Department of Geography and the Environment

This paper examines the political implications of the practice of framing mega urban development projects with the language of 'utopia' or 'Disney'. Through a case study of Kazakhstan's new capital, Astana, I argue that the stigmatizing language of 'utopia' is a highly political bordering practice, defi ning the 'imaginary' and the 'real.' Coupled with ethnographic data from fi eldwork in Kazakhstan between 2009 and 2011, I perform a textual analysis of English and German language press coverage of Astana, and demonstrate how narratives of 'false modernity' and 'utopia' have become the dominant way of reading and writing about the city. Although often critical of the project as a sign of the President Nursultan Nazarbayev's 'megalomania,' this coverage obscures more complex geographies of power and state-society relations in the independent state. Symptomatic of liberal (ie, top-down, one-dimensional) understandings of power, the hegemonic discourse simultaneously reinscribes the state's 'coherence' and erases the lived realities and agencies of ordinary citizens, while obscuring the more complicated politicaleconomic relations that condition and give rise to 'spectacular' urban development projects.

The cover of Alexander Cooley's Great Games, Local Rules epitomises the way that Central Asia has been treated in macro-scale geopolitical writing since 1991 (see ). With the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars and observers were quick to pinpoint a supposed power "vacuum" in the region. The vacuum metaphor represents less an inert space emptied of powerful actors, but in these authors' imaginary is more accurately understood in terms of the vacuum's sucking process -drawing in powers from all around the world to the centre of the Eurasian continent. In the cover art of Cooley's book, we see the symbolic representation of the three powers that have traditionally been assumed to be the three relevant actors in the post-Soviet making of Central Asian geopolitics: the dragon for China, the bear for Russia, and the eagle for the United States. The animals are depicted as solid black outlines, but with sharp lines, and in aggressive positions, surrounding a solid red map of Central Asia (given the frequency with which Central

This article examines the elite nation-building project in post-independence Kazakhstan through an analysis of monumental architecture and miniature models in Astana. It considers the role of the country's new capital as a modernist project, in which elite geopolitical imaginaries are multiply inscribed in the cityscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures on modernity and authoritarian regime legitimation, the article considers modernity as a discursive trope employed in legitimating the Nazarbayev government, and one that has various material manifestations in the urban landscape of Astana. The research is based on fieldwork in Kazakhstan in Summer 2009, and examines architecture, monuments, and the 2009 Astana Day celebrations. Through a focus on the monumental and the miniature, it highlights their similar roles in transforming symbols of Kazakhstani independence and identity into objects of reverie outside the field of political contestation.

State-led urban development projects, especially in non-democratic settings, are conducive to a top-down analytic that focuses on state planners and architects. The goal of this article is to explore how we might decentre this narrative and jointly consider elite and non-elite narratives, through an analysis of discourses of modernity as enacted in and through these statist urban projects. Deploying a practice-based analytic, I explore how notions of 'modernity' are performed and enacted through the exclusionary practices of elites and non-elites alike. Taking the case of Kazakhstan's new capital city, Astana, I examine how the state-led urban modernisation agenda simultaneously draws upon and re-inscribes a set of interlocking popular geographic imaginaries (Soviet/modern, urban/rural, north/south), and demonstrate how ordinary citizens are not just passive spectators, but active participants in the political drama of state-and city-building.

In a world still dominated by a geopolitical system of territorial states, one tool in the stateand nation-building repertoire is the strategy of moving a capital from one city to another, and to an ostensibly more 'central' location of a geometrically conceived territory. From Ankara to Brasília, the technique has been used in a variety of places around the world, and Kazakhstan's new capital since 1997, Astana, is one more recent iteration. Taking a Foucauldian approach to analysing political technologies of government, the author examines the strategy of the centrally located city and considers how it has been instrumental to simultaneously producing a 'state effect' and a 'territory effect' in newly independent Kazakhstan. Part of a larger mixed-methods study, this article draws on a diverse range of methods, including data from interviews, participant observation, textual analysis, focus groups and a country-wide survey.

The world cities literature typically examines how and why certain cities achieve world city status, but this article examines why some actors eschew the world city competition and choose not to engage the discourse, despite deploying the very same urban development tactics. Through a case study of Astana, Kazakhstan's new capital city, I argue that state-and nationbuilding concerns in the era of independence have prevailed over interests in engaging the free market and liberalist narratives that accompany the world cities discourse. Demonstrating how the Nazarbayev regime has largely modeled its Astana project on Atatürk's development of Ankara, I jointly examine geopolitical discourses that shape how the relationship between the two cities is narrated and interpreted by elite and ordinary citizens alike. Drawing on data from interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted in Kazakhstan from 2009-2011, I demonstrate how these identities support the Nazarbayev regime's state-dominated economic arrangements much more effectively than could a neoliberal world cities script. [

Focus groups, like interviews and survey research, are typically employed in liberal settings, and are often designed to reveal the 'opinion' of participants. However, as I argue here, the 'opinion' is itself a technology of government, which cannot be assumed to operate the same under different regimes of governmentality. Giving the example of my experience with focus group research in Kazakhstan in autumn 2010, I demonstrate how, in many places around the world, popular 'opinions' are not technologised under prevailing regimes of government: they are not the basis of rule and/or legitimacy. Extending the geographic literature on methodological research as a set of 'collaborative performances' , I argue that differential subjectivity practices in 'closed contexts' have important implications for the field methods that researchers choose to employ. I thus call for attention not just to the micro-political context of these research practices, but also to the macro-political context (and its concomitant technologies of government) in the conduct of qualitative field research.

the normative language of the liberal/illiberal binary by foregrounding the ways in which closure can be an authoritarian act. Illustrating the variety of scales and places at which these practices unfold, the contributors are concerned with what implications they have for conducting geographic fieldwork. The main questions raised by this set of papers are: how is research in 'closed contexts' different from (or similar to) more 'open' settings? Does it raise unique ethical and methodological dilemmas? In what ways are field methods themselves informed by particular notions of power, agency, and freedom, and how might these differ between more-or less-closed settings? This article first provides some theoretical contextualization, before then introducing how each author variably highlights these themes through a critical reflection on their own experiences of conducting fieldwork in closed contexts, ranging from Vietnam to Kazakhstan, Mozambique, and the United States.

Argues for a reframing of the globalization of higher education in terms of geopolitics.Discusses the knowledge-based economy discourse in Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan.Conducts case study of new university projects in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.Links recent nationalization and internationalization agendas in West & non-West.This article examines recent higher education projects in two resource-rich, developmental states: Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. These projects are indicative of broader trend across Asia to move beyond previous national universities, toward a state-initiated model of the globally competitive university, which is designed to become an regional hub for elite education. Drawing on a range of qualitative methods, I consider the geopolitical context in which these projects have been conditioned and materialized, with a focus on how they are legitimated by policy-makers in the two case countries. By reframing discussions about the globalization of higher education in terms of a geopolitics of higher education, I argue that the cases of Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia are not exceptions set outside of the hegemonic liberal system, but that they are ‘mirrors’ of recent internationalization agendas undertaken by elite Western universities. Through considering localized discourses of promoting knowledge-based economies, I consider how elites simultaneously work with and reconfigure globally-hegemonic discourses, and specifically how these elite university projects are part of broader authoritarian political configurations in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.

Contributing to the growing literature on feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the security discourses employed by the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan's postindependence nation-building process. It examines the ways in which militarism and the 'culture of war' are productive of gendered national identities in Uzbekistan, focusing on how the 'protector -protected' relationship figures prominently in the Karimov regime's anti-terrorist rhetoric. It does so through a textual analysis of the Andijon uprising and the 'Day of Memory and Honor' holiday. It argues that the terrorist threat has been a driving factor in the pervasive militarization of society, but that official responses to state violence in Andijon obscure alternative security concerns of the general population in Uzbekistan -and more specifically those of women. It adds to existing feminist geopolitics literature by expanding it into a new empirical context, while rejecting the assertion that a 'geopolitical' analysis necessarily entails a 'global' approach.

A US geographer examines prevailing geopolitical discourses in Kazakhstan, through a case study of attitudes toward China and its influence in contemporary affairs. As part of a broader research project, the study draws on data from participant observation, textual analysis, interviews, focus groups, and a country-wide survey administered in Kazakhstan between June 2009 and July 2011. The author investigates the divergent findings across these methods, reflecting a profound ambivalence in popular attitudes about China, and explores their implications for the political geographic literature on state-making.

Planners around the Arab Gulf states are increasingly drawing on narratives about 'urban sustainability,' despite the fact that the explosive growth of urban centers in the Arabian desert largely defies the logic of sustainability. In this article, I consider how and with what effect these narratives have been deployed by various actors in Doha, Qatar. Eschewing a simple economistic reading, I highlight political geographic context and analyze how actors mobilize and rework these discourses. Drawing on mixed-methods fieldwork in Fall 2013, I illustrate how sustainability narratives are mobilized together with nationalist tropes about modernizing Qatar and building up the country's international prestige, while preserving local traditions and culture through the built environment. With a focus on recent efforts to green Doha, this analysis sheds light on the disciplining function of nationalist discourses in the production and constitution of what it means to label development practices 'green' in contemporary Qatar.