Zarkamol Munisov (Camille)

Zarkamol Munisov (Camille) is from Uzbekistan. In 2019, he received his MA degree in International Relations and Diplomacy at Shanghai University. His Master thesis addressed the "Development of Sino-Central Asian Relations: Opportunities and Challenges of the SREB implementation."
Camille was the first President of Shanghai University International Student Ambassador mission, which is directly linked to the Internationalization Strategy of the university. From March to November 2019, he worked as an assistant manager at SHU Global and was responsible for the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) projects.
Camille is fond of filmmaking. His work on the significance of SDG6 in the sub-section “SDG” of this website. In addition, in 2023, his picture “Why is the environmental awareness important?”, co-directed with Olga Goryunova, took top prize at the First “China Environmental Labelling Day” Creative Short Film Contest.

Recently, Camille has been researching the concept of blame in Aral Sea narratives. Although the Aral Sea crisis began in the early 1960s, the discourse of irrigation’s negative impact on Central Asia’s environment has been a point of contention, at least in Soviet scientific circles, a few decades earlier. Despite this, the Soviet leadership abused the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers that used to empty into the Aral Sea. Most narratives take cotton monoculture as the basis of the Aral Sea desiccation, which seems one-sided. Thus, this research aims to analyse other aspects of water use in the region during the Soviet era. Although the list of actors involved in this issue is more extensive than the Soviet and Karimov administrations, narrators attribute blame solely to these two agents. Thus, this study aims to decode an assumption about selective accountability.

Camille’s second project investigates the history of ethnic minorities of Uzbekistan. In particular, the research on Jewish investigates how Bukhara (or Bukharan) Jews impacted the establishment of Uzbek traditional performing arts, such as traditional dance, music and theatre.

On 1 July 2022, following the proposed constitutional amendments extracting Karakalpakstan’s national sovereignty, Karakalpaks held a massive protest in the capital city Nukus. Thus, the third project aims to provide a historical interpretation of why the idea of sovereignty is essential to this ethnic group.