Book Launch – Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (Video)

Book Launch – Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm

March 11, 2021

Virtual book launch hosted by the Central Asia Program at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University on March 10, 2021.

The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In this comparative study, Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the ‘new’ states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries—one “western” and democratic, the other “eastern” and dictatorial.

Speakers

Diana T. Kudaibergenova, Author

 

Diana T. Kudaibergenova is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the GRCF COMPASS project at the Centre of Development Studies (Department of Politics and International Studies) also at the University of Cambridge. She studies different intersections of power, regimes, state-building and nationalism. 

Asel Doolotkeldieva, Discussant

 

Asel Doolotkeldieva is a Senior Lecturer at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. She earned her PhD from the University of Exeter (UK) in Politics and her Masters’ degree from Sciences Po Paris. Previously, she was a Visiting Fellow at College Mondial, FMSH (Paris, France). Her academic interests include social mobilizations, regime transition and democratization, postsocialism, and political economy of resource extraction in Central Asia. 

Maryia Rohava, Discussant

Maryia Rohava is a researcher at the University of Oslo in the field of East European and Russian area studies. She was a visiting research fellow at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin. She was awarded a ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius grant “Trajectories of Change” and a Civil Society Award for her fieldwork in Belarus from the Open Society Foundations. Her research interests include identity politics in post-Soviet countries and comparative studies on authoritarian regimes. She published her research in East European Politics and Society and Nations and Nationalism.

 

Marlene Laruelle, Moderator

 

Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Director, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Director, Central Asia Program; Co-Director, PONARS-Eurasia; and Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University. She works on political, social and cultural changes in the post-Soviet space. Marlene’s research explores the transformations of nationalist and conservative ideologies in Russia, nationhood construction in Central Asia, as well as the development of Russia’s Arctic regions. She has been the Principal Investigator of several grants on Russian nationalism, on Russia’s strategies in the Arctic, and on Central Asia’s domestic and foreign policies from the US State Department, the Defense Department, the National Science Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Henry Luce Foundation, etc.