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  • Repackaged Authoritarian PoliciesKazakhstan's "New" Version of Media Controls
  • Peter Gross (bio)

Kazakhstan is one of many former communist countries that defies Ivan Krastev's assertion that authoritarianism has ceased claiming "to be a real alternative to democracy."1 Since December 2011, when a strike by workers in Zhanaozen was brutally suppressed by the authorities and unrest spread throughout the country's Mangystau Region, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev has ratcheted up his already commanding rule.2

The media have been significant targets of Nazarbayev's authoritarian governance. Nazarbayev's government has engaged in a gradual but steady, multilayered, near monopolization of media in a country that had an underdeveloped journalistic scene from the start.3 At first glance, Nazarbayev's approaches to controlling the media in his favor are analogous to those of fellow autocrats in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, but there are significant realities and practices that separate Kazakhstan from other formerly communist states.4

A Brief Political Context

While there has been progress in the economic sphere and in the establishment of civil societies throughout Kazakh history, its geography-related "national ideology and apparent obsession with global crises" and the resulting extant conservative culture continues to have deleterious effects on progress.5 This culture buttresses the facilitating national penchant for "a strongman leader whose primary responsibility is to safeguard national security" and feeds the governing class's rationalizations for authoritarian rule.6 Kazakhstan, a predominantly Muslim country, is a noncompetitive authoritarian state wherein voting has become a meaningless exercise.7 The dominance of Nazarbayev and his Nur Otan Party, fraud, patronage, and their engineered absence of bona fide opposition contribute to the rigged system in which active citizen participation has little impact on outcomes that are effectively pre-ordained.8 The Nazarbayev administration speaks in terms of democracy while governing authoritatively. Astana's political masters appear unbreakable in their conviction that control over civil society, markets, and the media secures political power.9

The Nazarbayev administration justifies its obsessively autocratic mentality as [End Page 187] a means of self-preservation, which in Kazakhstan includes inciting aggression against independent media and journalists and the creation of manipulative policies, laws, and propaganda. Monopolization organically lessens the need to employ these tactics. To that end, the state and the government remain the unremitting advertisers, propagandists, and controllers of the media and information, in the name of "security and the fight against international terrorist threats."10

In the digital realm, there is the added cynical use of electronic communications to offer public services—e-government—and an overwhelming presence by Nur Otan Party members and associates. The rulers portray the control and exploitation of state media and assaults on the few remaining independent media outlets as necessary not only to protect the country, but also to uphold the citizens' privacy, safety, and overall well-being in society.

A One-Family (and Associates) Oligarchy

The media oligarchs' sway over traditional platforms is comparable to that of many of their counterparts in former communist countries. The oligarchic figures in these countries either co-opt the state and government, like in most Central and Southeast European countries, or are co-opted by the state, as in Russia, Belarus, Hungary, and Macedonia.11 In Kazakhstan, neither type of appropriation is necessary. The fact that they have been uniquely a Nazarbayev family affair since 1991 makes the way that the family and "business associates have taken control of all of the most influential organs of the media" the system's most conspicuous trademark.12 On the political and legislative side, Nazarbayev's control over the Nur Otan Party and the party's aggregate domination of state and government organs, including the parliament, assures media legislation and policies in favor of his political household. The articulation of laws is inhibiting freedom of the press, allows for wide interpretations that amount to censorship, and incentivizes self-censorship.13

The party's near monopoly over the media assures propagandistic support for such legislation and policies, which makes the tag-team of political and media power impervious to demands for change; those who clamor for democratization are easily rebuffed and neutralized in ways reminiscent of the Soviet era.

Although...

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