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.
The contributors to this book discuss the new conjunctions that have emerged between foreign policy events and politicized expressions of Russian nationalism since 2005. The 2008 war with Georgia, as ...well as conflicts with Ukraine and other East European countries over the memory of the Soviet Union, and the Russian interpretation of the 2005 French riots have all contributed to reinforcing narratives of Russia as a fortress surrounded by aggressive forces, in the West and CIS. This narrative has found support not only in state structures, but also within the larger public. It has been especially salient for some nationalist youth movements, including both pro-Kremlin organizations, such as "Nashi," and extra-systemic groups, such as those of the skinheads. These various actors each have their own specific agendas; they employ different modes of public action, and receive unequal recognition from other segments of society. Yet many of them expose a reading of certain foreign policy events which is roughly similar to that of various state structures. These and related phenomena are analyzed, interpreted and contextualized in papers by Luke March, Igor Torbakov, Jussi Lassila, Marlène Laruelle, and Lukasz Jurczyszyn.
Introduction Laruelle, Marlene; Hohmann, Sophie
Problems of post-communism,
09/02/2020, Letnik:
67, Številka:
4-5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This cluster explores the birth of Islam in Arctic conditions by looking at several regional cases. The presence of Muslim populations in Russia's subarctic regions is part of a centuries-long trend; ...yet it was the collapse of the Soviet regime and the subsequent huge socioeconomic transformations that really gave birth to Polar Islam. Soviet patterns of migration and labor (Azeri engineers in Siberian industries) are now combined with post-Soviet patterns (young Tajiks and Dagestanis looking for unskilled jobs). This introduction briefly discusses the labor migration context that has been given rise to the new phenomenon of Polar Islam.
Introduction Laruelle, Marlene; Hohmann, Sophie
Problems of post-communism,
07/2020, Letnik:
67, Številka:
4-5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This cluster explores the birth of Islam in Arctic conditions by looking at several regional cases. The presence of Muslim populations in Russia’s subarctic regions is part of a centuries-long trend; ...yet it was the collapse of the Soviet regime and the subsequent huge socioeconomic transformations that really gave birth to Polar Islam. Soviet patterns of migration and labor (Azeri engineers in Siberian industries) are now combined with post-Soviet patterns (young Tajiks and Dagestanis looking for unskilled jobs). This introduction briefly discusses the labor migration context that has been given rise to the new phenomenon of Polar Islam.
In January 2022 mass protests spread quickly across the whole of Kazakhstan, becoming the largest mass mobilization in the country's modern history. We analyze these mass protests through the ...framework of regime-society relations, arguing that a ey failure of the regime built by Nazarbayev is the inability to reconcile its neoliberal prosperity rhetoric with citizens' calls for a welfare state. We then explore how a tradition of protests has been developing since 2011 and address the structural components of regime (in)stability and how they contributed to violence in the protests.
This book offers a unique insight on the main far-right actors and ideological trends that push, on both sides, for reshaping the Europe-Russia relations and for the emergence of a new pan-European ...illiberal ideology.
This article examines how the nation is presented and staged on the small screen in Kazakhstan. Television is a mirror in which the nation can project itself as an "imagined community." However, the ...Kazakhstan authorities waited a long time before investing in the small screen. As the country feels more pressure from Russia and younger generations seek a greater sense of Kazakh identity, the authorities seem decided to invest into soft power tools that reinforce Kazakhstani/ Kazakh cultural autonomy. After a brief overview of the Kazakhstani televisual landscape and its recent evolutions in ownership, language, and audience ratings, I examine documentary films as a reflection of official historiography, and then decrypt the broadcast "Signs. Legends of the Steppe," which encapsulates the new genre I name patriotic entertainment.
This paper aims to contribute to the discussion on Arctic migration and urban sustainability by exploring the case of Norilsk, the first sizeable circumpolar city in the world entirely built on ...permafrost. Norilsk represents an archetypal model of mobility flows managed by a 'big business' firm. Indeed, between the 1960s and 1980s, the city's metallurgical complex promoted massive in-migration, followed by massive out-migration in the post-Soviet decades, with several projects of 'managed decline'. The rich research done on mobility patterns in Russia's North still lacks detailed case studies of demographic evolutions at the urban level, a gap in knowledge that this paper hopes to address by looking at the evolution of Norilsk's population over the longue durée, from the Soviet era to contemporary in-migration flows. This paper also aims to enrich the literature on Arctic identities by investigating the paradoxes of Norilsk urban identity as it is lived by several generations of inhabitants.
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