CAPS Unlock

🔥This Friday: The second meeting of Between the Lines, a new English-language book club from CAPS Unlock and 1000 Books.

📍1000 Books, Almaty
🗓 Friday, May 15
🕓 4:00 PM

🤳 This session will explore The Greater Common Good by Arundhati Roy, led by Hugh McLean, Senior Advisor at CAPS Unlock.

🤔 Together, we’ll read, reflect, and discuss key questions:

-What does “the common good” actually mean in practice?
-Who gets to define it—and who is left out?
-What is the role of governments, corporations, and citizens in shaping development?
-How do these debates connect to environmental and social justice today?
-Can “progress” be measured without asking who bears its cost?

This is a participatory session—coffee, conversation, and collective thinking in a relaxed bookshop setting.

Let’s meet, read together, question assumptions, and talk openly. See you there! 🙌

🔗 Register via link (check out story highlights)

In this week’s episode of the CAPS Unlock podcast, we begin with a novelty in the European Union’s sanctions campaign toward Russia. For the first time, Brussels has applied what it calls an anti-circumvention mechanism at the level of an entire country: Kyrgyzstan.

The measure is narrow but consequential. It targets specific categories of industrial equipment and financial channels that the EU believes have enabled sanctioned goods to be rerouted into Russia. Bishkek firmly rejects these claims.

🇰🇿We then turn to Kazakhstan, where confusion over residence permit rules triggered unnecessary alarm. Reports suggested applicants might need advanced Kazakh language proficiency at B2 level. That interpretation proved incorrect. The government later clarified that requirements have not broadly tightened, but instead become more selective.

In this week’s interview, we look at foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) in Central Asia with Shairbek Dzhuraev, executive director of Crossroads Central Asia. Drawing on the European Neighbourhood Council’s report Information Under Pressure, we examine how external actors, primarily Russia and China, project narratives into local information spaces.

These campaigns are sustained, coordinated, and adapted to national contexts. In Kazakhstan, messaging is locally calibrated; in Uzbekistan, it is more global and ideological. The conversation also explores a growing “resilience gap,” as pressure on independent media and civil society weakens the region’s ability to respond.

🎧Listen to the episode here:

Substack: https://havli.substack.com/p/kyrgyzstans-sanctions-headache-kazakh

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/kz/podcast/kazakhstans-oil-shock-kyrgyzstans-crypto-bet-and-a/id1781868199?i=1000762895694

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3lQ6qTCcTmR8e79xSHb11Z?si=e3fa81f5ac5f419e

On April 8–10, CAPS Unlock organized a capacity-building training on policy evaluation. The training was moderated by Dena Lomofsky, an international development practitioner and senior consultant at Southern Hemisphere (), a socioeconomic development consultancy based in South Africa.

Participants engaged with core approaches to policy evaluation, with a focus on developing the skills needed to produce credible, contextually grounded assessments that support evidence-informed policymaking. The training also included a practical component: participants used the Law on the Status of Teachers in Kazakhstan as a case study, developing a policy evaluation plan for the legislation.