Seeing Revolution Everywhere: The 'Kazakhstan Spring' That Isn't
Why are outside analysts so ready to see a nascent Kazakh uprising that isn't really there?
While the world ponders what to make of a post-Kim North Korea, or the horrifying clashes in Syria, or the sad devolution of the Egyptian Revolution, there is another country where conflict is raising fears of instability: Kazakhstan.
Over the weekend, a long-simmering worker's strike in the western oil town of Zhanaozen boiled over into an outright riot, and in the melee with Kazakh security forces at least 15 people have been killed. Information from the area has been extremely difficult to come by, leading to many unanswered questions about what, precisely, happened. The Kazakh government declared a state of emergency until January 5 and has restricted access by journalists. One activist has been jailed for protesting the government's response and the Kazakh government is fending off criticisms of its violent response to the riots. The area seems to be in an uneasy calm but a great deal of tension remains.
While the situation in Kazakhstan continues to seethe -- hospitals are still treating wounded suffering from gunshot wounds and the streets of Zhanaozen are dotted with burned-out buildings -- it is important to keep in mind what Kazakhstan is not. Kazakhstan is dealing with localized unrest. It is not dealing with an Arab Spring-style movement or even a revitalized global terrorist movement.
There is a certain path dependency to describing situations of political and social unrest in familiar terms -- that is, when analysts look at a new situation then tend to contextualize it in terms of what they're most familiar with. So when a terrorism analyst looks at Kazakhstan he or she often sees the specter of terrorism; when a political analyst looks at Kazakhstan he or she sees instability.
Similarly, Alexander Shustov starts his piece off by calling Kazakhstan "a hotbed of extremism," which does not at all match what I saw in my own time there. He ties the oil workers' riot to a series of terrorist acts carried out by Jund al-Khalifah but it's hard to see any evidence that the two are connected. The implication is that unrest in Kazakhstan is related to and inspired by the Arab Spring.
The riots in Kazakhstan are actually a localized labor dispute between some oil workers striking for better working conditions and higher pay and the state-run oil company, OzenMunaiGaz (with the clever acronym OMG). There is also terrorism in Kazakhstan, a worrying trend that so far has remained very small scale -- limited to a few bombs and a bunch of scary talk on the Internet. But there's no apparent reason to combine the two into a broad argument about some Arab Spring-inspired uprising in Central Asia. And that does not match with the facts of what has happened.
There is no indication that Jund al-Khalifah enjoys any popularity within Kazakhstan (most of its leadership is in northwest Pakistan, anyway). Similarly, apart from a 12-person protest in Astana, the plight of those oil workers just hasn't resounded throughout Kazakhstan the way Mohammed Bouazizi's self-immolation rippled across the Middle East. Previous protests in Kazakhstan over Chinese land leases and high housing prices drew crowds that dwarfed even Zhanaozen's rioters. Additionally, Jund al-Khalifah remains an unpopular and marginal group within both Kazakhstan and the "global jihad" movement, no matter what its eager Internet videos say.

So, while we should keep an eye on Kazakhstan, we should also keep in mind what isn't happening. It's easy to fall into declaring the sky is falling every time something dramatic happens, but the reality is, sadly, far more boring.