CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Madaminova, Rokhila |
|---|---|
| Title | Populist discourse in post- Soviet Kazakhstan and Tajikistan |
| Summary | Recently, Kirk Hawkins’ populism a discourse approach has been gaining popularity within academia. As a theoretical framework, it is claimed to be applicable to different case studies and easy to operationalise in real life. Hence, this thesis aims to apply Hawkins’ discursive approach to the study of populism to post-Soviet Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, and discover, whether the leaders like Nursultan Nazarbaev and Emomali Rakhmon use populist discourse to legitimize their undemocratic actions. To conduct the research, the speeches of both Presidents’ from the early 1990s up until 2017 have been analyzed through holistic grading method of content analyses. The results reveal that indeed, both Nazarbaev and Rakhmon utilized populist discourse, mostly, during the democratic and pluralist periods. Further analyses suggest that populist discourse both in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan was used while the regimes of Nazarbaev and Rakhmon had been attacking the pluralism— democratic norms and values. Eventually, both leaders were able to eliminate pluralism, and successfully built and consolidated their authoritarian regimes in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Thus, the findings of this thesis show that indeed, leaders can opt for populist discourse to legitimize the attack to democracy, and if successful, subsequently fall into authoritarianism. Also, by attempting to study populism in post-Soviet space, this thesis goes against the regional bias the existing researches on populism are blamed with, and illustrates, that populism can be present in any space and time. |
| Supervisor | Jenne, Erin, Kristin |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/madaminova_rokhila.pdf |
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