OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In this talk, I argue that unconventional ways of political contention successfully shape the regime, its elites, and its forms of oppression even under the most authoritarian contexts and repressions. Using the context and temporal development of the Kazakh Spring protests (2019-ongoing), I focus on how the interplay between the repressive regime and democratisation struggles define and shape each other. Combining original interview data, digital ethnography and contentious politics studies, I argue that the new generation of activists, the likes of Instagram political influencers and renowned public intellectuals, can de-legitimise and counter one of the most resilient authoritarianisms and inspire the mass protests that none of the formalised opposition ever imagined possible in Kazakhstan. The talk will conceptualise how the post-Nazarbayev Kazakhstan struggles for its path to democratization.
