Post-Soviet chaos - Joma Nazpary

In the 1990s, the former states of the Soviet Union underwent dramatic and revolutionary changes. As a result of enforced, neo-liberal reforms the fledgling republics were exposed to the familiar effects of globalized capital. Focusing on Kazakhstan, where violence and corruption are now facts of everyday life, this work examines the impact of the new capitalism on the people of Central Asia. In a detailed social and political analysis, this work charts the fragmentation of a whole society into a dispossessed majority and a predatory elite, whose interests and networks coincide with those of the global financial institutions. The elites that this work identifies employ large-scale violence and corruption to dominate the majority, who are left in a state known as chaos or "bardak". Using in-depth interviews and material gathered over more than a year's fieldwork, this text explores the responses of the dispossessed to their dispossession. Comparing the effects of neo-liberal reforms in Kazakhstan with those in other regions, it concludes that causes, forms and consequences of dispossession in Kazakhstan are particular instances of a much wider global trend.