Political Opposition and Government’s Responses in Kazakhstan’s Authoritarian Regime

The aim of this article is to give a diachronic analysis of the processes in which political opposition and government’s responses towards it have unfolded in Kazakhstan’s authoritarian regime. The first generation of political opposition in Kazakhstan was the social movements that were organized on the initiative of intelligentsia from the late Soviet period to the early 1990s and raised national and environmental issues. Nazarbayev’s government responded to this type of political opposition with repression and co-optation. The second generation of political opposition in the form of a profit-seeking party arose from the late 1990s to the early and mid 2000s. The responses of Nazarbayev’s government towards it were strong repression and offensive discourse. Since 2010s the third generation of political opposition in the new form of a mass protest has been rising up and Kazakhstan’s government has been responding to it with repression and offensive discourse as before. But the same way of responses as before in different conditions of state-society relations has not achieved the effect of stabilization of the regime.