Making sense of the January 2022 protests in Kazakhstan: failing legitimacy, culture of protests, and elite readjustments

Abstract

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.