Mr Miras Zhiyenbayev

Miras Zhiyenbayev currently serves as Advisor to the Chairman of the Board for International Affairs and Initiatives at Maqsut Narikbayev University (MNU) in Astana, Kazakhstan. His work analyses the agency of middle powers in shaping international norms and navigating great-power competition. He is the author of Widening the Scope: How Middle Powers Are Changing Liberal Institutionalism (KazISS, 2023). Prior to his current position, he was Senior Fellow and founding Head of the Foreign Policy and International Studies Programme at the MNU’s Maqsut Narikbayev Institute for Networking and Development, which was the first university-based think-tank in the region. From 2022 to 2024, he served as a Leading Expert (Leading Research Fellow) at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, the nation’s pre-eminent think-tank, which operates under the auspices of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan and is recognised as the top think-tank in Central Asia.