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Paper abstract:

The following paper examines transforming national identity of Kazakhstani citizens after January unrest and war in Ukraine. Prior to this major political events in a country and within the region, there has been a common dichotomy between civic and ethnic national identity models in Kazakhstan. There was a three decade long ambiguous state policies of nation building, where there was no clear consensus between "Kazakhstani" and "Kazakh" identity. On the one hand, it was essential to preserve ethnic-centred ideas of state-forming (less preferably "titular") nation- Kazakhs. Namely, policies on promoting state language, ethnicizing names of cities and regions based on the interests' of ethnic majorities or repatriation were necessary. At the same time, there has been state vector of "Eurasianist" and even globalising trajectories of national identity, which were reflected in having Russian literature or language studied at schools or trilingual language policies where English has become pivotal as well.

Such janus-faced state strategies of nation building has developed vague perception of national identity of citizens of Kazakhstan. However, the resign of Nursultan Nazarbayev became a turning point in transforming political culture and participation, which can be treated as the beginning of changing national identity perceptions. Even more than that, January-2022 unrest has shown that national identity is getting even more uncertain in terms of its future models. Later on, Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has also affected potential ways national identity would be changing on civic level.

The main argument of this paper is that the war in Ukraine has influenced the growing ethnic nationalism in the country. It can be seen through increasing demand on learning Kazakh language and even via state reforms. President Tokayev has announced the new set of reforms in March 2022, where new administrative-territorial division has been changed, where the names of new regions have significantly been ethnicized. What is important to observe and pay attention to, is how state might react to further growing ethnic sentiments of citizens and what kind of policies it might offer later.

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This paper explores the constructs of narratives of national identity presented in the history curricula of independent Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. In the Central Asian context, with its shared and perplexing history, policy-making of national identity is in the midst of rethinking and revisiting its previous notions from the glorified past. This pattern of reclaiming forgotten past and reviving innate features can be empirically observed among states with transitioning political systems. In the selected states the notion of national identity is mostly defined through ethnic markers of titular groups along with imperatives that have been engrained throughout history. Exploring this trend of revisiting and reviving history in state policies for national identity construction is the main research area of this paper. Examining the historiography of these states after gaining independence will give a better understanding of national identity politics in this region. The paper is based on a qualitative analysis of state-approved history textbooks used in public schools, official state documents, and semi-structured interviews. Based on the premises of critical discourse analysis and narrative studies, my main argument is that with a shared political and historical past, the selected countries have taken different approaches to building the sense of belonging through historical pages. Semi-structured interviews with regional experts in history writing shed light on the role of state policies in the process of producing national history. Another argument is that history writing and rewriting in post-colonial settings are preconditioned and sustained by the political and social settings of that given time. Hence, the influence of political and social aspects is investigated. Elements of mythmaking, interpretations of shared and contested historical events, linguistic semiotics, and emerging history narratives are the main discursive themes that are discussed in detail.

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Paper abstract:

My paper will provide a new argument related to state-building in Central Asia (including Afghanistan). Based on my archival and library research carried since June 2021, I found out that linguistic politics played the most important role in defining ethnicity and nationhood in Central Asia. Despite the decisive role the Soviet National Policy played in defining national boundaries in Central Asia, the role of internal factors are either treated secondary or undermined in the existing literature.

My findings suggests that the idea of being Uzbek, Afghan, and Tajik was primarily shaped by the Nineteenth Century Western notion of linguistic nationalism with the aim of reducing the domain of Persian readership "the Persianate nationhood" as Benedict Anderson might define, and was divided between Pashto (Afghani), Uzbek (a Turkic language), and Tajik (Central Asian Persian) domains. Although the Uzbek-Tajik, Pashtun-Tajik and Iranian-Non-Iranian tensions are dating back to the Chinghiz Khan or Timurid invasion of Iran and to the Shiite-Sunnite war between Uzbeks and Safavids and later between Pashtuns and Safavids, it became more linguistic towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, which ultimately reduced the political domain of Persian language. For Persian to survive as an official language in Afghanistan and Central Asia, it had to first define Tajikness and then rely entirely on Tajik people to partially maintain its status.

Reading travelogues and official histories as well as secondary sources (in Persian, Russian and English), I found out that the undisputed role of Persian language as the language of Islam, spirituality, education and politics - lingua franca, gets questioned at the time when Afghan and Uzbek rulers in the early Twentieth Century start searching for elements to help defining and creating nationhood. Shifting from the written Persian language to spoken languages, creating national histories, new grammatical rules, emphasizing on accents and registers over commonalities are parts of the main discourses in this time.

Regarding the wider implication of my research for the existing scholarship on state-building with a focus on Central Asia and Afghanistan, my paper unravels the complexity of state-building and criticizes state-building practices in these countries for not enjoying popular support at the time of their creation and largely relying on foreign support. Simply put, this paper problematizes the notion of state-nationhood in these countries by providing a historical account on how these states were created before the idea of nation "imagined nation or readership" existed at all.

I am a fourth-year PhD dissertator at Nazarbayev University. This paper is part of my PhD dissertation which I aim to finish by May 2023.