Paper abstract:

This paper argues that understanding the grounds and aftermath of “Bloody January” 2022 (it is still poorly known why mass protests turned into the biggest violence Kazakhstan experienced since its independence) necessities the analysis of Kazakhstan’s political economy. This kind of analysis implies that the emergence of structural and class inequality resulting from the neoliberalization of 1990, which this paper depicts as structural injustice, can be seen as the main reason for protests and political violence in Kazakhstan. Neoliberal reforms, contrary to the expectations to build a democratic and prosperous Kazakhstan after the Soviet period of the totalitarian system and Soviet model of colonial development, laid the grounds for building another version of a fundamentally unequal society and continuation of coloniality — the oligarchic rentier capitalistic system, which was in symbiotic relations with a politically authoritarian regime. Neoliberal capitalism facilitated the emergence and provided the grounds for developing the plutocratic authoritarian regime since the marketization reforms, foremost privatization, led to the emergence of the immense political capital of the rich and created plutocracy in place of democracy.

Hydrocarbon-rich Kazakhstan is an excellent case to understand how neoliberal capitalism and its accompanying inequality have trapped former socialist countries in lopsided development, coloniality of the global economic and financial system, job division, chronic social injustice, and political authoritarianism.

There is a need to question the mono-disciplinarity of today’s social sciences, the positivistic approaches of economics, political science, and political economy to poverty and inequality. In line with the critical theory’s approach, this paper argues that poverty and inequality are political and socially determined phenomena (conditioned not only by economic but also by historical, political, racial, and gender-related factors), which cannot be measured quantitatively. The January 2022 protests show that the Kazakhstanis want not only a democratic state but also a social state. These are indispensable factors in building a strong Kazakhstan in the face of multiple challenges, especially those coming from the north and east of the country.