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Abstract

Observing public sentiment is one of the critical instruments for public officials and decision-makers in determining the acceptability of governmental initiatives and directions of the policy agenda. Traditionally, different mechanisms for measuring public opinion have evolved alongside democratic regimes. With the growing dominance of digital technologies, platforms such as social media now play an important role in supporting democratic discourse, shaping political identities, and expressing public concerns.

However, in countries of limited liberal traditions or politically constrained environments like Kazakhstan, civic discourse is generally redirected to digital platforms, and in the absence of accessible and safe mechanisms of political participation, these online spaces emerged as primary settings for public discourse, political expression and civic engagement. The “double shock” of 2022, involving large-scale anti-government protests named "Bloody January", and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, triggered a series of complex political, social and economic changes in Kazakhstan that significantly shaped public sentiment. Although Kazakhstan’s official neutral stance on the war can be understood from the standpoint of international diplomacy, security priorities, and economic interests, the sentiments of its population regarding the socioeconomic transformations brought by the conflict have been given far less attention. While economic indicators may suggest progress, the broader and widespread impact, particularly how citizens react and experience these changes, is often overlooked in political discourse and official narratives. Public perceptions are clouded by contradictory narratives, and the full extent and nature of these consequences remain unclear. The public discourse over the spillover effects of the war emphasises the need to consider public sentiment more seriously to gain a more accurate picture of the true nature of socio-economic transformations. This includes understanding how these effects are perceived in a society marked by a long and complex political relationship with Russia.

Therefore, the paper examines the concept of infrapolitics in Kazakhstan, the subtle, everyday and hidden forms of political engagement by netizens within Kazakhstan’s digital space. By bringing to light this often overlooked sphere of political life that exists beneath formal institutions, the paper explores citizens’ sentiments about the socio-economic consequences of the war in Kazakhstan by using a novel multidisciplinary methodology that integrates political science and data mining. The approach also offers a transferable framework for understanding political expression in other conflict-affected hybrid regions, where conventional forms of participation are often limited or suppressed.

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Abstract

Despite being geographically located in the Northern Hemisphere, Central Asia countries share structural similarities with Global South research systems, which remain peripheral in global knowledge production and whose scientific achievements rarely attract wide international attention. Yet between 2000 and 2025, Scopus-indexed social science publications from the region experienced rapid growth from 19 to 2,605 respectively. This expansion raises a key question: does increased output signal substantive integration into global scholarly networks, or does it primarily reflect metric-driven policy incentives within structurally underfunded research systems? While existing bibliometric studies tend to aggregate Central Asia within broader post-Soviet analyses, or focus narrowly on individual countries or specific disciplinary fields - typically in natural and hard sciences - the social sciences, historically ideologized and institutionally marginalized during the Soviet period -remain underexamined as a distinct regional field.

This study approaches Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) as a distinct regional research system shaped by the Soviet-era legacies of academic dependency, low R&D investment, and the consequences of metric-based governance for knowledge production in emerging systems. It investigates how authorship and collaboration patterns in internationally visible social science research have evolved over the past 25 years, and how different forms of collaboration relate to publication quality and citation impact.

The analysis draws on a longitudinal dataset of 13,457 Scopus-indexed social science articles with at least one Central Asian affiliation. These publications are treated not as a comprehensive measure of regional scholarship, but as an indicator of internationally visible research activity. The study examines three levels of analysis: single-authored publications, author-level co-authorship, and national, regional, and international collaboration. It evaluates collaboration intensity, team size, citation impact, and journal quality.

Preliminary findings suggest that international collaboration is associated with higher citation impact and publication in higher-ranked journals; however, this advantage appears unevenly distributed across countries and collaboration structures, and may reflect asymmetric integration into global knowledge networks, reinforcing existing hierarchies of knowledge production. The findings have direct policy relevance for higher education systems in Central Asia. They suggest that policies focused narrowly on publication counts risk reinforcing dependence on external collaboration and may not lead to sustainable improvements in research quality. Instead, strengthening domestic capacity, supporting balanced partnerships, and prioritizing quality-based evaluation may offer more sustainable alternatives.

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Abstract

Many post-Soviet countries exhibit a distinctive sociolinguistic configuration in which Russian retains a dominant functional role, often at the expense of indigenous languages. This paper develops an integrated theoretical framework linking language use, cultural structure, and long-run linguistic dynamics.

We conceptualize culture as a structured system of meanings and practices and introduce a novel distinction between linguistically expressed culture—domains whose transmission depends on language (e.g., literature, science, written history)—and linguistically unexpressed culture—domains that can persist independently of a specific linguistic medium (e.g., customs, social norms, ritual practices, and embodied traditions). This distinction allows us to formalize a language–culture mismatch, whereby the dominant language does not fully coincide with the core cultural system of a society.

Building on insights from linguistic relativity and evolutionary dynamics, we propose a stylized dynamic model of language competition with cultural feedback. The model generates multiple equilibria: a low-level equilibrium associated with language decline and a high-level equilibrium corresponding to language revitalization. Crucially, we show that linguistically unexpressed cultural domains act as a latent reservoir of identity, sustaining cultural cohesion even under partial language shift and thereby lowering the threshold for subsequent language recovery.

Within this framework, reciprocal bilingualism plays a non-trivial role: rather than accelerating assimilation, it may facilitate coordination across linguistic groups and support the expansion of the indigenous language, provided that cultural cohesion remains anchored in non-linguistic domains. This mechanism helps explain why linguistically heterogeneous populations may remain culturally cohesive and retain endogenous potential for language revival.

We illustrate the theoretical argument using the case of Kazakhstan, where strong bilingualism coexists with a robust indigenous cultural core and expanding domains of Kazakh-language use. The analysis suggests that such systems are inherently dynamic and may transition toward either linguistic convergence or sustained bilingual equilibrium with increasing prominence of the indigenous language.

The paper contributes to the literature by integrating cultural theory with dynamic models of language competition and by identifying a previously underexplored mechanism through which culture can outlive language and subsequently enable its revival.

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Abstract

Who is willing to pay for the future without climate issues and why? Conventional wisdom states that younger generations tend to be more supportive of climate policies than older generations. This assumption has traditionally guided policymakers in developing targeted environmental policies to elicit greater positive public feedback. However, how do people's attitudes towards financial contributions to the environment change when questions of affordability and institutional trust arise? This paper examines public willingness to pay (WTP) for climate mitigation policies across 28 post-socialist countries using data from the second (2010) and fourth (2023) waves of the Life in Transition Survey (LITS). It reveals a picture that challenges prevailing knowledge. Findings suggest that belonging to a younger generation does not automatically lead to greater support for climate. Differences between cohorts emerge when the birth cohort interacts with income and disappear when it interacts with trust. The paper argues that willingness to pay for climate policies in post-socialist countries is shaped less by generational differences than by economic capacity, institutional trust, and political context, including EU membership and post-Soviet legacy.