Abstract

How should post-Soviet nation-building in Kazakhstan be analysed: as a project driven by state elites from above, or as a process negotiated from below through everyday identities, language practices, and citizen responses? This paper argues that the opposition between top-down and bottom-up approaches is analytically limiting. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory, and engaging Rogers Brubaker’s concept of the nationalizing state, it reconceptualises post-Soviet nation-building in Kazakhstan as a single hegemonic field in which official state projects, minority responses, and citizen-level perceptions are articulated together rather than operating as separate domains.

The paper examines three interrelated dynamics. First, it analyses how Kazakh state elites constructed a hegemonic project in the 1990s around language policy, citizenship, demographic restructuring, and diaspora repatriation. Through these processes, Kazakhness was articulated as the core signifier of post-Soviet restoration and legitimate statehood. Second, it shows how this project was later reformulated through broader and more incorporative discourses of national unity, Kazakhstaniness, and Eurasianism, enabling the state discourse to widen its legitimacy without relinquishing the privileged position of the titular nation. Rather than displacing the earlier project, these discourses reworked and stabilised it under changing domestic and international conditions. Third, the paper investigates why Russian and Russophone minority actors failed to consolidate a durable counter-hegemonic project despite early resistance to language reform, bureaucratic restructuring, and demographic change. Their claims remained fragmented, while state strategies of selective accommodation, depoliticisation, and symbolic inclusion limited the emergence of a coherent rival discourse.

Rather than separating elite projects from everyday negotiations, the paper reads legal and political texts, minority responses, and citizen-centred studies within a single hegemonic field. In doing so, it argues that the top-down/bottom-up distinction obscures the processes through which “the nation,” “the people,” and legitimate belonging are constructed in Kazakhstan. More broadly, the paper suggests that discourse theory offers a useful way to rethink post-Soviet nation-building beyond static analytical binaries.