Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with the place of the State in the shaping of mental representation of the world of Kazakhstani students. It is based on the results of a survey conducted in 2018 and 2019 among 540 students interviewed in Astana, Karaganda and Almaty.

Paper long abstract:

Spatial representations are a powerful factors in territorialization. They allow to know and to understand space extent and limits but also to construct individual and collective belonging to territories. Representations are partly determined by individual knowledge and practices of space. But they also are collectively elaborated through the assimilation of discourses produced by actors, notably the State. It is then possible to show how spatial representations are shaped and to measure their prevalence in a given population.

In the framework of a research project conducted in Kazakhstan in 2018-2020 seeking to address issues on mental representation of regionalization process, we found that the weight of the state in representations of global space was greater there than what we had previously observed in other countries of the world. In this proposal of communication, we will show to what extent the case of Kazakhstan illustrates the weight of ideologies and political discourses in the construction and the structuring of the mental representations of the world space, with regard to the construction of the State itself and its relation to the rest of the world.

The paper is based on the results of a survey conducted in 2018 and 2019 among 540 Kazakhstani students interviewed in 3 cities: Astana, Karaganda and Almaty. This survey focused on spatial representations of world regions based on the realization of a map of world regions. The analysis of the regions drawn by the students on the world map is characterized by a strong presence of the state, whether it is the Kazakh state or the other states of the world, which are identified much more often than in previous surveys conducted elsewhere. Kazakhstan itself is identified as a region in its own right, with an explicit discursive and graphic apparatus (hearts drawn on the map) showing the attachment of the students interviewed to their country. Moreover the country is placed at the center of a large Eurasian region and student’s discourses insist on the role of the country in the regionalization construction process: beyond the usual centering that can be observed, this Eurasian positioning includes large parts of the government's discourse on the country's regional role. We will show how Kazakhstani students' representations of global space are shaped by the geopolitical rhetoric promoted by the Kazakhstan state since its independence in 1991.