The Bloody January in Kazakhstan in 2022: Genuine Popular Protest or Attempted 'Coloured Revolution'

Abstract

The January 2022 violent events in Kazakhstan commonly known as Bloody January or Qandy Qantar was one of the most severe political crises in post-Soviet Central Asia. What originally started as calm demonstrations over the drastic increase in the liquid petroleum gas (LPG) prices quickly turned into a national upheaval, violent clashes, assaults on the institutions of state, and unprecedented action on the part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The crisis revealed the existence of underlining socio-economic disparities, citizen discontent with the authoritarian rule, corruption, and the persistence of the political elites allied to the previous President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Meanwhile, the Kazakh government and the Russians were presenting the unrest as an attempted colour revolution backed by foreign-trained terrorists and foreign actors aiming to overthrow the regime. This paper critically looks into the conflicting accounts of the events of January 2022 by assessing whether the unrest was a true popular protest movement, elite power play, or an externally instigated destabilization effort. The theoretical approaches employed in the study to examine the interplay between socio-economic grievances and state security discourse and the regional geopolitical interests include the Realism theory, Securitization Theory, Authoritarian Resilience, and Social Movement Theory. This article claims that the crisis in Kazakhstan is not explainable by just one thing. Instead, Bloody January was a complicated combination of social unrest, political maneuvers of the elites, authoritarianism, and Russian geopolitics in the post-Soviet environment. The paper also emphasizes the ways in which the crisis changed the position of the CSTO and strengthened wider arguments about regime security, sovereignty, and regional stability in Central Asia.