Kazakhstan Initiative Brief No. 1, November 2013
On November 6, 2013, the Central Asia Program at IERES launched its Kazakhstan Initiative with a one-day event on “Kazakh Culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Legacies and Innovations.” The conference, opened by the Ambassador of Kazakh-stan to the United States, H.E. Kairat Umarov, featured the most prominent repre-sentative of Soviet and contemporary Kazakh culture, Olzhas Suleymenov, cur-rently permanent representative of Kazakhstan to UNESCO. This conference is part of the IERES/CAP goal of relinking knowledge on Eurasian societies with the study of their cultures. IERES’s Central Asia Program hopes to contribute to the study of the cultures of Eurasia as living dynamic entities, functioning in interaction with politics and the economy, and reflecting contemporary social changes in the region.