The Kazakh Potemkin e-village
E-participation and online civic engagement in Kazakhstan
MA Thesis East European Studies Thomas de Winter – 10880747
University of Amsterdam Supervisor: dr. C.W.C. Reijnen
Second reader: dr. D. Fainberg 15 January, 2016
Content
Chapter 1: E-governance and democracy ... 1
1.1 Introduction ... 1
1.2Problem Analysis... 4
Chapter 2: Changing technology, changing democracy? ... 7
2.1 The Information Age ... 7
2.3 Cyber-sceptics ... 10
2.4 Online public spheres ... 12
2.5 The Cute Cat Theory of digital activism ... 14
2.6 The dictator’s dilemma ... 16
2.7 Different conceptions of democracy ... 18
Chapter 3: Methodology ... 22
3.1 Research methods ... 22
3.2 Reliability and validity ... 23
3.3 Research design ... 24
Chapter 4: Kazakhstan online ... 25
4.1 ICT regulations and development ... 25
4.2 Laws and repressive instruments ... 27
4.3 E-governance in Kazakhstan ... 31
4.4 International organisations’ efforts ... 35
Chapter 5: Online civic engagement in Kazakhstan ... 40
5.1 Civic culture, a citizens’ opinion ... 40
5.2 Everything is politics ... 43
5.3 Kazakh citizens engaged ... 47
Chapter 6: Conclusion ... 49
6.1 Theoretical reflections ... 49
6.2 E-governance development in Kazakhstan ... 50
6.3 Online civic engagement in Kazakhstan ... 51
6.4 The Kazakh Potemkin e-village ... 52
1
Chapter 1: E-governance and democracy
The first chapter contains an introduction to the topic of this thesis, followed by a problem analysis. The two result in a research question and supporting sub-questions. The chapter ends with an outline of the following chapters.
1.1 Introduction
The United Nations, the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are all paying special attention to the development of e-governance across the globe. The OECD presented e-e-governance as a tool to achieve better government in its study ‘The e-Government Imperative’ in 2003, whereas the UN started to conduct biannual e-governance surveys since that same year. The EU followed one year later with its ‘European eGovernment Services program’ (IDABC). These organizations did not focus solely on the Western world, but also on developing nations. Around the year 2000, a number of scholars started to posit that the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) would inevitably be accompanied by shifts toward democratic government (see Chadwick & May, 2003; Hague & Loader, 1999; La Porte, Demchak & de Jong, 2002; Norris 2001). As a result, the UN, EU and OECD are very much engaged in governance worldwide. In this light, it is interesting to explore the development of e-governance in the post-Soviet space considering the fact that a very diverse landscape of postsocialist pathways emerged (Bunce, 1999. P. 759). To be more precise, not all countries have chosen the path that led to (different types of) democracy.
Based on the line of reasoning that the implementation of e-governance in a country is directly connected to democratization, one would expect more democratic countries to have a more developed e-governance. Katchanovksi and La Porte (2005) tested whether the level of democracy affects openness of electronic governments. They found a positive relationship between the level of democracy and the openness of cabinet-level websites in OECD and post-communist countries. In a similar way it is possible to test the abovementioned assumption. By comparing Freedom House statistics and the UN E-Government Survey 2014, one gets an idea of the level of democratization of each country and their e-government readiness. Katchanovski and La Porte (2005) make a distinction between ‘cyber democracies’ and ‘Potemkin e-villages’ (i.e. window-dressing) in electronic governments. They provide the example of government websites in Ukraine: in the year 2000, Ukraine scored very high on their openness index of cabinet-level websites. However, Ukraine had only 12 internet users
2 per 1000 citizens in that year. The fact that 99% of all Ukrainians was unable to use government websites back then is a sign that these websites represented an elaborate façade that created the impression of openness (P. 672-673). The figure below shows both the level of democracy and e-government development scores of all 28 former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Figure 1. Democracy and e-governance compared
Sources: United Nations E-Government Survey (2014), Freedom House Nations in Transit (2014a)
Based on this quick overview, a couple of interesting cases can be identified. Estonia has both the highest democracy score and the most developed e-governance. This makes Estonia the top performing country and advocates for the scholars who claim that e-government development and democratization go hand in hand. Other countries that clearly confirm this claim are the Central Asian countries Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, albeit in the exact opposite way, namely a low democracy score corresponding with underdeveloped e-government. Two cases that firmly oppose the assumption however, are Kazakhstan and Russia: both score high on the e-government development index, yet very low on level of democracy. Based on the categorizations of Katchanovksi and La Porte (2005), these could be potential ‘Potemkin e-villages’, whereas Estonia is the best example of a cyber-democracy. Belarus and perhaps even Azerbaijan could be labelled Potemkin e-villages as well, even though their e-government is less developed.
3 E-governance can be described as “the use of ICTs to design new or redesign existing information processing practices in order to achieve better government, especially in the field of electronic service delivery to companies and citizens” (Bekkers, 2012. P. 329). Better government can include multiple aspects: increasing the accessibility of governments for instance, or facilitating the quality of public service delivery, stimulating internal efficiency, supporting public and political accountability, increasing the political participation of citizens and improving inter-organizational co-operation (Ibid.). E-government interaction exists in the following ways: government to government (G2G), government to citizens (G2C), government to employees (G2E) and government to businesses (G2B) (Homburg, 2008). Of these four forms of e-government interaction, it is mostly G2C that has the potential to enhance democracy. It is therefore only this form of interaction that is being referred to in this paper. It is more accurate to speak of e-governance however, as e-government generally refers to top-down policy, revolving around the government and pointing at public service delivery. E-governance goes beyond that. It adds the factor of citizen engagement and participation in governance to e-government, thereby reducing the state to one of many actors involved (Rossel & Finger, 2007. P. 405). It is precisely the emphasis on this factor of two-way communication that is missing in the traditional concept of e-government, but that is indispensable if ICTs have a role to play in enhancing democratic practice (Shahin & Finger, 2008. P. 27).
In order to define the scope of this research, it is required to be even more specific. The concept of e-democracy, the use of ICTs to support the democratic decision-making processes, is seen by many as a synonym for online voting. Yet it encompasses another important mechanism through which citizens can influence democratic decision making: e-participation (Macintosh, 2004. P. 1). E-e-participation can be defined as “efforts to broaden and deepen political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another, with civil servants, and with elected representatives using ICTs” (O’Donnell et al., 2007). It opens up new possibilities to improve government policies, as is illustrated by the UN Public Administration Network’s (UNPAN) definition of e-participation: “the process of engaging citizens through ICTs in policy and decision-making, in order to make it participatory, inclusive and deliberative” (UNPAN, 2013). The link between e-government and democratization goes via e-participation. E-participation hold the promise of ‘online’ democratic citizenship, which can be reached through engagement and civic empowerment. It consists of three levels: enabling, engaging and empowering. Enabling simply means to use
4 technology to support people that would not naturally use the internet, to make it accessible and understandable. Engaging refers to consultation of citizens by governments, to enable deliberation on policy issues. The top level is empowering, meaning active participation by -, and facilitating bottom-up ideas of citizens to influence the policy agenda. Only on this level do citizens have direct impact on policy-making (Macintosh, 2004. P. 3).
Figure 2. Levels of participation
Source: Macintosh (2004)
In sum, the overarching concept is e-government (a term that is more or less interchangeable with e-governance in this paper), but e-government/e-governance cannot directly affect civic empowerment and democratization. The mechanism through which this happens is e-participation. For practical reasons however, this underlying mechanism will not always be set forth completely throughout this paper. The Potemkin-thesis holds that in a country where e-participation does not lead to democratization, one possible explanation can be that this is because the regime is deliberately building a façade. In other words, it does want to join the electronic revolution, but does not want to allow a revolution against the regime.
1.2 Problem Analysis
Given the fact that international organisations (IOs) are actively pushing for e-governance reforms in transition economies and developing countries, including the post-Soviet world, it is remarkable that some countries have a highly developed governance, but that their e-governance development is, at first sight, not accompanied by democratization. The best example here is Kazakhstan: very well developed in e-governance, yet very much non-democratic. Examples like Kazakhstan have encouraged scholars to put forward the ‘legitimation hypothesis’ in an attempt to understand these cases: economic globalization and
5 technological development drive e-participation initiatives in authoritarian regimes, regardless of the level of democratization as well as broader trends of democratization (Åstrom, Karlsson, Linde and Pirannejad, 2012. P. 144). What also explains the high scores of countries like Kazakhstan on the UN’s government development index, especially the e-participation segment of it, is the fact that the UN method of measurement is concentrated on the availability of participation and deliberation mechanisms, while leaving out actual usage of it. This allows authoritarian states like Kazakhstan to offer e-participation mechanisms, without actually providing their citizens with access to the technology. Without the bottom-up input of citizens, e-participation will obviously never enhance democratization. This is what Katchanovksi and La Porte (2005) label Potemkin e-villages. The other way around, if online civic participation appears to be high in Kazakhstan, yet government e-participation initiatives are not influencing this, it would also indicate that the Kazakh government attempts to build a Potemkin e-village. It could do so by means of implementing state surveillance systems, allowing the regime to monitor internet traffic and filter or suppress internet content. Citizens then have to opportunity to engage, but their engagement is rather meaningless. Especially when compared to perceptions of civic engagement in democratic countries. In this case, it would be remarkable that international organizations are pushing for e-governance reforms in Kazakhstan, presuming that the rationale behind their initiatives is to enhance democratization, something that is not reached through their means. The presumption that e-governance and democratization are related is regarded as true throughout this thesis, based on the arguments set forth above.
In this paper I will reassess the Kazakh governmental e-participation policies in relation to democratization in Kazakhstan, in order to test if the Potemkin e-village hypothesis holds. Is there any democratization taking place in Kazakhstan, and what have the government’s e-governance policies to do with that? For that it is first of all necessary to define the concept of democracy. A rigid conception of democracy, focusing on the interaction between formal actors like political institutions, the media and citizens, not only ignores other domains and forms of politics, but also received a lot of criticism for being too formalistic, state-centred and bound to the prevailing political and institutional arrangements (Dahlgren, 2009. P. 5). This ‘political communication’ conception of democracy largely ignores participation. I therefore make use of a broader conception of democracy, which includes the public sphere, deliberative democracy and civil society. These broader conceptions of democracy allow for a much more thorough analysis of democratization in Kazakhstan. In this paper I evaluate
e-6 governance and e-participation initiatives in Kazakhstan, after which I evaluate its influence on the level of online civic engagement in the country. I include not only initiatives of the Kazakh government itself, but also those of international organizations. Only then it is possible to determine if e-participation initiatives are genuinely supporting democracy in Kazakhstan, or if they are in fact contributing to the upholding of a democratic façade. I aim to provide an answer to the following question:
To what extent are e-participation initiatives influencing online civic engagement in Kazakhstan?
The following sub-questions are formulated to create a more well-structured research:
- Which theoretical insights into civic engagement, e-participation and the relation between democracy and technology exist?
- How is the Kazakh government developing its e-governance and e-participation and what is the role of international organisations in this development?
- What is the degree of online civic engagement advancement in Kazakhstan?
As reflected in the sub-questions, it is first of all necessary to set forth the debate on e-government and technology. Moreover, it is important to introduce different conceptions and types of democracy, as they are crucial to the argument made in this paper. These two key elements of this thesis are discussed in the second chapter. In chapter three, methodological issues are considered. The fourth chapter consists of a contextual overview and analysis of e-government and e-participation in Kazakhstan, followed by the degree of civic engagement that can be observed in the Kazakh online sphere in chapter five. The sixth and final chapter contains conclusions and final remarks.
7
Chapter 2: Changing technology, changing democracy?
In this chapter a theoretical framework is outlined, in which first of all the Information Age and its consequences for democratization are discussed. The chapter proceeds with the main agents of the democratic system, citizens, and argues that the internet in its facilitation of public spheres does offer a lot of democratic potential even in non-democratic regimes. Furthermore, civil society in Kazakhstan is discussed. Finally, e-governance in authoritarian regimes is addressed, as well as different conceptions of democracy.
2.1 The Information Age
We have entered the ‘Information Age’, defined by Manuel Castells as a society in which activities and economic production take place in a technological paradigm, constituted around ICTs. In the Information Age, information constitutes the core of the economy, resulting in new forms of control, social interaction and development (Homburg, 2008. P. 42). Castells is an influential scholar on whose work many policy proposals and – programmes around the world are based. He argues that whereas in the Industrial Age, the production of material goods was always concentrated in specific geographical locations (Castells refers to this as the ‘space of places’), the Information Age replaced this space of places with a ‘space of flows’: information flows through capital markets and is being exchanged between persons all over the world. In his trilogy ‘The Information Age’ (1996, 1997, 1998) Castells notes that it is the space of flows that enables the functioning of a global marketplace and moreover, represents the processes that construct the economic, social and symbolic lives of a significant part of the world population (Homburg, 2008. P. 48-50). Castells emphasizes that the role of the nation state will change, and that it remains to be seen whether nation states can deal with the challenges of the Information Age. He ascribes a greater role to networks and nations operating in supranational organisations like the EU, UN, NATO and OECD. He also emphasizes the role of local governments, arguing that they are more suitable to function in the Information Age because they are more representative and legitimized to handle local, territorialized interests, and more flexible and better to adapt to ever changing spaces of flow and technological networks (Ibid. P. 53). While scholars more or less agree on the growing presence of information in society, there is no consensus whatsoever on the long-term effects of an Information Age. This is also the case in the debate about the role of the internet in democratization. In this debate, the two sides can be described optimists and cyber-sceptics.
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2.2 Cyber-optimists
One of the first books fully devoted to the internet and democracy was ‘The Internet, Democracy and Democratization’. The editor of this book, Peter Ferdinand, clearly held a positive stance towards the democratizing potential of the internet in the early 2000s. Not only did he believe that the internet would allow networks of local governments and EU-members to be created, but even direct democracy could be closely approximated. In Ferdinand’s opinion there were just a few boundaries that had to be overcome in order for his assumptions to be fulfilled: the costs of internet access would have to be lowered around the world, the transformation to information societies would have to be completed and an information overload would have to be avoided (Ferdinand, 2000. P. 174-182). Even though this work is obviously outdated by now and it is easy to claim that Ferdinand was not entirely right, the book still serves a good example of the beliefs that scholars in the West had when it came to the possibilities of the internet.
A major shortcoming of Ferdinand’s work is that he fails to address how exactly the internet will bring democracy. Apart from his hypotheses that internet allows networks to be created and offers possibilities for direct democracy, he does not mention any direct mechanisms through which internet could democratize in practice. Other authors fill this gap, however. Clay Shirky (2008) argues that the internet allows for ‘organizing without organizations’, by which he means that it has the potential to lower barriers to collective action. Larry Diamond (2010) adds to this that it can allow citizens in closed societies to spread news, express opinions, reveal corruption and mobilize protesters (Diamond, 2010; Gunitsky, 2015). Another rather optimistic scholar is Andrew Chadwick (2001), who notes that the internet offers abundant opportunities for an ‘electronic face’ of governments. Political elites can enhance their legitimation and build up support through the website of their executive branch, for instance. This could offer a solution to the problem of democratic control that is omnipresent also in liberal democratic states (P. 454-455).
Chadwick and May (2003) differentiate three models of interaction between citizens and states in the Information Age. In the managerial model, the government has a regulatory role. It focusses on efficient and fast delivery of government information and services to citizens, creating so-called ‘one-stop shops’, hence treating its citizens like customers and the governmental institutions like businesses. The flow of information in this model is predominantly unilinear from government to citizens (P. 277-278). The consultative model is intended to facilitate the communication of citizen opinion to government. The role of the
9 government is to respond to needs of societal interests. These needs are expressed electronically, for instance through e-voting at elections, opinion polling and advisory referenda (Ibid. P. 279). In the participatory model, the government is just one of many actors present in civil society. It is based on horizontal flows of information, with the aim of allowing a maximal number of citizens to participate in decision-making. This is supposed to create a ‘cyber civil society’ (Ibid. P. 280). Chadwick and May argue that the managerial model is likely to erode democratic processes, while the participatory model is supposed to enhance democracy. The consultative model is in between the other two. Their analysis of the United States, Britain and the European Union shows that e-government initiatives of all three were predominantly based on the managerial model. Their final note was therefore rather negative (Ibid.).
Entirely devoted to the potential of government is the OECD study ‘The e-Government Imperative’ (2003). According to the OECD, e-government improves efficiency and government online services, can help achieving specific policy outcomes, contribute to economic policy objectives, be a major contributor to reform and, most relevant to this paper, can help build trust between governments and citizens (OECD, 2003. P. 11-12). Citizens have to get engaged in government in order to build and strengthen a trust relationship and ICTs can be a tool to achieve this. The easiest ways to increase citizen engagement are by informing them, by consulting them and by allowing them to provide feedback. In an ideal situation, citizens would even be involved in policy making directly (Ibid.). Access to information, consultation and participation are the three mechanisms that the UN uses in its e-participation index as well. The rationale behind them is that they open up decision-making processes, which may in turn improve the quality of decisions made.
Pippa Norris (2001) talks about the ‘Digital Divide’, the difference between rich and poor countries and citizens that is reflected online. She finds that due a lack of economic development, the global divide in access to digital technologies has grown since the 1990s. Positioning herself somewhere in between the cyber-optimists and cyber-sceptics, she draws three main conclusions. First, she notes that many established political institutions act conservatively on the internet. They have a website, but do not act much different online compared to their traditional offline behaviour. Second, the internet will reinforce the activists by reducing their costs of communication, mobilizing and organizing, but it does not succeed in mobilizing the disengaged. Third, on a more positive note, she argues that internet has
10 provided an arena that facilitates more open and egalitarian competition in civic society. (Norris, 2001. P. 237-239).
To sum up, cyber-optimists hope that the internet offers new opportunities for political mobilization, different from joining parties, lobbying, and grassroots community movements for instance. Moreover, they hope it will diminish inequalities in public life by reducing certain barriers to civic engagement significantly, while increasing opportunities for political debate and spreading information. If people become more conscious about public policy issues, they will become more engaged. In an even further stage, the internet could enable us to bypass representative democracy and accomplish direct democracy, or at least increase public deliberation through online discussions, news groups, feedback forms and so on (Norris, 2001. P. 235-236). Nowadays, the utopian view of the possibilities of the internet that scholars had in the beginning of the century is easy to counter. No such thing as direct democracy has occurred so far and engagement with politics has not seen a spectacular rise. Judging the cyber-optimists on the non-fulfilment of their predictions would be too easy, however. These scholars were one of the two extremes in a wide spectrum of opinions on the potential of the internet. Positioning yourself on either end of a spectrum always involves more risk of being wrong than safely representing an opinion somewhere in the middle. It is clear that the cyber-optimist end of the spectrum is hard to defend at present, but that does not make the idea that internet can enhance democracy useless. Albeit in small steps, or on a small scale, the internet can still allow for easier communication, citizen activism and political engagement. This will be elaborated below, but it is first necessary to set forth the cyber-sceptic point of view.
2.3 Cyber-sceptics
Not all scholars are as optimistic as the abovementioned ones. Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski and Zittrain (2008, 2010, 2011) are the editors of three volumes of research on the trends and patterns shaping information controls around the world: Access Denied, Access Controlled and Access Contested. Focussing on internet censorship and surveillance practices worldwide, their work encompasses a more technical side to internet filtering, as well as numerous case-studies, for instance on control and subversion of the cyberspace in Russia. Deibert et al. present nothing less than an outright internet-sceptic view, substantialized with an impressive amount of research. They argue that ICTs are ineffective in many cases and marginal to the process of regime contestation in others. The internet is also subject to government censorship
11 and control, allowing non-democratic governments to stall democratizing processes relatively easily (Gunitsky, 2015. P. 44).
Another influential internet-sceptic is Evgeny Morozov. Despite the high expectations of the internet’s capacities to open up closed societies, countries like Belarus, Kazakhstan, Iran and China are probably even more stable autocracies than in the beginning of this century, as Morozov delicately points out: “The idea that the internet favours the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside” (Morozov, 2011. P. 8). As other internet-sceptics, Morozov notes that authoritarian regimes have adopted the internet, to build what he calls the ‘spinternet’: regimes hiring, training and paying bloggers in order to spread the governmental ideology throughout the internet. Censorship is not effective, simply because a message on the internet spreads faster than someone can censor it. Therefore, spinning messages is the only effective way for authoritarian regimes to control the internet (Ibid. P. 117-120). Another argument of him is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If civilians in a remote Russian village get connected to the internet, their primary needs will be to enjoy themselves. They visit YouTube for instance. Then follow ‘talk’ (email, blogs), ‘share’ (Facebook, Twitter) and ‘learn’ (Wikipedia). Only at the top of the pyramid is ‘campaign’ (Amnesty, Human Rights Watch), thus it is very naïve to assume that regular citizens in authoritarian regimes are even interested in using the internet for democratizing purposes (Ibid. P. 70-71).
An argument similar to Morozov’s is made by Seva Gunitsky (2015). Analyzing social media usage of authoritarian regimes, he finds that these regimes have recently moved from what he calls ‘contestation’ to ‘co-optation’. The regular strategy is no longer one of harsh censorships and plain denial, but has become much more sophisticated. It still contains elements of censorship and control, but also attempts to subvert the reach and power of the internet by co-opting it. Kazakhstan is developing its own national online space to replace Western alternatives for example (Gunitsky, 2015. P. 50).
Cyber-sceptics, in short, suggest that the internet is just a new opportunity for established political actors to reinforce their grip on society. The virtual world, in their view, is nothing more than an online reflection of the real world where traditional interests dominate. No new opportunities for deliberative and participatory politics arise, as governments mainly disseminate information in a top-down manner (and not bottom-up), while citizens looking for information online tend to follow their offline preferences: they still
12 visit the websites of BBC, CNN or whatever offline media they use (Norris, 2001. P. 236-237). The internet-sceptic view is the other end of the spectrum, which makes it also relatively easy to counter. Many sceptics tend to focus strongly on the interaction between formal political actors, the type of interaction that is indeed often absent in non-democratic regimes. But where the cyber-optimists are often accused of refusing to see the downside of the internet, its usefulness for propaganda purposes, surveillance and censorship, the same argument can be made that cyber-sceptics turn a blind eye on everything that goes on under the surface. In the next sections I will show that there is more than the formal interaction between state and citizens however, and that democratization can also occur bottom-up and in small steps.
2.4 Online public spheres
Rational deliberation takes place in what Jürgen Habermas (1989) dubbed the public sphere. The internet can be seen as an exemplary medium for facilitating public spheres: discursive spaces which are largely constituted in modern society through communications media (Habermas, 1989) and permit the circulation of information, ideas, debates and the formation of public opinion (Dahlgren, 2006). Public spheres consist of three constitutive dimensions: structures, representation and interaction (Dahlgren, 2006). The structural dimension has to do with the formal institutional features such as media organizations. This dimension is closest related to freedom of speech, access, inclusion and exclusion and other traditional democratic issues and, in terms of internet, to the way in which communicative spaces relevant for democracy are largely constructed. The representational dimension refers to the output of the (mass) media and its degree of completeness, accuracy, fairness, pluralism of views, agenda setting, objectivity and other characteristics. The interaction dimension consists of both citizens’ encounters with the media and interaction between citizens themselves, which can include anything from two-person conversations to large meetings. (Ibid. P. 148-150). Following Dahlgren (2006), several types of online public spheres can be singled out:
Table 1. Types of online public spheres
Versions of e-government/ e-governance
Top-down character; interaction between government representatives and citizens; information dissemination on
governmental administration and services; e-governance more about horizontal civic communication and input for government policy. The Advocacy/activist
domain
Discussions framed by organisations with shared perceptions, values and goals, geared for forms of political intervention; traditional parliamentarian politics, established interest groups
13 (unions) and new politics of social movements and other activists. The vast array of diverse
civic forums
Exchange of views among citizens and possibilities for deliberation; generally understood as the paradigmatic version of the public sphere online.
The prepolitical or parapolitical domain
Social and cultural topics having to do with common
interests/collective identities; not always explicitly political but no clear boundary with non-political.
The journalism domain Everything from news organisations (traditional and online-based) that is online, including blogs; also core element of public sphere online.
Source: Dahlgren (2006. P. 153).
Returning to the cyber-optimists vs. cyber-sceptics debate, two arguments can be posited with regard to the internet’s role in the public sphere. The sceptics would argue that the impact of the internet on the public sphere is limited. But, as Dahlgren points out, most evidence in support of this argument is based on the formal political system and the traditional role of the media in that system (see Clift, 2003; Margolis & Resnick, 2000). Cyber-optimists, in contrast, claim that the sceptics are searching for evidence in the wrong place. The traditional democratic system has changed significantly, they say. It is no longer all about electoral politics, but we witness a shift to issue politics, informal politics or ‘life politics’ (Bakardjieva, 2009; Giddens, 1991). Connected with this is the idea that the contemporary disengagement with politics is for many citizens not a disinterest in politics itself, but merely in its traditional parliamentary form. Instead, citizens see politics as an instrument to achieve specific goals (single issues) and to express group values, ideals and belongings within the public sphere (Dahlgren, 2006. P. 155). Therefore one needs to search for civic engagement advancement not only in traditional government-citizen interaction, but also in other public spheres. In this paper this is done by focussing not only on e-participation, but also on civic forums and the advocacy/activist domain.
Communicative interaction among citizens is of vital importance to democracy, both morally and functionally. Interaction occurs in publics and publics are increasingly formed online, but obviously not all online interaction among citizens fits in the Habermasian idea of deliberation aimed at achieving rationally motivated consensus (Dahlgren, 2002. P. 2-5). This is why we should look at online (political) discussion not just through a ‘rational-critical political debate’ lens, but also through the lens that Dahlgren has labelled ‘civic culture’: the enactment of citizenship understood as forms of social agency (2006. P. 157). Dahlgren offers a framework with which the conditions necessary for civic engagement can be analysed. Civic cultures operate in what Habermas calls the life-world. They consist of the dimensions knowledge, values, trust, spaces, practices and identities (Dahlgren, 2009. P. 108).
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Table 2. Dimensions of civic cultures
Knowledge Citizens’ ability to acquire relevant knowledge. Specific skills needed, such as literacy and referential cognizance of the socio-political world.
Values Without democratic values democracy will not function, so substantive (equality, liberty, justice, solidarity, tolerance) and procedural (openness, reciprocity, discussion, responsibility/accountability) values should be anchored in everyday life.
Trust Honesty and expectations of reciprocity among or between groups of citizens, necessary for collective political action.
Spaces Accessibility of viable public spheres in the life-world of citizens, where they must be able to encounter each other, representatives and policy and decision-making spaces.
Practices Concrete, recurring practices, both individual and collective, which help generate personal and social meaning to the ideas of democracy. They must have an element of routine about them in order to be part of civic cultures. Identities People’s subjective view of themselves as members and (potential) participants
of democracy. Identities develop through experience and experience is based on emotions. The salience of civic identities can vary among individuals but is generally low.
Source: Dahlgren (2009)
2.5 The Cute Cat Theory of digital activism
Much credit is often given to the concept of civil society for its supposed role in the downfall of communist regimes. A good example is Poland, where Solidarity was the central political actor for many years and is generally seen as the driving force behind the democratic transition. There are also several examples where the democratic consolidation failed due to a supposedly weak civil society. The example mentioned most often is Russia (Kubicek, 2002. P. 603). Kazakhstan falls in the same category. It is important to consider the relativity of the concept of civil society in post-Soviet states like Russia and also Kazakhstan. In the normative sense of democratic theory, civil society is only present to the extent allowed by the dominant elites, as mass opinions, behaviour and attitudes are still very much dependent upon this elite (Gel’man, 2003. P. 90). Moreover, formal institutions in so-called ‘hybrid regimes’ (authoritarian regimes with democratic elements in them) are often said to be non-relevant in practice. What matters is not formal but ‘informal politics’. Ruling is based on social relations such as kinship, on unwritten norms, habits and practices. Informality is what guides political behaviour in these states, not formal politics (Hale, 2011. P. 581-582).
Anders Uhlin (2006) notes that civil society is present in the post-Soviet space, but that its activities are rather non-confrontational. Civil society groups exist in the fields of human rights, women, labour, environment, ethnicity/nationalism, social welfare and more.
15 Yet, many of them have as main activities information gathering, public education and networking. They tend to abstain from demonstrations, boycotts and strikes (P. 65). In general, if assumed that civil society is supposed to form a parallel society by ignoring or bypassing the authoritarian regime, one could say that this was hard to achieve in the Soviet Union as there were few political opportunities. Civil society actors were more successful in mobilizing resistance against the regime, as the Solidarity-case illustrates. Only in the Baltics civil society was able to produce new political actors. In many other states, strong leaders managed to gain the upper hand and marginalized civil society actors. As a result, civil society was not able to be a check against the state power in many of the post-Soviet states nor to be a representative of certain groups in society. The latter is reflected in their low level of membership. NGOs do assist the state in designing and implementing public policies, but non-similar to Western democracies: there is a tendency to include only moderate NGOs in policymaking and ignore the more oppositional ones. It is also important to stress that only some NGOs are pro-democratic, so even though the sheer existence of multiple civil society groups might indicate political participation, many are in fact apolitical or anti-democratic and not interested in political participation at all (Ibid. P. 139-141).
So far, it is argued that politics have evolved online. Instead of the traditional form of politics, it is now more appropriate to speak of life-politics. Moreover, from a civic culture perspective, a lot of content on the internet is political. Some authors even argue that everything is political, albeit secretly (cf. Shklovski & Valtysson, 2012). What remains is the question why and how life-politics or civic culture would enhance democratization, or more specifically civic engagement. Clay Shirky (2011) analysed the way that Western countries try to enhance democratization in non-democratic states, and finds that they mostly do so by pursuing internet freedom. What he calls the ‘instrumental approach’ is omnipresent: a focus on the prevention of censorship of for example Google and YouTube by authoritarian regimes and advocating public speech by citizens. This approach is politically appealing and action-oriented, Shirky notes, and can deliver rapid, directed responses to censorship by dictators (2011. P. 29-31). Yet, it overestimates the value of access to information and of traditional- and mass media, while it underestimates the value of digital- and social media that enable private communicative interaction and local coordination among citizens.
Instead, Shirky argues for an ‘environmental approach’. This approach focusses on the development of public spheres. Social media can strengthen civil society, which in turn is a precondition for pro-democratic regime change. In other words: positive changes in a country
16 follow, rather than precede, the development of a strong public sphere (Shirky, 2011. P. 32). This can be exemplified by the 1989 revolutions, where the leaders of East Germany, Poland and the other countries faced civil societies strong enough to resist to the governments. There will be no political change without the dissemination and adoption of ideas and opinions in the public sphere, Shirky stresses, as illustrated by for example Habermas’ argument that the printing press helped Europe to democratize by providing space for discussion and agreement among politically engaged citizens, even before the state had completely democratized. Thus, access to information is politically far less important than access to conversation (Ibid. P. 34).
Public spheres do not emerge as a result of people’s embracement of abstract political ideals. Instead, they emerge in society as a result of people’s dissatisfaction with daily matters, be it economics, governance or what not. Bakardjieva relates to this as ‘subactivism’: a kind of politics that develops at the level of subjective experience, submerged in the flow of everyday life. Subactivism encompasses small-scale decisions and actions, often by individuals. These decisions generally have a political and/or ethical frame of reference and can hardly be seen through a traditional lens with which political participation is measured. Subactivism is “a refraction of the public political arena in the private and personal world” (2009. P. 92).
2.6 The dictator’s dilemma
It is needful to narrow down the debate to e-governance in authoritarian regimes. As Shanti Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas (2003) notice, it is tempting to see the internet as a menace to authoritarian regimes: the dynamic internet posing a serious challenge to the unwieldy bureaucracies of aging dictators is not hard to imagine, especially not for a cyber-optimist. And indeed, citizens in authoritarian regimes can now find previously inaccessible information online, internet offers new opportunities for dissidents and actors other than the regime now have the chance to position themselves independently in a previously elite-controlled economy (2003. P. 135-136). Yet, authoritarian regimes have proven to be anything but absent from the internet. They control access and, through e-government for instance, guide its development so that it serves state-defined goals and priorities. They might even extend their reach through the internet. Based on a total of eight case studies, Kalathil and Boas argue that “the internet is not inherently a threat to authoritarian rule. Rather than sounding the death knell for authoritarianism, the global diffusion of the internet presents both opportunity and challenge for authoritarian regimes” (Ibid. P. 136). Kalathil and Boas are somewhere in between the optimists and sceptics.
17 At first, authoritarianism and e-governance is an odd-sounding combination. One would probably not expect authoritarian regimes to facilitate online participation of their citizens. Åstrom, Karlsson, Linde and Pirannejad (2012) try to understand the rise of e-participation in non-democracies. As they point out, the conceptual basis of e-e-participation in non-democracies is obviously not to fulfil the democratic potential of the internet, but has to be sought elsewhere. The scholars find that e-participation efforts in democracies are best explained by domestic factors: a democratic country’s level of development and level of democracy have a positive effect on its e-participation development. In non-democratic countries however, this is not the case. Here, an international factor, namely economic globalization, emerges as the strongest driver behind e-participation initiatives (Åstrom et al., 2012). Non-democracies like Bahrain, Singapore and Kazakhstan want to become attractive to foreign investors, so they develop their ICT sector accordingly.
Johnson and Kolko (2010) examine the online presence of authoritarian regimes by exploring the utilities of national- and city/regional-level e-Government websites in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, as they expect authoritarian regimes to be uninterested in increasing transparency and accountability (necessities for democracy) through the creation of e-Government websites. Their conclusion is that all their criteria, access to information, services/interactivity and audience/agenda setting, are met only to a limited extent. The government websites do have features that help facilitate citizen-government communication for example, but then never provide specific contact details and personnel names. Additionally, Johnson and Kolko reveal that local level e-Government sites seem to be more informative, responsive and interactive than the national-level counterparts (Johnson & Kolko, 2010). This last finding is consistent with Castells’ notion that local governments are more suitable to function in the Information Age, as they are more representative and legitimized to handle local interests, and adapt easier to changing spaces of flow.
However, as Åstrom et al. (2012) remark, “it would be too easy to assume that e-participation initiatives in non-democracies are meaningless charades, played out for the pleasure of international forces. While this may indicate why governments undertake these initiatives, such a perspective underestimates the agency of citizens, the power of networks, and the dynamics involved.” (2012. P. 148). It is precisely the emerging pattern of tensions that is interesting: between international organisations pushing for e-government reforms and change and authoritarian regimes pursuing continuity and stability. Between the
18 democratizing potential of increasing opportunities for e-participation and the potentially anti-democratic implications of technologically-enhanced government surveillance (Ibid.). Martin Karlsson (2013), making use of the proactive and reactive uses of technologies mentioned by Kalathil and Boas (2003), presents four potential strategies for how regimes can utilize the political potential of ICTs. A regime can be inactive, meaning that it chooses not to use any proactive nor reactive possibilities of ICTs; it can be strictly reactive, utilizing technology only in order to monitor and filter usage of the internet; it can be completely proactive, using ICTs to create opportunities for political participation, communication and transparency, without filtering or controlling its citizens; it can make use of both the proactive and the reactive potentials of ICTs (Karlsson, 2013. P. 182). It does obviously not make sense for an authoritarian regime to adopt a completely proactive ICT strategy, but the three other strategies are all compatible with authoritarian logic.
Karlsson’s argument is that a fully proactive ICT strategy would indicate a potential development towards democratization and openness. He makes use of the UN e-government development index on ‘possibilities for political participation on the internet’ and Freedom House statistics on ‘Freedom on the net’ to analyse whether this is the case. He uses the former as an operationalisation of a proactive use of ICTs, the latter functions as evidence of filtering, censorship and surveillance of citizens (Ibid. P. 183). Karlsson finds that the vast majority of authoritarian regimes using a proactive ICT strategy combines this with strong surveillance and censorship, leading him to conclude that the internet is a double-edged sword in non-democratic states and that dictators tend to make use of a ‘carrot and stick’ approach (Ibid.). Karlsson’s conclusion is typically one based on a traditional perception of democracy however, as the next section illustrates.
2.7 Different conceptions of democracy
Lincoln Dahlberg (2001) classifies all internet-democracy rhetoric and practices in three broad camps: liberal individualist, communitarian and deliberative. Liberal individualists consider a democratic model legitimate if it allows for individual interests to be expressed. The individual is the most important actor and is portrayed as a rational, autonomous subject able to express its own best interests. The internet is a great help to individual voters, as it enables them to access enormous amounts of information, with which the best electoral choices can be made. Many online democracy projects are based on this vision, for example the USA-based Democracy Network or Politics.com. They attempt to provide individuals
19 with as much information as needed to make the best choices for themselves and with the means of registering these choices (Dahlberg, 2001. P. 160).
Communitarians argue that the enhancement of communal spirit and values is a necessary element of a democratic model in order to be legitimate, thereby challenging the liberal individualist idea of maximizing individual choices. It is only within a community that individual freedom, expression and democracy are enabled and the communitarian self is established within relationships structured by social roles and shared subjectivity (Bakardjieva, 2009. P. 91). Not the interests of individuals, but democratic dialogue is what matters and digital media are, as opposed to traditional, top-down mass media, a great opportunity for two-way interaction. Civic networks can arise from forums, social media, online games, role-playing domains and other virtual networks (Dahlberg, 2001. P. 166).
Members of the deliberative democracy camp say that a democratic model is legitimated by its facilitation of rational discourse in the public sphere. In contrast to the liberal individualist conception of politics as the expression of individual interests, the deliberative camp sees free and open dialogue, the exchange of arguments and the challenging of claims as ideal democratic participation. An individual should have the ability to be led by rational arguments and ignore personal interests and particular opinions (Ibid. P. 167). Deliberation is a public activity, rather than a collective one. This is where it differs from the communitarian model. Moreover, in the communitarian model dialogue is needed to help discover a common good, whereas in the deliberative model it is used to help participants move towards agreement and understanding despite their differences. Finally, democracy derives its legitimacy from ‘the will of all’ in the liberal individualist and communitarian models: individual preferences do already exist, they are pre-given, making the subject (individual or collective) self-determining. But in the deliberative model, legitimacy stems from the deliberative process in which the will of subjects is formed (Dahlgren, 2009. P. 4-5). Following Bakardjieva (2009; 2012), Bentivegna (2006), Dahlgren (2005; 2009) and others, a perspective on the democratic potential of the internet can be proposed that focusses on facets of democracy located ‘below the surface’. Instead of the visible world of politics, typically connected with voters, campaigns, assemblies and organized street- and media activities, it is possible to concentrate on advancement at the level of meaning and individual agency. A new perspective then unfolds, namely “the capacity of the internet to enhance democracy through the multiplication and enrichment of the everyday practices of citizenship” (Bakardjieva, 2009. P. 92). The liberal individualist highlighting of information,
20 electoral choices and voting definitely represents an important share of citizenship, but the concept of citizenship can be significantly expanded. Peter Dahlgren (2006) labels this ‘civic culture’, while others (Hermes, 2006; Couldry, 2006) speak of ‘cultural citizenship’ or ‘public connection’. This perspective crosses the boundaries between politics, cultural values, civil values and identity processes (Bentivegna, 2006. P. 331).
Returning to the perspective of authoritarian regimes, one can say that online public spheres heighten the dictator’s dilemma. Popular culture provides cover for more political uses of social media. As Ethan Zuckerman (2013) illustrates, a political blog like Alexei Navalny’s LiveJournal page attracts attention, but a forum on which people discuss football does not. A political blog is also easy for the state to shut down, and the state will therefore always act against it. Take Navalny’s blog for example: even though some people might protest, the public will generally accept it being silenced. Yet tools that are more broadly used, such as well-known forums, are much harder to censor without risking to politicize the large group of usually apolitical actors. Moreover, it might alert non-activist users to censorship practices of the government. Another example can be given. Proxy-servers, in their obvious function of bypassing regime blockades, are easy for a dictator to track and shut down. But websites on which ordinary citizens share pictures of cute cats are at first sight apolitical, and thus harder to identify as containing political content. However, these websites may comprise a lot of so-called ‘latent content’, argues Zuckerman, and following Bakardjieva’s concept of subactivism, have the potential to empower citizens (Zuckerman, 2013; Bakardjieva, 2009). The ‘Cute Cat Theory of digital activism’ is born.
In sum, this theoretical framework addressed the Information Age and its possible consequences as seen by cyber-optimists and cyber-sceptics. The concept of online public spheres was set forth, which will be used in the following chapters to examine the degree of democratization in Kazakhstan. The word degree does not refer to a clearly perceptible stage of democratization, as there is no such thing as a score or result of assessing a country along the components of Dalhgren’s framework. The solution here is to assess the level of democratization in Kazakhstan in comparison with general ‘Western’ standards. This will be done throughout the following chapters by referencing and comparing the findings to what is generally perceived as democracy in the West. Moreover, theoretical works on how dictators can control their countries online have been addressed, which will be used later on to investigate if President Nazarbayev is trying to obscure the online space of Kazakhstan and if so, how this is being done. Lastly, the relationship between e-participation and
21 democratization has been addressed in the first chapter. Based on the arguments set out there, this thesis assumes a causal relationship between e-participation and democratization ceteris paribus. However, this implies that the causality, although usually accurate in expected (normal, democratic) conditions, can fail or the relation can be abolished by intervening factors. The Kazakh government could in this case be an important intervening factor.
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Chapter 3: Methodology
In this chapter, research methods are outlined, as well as reliability- and validity issues and the research design including justification of case selection and respondent selection.
3.1 Research methods
The first part of the research examines the level of online civic engagement in Kazakhstan. This is done both by desk research and a quantitative survey, which will be addressed below. By analysing a large lump of material, of which the main part consisted of policy documents, it is possible to extract a significant amount of information in a feasible amount of time. The analysis is based on the operationalized concepts in the theoretical framework. In order to add an extra layer to the desk research, several interviews have been carried out with so-called experts in this field. As for logistic purposes, these interviews have all been done by phone and/or written. The conducted interviews were (semi-)structured of nature, as this type of interviews is most suitable to written correspondence (Van Thiel, 2010). Open interviews would encompass the risks of either getting too much irrelevant information, or discourage the respondents to reply at all as open questions hint at extensive, and therefore time-consuming, answers. The (one) phone interview was intended to be exploratory and therefore non-structured.
A quantitative survey was carried out to get an impression of the degree of ‘civic culture’ of Kazakh citizens. The questionnaire contained 22 questions, divided in seven sections after Dahlgren’s conceptualization of civic culture: political efficacy, knowledge, values, trust, spaces, practices and identities. It was created with the help of Google Forms, an online tool to create and analyse surveys. The questionnaire was designed in English, tested and then translated into Russian to bridge the language gap. The Russian translation was then reviewed and improved by native speakers. Finally, it was launched in Kazakh Facebook-groups. The decision to use Facebook and no other available online mediums was made based on several considerations. Firstly, Facebook can be considered as relatively independent, and therefore outside the control of the Kazakh state, which should minimalize the risk of biased answers due to pressure of the government. Secondly, it can obviously be assumed that Kazakh citizens who are on Facebook are online-citizens and therefore match the target group of the survey. For this reason, spreading the survey through offline channels was not an option. The survey was promoted in the following groups: Smart Kazakhstan (about modern technology, the internet, new applications in Kazakhstan), Nesoglasnye Kazakhstan (The
23 Dissenters of Kazakhstan), Sotsialisticheskaya Mirnaya Kazakhstanskaya Revolyutsiya (The Socialist World Kazakhstan Revolution) and Protiv Kapitalizma (Against Capitalism). Most of these groups are politically motivated and are biased against the current regime. It was not possible to test the survey in pro-regime groups, as there simply were none. This does not make a great difference, however. The questionnaire is not about political preferences or views, but about the process behind them, about how those views get constructed. All kinds of groups could be suitable for that, although people in politically affiliated groups might be more inclined to fill out this kind of questionnaires. Hence, it was decided to focus on these kind of groups.
3.2 Reliability and validity
A first element of reliability and validity issues is the accuracy of measuring instruments (Van Thiel, 2010). A large amount of the survey questions is based directly on Dahlgren’s theory and its operationalisations. To avoid mistranslations, the questions were tested by both English and Russian speakers before spreading it. In terms of repetition, online solutions like Google Forms offer convenient possibilities to repeat the survey if desired. As for the interviews, the reliability and validity issues are not very notable. All the interviewees give a biased answer on the questions, but in a sense the policy documents of international organisations do so as well. Government officials would most probably give another biased view. The interviews are used mostly to add up to the policy documents and desk research. By selecting only one case, Kazakhstan, it is possible to zoom in to that case on a very detailed level, so that the internal validity gets ensured (Ibid. P. 100). The external validity of case-studies is often a difficult point because each case is different and therefore non-generalizable (Swanborn, 1996). In theory, countries with a similar policy and embedded in a similar setting as Kazakhstan could give similar results, but in practice hardly any country would fit that profile.
The choice to use Facebook groups to collect data implies a reliability issue that needs to be addressed. First of all, there is a high possibility that the choice for this medium causes a very select group of respondents, namely those who are already aware of the limited environment of KazNet and therefore deliberately chose to move away from there. Following that, there is also a high possibility that those who move away from KazNet do so because they hold beliefs that diverge from those in power. However, the goal of the survey is to assess the level of online civic engagement. Whether the respondents are pro-government or not is irrelevant in this case and the fact that they deliberately moved away from the KazNet
24 might make it easier for them to be politically active online. It therefore makes sense to collect data on Facebook. On the contrary, it would be an illogical decision to search for civic engagement in spheres where it is not likely to exist because of the government controlling.
3.3 Research design
The case-selection has been set forth in the introduction of this paper. In short, when comparing statistics on democracy and e-governance development in the post-Soviet states, Kazakhstan is the most striking example of two extremes that, in theory, are an odd-sounding combination. That makes it the most interesting case to research. Furthermore, as there is hardly any research on Kazakhstan’s e-governance development, nor the way its regime is behaving online, there was (and still is) a need to explore this field. The selection of respondents has been based on snowball-sampling, a form of selective sampling. As for the interviews, use was made of personal networks to reach relevant people. Through the first respondent working for the Netherlands Embassy in Kazakhstan, it was possible to get in touch with people working for the United Nations, Transparency International and two relevant NGOs in Kazakhstan: Astana Civil Alliance and Kameda. Concerning the questionnaire, the method was essentially purposive sampling, as the idea was to study particular (Facebook) groups. Within those groups it was not possible to proactively seek out subjects however, so therefore it can also be labelled convenience sampling to a certain extent. The goal was to get as much respondents as possible within the groups. 57 responses were collected in the end, with a sufficient division between gender and age groups. For more information on the survey, see chapter 5.
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Chapter 4: Kazakhstan online
In the fourth chapter, Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet pathway is outlined, as well as the regime’s e-government development, internet surveillance and filtering practices. It also examines how international organisations are aiding the country in this development and what the current state of affairs in Kazakhstan is. All this with the aim to assess if the Kazakh government is developing its e-governance in order to promote civic engagement, or not. The following sub-question is answered: How is the Kazakh government developing its e-governance and what is the influence of international organisations on this development?
4.1 ICT regulations and development
The post-Soviet pathway of Kazakhstan can be typified by continuity of national leadership, despite political changes in the larger post-Soviet realm. Markets liberalized and global economic activity increased. Some gained a fortune by taking over former state institutions after communism collapsed, but the Kazakh state did not lose its power. Many international actors even consider President Nursultan Nazarbayev as an authoritarian leader. Nazarbayev has been in charge consecutively since December 1991. His latest re-election was in April 2015, securing almost 98% of the vote. It is possible to typify Kazakhstan as a ‘rentier state’, having apart from Nazarbayev’s leadership position also a neopatrimonial and centralised political system. Moreover, the structures of traditional social relations of clans, tribes and families, rooted in the pre-Soviet era, are very suitable for rentier practices (Franke, Gawrich & Alakbarov, 2009. P. 109). Kazakhstan’s main natural resource is oil, which comprises almost 60% of the country’s total export.
Most Kazakh people speak Russian, a language with an elevated status in the country. Also, some 40 percent of the population is not ethnically Kazakh. The government has tried to lift the Kazakh language by making it the standard for all government documents and employees, and language is an important aspect of the regime’s nationalist policies (Shklovski & Struthers, 2010. P. 113). In terms of ICTs, Kazakhstan is in the middle of digital developments. Levels of internet adoption and technical skills are relatively low but rapidly growing, and the Kazakh government is lowering prices for broadband and mobile internet access. At the same time, it is developing a distinct national ‘Kazakh’ space on the internet, using a surprisingly easy strategy: the ‘.kz’ domain. ‘KazNet’ is the Kazakh variant on the more developed RuNet, the Russian internet space of search engines, social network sites and
26 other utilities for Russian speakers. The .kz domain is seen as a manifestation of Kazakhstan by its citizens, and it is something many are proud of and feel connected with (Ibid. P. 126).
With its oil revenues, Kazakhstan is able to fund the development of its ICT infrastructure domestically. This has allowed the regime to closely control electronic media, while regulation remains vague. The regime buys its ICT hardware directly, thus little interaction with foreign aid is required due to sufficient funds. This is in contrast to other Central Asian states such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, where international donors provided aid and in return demanded a more open, articulated regulatory environment (Mcglinchey & Johnson, 2007. P. 275). The number of internet users in Kazakhstan increased from 200.000 to 1 million between 2001 and 2006, reflecting the rapid growth of the Kazakh online community. Noteworthy however, is that internet usage is very much concentrated in the cities: there is almost no online activity on the countryside. The most common language online is Russian, used by nearly 95% of the users. Kazakh and English comprise the other 5%. The telecommunications market was liberalized in 2005, but it is former state-company Kazakhtelecom that remains the dominant player on this market, allowing only little competition (OpenNet Initiative, 2010. P. 183-185). The government-owned Nursat is its monopolizing companion on the telecommunications market. With only Kazakhtelecom already controlling 70% of the access market, the regime was able to extend its authoritarianism to the new ICT media throughout the 1990s (Mcglinchey & Johnson, 2007. P. 282-283). It is also important to stress that ‘private’ ownership of newspapers and media in Kazakhstan does not imply independency. Most of the private owners are members of the ruling elite, hence most privatized media outlets are strongly pro-governmental (Allison, 2006. P. 94).
Like in many (semi-)authoritarian regimes, Kazakhstan possesses a strong desire to be a member of international organisations. President Nazarbayev is actively pursuing membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) since 1996 and is currently close to accession (WTO, 2015). Furthermore, Kazakhstan took over the Chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2010 (OSCE, 2010). Despite the active membership in international organisations, the Kazakhtelecom and Nursat monopoly has not been broken yet. Moreover, as Mcglinchey and Johnson point out, the country’s new ICT regulations will likely prove sufficient for ensuring continued government control over electronic communications (2007. P. 283). At times when the Kazakh government needed to contract with foreign companies to acquire new technologies, these
