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Paper short abstract

This paper addresses the transformation of power relations in Khorgos, a logistical hub on the Sino-Kazakh border. Triggered by multiple crises, truckers expressed their dissatisfaction with the abuse of logistical power. Through protests they hoped to get reconnected to the cross-border trade.

Paper long abstract

In the last decade Kazakhstan proved to be a stable logistical partner within China´s Belt and Road Initiative. In January 2022 an unprecedented upheaval, manifesting people´s frustration with hiking gas prices and political elites, swept across the country and damaged this image. The protests were preceded by nearly two years of a raging pandemic and followed by the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war.

However, the crises also had a consolidating impact: they revealed logisticians´ dissatisfaction with endemic corruption and the abuse of power associated with the clan of Kazakhstan´s former president Nursultan Nazarbaev. Notoriously long queues of trucks in Khorgos, a main logistical hub on the Sino-Kazakh border, were emblematic for the logistical power monopoly. Following the January upheaval were truckers´ protests in Khorgos pointing at their precarious situation: “We can't wait any longer!”

The truckers´ protests following Kazakhstan´s multiple crises furthered a reconfiguration of power in the realm of logistics. This transformation is shown by data based on 17 months of ethnographic field research between 2016 and 2021 in south-eastern Kazakhstan.

This paper aims to make three contributions. First, empirically: the truckers´ protests in Khorgos show how the monopolization of logistics by political elites in Kazakhstan is encountered; second, methodologically: transformation is studied at a border crossing, an infrastructural choke point, which blatantly exposes logistical power relations; third, conceptually: the crises are seen as connectors rather than ruptures by rendering visible inequalities and (re-)linking disconnected logisticians to the cross-border trade.