러시아ㆍ유라시아

Kazakhstan has not experienced any ethnically motivated conflict since the country achieved independence in 1991. The fact that political stability has been secured in independent Kazakhstan, has generally been considered as one of the most important achievements of the Nazarbaev regime. Nazarbaev certainly uses a wide variety of strategies in order to control the non-Kazakh ethnic groups, especially the ethnic Russians. This paper analyses some of his preferred tools of governance and expose them to closer scrutiny, try to explain how they are being used, and demonstrate some of the effects they have produced. While consociationalism is a model of democratic coexistence which has been tried out in various forms in several countries of the world in order to promote stability and democracy in divided societies, it has also been severely criticized by others. For their part, the Kazakh leadership has clearly rejected it. The paper shows that the hegemonic control model is appropriate to the Kazakh case.