Ideas, Institutions, And Regionalism: Kazakhstan’s Shifting Narrative Within The Eurasian Economic Union?

Abstract

This thesis examines how Kazakhstan's presidential discourse has constructed, justified, and adapted its relationship with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) across a baseline period of 2019-2021, and in response to two major shocks - the January 2022 protests and the February 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. To investigate this, the study employs Discursive Institutionalism (DI), as developed by Vivien A. Schmidt, and analyses a corpus of official speeches, presidential addresses, EAEU summit statements, and high-level policy documents, supplemented by triangulated evidence from administrative responses and limited elite interviews. The central argument is that Kazakhstan's presidential discourse has not undergone an abrupt policy reversal but rather a emerging pattern of discursive shift: a gradual but analytically observable reframing of EAEU membership away from integrationist and neo-Eurasianist language toward pragmatic-sovereign discourse, emphasising economic functionalism, institutional equality, and Kazakhstan's role as an autonomous connectivity hub. Drawing on Discursive Institutionalism, where discourse is understood as both the representation of ideas and the interactive process through which political actors communicate and legitimize them, the study focuses specifically on communicative discourse that is, the public-facing articulation of policy ideas by political leaders directed toward broader audiences. In this sense, presidential discourse is treated not as a derivative reflection of internal policy coordination, but as an independent site of agency through which institutional constraints are actively reframed and presented as sovereign political choices. The thesis contributes to the application of Discursive Institutionalism in Central Asia and demonstrates the analytical value of combining presidential communicative discourse with administrative communication data.