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Although the lives of LGBT people in Central Asia have recently received scholarly attention, authors do not pay due attention to transgender (trans) issues. This paper explores living conditions of trans people in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as trans organizing in these countries. Semi-structured interviews with 11 trans activists were conducted in March–April 2022. According to the respondents, trans people in Central Asia face pervasive discrimination, harassment and rejection on behalf of society at large and their families. Many live in a desperate economic situation. Access to legal gender recognition aimed to align the person's legal gender with their gender identity is limited; the process requires psychiatric evaluation, medical interventions and/or going to courts. A limited number of doctors can provide transition-related medical care (hormone replacement therapy, surgeries). Trans activists self-organize to address these issues and promote trans rights in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Their areas of work include providing direct support, educating doctors, and conducting advocacy with state institutions and international actors. The political environment is hostile towards trans activism. Organizations face problems receiving official registration; in Tajikistan, state pressure on civil society is especially severe. Anti-gender movements are another obstacle for trans activists. Political instability often disrupts activists' advocacy efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the rigorous reading of Social Identity Theory (SIT), this paper reconstructs the ideational sources of Kazakhstan's status seeking by identifying the Kazakhstani perception of the (un)fairness of the international system, and the nature of the existing hierarchies in world society. By using the fine-tuned ideal types of status enhancement strategies as the basis of the coding scheme, a qualitative content analysis of Kazakhstan's first president's speeches and texts reveals that Nursultan Nazarbayev adopted a social cooperation strategy. He perceived the international system as permeable, although rather unfair, but nevertheless open for improvement through multilateral cooperation. Nazarbayev accepted the negative results of comparison and responded with an adequate agency. He cultivated a special niche of foreign policy as a champion of nuclear non-proliferation, and a place for open and constructive dialogue. Therefore, Kazakhstan projected itself as a doctrineless good power, without an alignment to a particular great power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the everyday lives of queer people in Kazakhstan, exploring how they express agentic power and negotiate their queer identity. This research is based on a Foucauldian-informed narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with 11 people who identify as queer and live in Kazakhstan. Findings show that the choice and ability to regulate one's visibility are crucial expressions of queer agency and resistance. This paper expands on previously published research on gender and sexuality in Central Asia by focusing beyond the issues of violation of human rights and the difficult experiences of queer people, by considering instances of acceptance, support and positive experiences alongside experiences of homophobia, transphobia and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the personal papers of Fatima Gabitova, a writer and pedagogue who fell victim to Stalinist repression as a ‘wife of an enemy of the people’ in the Kazakh SSR. Gabitova’s life was in many ways extraordinary, and many of her experiences were hardly typical. Nevertheless, her exposure to Kazakhstan’s cultural and political elites and the rich textual archive she left behind provide a highly nuanced window into the lived experience of Stalinism in Kazakhstan. Her writings, which include journals, poetry, letters and memoiristic essays, reveal a highly articulated sense of self that was informed and influenced by the realities of life under Stalinism, but was not ultimately determined by the parameters of the Soviet system. Throughout her personal writings, Gabitova exhibits a complicated ambivalence towards the reality of Soviet rule that demonstrates the broader contradictions of Stalinism as a system that was at once repressive and participatory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper analyses the multifaceted discourse of development and nation-building in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It addresses the regional clan–central elite relations and Nursultan Nazarbayev regime's legitimating agenda through the Kazakhstan 2030 Strategy for development. The economic developmental component in Nazarbayev's ideological discourses is primarily an exercise of control over regional economic and political elites and that helped building further legitimacy for the regime in various socio-ethnic constituencies on both the regional and central levels. Kazakhstan 2030 was deployed by the regime to substitute the Soviet version of ideology, legitimize the regime among various ethno-lingual audiences, and discipline the behaviour of regional elites. The paper shows how the study of elites’ interests can best explain the nature of national ideology and development projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper evaluates Kazakhstan's natural resource policies and their impact on the standard of living of the Kazakhstan population within the framework of three determinative factors: globalization and international markets; Soviet legacy and ‘resource nationalism’; and Nursultan Nazarbayev and his authoritarian leadership. It argues that natural resource policies of Kazakhstan failed to improve the living standards of the majority of people in Kazakhstan, especially the poor and those living in oil-producing and rural areas, despite increasing oil prices and revenues. The argument will be supported with an analysis of Kazakhstan's oil wealth distribution in light of global initiatives as well as with evidence derived from official reports and statistical data to find out whether Nazarbayev's widely discussed ‘resource nationalism’ is ‘nationalistic’ enough to favour the whole nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Across Eurasia, authoritarian leaders have sought to justify their ‘strong-hand’ approach to government by framing instability as a security threat and the strong state as a guarantor of political stability. Such ‘regimes of certainty’ promote a modernist valorization of order, the flip side of which is a demonization of political disorder instability, or mere uncertainty. Examining the spatial and temporal imaginaries underpinning such narratives about in/stability in Central Asia, this paper compares official discourse in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where state-controlled media and official publications have stigmatized political instability in Kyrgyzstan as indicative of the dangers of political liberalization and a weak state. Ostensibly about the ‘other’, these narratives are also about scripting the ‘self’. I argue that official interpretations of ‘disorder over the border’ in Kyrgyzstan are underpinned by a set of spatial and temporal imaginaries that do not merely reflect regional moral geographies, but actively construct them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the evolution of Kazakhstan's development through an analysis of population trends, infant mortality, air emissions, water management, oil production, income, cost of living and average salary. The longitudinal data analysis demonstrates that the development of Kazakhstan during the Soviet period was far from sustainable in terms of uncontrolled environmental pollution. Time-series analysis illustrates that the 1990s transition to the market economy temporarily eased environmental degradation but also brought about initial socio-economic disarray and decline in living standards. Further support for rural areas and economic diversification is needed to move away from Kazakhstan's heavy reliance on mineral resource extraction to a more sustainable path of development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A new political development that emerged after the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the adoption of ‘homeland stances’ by the newly independent states. Through the construction of the homeland image, the states of the region claimed responsibility not only for their own citizens, but also for a diaspora community of co-ethnics. Kazakhstan became one of these states and its leadership portrayed Kazakhstan as the homeland of the Kazakh diaspora. Furthermore, Kazakhstan's leadership developed far more active homeland rhetoric and initiated an ethnic return-migration policy as early as 1992. This paper will explore the discourse of Kazakhstan's leadership on the repatriation of its co-ethnics as well as the legal and political context that it created to achieve their smooth absorption into domestic society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper the authors explore alternative discursive constructions by Kazakhs in Mongolia and Kazakhstan of a ‘Kazakh homeland’, one which is markedly not coterminous with the borders of any state. As the use of nomadic pasture lands cut through and across state borders in the last centuries, so do contemporary Kazakhs describe and justify a variety of other cultural practices, from visiting shrines to obtaining illegal passports, in terms of a shared ‘Kazakh’ cultural history of movement. The stories people evoke and tell about the connection and ‘Kazakhness’ (Kazakhshylykh) evidence the simultaneous idealization of both ancestral rootedness and mobility as fundamental to a sense of ‘belonging’ to the land. This ancestral world also reveals the fundamentally arbitrary nature of borders in a world where belonging is made by moving: moving through space, moving through time. From such discursive temporal and spatial practices of passing and dwelling emerges a cultural–historical position that ultimately transcends the region's colonial history and its current nationalizing states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews the characteristics of the agricultural credit policy in Kazakhstan with a particular focus on emerging rural financial institutions. It is not easy to evaluate the real effect of credit policies due to the limited funds directed at agricultural production. Kazakhstani experience shows that commercial banks are used almost exclusively to provide agricultural producers with credit, while the new specialized credit institutions emerging in the agricultural sector only cater to a very small fraction of the total demand for credit. Presently, there are discussions in Kazakhstan concerning the creation of a specialized agricultural bank; however, this idea has some shortcomings that should be taken into consideration. Lack of credit is one of the main reasons for insufficient investment in agriculture. The underdeveloped land market in Kazakhstan makes formal credit institutions very cautious about accepting agricultural land as collateral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the cooperation after independence on four Central Asian transboundary rivers. The paper shows that, even though the Central Asian states agreed in 1992 to continue with the basic water-sharing principles, new agreements had to be made. New agreements were only made in basins with large-scale water-control infrastructure, which have transboundary significance or are transboundary themselves. The inequitable water allocation between the riparian states has continued and has not triggered new agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the nature of Islam in Kazakhstan and its role in contemporary Kazakh society and politics. It highlights the unique place of Islam in the social and individual experiences of Kazakhs who see Islamic religion as a 'way of life', and illuminates several interrelated qualities of the Kazakh religion, such as a strong association of religious identity with ethnic identity of Kazakhs, interpenetration of religious canons with indigenous traditions and a growing tendency toward 'individualization' and 'intimization' of Islam. Another goal of the paper is to shed light on the worrisome process of the securitization of Islam. The latter phenomenon refers to a discursive practice of presenting Islam as a threat to Kazakhstan despite the prevalence of 'moderate' and apolitical manifestations of Islam in the republic. The study documents political interests surrounding securitization of Islam and the context which made the invocation of security in relation to Islam possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was the world's largest hydrocarbon producer. The landmass over which these resources are distributed is vast and the reserves mostly landlocked. To convey these hydrocarbons to refineries and to market, the Soviets constructed the largest integrated pipeline networks in the world. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, new competing national interests have produced tensions over these energy resources and transmission corridors, with economically detrimental and often irrational consequences. In Central Asia, the post-Soviet Republics of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan produce significant amounts of hydrocarbons and export their oil and gas to or through Russian Federation territory. Russian government policy aims to continue exercising political control over these resources and to maximize Moscow's share of profits from their export. This paper examines oil and gas transmission issues in Central Asia, against a backdrop of emerging new relationships between the Russian Federation and the three post-Soviet republics, the resurgent strategic competition between Russia and the United States, China's developing power base in the region and Iran's potentially key geographic position for channelling Caspian energy supplies towards the Persian Gulf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the Kazakh–Kyrgyz relationship in many ways shaped the emergence of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz elites were willing to collaborate with Kazakhs while simultaneously trying not to be marginalized by them. Kazakh elites in the Turkestan ASSR's government supported the first Kyrgyz nationalist project, the Kara-Kyrgyz Mountain Oblast (KKMO), in 1922. However, the division of Turkestan during the Central Asian national–territorial delimitation in 1924 and the increased linkage between national identity and political and cultural rights deprived the Kazakh–Kyrgyz regions of their socio-economic unity. Consequently, Kyrgyz leaders, to get their fair share of the disintegrating Central Asian economy as a separate group, had to contrast themselves to their Kazakh allies. The case of Soviet Kyrgyzstan shows that the intertwined relationship among Central Asian elites provides a more nuanced and complicated story of the formation of Soviet national republics in the region. Particularly, Central Asia's settled/nomadic dichotomy and the inter-elite relationship within each population have been more influential than scholars have acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of outer space technopolitics in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It explores how outer space, the technological artefact of global relevance, works as a postcolonial fetish of modernity that is called upon to produce what it represents, that is, the reality of a technologically advanced Kazakh nation. The article shows that in its project of becoming a spacefaring nation the country reiterates major incentives that have motivated nuclear and space programme development in the postcolonial context of the Global South. It explores how collaboration with Russia allows Kazakhstan to claim its share in the Soviet space legacy rather than to distance itself from it. The study then traces the rise of a new internationalism in the Kazakhstani space programme outside the post-Soviet context. The article contributes to the debate on postcolonial technopolitics and shows how outer space has been used to enhance the conventional domain of postcolonial national ideologies – nativism and tradition – with technology and science. Finally, it depicts how the growing resistance to the space programme among Kazakh civil society groups reveals a close association of the environmental agenda with an 'eco-nationalism' permeated by a profoundly anti-imperial and, ultimately, anti-authoritarian political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical frameworks developed for, and applied to, the study of student transfer between higher education institutions build on evidence from Western contexts, specifically the United States. The current article contributes to understanding factors that drive student transfer in the Central Asian context, specifically that of Kazakhstan. Through inductive coding of qualitative interviews with undergraduate transfer students in Kazakhstan, this research identifies student-centred factors of social embeddedness, parental influence in higher education decision-making, evolving career choice awareness, strategies for academic success, the quality of teaching and relationship ethics with students. While these factors influencing student transfer in Kazakhstan align with the existing Western context-based literature, the data in this research offer a localized perspective on what these factors mean in the context of a contemporary Central Asian country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of Kazakhstan's wealth hinges on oil rents, and the overall performance of the economy is closely linked to petroleum's price fluctuations. This study asks (1) why the institution of private ownership of oil proceeds has not led to a positive transformation of patron–client relations embedded in the country's energy sector, thus challenging the relevance of the 'private ownership' narrative, and (2) why the collapse in the price of oil did not affect the stability and essential character of the regime in power. To answer these questions, the article examines two case studies: the privatization of the oil sector in the 1990s, and the post-2014 oil crisis. Thus the article problematizes important theories on oil-sector privatization and contributes to recent work on regime stability as it pertains to the resource curse. The analysis of the constitutive impact of oil wealth on Kazakh politics generates wider insights on the links between the power of informal networks and regime stability in petrostates through boom and bust cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1997 a monument dedicated to Heroes of the Soviet Union Aliya Moldagulova and Manshuk Mametova was unveiled on the former site of the monument to Lenin in central Almaty. This case study investigates the valorization of these Soviet-era World War II heroes in independent Kazakhstan, and argues that the Kazakhstani state has recast these heroes as significant figures in the official centuries-long history of Kazakhstan. Incorporating and commemorating the Soviet experience of World War II as part of the narrative of an independent state provides an avenue for legitimating Kazakhstani nation-building efforts. Incorporating regionally important stories of women heroes through monuments and commemorative activities demonstrates the symbolic and instrumental roles that monuments in public spaces play in reinforcing officially acceptable gender roles and in structuring power relations between the regions and the centre in Kazakhstan and between Kazakhstan and Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2013, there have been multiple fires in bazaars in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Most of these fires have occurred in Barakholka, the largest bazaar in Central Asia, known for wholesaling in apparel, shoes and low-quality household and office supplies. Ownership of Barakholka is opaque. Using recurrent Barakholka fires as my point of departure, this article contributes to scholarship by describing how the clearing of old bazaars is followed by new property developments and the imposition of new rent regimes. In doing so, I argue that fire – a form of ruination that not only destroys property but also severs networks and people's relationship to a place – is illustrative of how the bazaar, as a new institution within an emerging post-Soviet market economy, was moulded by private interests, and repeated, often ruinous assertions of control over property. I also argue that this process was embedded in a larger political economy that sought to 'civilize' the earlier marketplaces. This article is based on ethnographic interviews and repeated visits to the Barakhola between 2016 and 2018, and media accounts of the fires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its privatization in 1995, Kazakhstan's largest steel mill has been in a restructuring process characterized by workforce reduction, augmented pressure on remaining jobs and labour conflict over wages, work conditions and corporate social responsibility. In 2013, in an attempt to re-establish harmonious relationships with workers, management invited the mill's former labour aristocracy to join a newly established veterans' council, a forum resembling traditional aksakal councils, to discuss the company's difficult situation. In the context of a banquet in honour of the veterans, tradition became the contested terrain over which labour and capital struggled to endorse their own visions of the industrial future. As corporate capitalist visions of efficiency and professionalism, ethno-national concerns for harmony and stability, and practices rooted in the Soviet labour legacy clash, tradition is staged by actors as a practice which can either affirm or challenge industrial leadership in a labour conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Central Asia is often studied through the prism of its relationships with external powers, research on local public perceptions of these different actors has largely been overlooked. The literature on Kazakhstanis' perceptions of their neighbours, for instance, is scarce, and mostly focused on analysis of official discourse on Kazakhstan's multi-vector policy, with little exploration of how this is received, appropriated or refuted by the population. On the basis of Gallup data spanning the last decade, and several other surveys, we test most of the main hypotheses usually advanced to explain attitudes to the US and Russia – age, ethnicity and access to information – and draw five main conclusions: (1) Kazakhstanis are not defined by an exclusive pro-US/pro-Russian dichotomy; (2) they nevertheless largely choose Russia over the US if forced to pick; (3) age does not have a significant effect on foreign policy attitudes; (4) ethnicity does affect some of the attitudes under consideration, but its effects are not large enough to produce markedly different opinions among ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic Russians in aggregate; and (5) consumption of media from Russia and access to non-governmental and Western sources of information do not seem to have significant effects on the attitudes under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What would a ‘good’ industrial policy in the realm of cotton production look like? This article seeks to address this question through a focus on reforms to the cotton sector in Kazakhstan. In contrast with neighbouring Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, administrators in Kazakhstan had widely freed the cotton sector from government control as early as 1998. Agricultural collectives had been replaced by small private farms, and commercial cotton processors and traders entered the sector. However, in 2007, regulation tightened again and forced ginneries to use a complex warehouse receipt system without making sure that it was accepted by stakeholders and without appropriate institutions for implementing it in place. Moreover, it imposed financing restrictions on ginneries, which were major loan and input providers to farmers. In the following years, private producers and investors turned away from cotton, and cotton area and output fell substantially. We position our analysis in the broader debate about the right approach to industrial policy and argue that the cotton sector performance after 2007 shows how ill-designed regulation and government interference can turn a promising economic sector towards decline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the nineteenth century, European doctors began to creditkumiss(fermented mare’s milk) for the apparent absence of tuberculosis among the nomads of the Eurasian steppe. As European and American medical journals published articles on the ‘kumisscure’ and Russian doctors openedkumisssanatoria, praise for the drink’s curative powers was wound together with romanticized images of the nomadic pastoralists whose creation it was. In Soviet and now in post-Soviet Kazakhstan,kumisscame to hold the double status of medicine and of national heritage. Yet if in the nineteenth century, the steppe was notable for the absence of tuberculosis, in the late twentieth century, it is notable for its presence: Kazakhstan, like many post-Soviet countries, is currently the site of an epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Discussions of the epidemic now tangle together concerns over the physical health of the population with concern over the cultural health of the body politic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aytis is a central component of Kazakh oral literature. It is a duelling performance of improvised oral poetry between two aqins (poets, or bards) accompanying themselves on the dombra, a two-stringed plucked instrument. This article analyses contending issues in a transnational aytis between Chinese and Kazakhstani aqins, and explores how gender plays into the complex interplay of transnational identity politics, nationalism, performer positionality, and the preservation of intangible cultural heritage. This article argues that, though minority actors are subject to state-patronized national projects and the gender paradigms those projects entail, they can also obtain empowerment from performing tradition as a way to legitimize their status as culture producers and flexible citizens. Situated as the guardians of a constructed gender balance in society, women performers of oral tradition occasionally find themselves with opportunities to transgress the boundaries of their national and gender norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an analysis of the Kazakh nomadic political culture of the 1820s–30s with focus on two issues: (1) service and loyalty as elements of Kazakh engagement with the Russian Empire; and (2) the place in local political practice of the regional administrative offices (diwans) created for Middle Horde Kazakh nomads in 1822. While Russia’s goal was ‘bureaucratization’ and creation of ‘order’ in the steppe, in part through directing nomads to engage with thediwanand its elected Kazakh officials, Kazakh political actors variously embraced and rejected formal structures, and continued to define relevant norms and practices of governance. The analysis challenges both statist and nationalist narratives of nineteenth-century Kazakh steppe history by acknowledging the complexities of the Kazakh nomadic experience of empire-building. The ultimate purpose is to suggest new approaches for interpreting historical change throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For more than two decades, the Sino–Soviet border was almost hermetically closed to the exchange of people and goods. In the late 1980s, however, exchanges resumed at a remarkable pace between the immediate border communities of Zharkent, in Kazakhstan, and Chinese Khorgos. But this situation was short-lived. Currently, trade turnover in consumer goods between the two countries is conducted primarily via the hub bazaars of Urumqi, in China, and Almaty, in Kazakhstan, several hundred kilometres inland from the border. While the borderland population’s agency in these trade processes remains limited, top-down modernization efforts to upgrade infrastructure in the borderlands and to ‘centralize the periphery’ are the subject of popular controversy. The article explores local representations of development and exchange in the Kazakhstan–China borderland town of Zharkent and the everyday social practice and discourses they generate. I examine the peripheralization of this borderland community, which remains largely bypassed by commodity flows, at a moment characterized by multi-scalar attempts at modernization. In so doing, I argue that the trajectories of borderland lives perpetuate a subjective positioning in social space that reinforces perceptions of ‘remoteness’ and ‘disconnection’, despite powerful state-advocated visions of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article shows different ways of defining, understanding and performing ‘diaspority’ in the border region of Kordai (Kazakhstan) and Tokmok (Kyrgyzstan). Taking the example of Dungan people, as the Sinophone Muslims are known in Central Asia, both academic and political definitions of the concept of ‘diaspora’ are compared. This ethnographic account problematizes Kazakhstani Shaanxi Dungan ‘diaspority’. Together with this, the political definitions of ‘diaspora’ are also analysed. I show that while in China and Kazakhstan the definitions of the Dungans as a ‘diaspora’ of ‘China’ are somewhat complementary, once the Shaanxi Dungan emic perspective is taken into account, this concept becomes rather problematic. The kinds of diaspority defined by the states involved are ways of implementing particular cultural hegemonies that legitimate the two political regimes analysed in this article. Concurrently, this dual diaspority is used by the Dungan people in distinct ways in defining their own identities. Nevertheless, I show in this article that the ‘Chinese card’ is not necessarily played by all Dungans. Moreover, there are some Dungans for whom ‘Chinese-ness’ is not even relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is intended to contribute broadly to research in post-socialist urban studies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with ‘newcomers’ to the capital, Astana, from different parts of Kazakhstan, I examine the renting practices of newcomers. I analyse the experiences of newcomers in their new urban milieu of Astana, and try to answer the question of what it means to live in the city for various groups of individuals on a daily basis. I examine the Soviet and post-Soviet housing and the continuities of the Soviet legacy when it comes to the institution ofpropiska(city registration). I show that living in shared flats is a coping strategy to deal with expensive rents and meant to be a transitory step towards homeownership. For this reason many accept high rents and crowded housing as ‘normal’. Furthermore, I argue that informal renting practices are acceptable mostly for young and single people, who are free to experiment with city life, and are on their way to establishing careers and personal lives. However, elderly newcomers and young families with children who do not wish to live in shared flats, but have to rent, feel ‘homeless’ and trapped in ‘liminal housing’. For them, renting is undesirable, and they feel a sense of incarceration if they fail to secure housing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Soviet times, useful contacts had more value than money, and getting things done through unofficial channels of personal relations was a socially accepted norm. What changes have market reforms brought to Kazakhstan in these areas? This article details the use of informal payments and connections in Almaty and examines why non-monetary exchange of favours is increasingly being replaced by the immediate exchange of cash for assistance. This article argues that urban residents are becoming more inclined to quickly return a favour through cash and evade the lengthy exchanges involved in building reciprocal relationships, a practice widely accepted during Soviet times. This article also focuses on the importance of personal contacts in monetized exchange and demonstrates that cash payment is not a least preferred strategy for those who lack necessary networks. Urban residents in Kazakhstan in fact actively mobilize their personal networks to effectively and securely exchange monetary rewards. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite government efforts, post-independence Kazakhstan has largely failed to provide high-quality medical services to its population. State retrenchment in the public healthcare system has led to the deterioration of medical service delivery. It has provided incentives for people to widely use informal reciprocal exchanges – personal connections and informal monetary and non-monetary payments – to gain access to better medical care. In contrast to the existing explanations focusing mostly on the cultural origin of the continuity of informal exchanges, I argue that state retrenchment from the social sphere and under-provision of state goods and services have perpetuated informal exchanges in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Despite similarities in informal practices between Soviet and post-independence Kazakhstan, some important differences in terms of scope and the nature of informal exchanges are observed. This article draws on data collected from interviews, textual analysis, and original surveys of people's attitudes towards the healthcare system and informal help conducted in Kazakhstan in 2011 and 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The anti-corruption norm in both scholarship and the policy world has too narrowly focused on the domestic and institutional context of bribe-taking and public corruption. Instead, we argue that corruption in the contemporary global economy requires a multiple set of connected transactions, processes, and relationships that take place within informal transnational networks that blur the line between illegal and legal activities. These networks include multinational companies, elites in host countries, offshore financial vehicles and conduits, middlemen and brokers, and destination financial institutions. We examine how these actors operate in Central Asia, a region that is widely identified as corrupt, yet is rarely understood as embedded in the types of global processes, offshore connections and transnational links specified in our analysis. Examples of offshore centers in tax planning from Central Asia, and partial results from a field experiment based on impersonating high corruption risks from four Central Asian states, provide evidence for how the various actors in transnational financial networks structure their dealings. We then present two brief illustrative cases of how these transnational networks have operated in energy explorations services in Kazakhstan and telecommunications contracts in Uzbekistan. Our findings have theoretical, practical, and normative implications for scholars and practitioners of Central Asian international political economy and other ‘high risk' regions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kazakhstan's legal–regulatory framework provides for a small number of quotas for highly skilled foreign workers but has no provisions for legal employment of semi-skilled or low-skilled migrants from the Central Asian states, who enter under the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) visa-free regime and work informally in construction, household and service sectors. The lack of acknowledgement of the scale of informal labour migration has denoted an act of strategic neglect on the part of the state, allowing it to render migrant labour illegal, disposable, and keep migrants legally and statistically invisible. Unable to obtain a legal status, migrants nominally comply with the existing legal framework as they also circumvent and subvert it. The article details the entrenched informal regime of labour migration and explains why recent efforts to ‘legalize’ labour through the introduction of a labourpatent(licence), as is the case in Russia, are unlikely to bring in significant reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The institution of pristavstvo was introduced in the Kazakh Steppe in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This institution had different meanings and functions, from an individually held position (e.g., a pristav to the khān of the Junior Horde in 1820; the pristavs who accompanied the Kazakh delegation to Saint Petersburg in the first half of the nineteenth century) to an administrative-territorial structure (e.g., the pristavstvo of the Senior Horde; the Mangyshlak and Zaisan pristavstvos). Though the political structure of the Russian empire had included institutions analogous to the pristavstvo, it was not a conventional component of the Russian administrative system. Studying the features of the pristavstvo institution in the territory of Kazakhstan and analysing the transformation of the pristav's function provide new insights on how the multi-ethnic Russian empire was managed. They will also help scholars to better understand the forms and methods the Russian authorities employed to manage their nomadic populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Soviet agitprop that was produced for Kazakhstani soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. The author argues that one of the main goals of this propaganda was to cultivate a complementary Soviet-Kazakh identity. Conditions at the front made this difficult to accomplish, but Soviet propagandists persisted in tailoring their propaganda for the benefit of Kazakh soldiers. As the war progressed, Kazakh front-line propaganda acquired a more unambiguously Soviet orientation, a consequence of the elimination of key themes derived from Kazakh national history and considered too politically volatile by the Communist Party. The article concludes by suggesting that the narratives articulated during World War II by Soviet propagandists went a long ways towards setting the contours of a prescribed Soviet-Kazakh identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses spiritual healing in post-Soviet Kazakhstan with reference to changing discourses about ‘shamanic illness’: a condition that afflicts the future healer. What had traditionally been identified as the call of spirits was seized in the Soviet period by biomedical discourse which ascribed those symptoms to mental illness. Whereas this attitude also influenced popular understandings of ‘shamanic illness’ at the time, traditional ideas have been gradually restored in the context of the political and social changes of the 1990s. Biomedical discourse on ‘shamanic illness’ has also undergone significant changes. I argue that this was induced by multiple interconnected factors, among which are the reappraisal and support of the government for Kazakh ‘folk’ medicine as a part of the national heritage, and a favourable attitude to local, traditional forms of religiosity. This allowed for collaboration between doctors and healers in the context of institutionalization of traditional medicine. Alongside these influences the strength of the tradition of remembering the spirits of ancestors prompted the re-establishment of this core experience in the process of becoming a healer: the call of spirits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The reconstruction of the Soviet recent past is a controversial issue in the post-Soviet republics. In Kazakhstan, the reconstruction of the past has gradually rehabilitated leading Kazakh communists, such as Zhumabai Shaiakhmetov. One of the main rationales of this rehabilitation is his support for Kazakh historical writing, which resulted in a textbook published in 1943. This work has been seen as an endeavor by ‘patriotic’ Kazakh officials and historians to defend Kazakh national heritage against the ‘Soviet colonial empire’. By presenting a broader view of the war period in Kazakhstan from the archives, this article argues that this history textbook was in fact merely an agitation-propaganda product of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. Shaiakhmetov and others had mostly secured their career by remaining loyal to the Soviet system during the collectivization, the Great Famine and the Great Terror. Therefore, their encouragement of the publication of a national history in 1943 for propaganda purposes does not qualify them as suitable predecessors of the current generation of Kazakh rulers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the way the cultural revival in post-Soviet Kazakhstan is perceived by both the state and militants from non-titular nationalities. Based on ethnographic material, the author analyses state engineering of cultural diversity and the strategies elaborated by militants of Tatar cultural associations to manage the status quo, as well as the preservation of ‘cultural intimacy’. The study points to convergences between the state discourse about inter-ethnic concord and the practices of cultural national militants. It also shows that behind this apparent status quo, the cultural sphere has become the arena where the issue of the recognition of full-fledged citizenship and the legitimacy to reside in Kazakhstan is raised and disputed by non-Kazakh groups, albeit implicitly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Shcherbina Expedition of 1896–1903 was the Russian Empire's most concerted effort to gather the data necessary to facilitate peasant settlers’ migration to its largely nomadic steppe oblasts. Although this expedition was a massive exercise of imperial power privileging sedentary over mobile pastoralist lifeways, the oppositional views of its participants made matters more ambiguous. The civilizational hierarchies that emerged in its materials did not strictly privilege sedentary lifeways, and an effort was made to preserve mobile pastoralists’ lifeways and economic wellbeing. The project of objectively correct colonization that the expedition embodied was initially embraced by all interested parties as a certain solution to the clash of lifeways brought about by peasant migration to the steppe. After its work was published, however, contested use of its statistical norms made it clear that the idea of ‘correct colonization’ could not prevent the serious conflicts engendered by settlement in the steppe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been an increase in Muslim piety and practice in Kazakhstan since the fall of the Soviet Union. Much of this increase is due to the efforts of members of the piety movement in Kazakhstan, who preach and publish about Islam in an effort to inspire more Kazakhs to embrace a particular vision of Islam emphasizing daily prayer, modest dress and condemnation of saint and ancestor veneration. From its humble beginnings as a press primarily publishing translations of short books on Islam, Musylman Publishing House has grown to become an influential Islamic press in Kazakhstan. Building on observations at the Musylman Publishing House editorial office and interviews with its staff, this essay examines the history and publications of Musylman Publishing House. It is argued that the publishing strategy directed by Qayrat Isa, the owner and chief editor of Musylman Publishing House, has been a conscious effort to establish, expand and consolidate a publishing niche for the piety movement in Kazakhstan. The result of this strategy has been the establishment of a readership that no longer simply reads about Islam, but actively preaches to others and contributes articles and books to Musylman Publishing House, creating a self-sustaining piety movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tells the story of a piece of land called Syrymbet, which was the patrimony of Middle Horde khans in the eighteenth century, but which had shrunk over the course of the nineteenth century until nothing was left of it but a small plot of privately claimed property. Over this period, which saw the erection of an imperial legal-administrative structure in the steppe, the nomadic political culture and the nature of nomadic land claims within it evolved, as Chinggisids, the traditional elite caste in Kazakh society, struggled to defend their land rights, social status and political power based in patronage. Based on a close reading of archival and published sources, this micro-history traces the actions of Syrymbet's Chinggisid claimants Aighanym and her son Chinggis, from the 1820s to the 1890s, and argues that their adaptation to Russian rule facilitated their downfall, while new elites emerged to play their roles in a transformed nomadic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Aral Sea disaster is the result of Soviet-era irrigation policy. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the issue under the purview of international law. This essay addresses how this shift has affected attempts to slow or reverse the sea's depletion. Treaties on the non-navigation use of international watercourses and on the prevention of desertification have had little effect. While a number of regional instruments and arrangements have been brought to bear, they have also done little to reverse damage to the sea. Finally, attempts to regulate the issue through domestic law, as evidenced in the case of Kyrgyzstan, have done little as well. While some progress has recently been made under the auspices of the World Bank, it is not a result of international law. The conclusion is that the shift from domestic to international law has little improved the situation, and may have made matters worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon recent studies in the field of citizenship and transnationalism, this article examines the relations that Kyrgyzstani migrants in Kazakhstan and Russia entertain with their homeland, both in terms of concrete status (rights and responsibilities) and subjective attitudes (feeling of membership and loyalty). The article relies on field research, including semi-structured interviews, conducted in March and April 2007. Findings show that Kyrgyzstani migrants have developed a distinctive and somewhat paradoxical relation to their state of origin, in which pragmatic interest and long-term loyalty are not easily reconciled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares two transition economies that have diverged in their progress on important economic reform areas and then seeks to link these differences to their resulting levels of investment and business. For this study, interviews were conducted with firm representatives that had invested or conducted business in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in order to determine the areas of reform that were the most important for their investment and business decisions. The analysis indicates a relationship between Kazakhstan's advanced economic reforms in such areas as foreign investment legislation, tax legislation, banking system reform, and higher levels of investment and business. Uzbekistan's lack of progress in these reform areas has affected the level of investment in the country, but not the number of firms conducting business. This was primarily because firms could secure financing for the business through the US Export-Import Bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the domestic and foreign policies developed through President Nursultan Nazarbaev and his government in response to the nuclear legacy in Kazakhstan after the country gained its independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union. It highlights the nuclear activities and its effect to the country after the eruption of Cold War on August 29, 1949. Consequently, it reveals how the nuclear weapons and nuclear infrastructure were disarmed and dismantled. Moreover, the programs intended for the radiation victims in terms of domestic and international assistance are also discussed.

The article focuses on differences in the economic reform processes of the transition economies of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It highlights the influence of Soviet-era conditions on the economic transition in these countries citing their differences in the level of integration with Soviet-era Russia, in their pursuit of economic reforms and the level of turnover of the former Soviet elite.

The article reports that at present there are two distinct groups among the Uighurs living in the Ili river valley region of eastern Kazakhstan. The border between China and Kazakhstan intersects the valley that has been the backdrop to several migrations since the first Uighur families moved to the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Eugene Schuyler was the first American diplomat to visit the Ili Valley region during the 10 year Russian occupation. He reported violence by the Chinese Muslims against the Qing forces, including Chinese and Manchu civilians, on a grand scale.

Focuses on Kazakhstan's policy towards neighboring Central Asian countries. Relations with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and China; Common characteristics of Central Asian republics; Border conflicts, a legacy of the Soviet period; Issues of minorities, particularly Kazakhs in Uzbekistan.

Examines the nature of nationalism in Kazakhstan. Role of nationalism in international politics; Impact on the relationship between Kazakhstan and Russia; Influence of print-capitalism on the rise of language of imagined communities; Discussions on Kazakification; Details on social and ideological problems of Kazaks.