Aksana Ismailbekova is Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Germany. Her research focuses on the importance of gender, kinship and religion in negotiating socioeconomic change. She is the author of the book Blood Ties and the Native Sons: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan (Indian University Press, 2017), and the co-editor of Surviving Everyday Life: The Security Capes of Threatened People in Central Asia (Bristol University Press, 2020).