Kazakhstan needs religious patriots! (And already has them.)

by Wendell Schwab

Last week, Kazakhstan’s Vice Prime Minister Erbol Orynbaev told the board of the Ministry of Education and Science that the country’s schools have a vital assignment: to prevent “ideological extremism” – presumably the type of extremism that led to the criminal acts done in the name of Islam in western Kazakhstan and Taraz last year – by [...]

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Turkestan Album

by Nathan Hamm
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For at least the last seven or eight years, the Prokudin-Gorskii collection of color photos of the Russian empire taken in the early 20th century, gets noticed and reported by journalists, history buffs, and photography enthusiasts. Less well known is that the Turkestan Album, a series of volumes on the people, architecture, history, and economy [...]

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Kazakhstan’s Stability, Central Asia’s Stability

by Nathan Hamm
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Last week, the US Helsinki Commission held a hearing on Kazakhstan’s stability, looking at the violence in Zhanaozen and the recent parliamentary elections and questioning whether or not Kazakhstan is as stable as its government claims. The testimony, which can be found here is interesting and worth taking a look at. Included with the expert [...]

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Patronage Networks and Reformist Islam in Kazakhstan

by Wendell Schwab

One of the more amusing news stories to come out of Kazakhstan last week detailed the insertion of a Kazakhstani senator’s visage into a painting of the apostles greeting Jesus in a Russian Orthodox church.  While this could be viewed as a human-interest story to be placed in the same section as a waterskiing squirrel, it [...]

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Eye-Popping

by Joshua Foust
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Andrew Kramer has a report on Uncle Nazzy’s latest attempt to soothe Zhanaozen with sweet, sweet cash: Prime Minister Karim Q. Massimov said in a telephone interview last week that the government would give oil workers raises of up to several hundred dollars a month and would invest about $300 million in the town. “I [...]

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Kazakhstan’s Elections: Aspirations for Democracy amidst Expectations of Paternalism

by Alima Bissenova

The background to the January 15 Kazakhstan’s parliamentary elections has been most unfavorable. The image of stability that Kazakhstan’s government had carefully cultivated over the years has been tarnished with the outbreak of violence in an oil town of Zhanaozen. In neighboring Russia, on which Kazakhstan depends both culturally and politically, dozens of thousands of [...]

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Monitoring the Monitors

by Casey_Michel

Over the last few days, there’s been an ongoing debate on my Facebook wall as to the merits of the OSCE’s criticisms that came out following Kazakhstan’s recent Majlis election. After I posted Nazarbayev’s response to the criticisms – that is, his refusal to allow future critical monitors into his nation – a series of Kazakhstani friends came out in [...]

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Democracy’s Miller Test

by Nathan Hamm

Joshua Kucera has a very good article at EurasiaNet on the deflection of election criticism by Kazakhstani officials and a handful of DC analysts. They argue that the deficiencies in the parliamentary election are less important than overall progress toward democracy. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in particular have argued that they are on gradual, managed path [...]

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The Bizarre Kazakh Election Whitewash

by Joshua Foust

The OSCE is fairly unambiguous: Notwithstanding the government’s stated ambition to strengthen Kazakhstan’s democratic processes and conduct elections in line with international standards, yesterday’s early parliamentary vote still did not meet fundamental principles of democratic elections, the international observers concluded in a statement issued today. This probably surprises no one, since Uncle Nazzy declined to [...]

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The “Wild West” of Kazakhstan: a Crisis of Aspirations and Expectations

by Alima Bissenova

The outbreak of violence in Zhanaozen, a small oil town in Western Kazakhstan, has caused people to sit up and notice that Kazakhstan, despite its carefully cultivated reputation as a stable modernizing state, is not immune to social upheaval (if it has ever been) and that some internal discontent is brewing within the country. However, [...]

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