Kazakhstan: Nation-Branding, Economic Trials, and Cultural Change
The economic driver of Central Asia, Kazakhstan stands up for its forward-looking branding and its multivectoral foreign policy. Behind its many successes, the country has been facing difficulties in managing its relationship with foreign investors, avoiding an “oil curse”, and obscuring the growing public debt of its nationalized big firms.
Kazakhstan has partially failed to avoid social tensions linked to deep regional inequalities and to handle the 2014 economic crisis and the collapse of the national value, the tenge; at the same time, the role of Islam in public space, both urban and rural, has been evolving dramatically over two decades.
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