“Kazakhstani” Identity, Eurasian Regionalism and Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Biopolitics of Forced Migration, Modernity and Multilateralism

This paper examines a case of forced migration and its effects on the formation of national identity and the consolidation of state agencies, industries, and other formal organizations. A composite of several theories, namely “survival migration” and “biopolitical control” will be used to account for the case that features significant social transformation, conflict and even trauma. In the 1940s the population of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic underwent unprecedented migration of evacuees from the European parts of the USSR due to World War II. However in the same period the Soviet government conducted a “forced migration” policy for particular “ethnic groups” deemed politically unreliable in the context of World War II. In the 1950s-1960s, populations located in the European parts of the USSR were officially induced by the Soviet government to contribute to a massive industrialization initiative by relocating to industrializing regions in the Asian parts of the USSR. At around the same period, population dislocations in the People’s Republic of China caused a diaspora of Uighurs moving to the Soviet Union. The life activities of these migrants would be the basis for a new collective “Kazakhstani” identity that continues to the present day. However, this identity is distinct from, and in some cases opposed to, the historic primordial “Kazakh” identity held by the Turko-Mongol ethno-linguistic societies that inhabited Kazakhstan prior to the Soviet migrations. The government of the present-day Kazakhstan recognizes the significance of the Soviet migrations, and modulates the shift of political power towards ethnic Kazakhs. Checking the newly assertive Kazakh nationalist movement and the unresolved Uighur nationalism in Eurasia through regionalist-technocratic means may increase the viability of the more inclusive and socially constructed multicultural “Kazakhstani” and regional “Eurasian” identities and may help resolve the latent ethnocentrism in the SCO regional order.