This chapter examines Kazakhstan’s efforts to reform its teacher compensation system and investigates whether the substantial salary increase for teachers in Kazakhstan between 2020 and 2023 has improved the quality of teaching and educational outcomes. The traditional “Stavka system” of teacher remuneration, where pay is based on teaching hours, is explored along with other limitations of the system, such as income instability and reduced motivation for non-teaching tasks. The reform aimed to address these issues by introducing a new wage system with a hierarchy of teacher qualifications, providing incentives for complex teaching, and acknowledging the role of special working conditions. However, this system faced challenges in incentivizing non-teaching tasks and addressing disparities in teachers’ workload. The reform’s impacts are then evaluated. Initial observations suggest a rise in the profession’s prestige and interest among school graduates, but issues remain. These include insufficient financial incentives for extra-lesson activities and the new system’s limited effect on young teachers’ pay. While salary increases are vital, they alone are insufficient to enhance educational outcomes. The need for nuanced policies, transparency, and professional consensus is emphasized to ensure that reforms effectively incentivize high-quality teaching.

The chapter situates the English Medium Instruction (EMI) policy and practices within a private university in part of Kazakhstan to gather the perspectives of the users to examine their orientations towards the use of EMI, the potential they see in the EMI policy, and their perceptions of the widespread expansion of the English language industry in the local market. The study employed qualitative interviews with students, teachers, and administrators. The participants’ perspectives show their entrepreneurial orientations towards English, evident in their repeated discourses of the English language as potential capital and a key to global competitiveness. They also endorse the intense pursuit of EMI policy in Kazakhstan because, as they understand, individual as well as governmental-level investment in English-related language skills make brighter promises and prospects in the current global economy. English is also believed to enhance Kazakhstani citizens’ global competitiveness. In theoretical terms, these orientations are deeply interwoven with the core principles of neoliberalism and neoliberal rationality, characterized by terms such as capital, globalization, global competitiveness, economic advantage, market logic, and private investment.

The introduction provides the contextual and theoretical foundations of the book. It introduces the main argument that the Kazakh Spring is not a movement but a field of political possibilities capable of changing the established political value system. The Kazakh Spring has different actors and ideas connected by the common sense of solidarity and the urge for democratization. The book argues that the Kazakh Spring frames democratization hrough the radical remaking of the rules of the game that define the political in Kazakhstan. This means a consistent demand for the change of formal institutions that the regime has monopolized to sustain its powers and durability, namely, the laws, elections, and bodies of the state such as parliament, local municipal bodies, and public offices, but also free and independent media.

This chapter offers insights into the policy and practice of science education in English in Kazakhstan. Science education is currently seen as synonymous with education in English through the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, but this position has evolved over time as the policy has expanded across schools. Previous studies in Kazakhstan have found that teachers hold positive attitudes towards teaching science in English but experience practical challenges in teaching methods and linguistic resources. To better understand these challenges, a case study of science teachers was conducted jointly by the University of Cambridge and the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education (NUGSE) in 2019. Observations were conducted and evaluated using a modified Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP). The data indicate a dearth of innovation and transformation of STEM education, and of application of CLIL pedagogies. Overall, these findings seem to point to the need for sustained professional development that lasts over an extended time so that teachers can understand how to implement STEM education reform efforts and CLIL pedagogy.

This study was conducted in one region in northern Kazakhstan. It involved visits to one urban and two rural schools and regional and district educational authorities. The chapter describes a case study of stakeholders’ perceptions of the implementation of the Renewed Content of Education (RCE). The key questions guiding the inquiry were as follows. (1) How are the aims of the new curriculum understood and being delivered? (2) How have views of the RCE changed over time? (3) Have teaching practices changed? (4) How has the availability of school resources impacted reform implementation? The findings demonstrate that discourses articulated by stakeholders were those of adjustment and attempts to make the reform work in the challenging circumstances of increased rural–urban migration that has left some rural schools more disadvantaged. While the intent of the RCE was to provide a modern, student-centred programme aimed at building the skills needed for twenty-first-century learners, there was not necessarily enough thought of the impact on rural and remote schools. School communities are now slowly adjusting to better understanding the long-term benefits of this initiative.

The Republic of Kazakhstan is a land-locked country approximately twice the size of Western Europe but with only 18.8 million inhabits. Since 2001, Kazakhstan has made significant economic gains in growing a middle class and reducing poverty. The recent economic challenging facing the country focused on the regions. The January 2022 social conflict focused on the imbalance between urban and rural areas and the economic disparity between them. With independence, the Republic inherited 55 universities from Soviet times. In 2018 the total number of students in Kazakhstan’s universities was 512,677 with 93% studying at undergraduate level. Enrollment peaked in 2005-06 with 775,762 students. As of 2020, there are 129 higher education institutions. The financing of Kazakhstani public universities is a mix of government support and student paid tuition fees. The Board of Directors, whose members are external to the university, act as the main governing body of the public universities.

Patronage is a broad concept that can be used to describe such practices as clientelism and corruption. More specifically, this chapter considers party patronage where political parties ‘appoint individuals to (non-elective) positions in the public and semi-public sector’ (Kopecký et al, 2016). The research builds on the widening global database that measures the scope and depth of party patronage by examining public sector appointments in Central Asian countries. Of specific interest is why authoritarian states engage in patronage appointment practices when the dominant parties are already inextricably linked to the political elite. The study uses Kazakhstan as the site of enquiry and, through proxy indicators, extends the geography to consider Central Asia as a whole. We find the scope and depth of party patronage crosses all key policy sectors and reaches from the top to the lower tiers of governance. Looking at the trends for Central Asian countries since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, party patronage shows no signs of abating.

Much of the existing literature has addressed authoritarian learning from external examples but has failed to analyse internal examples. The chapter begins by analysing learning from China, Singapore, and Kazakhstan among the case studies, finding that China is a source of learning. Another example is the restrictive NGO laws that took off after the Russian foreign agents law across the post-Soviet region, which highlights copying at the very least, if not direct learning. The chapter then turns to the domestic, analysing Belarusian learning from the Soviet Union. The main point of interest in the chapter is that the Moldovan and Ukrainian regimes appear to learn from the internal, both in terms of failure and success. This is particularly the case regarding the examples of Plahotniuc and Poroshenko learning from previous regimes both belonged to. The chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of success and failure in authoritarian learning.

Eastern Europe and the USSR had large German minorities. In the USSR this dated back to Catherine the Great, who in 1763 issued a manifesto inviting Germans to settle and colonize land on the Volga in exchange for tax and legal privileges. During Gorbachev’s Perestroika the German minorities began making use of the West German law of return that immediately granted them citizenship as Aussiedler – a consequence of the ethnobiological definition of German nationhood (but why, assimilated, tax-paying, Germanophone second-generation descendants of Turkish labor migrants wondered, should russified descendants of labor migrants to eighteenth-century Russia have easier access to citizenship than they?). Chapter 6 charts the history and lived experience of the 2.3 million Aussiedler who immigrated since 1987 and who have remained largely invisible in public consciousness. The chapter title encapsulates their fraught situation of dual non-belonging: discriminated against in the postwar Soviet Union as “fascists,” they hoped to rejoin fellow Germans when emigrating, yet in reality were excluded as “Russians.”

Psychological assessment is deemed one of the most crucial parts of the science of psychology, particularly its clinical branch, and has helped enhance its credibility to a great extent. Although a considerable number of psychological assessment movements have originated in North America and Europe, limiting the developmental aspects of ongoing research on assessment trends and techniques to the aforementioned regions, and disregarding the role of other regions in the further development of this branch seems unjust and irrational. Moreover, the growing tendencies in adopting a reductionist approach in natural science and overlooking the importance of cultural aspects over the past decades have damaged the true nature of psychological assessment. The role played by culture and other contextual variables in psychological research has been duly emphasized, to such a degree that any clinical or psychological decision making without taking these factors into consideration is faced with skepticism. In this chapter, we will examine the historical trends in psychological assessment in Central Asia (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan) while discussing the scientific and research potential of its countries in expanding the field of psychological assessment.

The establishment of international financial centres has become a common strategy for rapidly modernising states. Such centres assist host states with attracting capital, generating income from taxes, contributing to the development of innovative economies and increasing the role of states in global governance. Overall, financial centres, and their systems of dispute resolution, can positively contribute to promoting foreign investment. The creation of the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) with its AIFC Court and International Arbitration Centre (IAC) is one recent example of an initiative to assist a rapidly developing frontier market, Kazakhstan, to become a more competitive economy regionally as well as globally. This chapter offers a perspective of what has been achieved in Kazakhstan with a view to assisting other frontier markets, including in Central Asia, to create their own international dispute resolution systems.

Reforms in the governance of higher education institutions in Kazakhstan to foster higher quality higher education systems, granting greater institutional autonomy, provide an opportunity to study the implementation challenges in moving from centralised systems controlled by Ministries to ones where institutions can pursue their destinies. This case suggests that moving towards a more autonomous system comes at a cost. Being free to set institutional strategies brings the possibility of making mistakes, something many leaders who have been trained in a compliance-based system find daunting. Further, if leaders have never operated in a more market-based system, their ability to scan the environment to determine and launch new initiatives can be a challenge. Such pressures can result in institutions reverting to compliance-based models which signal to the larger society that they are being responsible and faithful to prior norms of behaviour. In contrast, autonomy requires different systems of accountability.

This chapter explores ideological production and commemoration in the late Stalinist era through the lens of the fledgling myth of victory in World War II. Specifically, the chapter pursues the afterlife of Stalin’s oft-cited toast to the Russian people in both Russian and non-Russian contexts to tease out its rather inconsistent and ambiguous connection to the official war narrative. Far from a consistent Russocentric ideological rubric, this chapter shows that the Stalinist leadership refused to commit to an exclusively Russocentric understanding of the war. Rather, it allowed an “internationalist” paradigm to coexist with its Russocentric counterpart in discursive tension throughout the era. As Stalin’s toast was eliciting mixed reactions, party ideologues shaped a divergent set of postwar narratives geared toward mobilizing local populations along contrasting ideological planes. So long as the core ingredients of victory – Stalin’s leadership, party guidance, the Soviet system, the unwavering heroism of the Red Army and citizenry – remained in place, the myth’s articulators were free to promote a range of competing narratives, from accounts emphasizing a homogenous collection of Soviet people bound latterly in “friendship” to those stressing Russian “elder brotherhood" and ethnic diversity.

The TPNW was welcomed at the UN General Assembly, under the participation of a wide range of humanitarian groups and civil society organizations, supported by a groundswell of nations around the world. The Treaty firmly implants new law into the international legal landscape for states who wish to ratify it, sowing the seeds of potentially new normative behavior within the global community more generally. Indeed, the TPNW purports to strive for universality, raising significant questions regarding its ambitions in achieving legal unity within the wider international legal order. The dedication to the spirit of the Treaty cannot be ignored, nor can the optimism to ban nuclear weapons.