Diana Kudaibergen’s new book The Kazakh Spring: Digital Activism and the Challenge of Dictatorship (2024) is a book about change and hope. It is a book about how everyday people and everyday activities participate in striving for democracy and freedom in a world full of authoritarian legacies and, indeed, authoritarian futures.

Kudaibergen’s book is set in Kazakhstan, the last of the five Central Asian republics to experience a political transition from the leaders that have been in power since the end of the Soviet Union more than thirty years ago. At its heart, the book is an exploration of what Kudaibergen, following her research participants, calls “Qazaq Koktemi” or “Kazakh Spring,” a pro-democracy protest movement that emerged in Kazakhstan between 2019 and 2022. Despite the similarity in name, Kudaibergen argues that the Kazakh Spring is qualitatively different from the quick, revolutionary protests that led to the fall of numerous authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa commonly referred to as the Arab Spring. The Kazakh Spring is closer to the “Prague Spring:” “a process of gradual liberalization, with further politicization and involvement of different societal groups, who can engage in the process of political meaning-making an alternative to the dominant authoritarian regime” (p.13). The author focuses her argument between two chronological bookends. The first is the resignation of Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president since independence in 1991, in March 2019 at age 78. The second is the events of “Qandy Qantar,” or “Bloody January,” the violent repression of initially peaceful protests across Kazakhstani cities in January 2022. These two events, it is argued, are the first and second steps of the political transition out of and beyond the Nazarbayev era. The third step, which Kudaibergen anticipates as more radical democratization and the transformation of the Kazakhstani state away from Soviet, Nazarbayev-era, and “post-Soviet” structures, represents the promise of the Kazakh Spring.

The book’s main argument invites the reader to think about the most recent wave of protests and bloody repression, not as a “failed revolution” (p. 276), but as the opening of a new “political field” in Kazakhstan (p.12). Kudaibergen leans on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his conception of a field as “a terrain of struggles,” as a “network, or configuration, of objective relations between positions” (p. 12). Besides Bourdieu, philosophers Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt are also referenced throughout the book, and Kudaibergen often relates her arguments and insights to the political scientist Lisa Wedeen’s work on everyday authoritarianism and resistance in Syria under (Hafez) Al-Asad. The inclusion of these references is the main theoretical frame and contribution of the Kazakh Spring, which is otherwise really a book dedicated to providing a “living archive” (p. 286) of recent and ongoing events in Kazakhstan today. This is a rare feat for an academic book and deserves to be specially commended.

The book is split into eight chapters that unfold chronologically from 2019 to 2022. The chapters detail the legacy and origins of the democratic opposition in Kazakhstan that reaches back deep into Soviet and even pre-Soviet days (Chapter 1); and discuss the emergence of the most recent movement that imagines a radical alternative by no longer recognizing the regime’s sole power and its authoritarian rules (Chapter 2 and 3); present a fine-grained analysis of protest actions, including banners at marathon races, passionate testimonies in court proceedings, and creative and artistic uses of the physical body as a projection surface for political demands (Chapters 4 and 6), and the use of digital and online spheres in the spread and consolidation of the Qazaq Koktemi mindset (Chapters 5, 6, and 7). The final substantial chapter, Chapter 8, is co-written by Kudaibergen and the French political scientist Marlene Laruelle and focuses on “making sense of the bloody January 2022 mass protests” (p. 244). While certainly relevant and well-written, this chapter strikes the reader as an add-on; key ideas introduced and unpacked earlier are repeated and set into a slightly different theoretical framework (here, the focus is on state-society relations, rather than Kudaibergen’s otherwise central concept of the field). The conclusion recaps the book’s chronology, starting in March 2019, and ends by looking into the future. Taken together, these chapters chronicle the past and immediate present to make an argument about the possibility of a different future in Kazakhstan. As the artist cited at the opening of the conclusion who says “I have a choice” (p. 275), Kudaibergen seems to want to say to her readers, and the activists and citizens of Kazakhstan, that the country has a choice, that we all have a choice. The possibilities of political engagement and political reimagination made possible by the Kazakh Spring are the key to unlocking that choice.

Many elements in this book are especially remarkable. For me, the most fascinating chapter was Chapter 5, “Generation Q and Decolonizing Alash.” The chapter unpacks how questions of language (Kazakh versus Russian versus English), colonial heritage, and the legacy of Nursultan Nazarbayev are being challenged by members of the Qazaq Koktemi movement. Here, Kudaibergen makes a considerable ethnographic contribution to the fields of Central Asian and postcolonial studies by showing how large discursive narratives and structures are challenged in small everyday acts of resistance and subsequently replaced with alternative ways of thinking. She shows how the positioning of different ethnicities in Kazakhstan’s modern history has had a major impact on the framing of stability, peace, and power, and how doing away with this frame may open alternatives for different ways of imagining the state and, indeed, “the political” per se. This shows the power of the Qazaq Koktemi in action, how pro-democratic political change may not necessarily mean the ousting of a dictator, but may also entail gradual change through the reformulation of basic discourses. Politics, in other ways, can be remade by being rethought. In trying to rethink the heritage of the country and the state, “the Kazakh Spring activists hope to disconnect the routinized narratives established by Nazarbayev’s personalized nationalizing regime” (p. 187). What follows is one of the most powerful sentences of the book. The activists seek, Kudaibergen posits, “liberation from double dictatorship—from Nazarbayev’s rule but also from the Soviet institutionalization of ethnicity and ethnolinguistic politics inscribed in what the activists intuitively feel as the ‘coloniality of knowledge’” (p. 187).

Another big strength of the book relates to its research methodology and writing style. Kudaibergen frames her book as a work of ethnography and a study of everyday authoritarianism (p. 22-24) by studying how normal people experience and interact with a closed authoritarian regime. The book is both brave and creative, and Kudaibergen manages to create empathy and even familiarity between readers and research participants on the page. This is mainly done by relaying entire sections of conversations and direct speech in which both the researcher and the people she meets become living presences rather than bloodless interviewees. This is a fascinating example of how research can be done and written. This approach will be of particular interest to a new generation of ethnographers studying not the Central Asian states, but authoritarianism, social movements, politics and international relations more broadly. If we could ask for more depth from the author here, it would have been interesting to hear more about her own positionality and relation to the Bourdieusian field of Qazaq Koktemi. We get a glimpse of this when we hear that Kudaibergen too is a “child of independence,” and that many of the respondents from Almaty are her contemporaries, neighbors, and even friends (p. 24). The author also clarifies that “Kudaibergen” is a popular name in Kazakhstan, and that she is not related to one of the internet activists central to the online life of the protest movement (p. 232). If a new edition of this book comes out when the third, the final stage of Kazakhstan’s political transition is reached, perhaps a methodological appendix can be included that describes the methods in more detail and better positions the author.

An expanded edition would benefit from several additions. The most salient of these would be an updated commentary on contemporary events. The book went into production in 2022 and was published in 2024. What has happened in Kazakhstan in the meantime? Another improvement would explore the role of different online media and social networks in more critical depth. Kudaibergen writes that protest activists do not follow the “traditional media” (p. 144) because no one trusts regime-controlled information. As 2025 begins, however, critical voices about the accuracy and political taint of social media platforms (X, in particular) are louder than ever. It would be interesting to hear how a movement like Qazaq Koktemi can persist and further flourish in an information environment where digital channels, too, are muddied by political interests.