Protest and Crisis Politics in Kazakhstan: Understanding What Happened? & Considering What May Happen?

Join country and region experts Asel Doolotkeldieva (OSCE Academy), Dian Kudaibergenova (Cambridge), Edward Schatz (University of Toronto), and Sam Greene (King’s College London) for a conversation on the current protests and political crisis in Kazakhstan.

Moderated by Gwendolyn Sasse (ZOiS/Humbolt) Regina Smyth (Indiana University) Joshua Tucker (NYU, Jordan Center).

Register for the virtual event.

Asel Doolotkeldieva is a Senior Lecturer at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. Her ongoing book project looks at protests and contentious politics in Eurasia. Her latest article examines the ‘October uprising’ in Kyrgyzstan 2020. 

Diana Kudaibergenova is a Cambridge- based political sociologist. She studies different intersections of power relations through realms of political sociology dealing with concepts of state, nationalising regimes, and ideologies. Her most recent book, Toward Nationalizing Regimes. Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm, focuses on the rise of nationalising regimes in post-Soviet space after 1991 with a prime focus on power struggles among the political and cultural elites in democratic and non-democratic states (Pittsburgh University Press, 2020). And her latest research and forthcoming manuscript builds on contentious politics and protest movements and regime power dynamics in Kazakhstan after the 2019 resignation of the country’s long-term autocrat, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev (forthcoming). 

Edward Schatz is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He has written about the Kazakhstani events for the Monkey Cage Blog and is the author of Slow Anti- Americanism: Symbolic Politics and Social Movements in Central Asia (Stanford University Press, 2021). 

Sam Greene is professor of Russian politics and Director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London. Sam’s research focuses on mobilization and the social pathways of power in authoritarian settings. He is author of Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia (Stanford, 2014) and co-author with Graeme Robertson of Putin v the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019). 

Presented by the Competitive Authoritarian Protest Research Network (CAPRN), The University of Manchester, ZOiS Centre for East European and International Studies, King’s College London’s Russia Institute, UNC’s Center for Slavic, and Eurasian, and East European Studies.