Annual Nava'i-Nalle Lecture: Kazakhstan’s Nationhood

competing repertoires: Kazakhness, Kazakhstaness, and a third one, advancing a transnational and modernizing brand for the country. Each of these three narratives target different audiences (the Kazakh-speaking, the Russian-speaking, and the international community) and intimately interconnect domestic and foreign policy strategies. Thirty years after the perestroika, the country is still facing profound changes in its nation-building, with growing interactions between the state organs and several segments of the society. In this presentation, Marlene Laruelle will discuss the ongoing evolutions of Kazakhstan’s nationhood and sociological changes pushing for a more Kazakhness-centered agenda.
Thursday, February 8th6:00-8:00 PMReception to followCopley Formal Lounge

Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is an Associate Director and Research Professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University.  Dr. Laruelle is also a Co-Director of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia), and Director of GW’s Central Asia Program.  Dr. Laruelle received her Ph.D. in history at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures (INALCO) and her post-doctoral degree in political science at Sciences-Po in Paris.
On Central Asia she has co-authored The ‘Chinese Question’ in Central Asia: Domestic Order, Social Changes, and the Chinese Factor (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2013) and edited Constructing the Uzbek State: Narratives of Post-Soviet Order, The Central Asia–Afghanistan Relationship: From Soviet Intervention to the Silk Road Initiatives, Kazakhstan in the Making: Legitimacy, Symbols and Social Changes, and Kyrgyzstan beyond ‘Democracy Island’ and ‘Failing State’: Social and Political Changes in a Post-Soviet Society (all with Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013-2018). A last volume, Tajikistan On the Move: Statebuilding and Societal Transformations, will be out in June 2018.

The Annual Nava'i Lecture is made possible through a generous gift from the Alfred Friendly Foundation. The Foundation endowed the lecture in honor of David Nalle, Executive Director of the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship Program from its founding in 1983 to his retirement in 1992. The series is intended to foster public and academic interest in Central Asian affairs and particularly to encourage the work of younger scholars in this field of study.