CFP: Academic Freedom, Integrity, and Governance in Central Asia: Theory, Practice, and Emerging Challenges

 Central Asian Affairs is seeking contributions for its upcoming special issue, “Academic Freedom, Integrity, and Governance in Central Asia: Theory, Practice, and Emerging Challenges.”

Guest editors:

Dmitry Dubrovsky, PhD, Department of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague

Feruza Madaminova, PhD, International School of Finance Technology and Science (ISFT Institute), Tashkent

Assylzat Karabayeva, PhD, College of Social Sciences, KIMEP University, Almaty

Special Issue Scope

Academic freedom—understood as a normative foundation of higher education and a precondition to produce reliable knowledge—has become both an object of intense debate and a growing field of scholarly inquiry. Classical and contemporary theories conceptualize academic freedom variously as an individual right of scholars, an institutional condition of university autonomy, and a relational practice shaped by governance, power, and professional norms. In recent years, these theoretical debates have gained renewed urgency across different world regions.

These issues were central to two panels at the conference “Academic Freedom in Flux: Purpose, Beneficiaries, and Practices in the Contemporary World,” held on 16–18 October 2025 at the Tashkent State University of Economics. Discussions highlighted a set of challenges that transcend national contexts: the managerialization of higher education; the tightening of regulatory and political oversight over universities; and shifting modes of interaction between academic institutions and the state, society, business, and civil society.

For Central Asia, these debates are particularly salient. Ongoing reforms in higher education and research, coupled with the growing prominence of science and education in national development strategies, have reconfigured the institutional environment in which academic freedom is practiced. While reform agendas are often framed in terms of global competitiveness and integration into international academic markets, they simultaneously raise fundamental questions about how academic freedom and institutional autonomy are interpreted, negotiated, and protected in practice.

This special issue approaches academic freedom not only as a legal or declarative principle, but as a socially embedded practice shaped by governance regimes, professional cultures, and informal norms. Attention is paid to the tension between formal regulation and informal arrangements in research and higher education, including state–university relations, the effectiveness of academic self-governance, and the institutionalization of academic integrity.

A new and increasingly consequential dimension of these debates concerns the rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence in higher education and research. AI-driven tools—ranging from text generation and data analysis to automated assessment and surveillance—are reshaping everyday academic practices. In the Central Asian context, these technologies raise pressing questions about academic integrity, authorship, evaluation, control, and trust, as well as about new forms of dependency, oversight, and inequality. The intersection of AI, academic freedom, and integrity thus represents a critical and underexplored area for empirical and theoretical inquiry in the region.

At the same time, Central Asia’s historical experience makes it essential to address broader structural issues, including epistemic justice, academic imperialism, and academic colonialism. Scholars working in and on the region continue to navigate global hierarchies of knowledge production that affect research agendas, publication practices, and standards of academic “excellence.” Gender equality and inclusion, while not the primary focus of this issue, remain an important contextual dimension of academic development and are welcomed as part of broader, analytically grounded contributions.

Proposal Guidelines

This special issue invites submissions that engage theoretically and empirically with academic freedom, academic integrity, and institutional autonomy in Central Asia, both historically and in the present. The editors particularly welcome contributions based on original empirical materials and approaches from sociology, political science, history, education studies, and related disciplines.

Suggested themes include:

Theories of academic freedom and their applicability beyond Western institutional contexts

Managerial reforms and their consequences for academic freedom and institutional autonomy

Governance, self-rule, and power relations within universities

State-university relations and regulatory regimes shaping research and teaching

Academic integrity: norms, enforcement mechanisms, and institutional cultures

Artificial intelligence in higher education: implications for academic integrity, evaluation, and freedom

Formal rules versus informal practices in research and higher education

Epistemic justice, knowledge hierarchies, and global academic inequality

Academic imperialism, colonial legacies, and decolonial approaches in and about Central Asia

Academic labor, precarity, mobility, and patterns of brain drain and circulation

Gender Equality and inclusion in academia as a contextual and institutional dimension

Soviet and post-Soviet legacies of higher education and their contemporary reinterpretations

Deadline: May 15, 2026

All submissions should be sent to madaminovaferuza.f@gmail.com.

Please use the subject line: “Central Asia Affairs – Special Issues“