Governmentalization of the Kazakhstani State: Between Governmentality and Neopatrimonial Capitalism

Shifting Security and Power Constellations in Central Asia and the Caucasus

“…Consequently, neoliberal restructuring in this country went far beyond the mere structural adjustment reforms advocated for the western countries (Bruff and Tansel 2019). On the one hand, the resulting symbiosis in the form of "authoritarian neoliberalism" defined here as a mixture of authoritarian governance and neoliberal capitalism has provided state authorities with a blueprint not only for influencing lucrative financial investment and privatization channels in ways that benefitted only those embedded in the ruling class and their cronies (e.g., Sanghera and Satybaldieva 2021;Tutumlu 2019) Governing the Extractive Sector but also-to echo Tansel's seminal conceptualization of authoritarian neoliberalism-for employing a barrage of disciplinary strategies ranging from more explicit forms of state coercion to specific legal and administrative mechanisms to marginalize and criminalize oppositional social forces in order to "entrench existing power relations and inequalities" (Tansel 2017: 6). As outlined in this chapter, the use of such strategies has served the sole purpose of protecting capital accumulation and reproduction from any attempts to circumvent it, in particular by disempowering the labor class and plunging it into a state of precarity.…”

Governing the Extractive Sector: The Politics of Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Labor Resistance in Kazakhstan

“…Consequently, neoliberal restructuring in this country went far beyond the mere structural adjustment reforms advocated for the western countries (Bruff and Tansel 2019). On the one hand, the resulting symbiosis in the form of "authoritarian neoliberalism" defined here as a mixture of authoritarian governance and neoliberal capitalism has provided state authorities with a blueprint not only for influencing lucrative financial investment and privatization channels in ways that benefitted only those embedded in the ruling class and their cronies (e.g., Sanghera and Satybaldieva 2021;Tutumlu 2019) but also-to echo Tansel's seminal conceptualization of authoritarian neoliberalism-for employing a barrage of disciplinary strategies ranging from more explicit forms of state coercion to specific legal and administrative mechanisms to marginalize and criminalize oppositional social forces in order to "entrench existing power relations and inequalities" (Tansel 2017: 6). As outlined in this chapter, the use of such strategies has served the sole purpose of protecting capital accumulation and reproduction from any attempts to circumvent it, in particular by disempowering the labor class and plunging it into a state of precarity.…”

Social Reproduction of Post‐Soviet Migrant Labour: Braiding the International Political Economy

“…The scene of a woman locking her children behind closed doors makes sense in the context of the social experiment of post‐Soviet restructuring. In the course of it, “state welfare institutions became delegitimised and defunded … The Soviet welfare states became post‐Soviet debtfare states” (Sanghera and Satybaldieva 2021:34; see also Tutumlu 2019)—and with deeply gendered consequences. A rapid feminisation of poverty is one of the more vivid consequences of this “transition” to new capitalist “normality” (Satybaldieva 2021; see also Cookson 2016).…”