Dr Nurseit Niyazbekov is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations in KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He is researching and consulting various international media and think tanks in the areas of post-communist transitions, democratization, Central Asian state building and protest mobilization. He was a visiting research fellow at the University of Michigan and SciencePO. He obtained his PhD and MSc degrees in Politics and Sociology from the University of Oxford.