Dr. Rico Isaacs is a Reader in Politics at Oxford Brookes University. His broad research interests lay in Central Asian politics, nation-building, party development, authoritarianism and formal and informal post-Soviet politics. He is the author of Party System Formation in Kazakhstan: Between Formal and Informal Politics (Routledge, 2011) and has published articles on formal and informal institutions, charismatic authority, nation-building and Central Asian authoritarianism in a number of leading academic journals. He is the co-editor (with Abel Polese) of a forthcoming volume on Nation-Building and Identity in the Post-Soviet Space: New tools and approaches (Ashgate 2016) and has a further two books forthcomingFilm and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and post-Soviet Culture (I.B Tauris, 2017) andPolitics: an Introduction 3rd Edition (with Barrie Axford, Victoria Browne and Richard Huggins, Routledge, 2017). Rico has supplied consultancy for a number of agencies including Exclusive Analysis, The Electoral Integrity Project, V-Dem Varieties of Democracy Project, K2 Intelligence, Aprodev and the EU-Central Asia Monitoring Group (which is part of the Centre for European Policy Studies). He has also provided media commentary for Al Jazeera International, Eurasianet.org, The Washington Times, Business New Europe and Jylands-Posten on political developments in Kazakhstan and Central Asia.