‘There Can Be No Other Sun in the Sky’ : Political Myth, Spirituality and Legitimacy in Contemporary Kazakhstan

With the elimination of Soviet state communism in the early 1990s, the ideational foundation of politics in the five Central Asian former Soviet republics had to undergo fundamental rebuilding. Instead of the defunct basis of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism, the rulers of the suddenly independent Central Asian states urgently had to identify other ways and means of legitimizing their hold on power. The following is an analysis of how this quest has fared in the case of Kazakhstan, a resource-rich state with regional great-power aspirations

https://journals.vgtu.lt/index.php/MLA/article/view/5070

The aim of the research is to reconstruct the spatial apparatuses that are being used in Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. What our analysis would like to report, is closely related to the central hypothesis from which our thesis departs: the evidence, in this case, of a symbiotic relationship between the forms of the becoming-urban of these territories (Astana, the new Kazakh capital, is the main case study) and the post-Soviet social dystopia**; the fact that this dystopia is visible and understandable in primis through the lens of urban planning. Urban transformations, living standards, and spatial welfare are the main aspects that have been considered on a small scale. Transformations of territories, infrastructure development and the border apparatuses are, instead, the ones on a bigger scale. Santrauka Tyrimo tikslas – rekonstruoti erdvinius modelius, naudojamus Centrinėje Azijoje po Sovietų Sąjungos žlugimo. Nagrinėjamas Astanos, naujos Kazachijos sostinės, atvejis. Analizuojamas posovietinės socialinės distopijos reiškinys ir jo suvokimas per urbanistinio planavimo prizmę. Miesto transformacijos, gyvenimo standartai ir erdvinė gerovė yra pagrindiniai aspektai, kurie buvo detaliai analizuojami. Raktiniai žodžiai: Centrinė Azija, distopija, erdviniai modelia

Development in Kyrgyzstan : Failed State or Failed Statebuilding?

This chapter examines the tensions present in approaches to development in Kyrgyzstan. It argues that development in this small post-Soviet republic has been approached primarily as formal statebuilding (Marquette & Beswick 2011), implying a belief that domestic political institutions and processes are the primary cause of fragility and that the adoption of democratic institutions and free market economic policies will result in development. The consequences of this inherently normative endeavour are explored in terms of the local political economy that has developed since independence and especially in the 2000s. Centrally, it is demonstrated how the competing interests and priorities of donors and local elite have undermined development efforts. On the basis of this analysis, it is suggested that rather than being framed as a failing or failed state, Kyrgyzstan is better understood as a case of failed statebuilding that cannot be remedied by the adoption of the current principles for development in fragile states situations, as adopted by the international community. Instead, the focus needs to be on facilitating the rebuilding of state-society relations both locally and internationally with a view to beginning to check the marketization of the state that has occurred