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Abstract:

Discourses are inadvertently placed in the context of related practices and political leaders’ language of security reflects not only their thinking about issues of security, but it also reflects linkages to policies. Political rhetoric echoes sensibilities to the extant or past experience of threats, and on the other hand it affects policies which may aggravate likelihoods of insecurities.

The studies of political rhetoric in the post-soviet space are sparse. Among few studies is the study of New Year presidential speeches where the sense of “others” was invoked (Karaliova, 2016), danger discourses in Uzbekistan’s and Kyrgyzstan’s media (Megoran 2005). These countries were developing their statehood when notions of security were informed not only by experience of the cold war (Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde1998) though some countries in the region, like Kazakhstan, bore the nuclear legacy of preceding state (the republic had nuclear test sites). Speeches on security related issues have been studied as issues of difference of languages of counter-terrorism (McDonald et al 2013), as a way to understand rhetoric about refugees (Baker\ et al 2008), or when a country’s security is viewed as statist, exclusionary and militarized (McDonald, 2005).

This paper contributes to the field by discussing security-related political discourses in the post-Soviet Central Asia and compares official rhetoric of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan before and after the start of war in Ukraine using content analysis of major presidential speeches (using QDA Miner for quantitative and qualitative analysis). Analysis shows a significant variation in rhetorical prominence of different security issues and actors in the post-Soviet period before the war in Ukraine and after the start of the war. Before the war (analysis encompasses more than two decades of database of speeches) relative insignificance of most security issues for Uzbekistan conformed to its overall isolationist policies, while the general modernization frame of Kazakhstan prompted highest security-related references in its presidential speeches. Kyrgyzstan, as a relatively smaller country, falls in between. The peace and security discourse after the start of the war has started to change slightly to reflect also changing dynamics in the leadership of two of these three countries (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) and shows the precarious state of multi-vectoral foreign policy agenda in this period.