MECACS Seminar Series -- Book Launch of the 'Toward Nationalising Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm' (UP Pittsburgh, 2020) To register please email [email protected] by 5pm on Tuesday 29 September 2020.

MECACS – Public Seminar Series – To register please email [email protected] by 5pm Tuesday 29 September 2020

Book Launch of Toward Nationalising Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (UP Pittsburgh, 2020) By Diana T Kudaibergenova.

This new book presents an analysis of power relations and the rise of nationalist sentiments in the post-Soviet space. Political sociologist Diana T Kudaibergenova compares democratic and non-democratic settings of post-Soviet state-building in conditions where Russian-speaking minority groups almost outnumbered local “titular” ethnic groups in Latvia and Kazakhstan.

Using historical, archival and discourse analysis as well as hundreds of interviews with elites in these states, the book demonstrates how and why post-Soviet regimes in different political contexts become “nationalising” and how this influences both the political development and social situation on the ground.

Biography:

Dr Kudaibergenova studies different intersections of power relations through realms of political sociology dealing with concepts of state, nationalising regimes and ideologies. She received her PhD in 2015 from the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her first book, Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh literature (Lexington, 2017) deals with the study of nationalism, modernisation and cultural development in modern Kazakhstan.

Her second, based on her doctoral research, focuses on the rise of nationalising regimes in post-Soviet space after 1991 with prime focus on power struggles among the political and cultural elites in democratic and non-democratic states (forthcoming with Pittsburgh University Press).

Currently she is completing her third book manuscript on power, state and resistance in contemporary art of the post-Soviet Eurasia and works on a new project dealing with empowerment. Dr Kudaibergenova spent more than two years researching and teaching first sociology major students in Turkmenistan in English at the International University of the Humanities and Development in Ashgabat, where she also helped to establish the first postgraduate programme, and Academic Writing classes. She has also held a postdoctoral position at the Lund University Sociology of Law Department where she studied power, ideology and legality in Eurasia (primarily in Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Crimea).

Her articles appeared in Nationalities Papers, Central Asian Affairs, The European Journal of Cultural Studies, The Journal of Eurasian Studies and many others.