Between the "De-Extremification Policy" and the "Belt and Road Initiative": Central Asian resistance to the rise of China

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This research investigates Kazakh and Kyrgyz responses to China's "deextremificationpolicy" (DEP) in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region(XUAR), and the concomitant effects of the DEP on Sino-Kazakh/Kyrgyzrelations in the context of China's grand geopolitical 'Belt and Road Initiative'(BRI).Moving beyond accounts of BRI that ignore the agency of Central Asianstates or those that focus entirely on state-actors, this study will instead drawtheoretically on critical security studies and critical geopolitics to locate boththe DEP and the BRI in the domestic nationalist politics of Kazakhstan andKyrgyzstan. It will explore how contested state/popular nationalist narrativesare used to construct understandings of national identities and geopoliticalimaginations about Sino-Kazakh/Kyrgyz relations.The study uses two main research methods; document analysis and semistructuredinterviews with local state and non-state actors. Interpretive PolicyAnalysis will be undertaken on government, media and populist sources todraw out the major themes of Kazakh and Kyrgyz discourses regardingChina's DEP. Further interviews with key actors will help to triangulate thisdata.This study will be a major contribution to understanding how nationalism andpopular protest in Central Asia has the potential to derail China's grandgeopolitical projects, or whether China's BRI will be a vector to further cementauthoritarian rule in the region.This timely multi-level and grounded research will provide the mostcomprehensive and original understanding to date of the relationship betweenamongst the most pressing human rights (DEP) and geopolitical (BRI and therise of China) issues of our age.