Kazakhstan’s January 2022 Crisis: Representations by National Experts via Social Media

Abstract

This article aims at reconstructing the representations of the 2022 January crisis developed by Kazakhstani political analysts via social media. The research methodology seeks to combine quantitative and qualitative methods by assessing these representations by use of critical discourse analysis of social media posts by Kazakhstani political analysts extracted and processed by the use of API and PolyAnalysts based on marker words. The research significance lies in the unique situation of regime instability potentially providing the expert community with the chance to speak up openly. However, it is concluded that most analysts reproduced the official discourse that is in line with the discourses developed in non-democratic context. Thus, the dominant expert discourse of the January crisis is rather homogenous and relies on the dichotomies of “the old” versus “the new” as well as “the weak” versus “the strong.” As a result, the general picture by Kazakhstani political analysts looks more like a political myth about the birth of a “new Kazakhstan” than a reconstruction of the causes, actors and consequences of the January crisis. It implies that the expert community prefers controlled evolution of the state regime rather than grass roots initiated changes.