Limitations to the Nationalising State: Ethnic Violence as Corollary, Correlation or Contradiction to Kazakhstan’s Official Nationalisms? Katharina Buck (Buketov Karaganda State University, Kazakhstan) The core argument of my paper is that it is precisely the incumbent Kazakhstani regime’s ‘nationalising’ narratives of ‘interethnic harmony’ and ‘Kazakh hospitality’ that have been used in some rare but significant cases by Kazakh ethno-nationalist activists to justify violent attacks against non-Kazakh Kazakhstanis. I suggest that this illustrates the potentially disastrous long-term consequences of the current government’s ‘stabilising’ and ‘appeasing’ narratives and tactics of multiple, layered nation(s)-making, meeting a broader analysis of current challenges and tensions in the traditional conceptualisation of the ‘nation-state.’ Based on extensive ethnographic and documentary research in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, I analyse the state’s endeavour to ‘create Kazakhstanis.’ This means that I ask what Kazakhstani nation(s)-making has looked like, what it has sought to achieve and where it has failed, meaning that I identify the limitations of the official programmes of nationalism. My focus on Kazakhstani deviations, limitations and instances of failure in ideal-type ‘nation-building’ serves to explore how, regardless of the officially stated desire to make a state-nation, this project is unfinished. Importantly, despite Kazakhstan’s notable successes in maintaining overall stability in the post-Soviet context, violent expressions of chiefly ethnically-defined grievances that have been articulated represent visible limitations to the officially-stated desire of ‘Kazakhstani-making.’ I identify how the government’s narratives of harmonious coexistence thanks to the hospitality of the Kazakh hosts have been exploited by actors with ‘hostile’ and exclusivist intents. The narratives hammer home the notion that Kazakhstan’s citizenry consists of immutable ethnic subgroups with different degrees of belonging to the state, which has been used by Kazakh ethno-nationalists to justify violence against non-Kazakhs. Also, because such actors have gone virtually unpunished, new symbols of interethnic hostility have emerged and an atmosphere of insecurity is created which benefits the ‘stabiliser’ Nazarbaev in the short term in a ‘rally round the flag’ effect – with potentially disastrous long-term consequences for the country. I therefore suggest that the official programme of nation(s)-making is imperfect and riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. This contribution is relevant to the conference because I offer a novel analysis of several cases in which a ‘benevolent’ and ‘stabilising’ regime, using the language of civic accord, actually drives wedges into its population using tactics allegedly designed to unite this populace by narrating harmony and hospitality. This highlights the constraints and paradoxes of nation-making and demonstrates that states can sometimes be ‘nationalising’ in contradictory ways and seemingly indecisive or undecided. Moreover this contribution is relevant because it interlinks a criticism of the nationalising paradigm, bringing it together with an analysis of intra-state ethnic conflict, thus offering a novel perspective for security studies on current problems of governance and arising tensions and cleavages.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 07:52:17 +0000
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