UC Irvine

Activism in authoritarian countries conjures images of crowded streets and clashes with police. However, movement towards effective change can be made in quieter spaces through targeted initiatives. Issue focused activism is occurring in urban spaces in Kazakhstan responding to centralized urban development schemes and local issues such as green space preservation, residential displacement, and urban infrastructure development. Successful civic activism in Kazakhstan’s cities sharply contrasts with the concurrent arrests and detainments of protestors. This study focuses on the mechanisms of change by asking: how do citizens in Kazakhstan impact urban development processes and outcomes under authoritarianism? Political science scholarship asserts that there is little civic participation in illiberal spaces. Participation at the urban level is deemed inconsequential “low politics” with no expected impact on national political culture or policy. This study examines citizen effectiveness using a multiple case study comparison of development projects in three cities in Kazakhstan: Almaty, Astana, and Shymkent. The results of this research show that citizens and urban activists are intervening in centralized development plans in ways that help achieve desirable individual and community-level outcomes. Methods and modes of intervention vary per city, based upon the issues citizens are faced with, and their cultural, historical and institutional legacies. Despite diversity in the case studies, collectively these studies show that citizens have the ability to transform state-society relations in the context of entrenched institutional interests and legacies, in an authoritarian system. Collectively, the analysis highlights regional variations in governance despite extreme political and fiscal centralization. Variations in governance and citizens’ ability to elicit impact urban development processes are context specific. Divergent experiences of governance in the case studies was unprecedented given the shared governance arrangements, and their role in national economic development policy as signified through their status as Special Economic Zones. Variations in governance within a centralized sovereign state problematize state and regime types, and show new possibilities for how citizens can advance their interests at the local scale under these conditions. While agglomeration has concentrated governance, it has not diminished variations in governance which are elevated to the regional scale. Regional apparatuses struggle to govern newly agglomerated regions which have more diverse populations and geographies than pre-existing smaller towns and cities. The diversity of persons increases the range of potential interventions within regions. Successful, and even stalled, interventions in urban space provide frameworks and strategies that can be shared and implemented across cities with the potential to shift state-society relations and increase the role of citizens. Citizen-state clashes over national level politics have resulted in deaths and detainments, while the urban provides an arena for safe activism and democratic experimentation absent in Kazakhstan’s national level politics. Insights into the modes by which citizens organize in response to complicated, quasi-governmental, hybrid, public-private development agencies provide guidance and a network for urban citizens experiencing similar phenomena in different geographies. Transnational networks of support, expertise and funding represent globalization from the bottom-up (Kostovicova and Glasius, 2011). This is consistent with a stream of scholarship that sees this type of activism and organizing as the natural response to articulations of globalizations in local space (Levinson, 2002; Tsing, 2011; Hornberger and McCarty, 2012; Keck and Sikkink, 2014). Findings from Kazakhstan expand the geography of resources and participation in this activism, and exhibit new modes of political participation to respond to these pervasive governance arrangements.