Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
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.
