December 2016: workers at Emir Oil, Kazakhstan, display a banner protesting at the legal attack on independent trade unions. Source: KNPRK.Little noticed by the international community, Kazakhstan has become a model case for the global double trend of rising authoritarianism and shrinking civic space. While state pressure has grown continuously since the mid-1990s, the crackdown on civil society has intensified over the last year amid mounting economic hardship.
Like other post-Soviet regimes, the Kazakh leadership uses a myriad combination of tools to squeeze civil society. Legal and practical forms of repression are compounded by increasing restrictions to independent funding, gradually suffocating independent thinking and activism in Kazakh society. The west should open its eyes to the shrinking space in Kazakhstan and do more to support independent civil society as a counter-weight to the increasing state monopolisation of power.
Increasing state control
The latest bout of repression has unfolded in the wake of arbitrary mass detentions following a series of land protests last spring. The protests started in the western city of Atyrau in April 2016 and quickly spread to several Kazakh cities.
