Transnational Image Making and Soft Authoritarian Kazakhstan

A primary mechanism of rule in soft authoritarian post-Soviet Kazakhstan was the regime's ability to monopolize the instruments of persuasion. By carefully crafting and propagating images of state and society, constructing political dramas, and developing plausible public narratives about the provision of public goods, Nursultan Nazarbaev continually outflanked his political opponents. And then cameBorat,the Hollywood comedy that presented Kazakhstan as a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, economic, and political backwater. Not only were the images of this “Kazakhstan“ out of the regime's control, but the film's creator, Sacha Baron Cohen, went on the image-making offensive by conducting a variety of public dramas that further eroded the regime's image-making monopoly. This essay explores how the transnationalization of image-making creates new challenges for regimes intent on remaining soft authoritarian.