DSpace Repository

Nazarbayev University Repository (NUR) is an institutional electronic archive designed for the long-term preservation, aggregation, and dissemination of scientific research outcomes and intellectual property produced by the Nazarbayev University community and affiliated organizations.

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001. Theses 2896
002. NU Research Publications 11761
003. NU Research Institutes & Centres 586
004. NU Journals & Magazines 279
005. Forums, Conferences & Projects 1332

Recent Submissions

Access status: Open Access ,
Muslim Identity In The City Of Turkestan: A Qualitative Study Of Social Interactions
(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2026-05-12) Eidet, Amalie Moen; Guven, Funda; Agabekova, Zhazira; Oldfield, Anna
This thesis project is centered around Turkestan city in the south of Kazakhstan. Being the home to the Sufi leader Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, while at the same time an expanding modern city, the thesis explores how citizens in the city of Turkestan negotiate their identity between religious rules and values and secular systems. By looking at the population of people living in the city of Turkestan in Kazakhstan, there is an intersecting area between religious practices and secular environments. This research seeks to answer the question about how a pool of people affiliated with a specific educational institution in Turkestan perceive and negotiate their identity in a changing social and religious landscape. It focuses on conflicting feelings in individuals during the interactions between opposite genders stemming from religious rules, traditional values and secular norms of the society. The existing research gap in scholarship does not cover the study on how the role of the school setting affects cross-gender interactions and how the construction of a Muslim identity functions in a secular country such as Kazakhstan. Earlier research on the topic of Muslim identity tend to focus on the political top-down point of view on religious identity in a secular country, though this research shows how individual people negotiate their identity between religion and secularism in a special setting, namely a closed community affiliated with a Turkish Kazakh high school. Hence, it is a bottom-up point of view on identity, values and points of conflict and discomfort for individuals with religious beliefs in a secular environment. The methodology of the thesis is qualitative, and it includes semi-conducted, in-depth interviews. Based on the answers of the interviewees, this study argues that there is a strong religious identity and a moral compass within this group of people. However, many of the individuals experience a feeling of conflict with how the secular society and the religious rules are expecting them to behave. To analyse how individuals navigate their way through social interactions, concepts such as uyat (shame), neighborhood pressure and cultural and Islamic practices is examined. Finally, the study argues that religious values have a central role in many of the interviewees’ life, though the secular work or school environment hinders them in pursuing a religious oriented life. The intersection between religious values and rules that the interviewees want to follow may cause a conflict with the society around them, creating a feeling of discomfort, guilt or split opinions on how to behave in their interactions with opposite genders.
Access status: Embargo ,
On the F-purity of Nearly Commuting Matrices
(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2026-05-12) Ramazanov, Daniyar; Kadyrsizova, Zhibek; Mustafa, Manat
We study the algebraic set of nearly commuting matrices defined by the vanishing of the off-diagonal entries of the commutator matrix XY-YX. We prove that, over a field of prime characteristic, its coordinate ring is F-pure for n =4 in all characteristics except p = 2. We also present several conjectures for the case n = 5.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Last Eurasian Frontier: Soviet and Chinese Efforts at Domesticating Xinjiang, 1916-1962
(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2026-05-08) Walter, Andrew Travis; Akulov, Mikhail; Lu, Di
This thesis chronicles the evolution of the governing structures in the province of Xinjiang in the northwest of China during the period of 1916 to 1962. It is divided into three periods: 1916-1933, 1933-1949 and 1950-1962. Each period details how local provincial authorities exercised control over the province, their interactions with locals, and the involvement of both central Chinese authorities and external Soviet influence. It posits that the Soviet Union and China both desired a stable and secure Xinjiang and thus both contributed to the transition from indirect provincial rule to governing structures that further integrated the province into the centrally-controlled Chinese state, thereby leading to its domestication. This thesis argues that in effect, both the Soviet Union and China were trying to domesticate a shared Eurasian frontier that had historically been out of reach of both Russian and Chinese central authorities. Though at the beginning of the twentieth century neither Beijing nor Moscow exercised effective control over the region, Xinjiang’s local governance model of the negotiated state allowed local leadership to manage the province in the absence of direct central influence. This maintained the territorial integrity of Xinjiang and prevented it from detaching from the Chinese polity. By the early thirties, unrest in the province led to greater Soviet involvement in order to prevent provincial unrest from spilling over into the USSR. At this time, Moscow helped a local warlord, Sheng Shicai, build up the administrative apparatus in exchange for economic access to the region. This continued until the early forties which saw Soviet advisors removed from the region. Over the next few years, the Soviet Union utilized the crisis from the emergent East Turkestan Republic to negotiate with central Chinese authorities, who now had administrative reach into the province, to reach a modus vivendi in Xinjiang favorable to both sides. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, Beijing and Moscow were able to work directly with each other to develop and domesticate Xinjiang. In need of further economic and administrative development, Chines authorities invited Soviet advisors and joint stock companies into Xinjiang and even allowed Soviet passport holders to staff local administrative structures while implementing social and ethnic policies to integrate non-Han locals into the Chinese polity. However, these were only temporary measures: if Xinjiang was to be integrated into the Chinese state, Soviet citizenship and the related issue of extraterritorial legality would have to be solved. The Yi-Ta Crisis of 1962 provided an opportunity to resolve this issue, as the Chinese state later encouraged the emigration of Soviet citizens while simultaneously implementing new laws and regulations to eliminate extraterritoriality. Thus the Eurasian frontier of Xinjiang had been domesticated by 1962.
Access status: Embargo ,
Pandemic Shock, Employment Status, and Mental Health: The Moderating Role of Family Support
(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2026-04-29) Kulaijiang, Palizha; Bazarkulova, Dana; Bhowal, Rajarshi
Employing panel data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and leveraging fixed effects model validated by Lasso and Ridge stability checks, we find that job loss significantly deteriorates mental well-being. Among various forms of family support, only financial assistance from parents emerges as a significant buffer against the psychological distress of unemployment. Notably, the dynamic interplay of intergenerational support reveals a dual role. While employed individuals derive well-being from receiving more support from their children than from their parents, this pattern reverses during unemployment. The same imbalance becomes a psychological burden when unemployed, as individuals tend to rely more on parental support rather than support from their children. Exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, our Difference-in-Differences (DID) analysis uncovers a temporal paradox that unemployed individuals experienced a relative mental health advantage in 2020, which had dissipated by 2022. This pattern emerged even as the pandemic imposed a widespread and deepening psychological toll, as shown by Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) estimates. Finally, heterogeneity analysis identifies women, small-sized households, and adults aged 45 to 65 as the most psychologically vulnerable to job loss.
Access status: Open Access ,
Sexless minds, sexless bodies: Francois Poullain de la barre, Gabrielle Suchon, and early modern feminist thought
(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2026-04-28) Aitpenbet, Dana; Smith, Brian; Pisareva, Dinara
The thesis argues that the philosophical tools that early modern feminist thinkers have used to argue in favor of the liberation of women carry with them assumptions that are equally as limiting as the structures that they are trying to dismantle. The thesis shows that the liberatory arguments of the early modern feminists have unintended consequences. Thus, bringing the liberatory power of the arguments together with their unintended consequences, or their cost, reveals a tension within early modern feminism. The thesis focuses on two feminist thinkers from the seventeenth century France - Francois Poullain de la Barre and Gabrielle Suchon. Both of them have a goal of liberating women, both of them are from more or less the same intellectual milieu, and both of them use newly emerging and sophisticated philosophical tools when making their emancipatory arguments. What is more, both of them produce arguments that require women to give up on some aspects of their womanness. Drawing on the Cartesian method of radical doubt and mind and body dualism, de la barre makes his famous claim that “the mind has no sex”. By separating the mind from the body, de la Barre grants women rational equality, and uses the method of radical doubt to challenge the prejudices and customs that were used to subordinate women. De la Barre uses the strategy of de-sexing whereby the mind is viewed independently of one’s body. Nevertheless, the unintended consequences of de la Barre’s argument is that by prioritizing the mind, he renders the female bodies as philosophically irrelevant. What is more, de la Barre does not grant true rational equality, but he wants women to conform to a male-coded rationality. Drawing on the theological ideas, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, Gabrielle Suchon proposes the creation of a civil institution of celibacy, or a neutral life. Suchon acknowledges that the existing institutions of marriage and convent are deeply unequal and impossible to reform. Therefore, she proposes the institution of celibacy as a third option. By leading a neutral life, women would acquire freedom, knowledge, and authority. The strategy that Suchon uses is de-sexualization, whereby women must refrain from the sexual relations with men in order to acquire social and political equality. The unintended consequence of Suchon’s argument is that freedom and equality are only available for women if they abstain from the heterosexual relations and the embodied experiences.