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Abstract

Education in Afghanistan is a highly politicised field which has been going through a radical change since the return of the Taliban in 2021. Although the focus remains on the ban on female education, what is at stake here is education at large, which is becoming more and more complicated under the current regime. Taliban’s approach to education concentrates on three policies: (1) official bans, (2) curriculum change, and (3) proliferation of madrassas for boys and girls. Taliban have already banned courses like “Civic Education,” while introducing courses like “Emirate Studies” and ordering teachers not to teach Western values like human rights, democracy and even national symbols of Afghanistan. According to resources, Taliban’s curriculum change for primary level (Grades 1-6) is complete, while that for the intermediate level (Grades 7-9) is ongoing. It has also been announced that work is underway for a single curriculum for madrassas and schools at the primary level. It means that soon there will be no difference between schools and madrassas. This is line with Taliban’s policy of establishing “3-10 madrassas in every district,” which has exploded the number of madrassas in Afghanistan from 5.000 in 2021 to 21.000 in 2025. All these developments point to a process of “madrassafication of education” which is a multi-faceted issue involving; (1) establishment of madrassa education as the only legitimate way to employment and receiving aid; (2) indoctrination of new generations with Taliban’s ideology; (3) reproduction of a system of “governance by mullahs;” and (4) exploitation of education as a tool for regime survival. As a scholar working on politics of education in Afghanistan in the last fifteen years, I intend to analyse the ongoing “madrassafication” process in this paper which is a work-in-progress where I will be including new data as it comes up in due course.

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Why does repression sometimes suppress anti-government protest and at other times catalyze mass mobilization against the state? Existing accounts conceptualize repression primarily as an increase in the cost of dissent, yet they offer limited insight into the mechanisms through which state control reshapes citizens' political behavior. This paper develops an access-based framework that shifts the focus from how much repression a state employs to how repression restructures the channels through which citizens interact with the state and with one another. The framework distinguishes two dimensions of political access: vertical access, the institutionalized pathways linking citizens to state authorities, and horizontal access, the communicative and associational linkages among citizens themselves. Vertical closure transforms the direction of grievances by breaking down the state's grievance absorption mechanism, redirecting dissatisfaction from specific policies toward the regime as such. Yet this reattribution alone does not produce anti-government protest; mobilization requires horizontal access that enables coordination and collective action. Anti-government protest is therefore most likely under a specific configuration: restricted vertical access combined with open horizontal access. The framework further theorizes how the sequence and tempo of access closure generate distinct protest trajectories, including an inverted-U pattern at intermediate levels of repression. These expectations are tested through cross-national time-series analysis and a process-tracing case study of Kazakhstan's January 2022 protests. The findings contribute to debates on the repression-dissent nexus, political opportunity structures, and democratic backsliding by specifying the configurational logic through which repression produces regime-directed contention.

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Kazakhstan has a crucial role in international educational migration hosting thousands of students from the neighboring nations, which makes it the biggest educational hub in Central Asia. In particular, a high proportion of inflow of students actively immigrate into the western regions of Kazakhstan. The student flow into Kazakhstan is ranked by Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, north-west of Russia, key original countries, and interconnected components of the Middle Corridor. Apart from major cities like Almaty, Astana and Shymkent, there are the other regional cities, the one referring to Aktau city of Magystau region, hosting international students owing to its geopolitical landscape.

Due to shifting politics, analyzing the contribution of Kazakhstan in the educational migration is a key question of this paper. The relevance of the study is determined by the rapid growth of inflow of youth for educational purposes. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the motives of educational migration into Kazakhstan and identify the main trends of educational migration on the oblast level. In order to get more precise results, we have organized a questionnaire tending to cover more than 50 international students currently studying at Yessenov University located in Aktau city, Mangystau region.

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This paper examines the role of civil society actors during periods of destabilization, using the events in Zhanaozen (Kazakhstan, 2011–2012) as an instrumental case study. It represents the final stage of a broader research project and tests a hypothesis derived from an original analytical model developed by the author.

The Zhanaozen case is conceptualized as a “destabilizing event,” operationalized through the official declaration of a state of emergency. This approach allows for the empirical observation of how a political system responds to acute internal shocks. The research draws on a wide range of sources, including official documents, reports of international organizations, media materials, and selected digital content, enabling methodological triangulation and strengthening the reliability of the findings.

The paper is grounded in a conceptual distinction between a “stable state” (the absence of destabilizing events) and “stability” as a system’s capacity to withstand destabilizing pressures. It further develops a typology of civil society actors—systemic, non-systemic, and anti-systemic—based on their relationship with the state. The analysis also identifies two key mechanisms through which civil society may contribute to stabilization: communicative processes of dialogue and compromise (Habermas) and the production and diffusion of values, narratives, and discourses (Gramsci).

Importantly, the role of civil society actors is assessed not only in terms of its stabilizing or destabilizing character, but also in terms of its degree of significance, distinguishing between critical and non-critical forms of influence.

The central hypothesis, tested through a case study approach, argues that the role of civil society varies depending on both the stage of destabilization and the type of actors involved.

The findings contribute to broader debates on state–society relations, the dynamics of political stability, and the role of civil society in hybrid political regimes, offering a nuanced understanding of how different types of actors shape trajectories of destabilization and stabilization.