My PhD thesis examines the post-Soviet nation-building of Kazakhstan through the lens of higher education. Kazakhstan presents an interesting case of a post-Soviet transitional country that encounters challenges in the process of transition from communism and state socialism toward democracy and market economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence in 1991 have significantly changed not only the economic and political landscape of Kazakhstan. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, the thesis is particularly interested in the ideational transformation interrelating these different dimensions with a view to ensuring the legitimacy of the new government guiding the nation in the new era.

Drawing on Foucault, Bourdieu, as well as Poulantzas, the thesis further develops Gramsci’s notion of a system of intellectuals to shed light on the role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in establishing hegemony. This perspective foregrounds the contestations that inform the ways HEIs create, curate, and disseminate knowledge. These contestations continually play out between the evolving ideas of and perspectives on social reality, on the one hand, and the experiences of being involved or being excluded from the creation and curation of relevant knowledge, on the other.

The state policy of 2011 on research productivity (Kuzhabekova, 2017, p.121) serves as a point of departure for exploring this role of HEIs. The adopted policy is aimed at increasing the research productivity at Kazakhstani HEIs by introducing a requirement for faculty members to publish in journals with a nonzero impact factor in order to qualify for promotion (Kuzhabekova & Ruby, 2018, p.266). The study situates this important HE policy reform in the broader context of the post-Soviet transformation and the attempt of the Kazakhstani government to re-position the country in a globalised world where English has become the lingua franca. Interviews with faculty members of different universities shed light on how this new publication policy impacts the relationship between the different HEIs as well as between the different generations of academics. It identifies important changes in how academics relate to the national as well as international system of intellectuals, to use Gramsci’s term, with an important consequence for the type of knowledge that gets valorised by the imagined community of Kazakhstani HEIs.