Authors

Discussion

Questions of recognition justice have been present in the Central Asian cultural agenda for decades. However, their development into coherent conceptual proposals with local specifics are complicated by the fact that the dominant Western vocabulary of justice, although speaks to the regional agenda to a certain level, cannot fully reflect its nation-building context intertwined with lasting Soviet legacies. Contemporary Central Asian recognition debates are questioning existing narratives around languages, gender representations in public history, and of decolonial thinking that has been on the rise in the region since the 2010-s and was accelerated by the war in Ukraine. In this presentation I approach existing lines of discussions around recognition issues in the region offered by ongoing academic debates with a focus on cultural policies and practices in Kazakhstan and support the conclusions from the literature review with research findings from Almaty. Challenges of contextualisation of Western justice discourse and of circulating justice concepts outside the regions where it originally took shape are also considered from the perspective of policy mobilities scholarship: what insights into local policymaking in culture can be brought to discussion when Western neoliberal rationality under the travelling narratives meets top-down solutions of authoritarian regime?