This paper explores how decision-making under uncertainty can address opportunities, risks, and uncertainties for sustainable development; how decision theory, resilience thinking, and scenario planning approaches can assist the decision-making process. The paper will focus on decision-making for sustainable development under uncertainty associated with energy development in Western Kazakhstan. The main goal of this work is to demonstrate how different decision-making approaches under uncertainty can facilitate sustainable development of the oil industry in the region. Recommendations for sustainable development are examined for how the different approaches can be used to better inform the recommendations.

This dissertation examines the role of women in post-Soviet Kazakhstan as both productive members of society and the loci of national anxieties that have created fault lines in public opinion, government policy, and international development programs. It explores how Kazakh cultural concepts of ideal womanhood are used to identify categories of women eligible for state support or who become targets of community intervention. These include survivors of domestic violence, unwed young mothers, and “at risk” girls who may strive to fulfill or deviate from the expected Kazakh norms deemed appropriate for their specific life stage. These contested expectations are embodied in national legislation, international human rights programs, and Kazakh civil society. They are implemented by social service officials who provide the aid and who perceive the women involved in them as objects of their reform projects. Ethnographic fieldwork that provided the bulk of the research data was conducted between March 2018 and August 2019 in urban Almaty and provincial cities in southern and eastern Kazakhstan in domestic violence shelters, homes for unwed mothers, and girls’ empowerment programs. This included extended periods of participant observation supplemented by open-ended interviews with activists, crisis shelter directors and employees, and other stakeholders to generate multi-cited case studies. Because media played a significant role, the research incorporated an analysis of relevant Kazakhstani films and plays that highlight the challenges of negotiating ideals of womanhood and motherhood, propriety and martyrdom, which are also central themes animating my text. The research concludes that women in these programs respond to directives from international human rights organizations, national legislation, and changing social mores by deploying and reinterpreting Kazakh life stage ideals of womanhood. In so doing, they illustrate how women’s work and reproductive choices intersect with the goals of a national state, a changing Kazakh society, and the global discourse on women’s rights. As a contribution to the larger discourse on identity and citizenship in post-Soviet states, gender, Islam, and contemporary Kazakhstan, this study illustrates how “women’s issues” remain an unusually sensitive barometer of social values where the implicit becomes the explicit. / 2024-03-04T00:00:00Z

No description available.

This dissertation concerns the development and interaction of Kazakh and Russian identities in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. My research questions were: (1) what was the character of these identities in 2003/04 (the time of my research); (2) how have these identities interacted to form dominant and subordinate identities, and (3) how can the character of these identities and their interaction be explained? In order to research these questions I used a general questionnaire followed up by open ended interviews of a representative sample of Kazakhstani citizens. While my research findings show continued uncertainty and provisionality in both Kazakh and Russian identities, which confirms the broad trend of previous surveys, they also indicate signs of change in the emergence of more consolidated dominant and subordinate identities in the less Russianised areas like Chimkent and among the younger generation, while by contrast the older generations of Russians, particularly in the more Russianised areas, find it difficult to accept the delegitimation of their dominant status as reflected in the nationalizing policies pursued by the new state. In theoretical terms these findings confirm the importance of the study of ethnic stratification, which has not received sufficient attention in previous research in this area. In explaining these developments I found that the character of the transition and also of the ‘prior regime type’ in Kazakhstan has had a significant effect on ethnic relationships, but also that international factors, such as those presented in Brubaker’s triadic model, and internal factors, elaborated by Schermerhorn and Horowitz, were also important.

My diploma thesis analyze business environment in Kazakhstan. I decided to use PEST analysis to specify political, economic, social and technology factors. I believe, that my diploma thesis will help foreign investors to enter kazakhstani market.

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the ways in which the authoritarian regime in post-Soviet Kazakhstan maintained itself in power from 1991 until 2005. This study endeavours to uncover the palette of the regime’s methods by analysing the ways in which it went about controlling the oil industry – an industry with which the political and economical future of Kazakhstan is inseparably intertwined. The empirical section of this study investigates the interplay between the regime and the actors located in and around two cores: the National Oil Company and the oil-rich areas. This thesis focuses in particular on instances where players involved with the oil industry, whether directly or indirectly, attempted to challenge the regime’s authority in those two centres either due to greed or grievances. It is argued that these moments of crisis reveal the regime’s maintenance techniques, and can precipitate the deployment of new methods of maintenance in response to them. In order to account for the techniques that the Kazakh ruling regime applied in structuring its relationships with the oil industry, this thesis shifts the emphasis from the prevalent zhuz-horde, tribe, and clan-based approaches to Kazakh politics towards formal (corporatism) and informal (patron-client) mechanisms of control.

This thesis presents a foreign policy decision-making analysis of Kazakhstan's foreign relations in the initial post-independence period. The study applies a neoclassical realist theoretical framework in order to provide the understanding of Kazakhstan's external behaviour. The thesis conceptually assumes that the integration of the presidential decision-making element in the analysis of the republic's foreign policy is essential to account for Kazakhstan's foreign strategies, which would otherwise appear to be anomalous from the deterministic perspective of the structural theories of international relations. The set objective of the work is to produce a theoretically informed historical narratives of Almaty's policymaking during three episodes in the republic's diplomatic history – the elaboration of a distinct balancing strategy; the relinquishment of the nuclear arsenal; and the Nagorno-Karabakh peace mission. The reconstruction of events behind the decisions made by president Nursultan Nazarbayev and his key advisors through the assessment of primary materials sourced from the archives of Kazakhstani foreign policy demonstrates that foreign decision-making process played a crucial role in the identification of national interests and development of appropriate policy responses in each of the episodes under examination. Chapter IV illustrates how the nation's policymakers developed a unique balancing strategy to ascertain the country's sovereignty and eliminate security risks under overwhelming geopolitical pressures that emanated from Russia and China. Chapter V discusses the episode when Nazarbayev was subjected to direct international pressure to surrender the inherited Soviet nuclear arsenal on the terms imposed by the USA, in response to which Nazarbayev devised a deliberately ambivalent and protracted strategy in regard to the republic's nuclear status. Chapter VI reveals the adaptability of the republic's policymaking to the changing international context as the regression of the Nagorno-Karabakh peace initiative demonstrates. The exposition of intricate policy planning and profound diplomatic endeavours reflected in archival documents reinforces the thesis's premise about the non-deterministic nature of Kazakhstan's foreign policy.

The dissertation in hand is about the theological researches about the mission of the German Mennonite - Brethren - Church in Karaganda I Kasachstan from 1956 to 2000. The existing socialism with its atheistical values affected adversely the lives of the Christians and prevented them from missionary work. In spite of that mission was able to be practised. Experienced preachers and teachers in the church prepared the missionary work by instructing the Christians to be effective witnesses for the Lord. This was achieved by the training of young preachers. regular pronouncements of the Gospel and the work with children and young persons. The Christians retained this method until the middle of the 70ies when the regid laws concerning the missionary work were mitigated. Commited brothers. young persons, preachers and singers visited lonely Christians and churches in remote villages, had personal conversations with unbelievers and organized evangelizations. Members ofthe church were sent out as missionaries to erect parishes and carry out evangelizations / Missiology / M.Th.

The Kazakhs of post-Soviet Central Asia have been in the process of re-discovering their cultural heritage and establishing their own national identity. Profoundly affecting this process is that they live in a world that is becoming more and more globalized, with increasing degrees of interaction with other cultures. During Soviet times there was a large degree of isolation from cultures outside of the Soviet Union and their lives were mostly impacted by a Russian dominated system. After the collapse of the Soviet system they were suddenly exposed to a world of ideas, influences, and opportunities. Part of re-establishing their cultural roots involved consideration of their Islamic heritage. They were caught between trying to discover this for themselves and in doing so include cultural beliefs and practices that are blended into an orthodox expression of Islam, or allowing themselves to be told by outside practitioners of Islam how they should believe and act. Seventy plus years of communism had weakened the commitment and expression of Islam, and this as well as the forces of globalization has made them cautious and even suspicious of any radical expressions of religion. With the post-Soviet openness and exposure to other cultures came the opportunity for Christianity to present itself as a valid system of belief for Kazakhs. This began as an expatriate dominated exercise as individual Kazakhs embraced Christianity and the first churches were started. As the years progressed Kazakh church planting faced the challenge of having a foreign image and as a result needed to consider how to contextualize Christianity so that it could develop a Kazakh identity. At the same time church planting as with the Kazakh culture as a whole, was confronted with the impact of globalization. This meant that church planting had to not only consider Kazakh cultural factors but also what changes globalization would bring that impacted how church planting would be done. This study seeks to examine this church planting context that finds itself caught between the effects of contextualization and globalization, and by means of the principles of Grounded Theory discover principles for effective church planting. / Christian Spirituality, Church History & Missiology / D. Th. (Missiology)

After the break-up of the former Soviet Union in 1991, several states declared independence, including the Republic of Kazakhstan. Under the centralised soviet system Kazakhstan provided mainly raw materials to the USSR, and agriculture operated under a Moscow-based command and control model. Kazakhstan possesses vast wealth of mineral and energy resources and its agricultural land is well able to ensure national food security. However, after independence the rapid and frequently unplanned state actions such as land reform, taken to move from socialism to a market economy, were not always successful and the state of agriculture was initially one of chaos. A major exodus from the land to the cities ensued. Gradually Kazakhstani agriculture recovered some of its productivity but still lags well behind developed nations in the use of ICT supported agricultural information management (AIM). This research contributes to new knowledge in the area of ICT-based AIM by supplementing the limited statistical and scientific analyses of Kazakh agriculture by seeking to discover, through semi-structured interviews, the views and perceptions of agrarians who are both the customers and end users of ICT-based AIM in a post-soviet state. The researcher established that agrarian stakeholders were aware of the need for a centralised AIM system, but felt that to implement it, more assistance was required from the state. Kazakhstan can learn from the experiences of both developed and developing countries in furthering ICT-based AIM, and although its situation is unique, understanding of the perceptions of end users, who have had to make a series of flawed initiatives work, will arguably be relevant to policy makers in other post-soviet states.