Asel Murzakulova is Research Fellow with the University of Central Asia’s (UCA) Mountain Societies Research Institute and Co-Founder of the analytical Platform Mongu. Within the AGRUMIG Horizont-2020 team, her current research focuses on rural change and migration in Naryn, Jalal-Abad and Batken regions of Kyrgyzstan. Between 2015 and 2020 she led two UCA research projects on transborder tensions related to water and pasture management in Central Asia. In 2008, she was a visiting scholar at the Davis Center at Harvard University, and in 2013, at the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research covers border conflicts, migration, natural resource management and nationalism.