EMPOWER

In 2012, the CEELES hosted the international conference "Women in Modern Central Asia". It aimed to create a forum of exchange between young scholars and practitioners from NGOs and International Organizations that work on gender issues and their effect on the socio-economic development of Central Asia. Among the renowned keynote speakers was the former President of the Kyrgyz Republic, Mme Rosa Otunbayeva. The CEELES conference echoed the international efforts to refocus on the dimension of gender relations by the UN General Assembly, in particular, by means of the reporting process enacted by the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted in 1979. The conference addressed, as key issues, the transformation experienced by women in terms of employment, poverty, domestic violence, migration, the revival of religion in Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After this event, various workshops and conferences followed and they all fed into yet another publication of the REEES Centre, which came out in summer 2015: Thomas Krüssmann (Ed.), Gender in Modern Central Asia (Wien: LIT-Publishers, 2015).