Harmonious religious relations are a very sensitive and relevant topic today for Kazakhstan. Assylbek Izbairov, director of the institute for geopolitical studies, professor of the institute for diplomacy, religious scholar, told about the regulation in this sphere and how to build a system of religious relations in the interview to cabar.asia.

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In early 2016, a cache of Islamic State (IS) foreign terrorist fighter (FTF) records was leaked. It was subsequently obtained by a handful of media outlets and academic institutions, including the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London, where I spent a year and a half working as a Visiting Research Fellow. This report takes an in-depth look at the leaked documents, focusing in particular on the citizens and residents who originated in Saudi Arabia. (more…)

 In mid-February, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan, Sirojiddin Muhriddin, said that the country had begun the work on returning its citizens from Syria and Iraq. In recent years, nearly two thousand people departed for there. However, the situation in the country is uneven: in some districts, a large number of people join the ranks of extremists, and in other districts, there is not a single person who has departed. (more…)

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A journalist based in Tashkent, Louiza Atabayeva, was wearing a headscarf for a week and told what it was like to hold business meetings, travel by underground, meet boyfriend’s friends and hear personal insults when you wear a headscarf.
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The ability to distinguish extremist propaganda, violent media-leading xenophobia and hate speech in information consumed will help young users to become resistant to radical narratives.

The report “New Media Culture and Information Literacy as an Early Warning of the Radicalization of Youth” offers recommendations and educational methods for training young users.

I was 19 the first time marriage was mentioned. My mother told me about a young man whose family had expressed an interest in me, and then she promptly left the house. The realisation that I was of marriageable age was clearly as difficult for her as it was surprising to me. I was a geeky young woman who had never even shaken hands with a man, let alone had a boyfriend. I’d attended an all-girls Catholic school before opting to study science at university. My life was Malcolm X and Maya Angelou, X-Men and Spider-Man; summers were spent at my nani’s house in Karachi, and winters trudging through Yorkshire snow. Bespectacled before it was cool, I was short-sighted in more ways than one, young enough to believe that good things happened to good people. (more…)

This report treats developments in the violent extremist and terrorist online scenes in the 12-month period from 1 December 2017 to 30 November 2018. (more…)

«To achieve the goals set by the authorities of Kazakhstan, religious studies in schools should not become an ordinary school subject for the sole purpose of acquiring new knowledge, but should lead to an increase in tolerance among the youth and unity through diversity», – notes an independent researcher Meruert Seidumanova in her article written specifically for analytical platform cabar.asia. 

Русский Қазақша

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The young people of Kyrgyzstan think the situation of religious freedom and conditions for the Muslim population in the country are better than in neighbouring states of Central Asia.
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