Doing research on Central Asia and the South Caucasus is exciting and challenging. The countries of the region feature ethnic and religious diversity, undergo dramatic political, economic and social changes, have unresolved disputes with each other, and maneuver among great powers. The pace of events is quick, and it takes skills and stamina to keep up with developments on the ground. Additional hurdles are created by authoritarian constraints on freedom of media, lack of transparency in the public policy sphere, often insufficient official statistics, and linguistic fragmentations, which makes it necessary for a researcher to cast the net as wide as possible for collecting information that is scattered around.  

The Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, aims to support the community of students and scholars of Central Asia and the South Caucasus to deal with these challenges. To this end, we created Caspiana, a website with links to selected media sources, government portals, legislation databases, statistics, and academic resources related to the study of eight countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

In the Media section you can find lists of media sources in local languages, Russian, and English along with brief descriptions. For each country, we offer recommended sources, compiled on the basis of media credibility surveys. The Governance section consists of lists and links to national official portals, international official portals, and legislative databases. The Statistics section features links to statistics and databases provided by governments, international organizations, and think tanks. Last, but not least, the Academic Resources section is a treasure chest listing regional studies associations and conferences, study abroad options, language resources, digital projects, digital archives, GIS data, and journals.

Our project is in a pilot stage and we want to improve and enhance it in the future. We created a special form on the website for submitting recommendations and ideas. The vision is to develop Caspiana as a user-friendly and comprehensive depository of digital sources and tools to carry out research in the region.

Our great hope is that Caspiana will boost the transformation and upgrade of regional studies and encourage comparative research, helping to bridge the studies of Central Asia and the South Caucasus.