Call for expression of interest to join the management board in 2026. If interested, please fill submit this form by 31 October 2025
ESCAS is looking for board members starting from 2026
(date is negotiable)
The European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS) is an academic professional association supporting research and activities around Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and adjacent regions of the Caucasus, Russia, China, Afghanistan and Iran. Its main activity is a biennial conference hosted in one of the European countries or in Central Asia. The last one was in Tashkent and Samarkand in June 2025 (you can find information about it here)
At present we are looking for 4-6 new board members to join our team. At present, Prof Abel Polese is acting as president and Dr. Slavomir Horak as an vice-president and treasurer. Board members are volunteers. As such, you are, of course, not expected to devote too much of your time to ESCAS. However, there are peak times/events, when your high involvement will be required (usually, before the conferences). We expect that if you take up a task, you follow it through and complete it; otherwise, it makes no sense to be on the board.
Generally, the board consist of several formal and informal functions.
Formal functions (presented on the web and available publicly) within the Board include the President, Vice-President, Treasurer and Secretary. These functions are not elected directly by the General Assembly, but they are usually established after the Board elections among the newly elected Board members. These formal positions are typically combined with the informal responsibilities outlined below.
The President is usually responsible for the general management of the organization, represents the organization during several meetings, signs documents on behalf of ESCAS, distributes tasks among board members, and (in accordance with the board decisions) can define and implement strategic goals of the organization.
The Vice-President usually holds similar responsibilities as the President (with whom he/she closely cooperates), acts on behalf of the President in case he is empowered to do so by the President. The Vice-President is expected to be responsible for some of the tasks mentioned below. He informs the Vice-President about all activities where he/she acts instead of the President.
The Treasurer is in charge of financial operations, controls the general financial flows, realises the money transfer based on decisions of the Board, the President or the Vice-president, and (last but not least) is responsible for financial reports to the French authorities. As the principal account of the organization is in France, the candidate should have an excellent command of French (ideally a France-based or France-born person) and have experience in dealing with French authorities.
The Secretary holds responsibility for everyday and strategic communication with members (management of e-mail box, administration of member directory, answering questions and/or supervision over the website and social media). Therefore, the function can be merged with social media manager.
We are now looking for board members (or volunteers) to allocate the following responsibilities. Please note that ESCAS is a small organization, and the workload is accordingly very minor. Sometimes there are months with no tasks at all. But then, particularly around the biannual conference, the workload increases (and so do unintelligible messages on any kind of issue, so brace yourself with lots of patience).
1) Social media manager: ESCAS is on Facebook and LinkedIn, and it also has a mailing list. While everyone can post, and the responsibility is not solely yours, we also expect you to have the overall picture. If any member is unsure about something, you can provide the answer.
2) External relations manager (1-2): ESCAS, in addition to its own events, cooperates with several other organizations to sponsor, co-organise or support Central Asia-related activities. In the past months, we have supported Central Asia-related workshops and conferences such as:
Tashkent Workshop: Workshop (and training): Science excellence in Central Asia: between SCOPUS fetishisation, predatory journals and survival strategies of researchers. Tashkent 11 and 12 June 2025,
Lisbon Conference: «Geopolitics, Migrations and Identities in Central Eurasia», a Joint Meeting organized by the University of Lisbon from 8 to 10 January 2025
Istanbul Workshop: Unorthodox Approaches to Eurasian Studies, Marmara University, Istanbul 11-13 October 2024
We have also preliminarily agreed to support the Italian association of Central Asia conference in Venice, and we’re negotiating collaboration for a conference on Central Asia food traditions in Almaty in 2026. Ideally, 1-2 persons will follow these events and contribute to the organization and then report to the board.
3) Conference coordinator: the next large conference is in 2027, and the whole board will participate, but we expect someone to take an active role (under supervision from board members that already have experience with large ESCAS conferences, of course)
4) Network and development manager: our vision is that ESCAS could grow to at least have direct relations with all European and Central Asian professional associations (dealing with the region) and possibly go beyond that. This can be done with collaborations, small and large joint projects, or simply identifying key people with whom to build a synergy. Basically, the idea is that you take two parts (i.e. ESCAS and a university or an NGO, a professional association) and what they do together brings more value than what they would achieve separately (and, as a bonus, it is fun to organise it)
5) Professional development coordinator: ideally, we would like to host an online event every 6-8 weeks for the benefit of scholars and analysts. This could be a scientific seminar about a given topic, a professional development workshop (i.e. teaching a new methodology, how to use a tool) or a career-related event (i.e. how to publish, fundraise)
Note that you can take up more than one role, while some roles can be split between two (or more) people, however always with clear responsibilities of each position). If you have enough time and patience, you could follow some external events and social media. Above are just the minimal requirements
If you are interested, please fill out the online form by 31 October 2025, we will then proceed to announce elections with, as candidates, those who expressed interest.