Togzhan Seilkhanova's Preliminary Examination

Kazakhstan did not choose to leave the Soviet Union. In March 1991 its voters overwhelmingly chose to remain; independence arrived anyway, as a consequence of decisions taken elsewhere. The United States built, funded, and shaped an apparatus of its own in and around Kazakhstan: broadcasting networks, journalism and exchange-training programs, media-development grants, and the legal frameworks governing what could be published and taught.

This study treats that apparatus as information infrastructure in the material sense: built with capital, owned by particular interests, embedded in relations of production and power. Across three moments — the December 1986 Jeltoqsan protests, the economic transition of the 1990s, and the competition over Central Asian alignment in the early 2010s — it asks what the United States built, with whose money and toward what ends; whether and how these programs worked to install a Western liberal-capitalist framework as the natural political and economic order and to delegitimate socialist and collectivist alternatives; and what the three periods reveal about the political economy of U.S. information power in post-Soviet space. The evidence is documentary: U.S. legislative, executive, and agency records, multilateral-institution evaluations, and Russian- and Kazakh-language sources.

The study approaches each period with a working hypothesis about the objective the information programs served: a Soviet Union to be brought down, a collapsed economy to be remade along market lines, a resurgent Russia and a rising China to be held at bay. Against the documentary record, it tests whether one material interest runs beneath all three — to hold Kazakhstan within the orbit of Western capital, open to Western strategic access, turned away from Russian or Chinese integration and from any socialist or redistributive alternative.

Questions? Contact Togzhan Seilkhanova.