{"id":31349,"date":"2015-05-16T03:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-05-16T07:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31349"},"modified":"2018-01-15T17:33:44","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T22:33:44","slug":"kazakhstans-looming-succession-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/05\/16\/kazakhstans-looming-succession-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Kazakhstan&#8217;s looming succession crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At <em>The Diplomat<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/thediplomat.com\/2015\/05\/is-there-a-kazakhstan-without-nazarbayev\/\" target=\"_blank\">Catharine Putz<\/a> wonders if there can be a Kazakhstan without President Nursultan Nazarbayev:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In a new report, the International Crisis Group says that Kazakhstan is facing a stress test \u2013 its only president since independence turns 75 this summer and Russia\u2019s \u201cactions in Ukraine cast a shadow over Kazakhstan.\u201d To date, the report notes, Kazakhstan\u2019s devotion to continuity has trumped needed democratic reforms. Nursultan Nazarbayev\u2019s recent landslide reelection demonstrates his absolute centrality to political stability in the country and could prove to be \u201ca serious vulnerability.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The report encourages Kazakhstan to act soon \u2013 reconfirming its independence from Russia and lifting the veil on government operations in order to reassure citizens and foreign powers \u201cthat the state is not the work of one man or an exclusive ethnic project and that the transition to a post-Nazarbayev era will be smooth.\u201d The report recommends that Kazakhstan continue to pursue a multi-vector foreign policy by engaging equally with Russia and the EU; take a \u201crecognizable role\u201d in pursuing a solution to the Ukraine crisis; give senior officials \u2013 other than Nazarbayev \u2013 some stage time; practice restraint in issues of language, ethnicity, and nationalism; and broaden economic development beyond Astana.<\/p>\n<p>This is not the first time parallels have been drawn between Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, like all of Central Asia, had a sizeable ethnic Russian population when the Soviet Union dissolved. That population has dwindled; in a country of 17 million a 2009 census determined that ethnic Russians accounted for 23 percent, ethnic Kazakhs more than 60 percent. This is a more modern development, as it wasn\u2019t until the mid-1980s that the ethnic Kazakh population bypassed that of ethnic Russians in the region. Now, most ethnic Russians are concentrated along the northern border with Russia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>How do you say &#8220;<em>Apr\u00e8s moi, le d\u00e9luge<\/em>&#8221; in Kazakh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At The Diplomat, Catharine Putz wonders if there can be a Kazakhstan without President Nursultan Nazarbayev: In a new report, the International Crisis Group says that Kazakhstan is facing a stress test \u2013 its only president since independence turns 75 this summer and Russia\u2019s \u201cactions in Ukraine cast a shadow over Kazakhstan.\u201d To date, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,84,1119],"tags":[904,572],"class_list":["post-31349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-government","category-russia","tag-kazakhstan","tag-leadership"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-89D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31350,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31349\/revisions\/31350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}