Kazakhstan’s Nur-Sultan: where East and West meet on the steppe

 ABOVE: The capital city of Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan with landmark Baiterek tower. (PHOTO: iStock) The Republic of Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world by land area and is the world's largest landlocked country, covering a vast territory of 2,727,300 square kilometres. It is larger than Western Europe. Kazakhstan shares

Kazakhstan — the continued long march to liberal democracy

 Above: President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev (centre) celebrates the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of Kazakhstan, August 2020. It has been nearly two years since the first president of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, resigned from his office and transferred power to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, chair of the Senate and

The Republic of Kazakhstan 2019 election: Not our democracy but a democracy all the same

 People in the Western world really don’t know what repression is. It’s evident in our discourse on political issues when the words dictator and tyrant are used as low-brow insults directed at countries without much thought to the meaning these words carry. Few understand what real repression is, nor can