The Politics of Multiple Identities: Lineage and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan

Illusory Transition? Elite Reconstitution in Kazakhstan, 1989 – 2002

“…Schatz (2000 and underlines the importance of these 'sub-ethnic' groupings, while rejecting the historical reversion hypothesis, asserting that sub-ethnic attachments are also at least partially constructed categories, thus having different meaning in different historical periods. Therefore, clan politics are genuinely 'modern' and intertwined with rather than necessarily in conflict with other contemporary factors in elite constitution such as possession of economic and human capital.…”

“…Other research into the postSoviet elite has tended to focus mainly on the political elite (Lane & Ross 1999;Cummings 1999;Schatz 2000), an approach that has become less useful as political and economic power has become at least nominally jurisdictionally dispersed. I used two primary sources: Kto Est' Kto v Kazakhstane (Ashimbaev 2002a), whose 2002 edition contained biographies of over 3,000 leading personalities of Kazakhstan from the end of World War II to the present day; and, Kadry Reshayut Vse (Ashimbaev 2002b), a seven-part magazine series detailing changes in the elite since Kazakhstan's independence in 1992.…”

A Tale of Two Kazakhstans: Sources of Political Cleavage and Conflict in the Post-Soviet Period

“…As those investigating clan politics have demonstrated, clans are not static, unmodified holdovers from a pre-Soviet past. Schatz (2000), for example, argues that the increasing centrality of clan affiliation for Kazakhs at the individual level is in part the unintended result of the government's policy encouraging the development of a Kazakh national identity. Far from uniting Kazakhs, efforts to rediscover Kazakh history, traditions and language have accentuated sub-national differences, in particular those based on clan and tribal identities.…”

Immobility and the re-imaginings of ethnic identity among Mongolian Kazakhs in the 21st century

“…They continue to regard their ethnic identities as primary with the abstract notion of 'Kazakhstani' citizenship taking a subsidiary position' (Diener, 2006, 201). 'Civic national' identity, as a carry-over of Soviet 'internationalism', continues to have some importance, yet as in the Soviet past, the state-level discourse in support of a multi-ethnic state conceals a reality where one particular ethnic group experiences greater privileges (Schatz, 2000). During the Soviet period Russians were the privileged group while in post-Soviet context Schatz argues that Kazakhs are the privileged ethnic group.…”