(2009). Mass Spectacle and Styles of Governmentality in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 61, Politics of the Spectacular: Symbolism and Power in Central Asia, pp. 1249-1276.

Rather than interpreting President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s nation-building model of Kazakhstani-ness as a balance between civic and ethnic forms of nation-building, we show that Kazakhstani-ness was styled on Leonid Brezhnev’s supranational modern identity of the Soviet People. We explore three similarities by comparing rulers’ discursive aspirational statements (rather than historical policy trajectories) in a single case study of Kazakhstan. Both discursive models were based on teleological supranational state ideology, both were depicted as modern and advanced, and both modelled the new identity on the language and culture of ethnic majority. We used thematic discourse analysis in over 50 government documents and speeches of leaders to illustrate our argument. This case presents bigger lessons for regime’s power of defining the national membership in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and beyond.

This article questions conventional interpretations of the nature of power in authoritarian regimes that treat the political position of the ruler as hierarchical and top-down. Instead, it applies the principal–agent problem to information asymmetry in a single case study, Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan, to analyze the inability of the ruler to conduct effective oversight when officials engage in elaborate personality cults, depoliticization, and informal patronal practices that threaten the market and the legitimacy of the ruler. Data for this article came from local mass media and in-depth interviews with mid-level bureaucrats in Kazakhstan collected in 2011–2017 on a confidential basis.

This article answers the question of why Central Asia studies has not contributed more fully to the study of comparative politics since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It argues that during the Soviet period, Central Asia remained a dark matter to Western scholars specializing in Sovietology and who lacked access to the region. Although in the 1990s Western academics saw the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, expecting Central Asia to join the liberal world order, these hopes declined after the 2000s when not only the transition paradigm failed, but also because a consolidated form of authoritarianism closed access to the field. In conclusion, this article offers the most promising fields for the development of the study of comparative politics across and inside Central Asia.