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This paper examines the lived, everyday experiences of women fashion entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan, addressing the question of how they build and navigate their businesses in a context where there are gendered expectations for women. Drawing on ten in-depth qualitative interviews and digital ethnography of Instagram performances, the paper explores how entrepreneurial practices are embedded within social relations and culturally specific gender expectations.

The findings show that women entrepreneurs encounter different formal and informal constraints, including unpredictable taxes and regulations, as well as gendered expectations in family and institutional settings. Considering Deniz Kandiyoti’s concept of patriarchal bargaining, the paper argues that entrepreneurial agency is not expressed through resistance but through strategic negotiation within patriarchal structures. Furthermore, it shows that entrepreneurship in Uzbekistan is relationally embedded, with social ties simultaneously functioning as constraints and enabling resources.

This paper contributes to debates on gender and women entrepreneurship in three different ways. First, it extends the concept of patriarchal bargaining beyond the household, showing how it operates as an entrepreneurial strategy through which women navigate formal and informal constraints and opportunities. Second, it shows that an entrepreneurial agency in Uzbekistan is not always individualistic, but it is about social relations and embeddedness within them. Thirdly, it offers a contextualized understanding of entrepreneurship in Central Asia, where different institutional dynamics co-produce entrepreneurial practices.

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This paper will present an ongoing interdisciplinary research studying patriarchal social institutions and gender asymmetry in Central Asia primarily through feminist approach to social sciences. Based on social media analysis, political ethnography and semi-structured interviews with local and international experts, the paper answers the question why Central Asian region is experiencing increasing re-traditionalization of societies and revival of patriarchy manifest in the form of increased number of cases of domestic violence and violence against women. The research is built on and continues the previous project on multiple crises in the region, the author aims to place the “crisis of patriarchy” into the “vicious cycle” of “traditional and non-traditional” security threats that, according to Niklas Swanström (2010), the weakening states of Central Asia are facing. Gender roles and gender asymmetry play important roles not only in discussion of their relation to sustainable economic development and women empowerment in political representation but also in nation-building processes and nationalistic rhetoric in the region.

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Femicide, the gender-based killing of women, remains largely invisible in Kazakhstan, where legislation does not recognize it as a distinct crime. Despite high rates of domestic violence and gender-based killings—estimated at 400 female victims annually—media coverage frequently fails to frame these murders as a social issue rooted in gender inequality, cultural norms, and systemic injustice. This study examines how femicide is represented in Kazakhstani news media. Funded by UN Women ECA as part of the “Women Count” project, the research combines quantitative web scraping method and qualitative discourse analysis to address the absence of official data and proper media representation.

The study builds a database of 106 femicide cases from 4,000 articles published on the leading online news portal Tengrinews.kz between 2018 and 2023. Descriptive statistics reveal that most femicides occur in enclosed urban spaces, predominantly in victims’ homes, and involve male perpetrators aged 21–40. Intimate partners account for the largest proportion of perpetrators, followed by acquaintances and family members, highlighting the relevance of domestic and familial contexts. Common methods of killing include stabbing, beating, and strangling. More than half of the female victims had children, yet protective measures were rarely documented.

Critical discourse analysis of 48 cases demonstrates consistent patterns in news coverage. Femicide is often unnamed, with reports foregrounding perpetrators while minimizing victims’ lives and agency. News articles frequently justify the murderer, dramatize the crime, and prioritize third-party perspectives, reflecting implicit biases and reinforcing cultural norms that normalize gendered violence. Victim-centered reporting, while present, remains rare.

The findings underscore the urgent need for legal recognition of femicide in Kazakhstan, systematic data collection, and responsible media practices that foreground victims and contextualize murders within broader gender inequality. The study contributes to the limited literature on Central Asian femicide, revealing regional patterns, such as multigenerational family dynamics, that shape perpetrator-victim relationships. By highlighting both quantitative trends and qualitative framing, this research informs policy interventions, media guidelines, and public awareness efforts aimed at preventing femicide and addressing systemic gender-based violence in Kazakhstan.

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Scholarly literature on Jadidism and gender mostly focuses on female education, new-method schools for girls, and women’s increasingly more active social roles in the society. With respect to women and gender, Jadidism is rarely discussed as a reform of women’s marital rights. Discussion on the reform of women’s marital rights during the 1917 Muslim women’s congress is almost the only scholarly discussion on the question. However, such discussion started much earlier, in the 1890s, with the initiative of a then-qadi of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin. Although such discussion was initiated by men, it was ordinary women who pushed for reforms. I argue that one important part of Jadid movement, about which the historiography is mostly silent, was an attempt to address and to institutionalize the marital rights of women. I suggest that, in this respect, Jadidism was rather a response to changes that were already going on in the society and women were active agents in this development.