Iskander is the Executive Director of the Kazakhstan Council on International Relations (KCIR). He is also an Asia 21 Fellow, Atlantic Council Millennium Leadership Fellow, Rumsfeld Fellow, and CSIS Pacific Forum Fellow. Previously, Iskander worked as a foreign policy analyst for the Qazaqstan Radio and Television Corporation and as a senior fellow at the Institute of Diplomacy of the Academy of Public Administration. Iskander has also held a fellowship at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies and is an alumnus of the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) program, where he was awarded a scholarship. Iskander received his M.A. in international area studies from the University of Tsukuba. He speaks Kazakh, Russian, Turkish, and Japanese.