. Recognition follows the language the research is written in, not the practice it describes.

So what. The green transition is where this stops being an academic problem. A UN report cited from the podium warned that mobile peoples are exposed precisely because governments and investors treat their land as empty, and wind and solar go up without consent. "Vacant" pastoral land is an old colonial label doing new work on a decarbonisation timetable. Turkmenistan's renewable build out is only beginning. Herder communities brought their own document to Ulaanbaatar, the Nomads' Red Line, organised around water, health, land, traditional knowledge, heritage and participation, and its central demand is procedural rather than substantive: no decisions about our land without our participation.

What this doesn't tell us yet. It does not tell us what Turkmen camel herders themselves would say, because they were not there. That absence was the sharpest thing I felt in the room. I have written to Turkmen institutions, organisations and individuals and the replies have been thin. So this is an open invitation. If you are a Turkmen scholar, an institution, or someone connected to a herding community with an interest in documenting this, I would like to hear from you. Details are in Connect.

The Blotter

Turkmenistan Blotter

The Watch

Caspian & Central Asia Watch

Deep Dive

Monthly Deep Dive

Düýe at Dusk: the Arvana, the kejebe, and a literature that does not exist

The paper I presented at Nomadic Futures started with an evening in Balkan velayat. A wedding celebration turned up at the end of an unmarked desert track, and as the sun went down the camels were brought in for the night. That was the image I could not put away, and the research began as an attempt to find out what had already been written about it.

The answer was almost nothing. The Arvana, Turkmenistan's one-humped camel, falls between three separate bodies of scholarship and belongs to none of them. Read through Arabian, Saharan or East African frames it becomes a generic dromedary. Read through Mongolian frames it is measured against the two-humped Bactrian and found to be the wrong animal. Read through the horse and sheep complex that dominates writing on the steppe it is a footnote to an equestrian culture. I could not locate a dedicated ethnography of the Arvana in English, Russian or Turkish.

What exists instead is scattered across sources that were not trying to do ethnography. Working from Russian and Turkmen material and from a 1989 FAO livestock survey written by animal scientists, it became possible to trace how milk, breeding practice and naming carry a body of knowledge that was simply never assembled as such. A 2022 genetics paper on the Turkmen camel of Golestan, in Iran, makes essentially the argument I was making, in a journal with no interest in making it.

The kejebe is where that knowledge becomes an object. Slender branches are bent corner to corner into a frame so that a bride travels inside a portable dwelling carried on a camel. Once you have looked at a kejebe it is difficult to keep describing the camel as a source of milk, wool and transport. The animal is load-bearing in the culture, not merely in the caravan.

The regional frame matters here too, and it is moving. Times of Central Asia reported this month that camel farming is expanding across Central Asia as climate pressure mounts, which is the argument for the animal made in the register that governments actually respond to: water efficiency, drought tolerance, marginal land. That case is real and I am glad it is being made. It is also, on its own, exactly the reduction the kejebe argues against. A country can expand its camel herd for entirely sound agronomic reasons and still lose the knowledge system that made the animal culturally intelligible, because the agronomic case has no column for that.

What the room taught me

Three things from the conference reframed the project while I was sitting in it, and none of them were mine.

One presenter set herding knowledge beside animal science, category by category. Herding takes the whole herd across generations, treats animals as partners, uses mobility so livestock compose their own diets, and balances numbers against available forage. Animal science takes the individual animal, isolates it from its environment, immobilises it, feeds it standardised rations and maximises performance per unit of product. Two internally coherent systems. Only one of them gets taught as science. That is the FAO survey problem stated as a general rule.

Another put pastoralism's logic in a single diagram: high input variance plus high process variance produces low output variance. Herders match the variability of their practice to the variability of the ecosystem, and stability comes from moving rather than from control. Every intervention that reduces mobility in the name of predictability is therefore working against the mechanism that produced the predictability.

The third came from a herder in the Gobi, and it inverted the usual account of fieldwork. He said researchers open the eyes of pastoralists to their own importance, not the other way around. People in his own country had asked him why anyone would waste effort in the countryside. Working alongside outside research on land and biodiversity, he came to understand his own value as a pastoralist differently. I had been thinking of documentation as extraction. He was describing it as recognition, which is a different transaction with different obligations.

A closing slide left five questions with the room. The one I wrote down twice: when the loss is a practice rather than an asset, who has standing to name it?

Which returns to the gap. Mongolia's coaxing ritual for camels has held a UNESCO inscription since 2015. Turkmen camel pastoralism has no comparable recognition, no dedicated ethnography, and as far as I can establish no sustained documentation project. The next stage of this work has to be built around herder voices rather than around me, and that requires partners inside Turkmenistan. See Connect.

Sources: Times of Central Asia | Nomadic Futures, IISNC under the auspices of UNESCO | The presentation | What I learned in the room | What was on the screens

From the LinkedIn Feed

The Three Threads

Over the summer the three threads went quiet. What ran instead were reposts, which kept the feed alive while the conference paper took the writing time. The framework itself is not changing: Signal on Mondays for AI and methodology, Overhead on Wednesdays for GIS and satellite work, Karakum on Fridays for the thematic pieces. What is changing is the material running through it.

Starting this autumn the three threads will carry a single long project: translating and analysing Туркменоведение and linking what is in it to the present.

Туркменоведение, literally Turkmen Studies, was a Soviet monthly of history, ethnography, geography, literature and culture published in Ashgabat from September 1927 through 1931. It was the principal periodical of the Institute of Turkmen Culture, Türkmenkult, and it appeared only a few years after the Turkmen SSR was created in 1924, during the window when Soviet institutions were simultaneously trying to document Turkmen society and to remake it. That double purpose is what makes the run valuable twice over: as a source about Turkmenistan, and as a record of how Turkmenistan was being defined.

The subject range is unusually wide. Tribal and genealogical organisation, tamgas, şejere, folklore and oral poetry, dialects and phonetics, archaeology, agriculture, natural resources, education, religion and material culture. A. P. Potseluevsky published from linguistic and ethnographic expeditions that took him among the Anauli, Ersari, Saryk, Salyr, Tekke, Nohurli, Goklen and Yomut. G. I. Karpov, the central figure behind both the journal and Türkmenkult, wrote on Turkmen tamgas in 1929, on kalym in 1930, on alaman raiding in 1931, and on the Baluch in 1928.

The run also has an arc. The 1927 to 1929 volumes, with Karpov as principal editor from 1928, are the broadest and the most open. From 1930 the material narrows as cultural policy hardens, and socialist construction, collectivization, literacy and language reform take over the pages, though field reporting continues throughout. The 1931 volumes are the most interesting transitional object in the set, carrying real ethnography and explicit ideology on facing pages. In 1932 the journal was replaced by «За социалистическую Туркмению». One bibliographic caution for anyone hunting a set: annual volumes were not always twelve numbered issues, since some were combined, so the surviving record varies in how it describes each year. There is also a short 1981 study devoted entirely to the journal, Maral Gapurova's «Печать и культурная революция в Туркменистане», at 83 pages.

This is intended to produce published articles and reports, with a PhD by publication as the destination. If your institution, organisation or outlet has an interest in early Soviet Central Asian scholarship, ethnographic recovery, or the Sovietization of knowledge production, I would welcome a conversation about co-operation or about publishing this work with you.

From the Desk

From the Desk

Published recently

Trade Finance Global, August 7, 2026

Melons and money: Turkmenistan's sweetest economic symbol

A long-form feature arguing that heirloom melon varieties offer a higher value and less water-intensive alternative to cotton and wheat in a country where agriculture consumes roughly 91 percent of water on about 4 percent arable land. Covers Karakum Canal irrigation, the 2024 export surge and its concentration in the Russian market, seed diversity and sugar content, and the melon as a vehicle of national identity.

Read at Trade Finance Global

Dr. Dovran Orazgylyjov, August 5, 2026

Makul Kids English-Turkmen Picture Dictionary: Visual Learning with Words, Images, and Examples

Editorial board member, contributing editorial review to the first children's title in the Makul Dictionary Project. A bilingual picture dictionary organising several hundred essential English and Turkmen words into thematic units covering animals, food, nature, the body, transportation, professions, numbers, colours, verbs and adjectives. Each entry pairs an original illustration by the Turkmen artist Yusup Orazgylyjov with both headwords and an example sentence in both languages, supporting usage rather than rote recall. The volume extends a series that includes the Makul English-Turkmen Dictionary, Language Handbook and Proverbs.

View on Amazon

From the Archive

The Ride That Saved a Breed, Equestrian Life, issue 122, May 2026. Eighty-four days and 4,300 kilometres from Ashgabat to Red Square in the summer of 1935, told through the ride commander's diary, dispatches filed to Turkmenskaya Iskra from the trail, and Soviet archive material. Twenty-eight collective farm workers rather than cavalrymen, crossing the Karakum at ground temperatures above 60 degrees, pouring sulphurous water through their horses' nostrils because the animals refused to drink it, laying saxaul wood over kilometres of soft sand so the horses would not sink. The purpose was an argument: prove the purebred Akhal-Teke against the Anglo-Teke crossbreed under the worst endurance test available, and the breeding programme that was erasing it might be stopped. It worked. Crossbreds born after 1936 were struck from the purebred studbook.

I am putting it here deliberately. This edition is about a pastoral tradition that no institution has been asked to recognise. The 1935 ride is the opposite case: a Turkmen animal whose keepers found a way to force the recognition, at enormous cost, in the only register the state would accept. UNESCO inscribed Akhal-Teke breeding and decoration in 2023. The camel is still waiting. Read at Equestrian Life

Also reading

• Turkmenistan and the New Geopolitics of Silicon, Times of Central Asia. Silicon supply chains are not where most Turkmenistan coverage looks, which is the point.
• Establishing Reference Values for Serum Neutrophil Gelatinase-Associated Lipocalin (NGAL) in Turkmen Horses, Veterinary Medicine and Science. Reference values for NGAL in healthy horses, and in the Turkmen breed specifically, have been poorly defined. A narrow paper that quietly expands the veterinary baseline for the breed.
• Turkmen Energy, request the latest issue. One of the few sector publications tracking Turkmen oil, gas and power in any depth. Issues are distributed on request through the form.

Source Spotlight

Source Spotlight

An independent English-language regional news and analysis publication covering Central Asia and the region's position within the wider Eurasian system. Coverage spans all five republics with additional attention to neighbouring states, across politics and governance, business and economics, trade and investment, energy and infrastructure, international relations, security, justice and human rights, environment, society and culture. It mixes daily reporting with longer features, interviews, analysis and podcasts, and draws on contributors based both inside the region and abroad.

What makes it useful to me is a specific editorial habit rather than breadth alone. TCA consistently connects a local development to the wider system it sits inside, so a story about a rail contract arrives attached to the Middle Corridor, and a story about a refinery arrives attached to the market it is meant to serve. That is the same move this newsletter is trying to make, which means TCA doubles as a source and as a check on my own framing. It also states that it does not publish paid editorial content or accept compensation for coverage, which is not a universal position in this region's English-language press.

One caveat worth carrying. TCA runs considerably more critical material than most English-language outlets covering this region, and on topics that others route around entirely. That is much of its value. It also means the register shifts noticeably from piece to piece, because a wide contributor base drawn from inside and outside the region brings a wide range of positions with it. Check the byline and check who the writer is affiliated with before you take a framing as the publication's house view, particularly on anything touching governance or human rights. This is a normal thing to do with any outlet and an especially useful habit with this one.

I use it for regional coverage and, more often, for story leads. Two of this edition's Watch items and the Deep Dive's regional frame came from there.

Source: timesca.com

Methodology Bench

Methodology Bench

Reading a livestock survey as an ethnographic document

The Düýe at Dusk research had a structural problem before it had a method. There was no dedicated literature on the Arvana in any of the three languages that should have contained one. The method had to be built for a subject that had never been treated as a subject.

Read across the framings, not within one. Turkmen, Russian, Turkish, Persian and English sources each place the Turkmen camel inside a different comparative frame, and each frame is wrong in a different direction. Reading all five is not about accumulating more evidence, it is about locating the animal by triangulating the errors. Where every literature has the same blind spot, that blind spot is the finding.

Read technical documents against their purpose. The 1989 FAO survey, Dmitriev and Ernst's Animal Genetic Resources of the USSR (Animal Production and Health Paper 65, Rome), was written by animal scientists to characterise a breed for production, and the Arvana sits in section 8.2, One-humped camels. Read as it was intended, it is a table of yields. Read for what its authors had to record incidentally in order to compile it, it is a document about breeding decisions, naming conventions and milk practice, which is to say a document about knowledge transmission. The trick is disciplined: distinguish what the source asserts from what it presupposes, and never let the second become a quotation.

Treat the absence of a source as data. A missing ethnography is not a hole in the argument, it is the argument, provided you can show the search was serious. That means documenting where you looked and in what language, so the claim is falsifiable rather than rhetorical.

Go to social media when the archive fails. Reaching herding communities, Turkmen scholars and diaspora organisations directly through social platforms is a legitimate research channel when institutional routes are thin. It is also honest to report the response rate. Mine was low. That result belongs in the writing, because a study of institutional invisibility that quietly hides its own recruitment failure is proving the point by accident rather than on purpose.

Cross-check against work that is not trying to help you. The 2022 Golestan genetics paper supports the cultural argument precisely because it had no cultural argument to make. Corroboration from an indifferent source is stronger than agreement from an aligned one.

Resources

Resources Desk

Country reports and briefings

• Europe and Central Asia Digest, August 2026, UNDP in Europe and Central Asia. Third edition of the digest, a compact monthly regional round-up from the UNDP regional bureau.
• The winners of the EU Civil Society Facility in Central Asia mini-grants programme, UNOPS. Useful less as news than as a map of which civil society organisations across the region are currently funded and on what themes.

Datasets and tools

• Turkmenistan Overflight Permits: CAA approval and FIR routing. Nearly everything written about moving goods and people across Turkmenistan concerns ground transport: rail, road, pipeline, the Caspian ferries. The corridors overhead get almost no attention, which is odd given how much of the country's transit value sits in its airspace. This is a commercial permit service rather than an authority, so read it as vendor material, but the FIR routing and civil aviation approval chain are set out here more clearly than anywhere else I have found.

Archival curiosity

• 10 Surprising Facts About the Turkmen from an 1860 Book, Orient. A nineteenth-century outsider's account, worth reading for what its author found surprising as much as for the facts themselves.
• The Disappearance of the Turk: The Cultural Politics of Thoroughbred Horses in the Ottoman and British Empires, Donna Landry, University of Kent. Between 1650 and 1750 the English Thoroughbred was built out of Ottoman imports grafted onto native racing stock, an asymmetrical exchange in which appropriation became naturalisation and then total assimilation, until the Turk disappeared from the story of a breed he had founded. The point that carries furthest concerns Evliya Çelebi, who never wrote of Turk or Turkoman horses the way Western visitors did but particularised the breeds of the steppe on their own terms. Directly relevant to the Akhal-Teke, whose Turkoman ancestry sits inside the same erasure, and a close cousin of this edition's argument about the Arvana. Read the PDF. Landry's book-length treatment is Noble Brutes, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Announcements

Announcements & Events

Upcoming.

• First World Championship of Akhal-Teke Horses. Peelbergen Equestrian Centre, Kronenberg, the Netherlands, 4 to 6 September 2026. Organised by the Embassy of Turkmenistan to the Benelux countries and free to all visitors. The first championship of its kind for the breed, staged in Europe rather than in Ashgabat, which is itself the story. Details
• Fulbright Faculty Development Program 2027 to 2028. The US Embassy in Turkmenistan is accepting applications from junior university faculty for a one-semester, non-degree programme to develop courses, sharpen teaching and build partnerships with US institutions. Deadline 20 September 2026. Apply at apply.iie.org/ffsp2027.
• Registration open for CIET 2026. The Caspian International Energy and Transport forum. Register
• CASIB Regional Conference for Future-Oriented Research and Innovations. Alem AI, EXPO Exhibition Center, Astana, 17 to 18 November 2026. Organised by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg's representative office in Kazakhstan, the Central Asia Sustainable Innovation Bureau and Astana Hub, with support from the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space and the Kazakh Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The question on the table is how research can best contribute to sustainable development and the transformation it requires. Day one is presentations and plenary discussion on joint research activity, day two is workshops on knowledge transfer. Programme and registration to be announced. Announcement
• Central Asia femtech landscape study, survey open. A consortium including Women in Tech Turkmenistan, Accelerate Prosperity, Femtech Insider and partners across all five republics is running the first mapping of the femtech sector in Central Asia, covering startups and products, the supporting ecosystem of incubators, accelerators, grant programmes and investors, market size, and barriers to growth. Anyone building in women's health at any stage from R&D to scaling is invited. The survey takes about ten minutes. Contact [email protected] for the survey link or to become a research partner.

Worth noting.

• US-Turkmenistan Business Council elects new leadership. SIG SAUER, John Deere, The Coca-Cola Company and CNH lead the incoming board of directors. The composition is a reasonable index of which American commercial interests are actually engaged. Announcement

What to Watch

What to Watch

• Turkmenistan hosts the next Central Asia and Azerbaijan summit.

  The format is young and the venue matters. Watch whether Ashgabat uses the chair to push Trans-Caspian infrastructure or to keep the agenda deliberately modest, which has been the pattern. Caspian Post

• What follows the Herat memorandum.

  Gasifying one Afghan province is a far smaller commitment than completing TAPI, and it is also the first thing in years that looks like gas physically moving south under a signed schedule. The tell will be whether construction dates hold through the winter.

• Oil and Gas of Turkmenistan 2026, Ashgabat, 21 to 23 October.

  Offshore development, exploration and international partnership are on the programme. After the A8 result and the XRG entry into Block 1, the offshore session is the one to read.

• The Ice Silk Road.

  Arctic routing as an alternative to the Middle Corridor and to Suez keeps resurfacing in regional commentary. Currently more concept than corridor, but it changes the comparative maths for every Caspian route if it moves. Scientific American

• What the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists actually produces.

  COP17 and the IYRP close out with recommendations. The specific thing worth watching, for the reasons in the Lead, is whether Central Asian pastoral systems are named in the outputs or folded into a generic category.

Magtymguly

Magtymguly of the Month

Why this one, this month.

They said he has no country, that his caravan has moved on. Magtymguly wrote it about a man who had gone missing, and it lands on this edition because it names the exact condition the Lead is describing. A caravan that has moved on leaves no address to write to. There is no ministry, no register, no inscription, nothing an instrument can set a column against. The herders are still there. It is the caravan, in the sense of the thing that once carried the practice into public view, that has moved on. The poem is about one absent man and not about pastoral policy, but the shape of the sentence is the shape of the problem: the loss is real, it is plain to anyone looking, and nobody has standing to name it.

Connect

Let’s talk

If you work in Central Asian policy, Caspian energy, Eurasian trade corridors, cultural and historical research, or regional analysis, or if something in this edition sparked an interest of your own, I would welcome the conversation. And on a side note, I'm open to consulting, research, and speaking engagements, as well as the right full-time opportunity, and I'm especially keen to explore fellowships, part-time lecturing, and research roles.

If you are hiring, or know of a role worth a look, my open to work post carries a carousel walking through my background, regional experience and the kind of work I am after. It is the fastest way to get the whole picture in one place.

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