Between the "De-Extremification Policy" and the "Belt and Road Initiative": Central Asian resistance to the rise of China

This research investigates Kazakh and Kyrgyz responses to China's "deextremification
policy" (DEP) in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
(XUAR), and the concomitant effects of the DEP on Sino-Kazakh/Kyrgyz
relations in the context of China's grand geopolitical 'Belt and Road Initiative'
(BRI).
Moving beyond accounts of BRI that ignore the agency of Central Asian
states or those that focus entirely on state-actors, this study will instead draw
theoretically on critical security studies and critical geopolitics to locate both
the DEP and the BRI in the domestic nationalist politics of Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan. It will explore how contested state/popular nationalist narratives
are used to construct understandings of national identities and geopolitical
imaginations about Sino-Kazakh/Kyrgyz relations.
The study uses two main research methods; document analysis and semistructured
interviews with local state and non-state actors. Interpretive Policy
Analysis will be undertaken on government, media and populist sources to
draw out the major themes of Kazakh and Kyrgyz discourses regarding
China's DEP. Further interviews with key actors will help to triangulate this
data.
This study will be a major contribution to understanding how nationalism and
popular protest in Central Asia has the potential to derail China's grand
geopolitical projects, or whether China's BRI will be a vector to further cement
authoritarian rule in the region.
This timely multi-level and grounded research will provide the most
comprehensive and original understanding to date of the relationship between
amongst the most pressing human rights (DEP) and geopolitical (BRI and the
rise of China) issues of our age.