Assemblage of Power: The Belt and Road Initiative and Kazakhstan’s Developmental Discourse

Principle Investigator：Hanna Hlynenko

This research is dedicated to examining the narratives constructed around the Digital Silk Road in Kazakhstan, their political logic, and further, their implications for autocratic diffusion. It analyses the reality constructed by the governmental narrative as it exists in the wider network of ideas and representations and evaluates the significance of this discursive practice for justifying and solidifying the status quo.

Since the rise of the Belt and Road Initiative, the countries of Central Asia have been enthusiastic participants in the project. The creation of the Silk Road Economic Belt – a Central Asian part of the BRI was announced in Astana in 2013, and since its objectives aligned with Kazakhstan’s national development strategies, they were promptly embraced. Despite a significant power imbalance, Kazakhstan has been able to assert some ownership of the Chinese initiatives and create a specific functionalistic narrative around them, using it as a theoretical or idealistic accompaniment to the ongoing developmental plans claimed to ensure the establishment of the welfare state. While the national development program Nurly Zhol (Bright Path) arose as Kazakhstan’s version of the BRI, Digital Kazakhstan became the domestic extinction of the DSR.

This research considers the BRI and the DSR not as fixed campaigns or institutes but rather as a fluid process created and maintained not only by the political elites of the involved countries but also by the media, academia, actual infrastructure, and broader historical and social context. With the help of the assemblage theory and discourse analysis, I define the narratives and meanings of the existing discursive practices and assess their legitimizing significance and potential for autocratic consolidation.