Crisis, Risk, and Uncertainty in Modern Eurasian Governance. Managing the politics of fear and the politics of science in the era of COVID-19.

Faculty-development competitive research grants program for 2021-2022 (Covid-19 project)

The COVID-19 crisis has caused many difficulties in the countries of Eurasia. Beyond the immediate health crisis, the economic fallout will certainly have ripple effects, threatening to upend modernization projects like Kazakhstan 2020. Amid the economic and health crises, underlying questions of state-society relations loom large. The backdrop for this project is an intense modernization phase in Kazakhstan guided by projects like Kazakhstan 2050, which includes ambitious social, political, and economic reforms aimed at interjecting the country into the top 30 economies. These aims are both laudable and far-reaching. Yet the process of modernization is fraught with risks and uncertainties. It is a certainty that the spread of COVID-19 has been exponential because of the modern amenities of global trade and travel. The COVID-19 crisis had laid bare the simple fact that even the best government policies rely on wide-spread public buy in to succeed, and that between policy, implementation, and compliance lay complicated belief systems about what information is true and reliable. The approach in this project Crisis, Risk, and Uncertainty in Modern Eurasian Governance. Managing the politics of fear and the politics of science in the era of COVID-19 seeks to investigate micro-level or everyday interactions between the state and society that can illustrate theoretically relevant relationships related to risk, decision-making, and trust in authorities.