WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

The Russia-Ukraine war has unsettled post-Cold War assumptions about open borders, regional integration, and global economic interdependence across Eurasia. For Kazakhstan-a state deeply embedded in Russian trade, transit, and security infrastructures-the war has exposed the fragility of globalisation under conditions of sanctions, disrupted mobility, and geopolitical fragmentation. While existing scholarship focuses on macroeconomic adjustment and elite foreign policy balancing, less attention has been paid to how ordinary citizens interpret these shifts in real time.
This paper examines digitally mediated public perceptions of Kazakhstan’s socio-economic position during the war through the Four Rs framework-Redistribution, Recognition, Representation, and Reconciliation. Drawing on YouTube videos and associated user comments produced for Kazakhstani audiences, the study employs semantic and thematic analysis to explore debates over inflation, currency depreciation, labour market pressures, sanctions spillovers, and dependence on Russian transit corridors. Discussions of Russian relocators and cross-border mobility further reveal how “closed borders” are unevenly experienced, generating both economic opportunity and social tension.
Public discourse reflects a paradox of “being global after globalisation”: short-term gains from trade rerouting and energy exports coexist with anxieties over sovereignty, vulnerability to secondary sanctions, and constrained policy autonomy. The Four Rs framework enables a multidimensional reading of these tensions, illuminating how global conflict reshapes perceptions of economic justice, national identity, political voice, and social cohesion.
By situating Kazakhstan’s digital public sphere within broader processes of geopolitical fragmentation, this paper contributes to world-historical debates about how regional wars reconfigure globalisation from below.