New book on the Politics of Nation-Branding in Kazakhstan and Qatar
by Dr Kristin Eggeling, University of Copenhagen
On Friday the 13th of July 2018, I submitted a PhD thesis at St Andrews’ School of International Relations after three years and 290 days of quite hard work. Cheekily entitled ‘Brand new world: the politics of nation-branding in Kazakhstan and Qatar’, the thesis told a story about various high-profile international prestige projects pursued by the governments of Qatar and Kazakhstan – two relatively little discussed countries in International Relations – to put their names onto the global map. A little less than two years later, this thesis is now published as a research monography in Routledge’s Interventions Series under the title ‘Nation-branding in Practice: The Politics of Promoting Sports, Cities and Universities in Kazakhstan and Qatar’.
As a piece of academic work the thesis, and now the book, has two core ambitions. On the one hand, it operationalizes and develops a distinct analytical approach to the study of nation-branding, a genre of international identity politics that is commonly understood as a vain, superficial selling technique with little political salience. Specifically, it draws on shared insights from practice theory and constructivist notions of nationalism, identity, and power, to challenge this reading. Through its alternative lens that understands political identities as a complex practical-ideological achievement, it argues that nation-branding is neither neutral nor primarily economically motivated, but inherently politicized and tied to the legitimation of current political regimes. The starting point for this argument are a range of everyday practices and sites long ignored by international relation scholars. In particular, the book traces how the political leadership in Doha and Astana (now Nur-Sultan) have used participation in the international sports circuit, specular urban development, and the construction of ‘world class’ universities to first produce and then spread and stabilize favourable ideas about their state. Case studies include the Astana Cycling Team, the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the presence of American elite universities in Qatar, and the scattering of mega-structures designed by the world’s most famous architects around the states’ young capital cities.
The book’s second ambition is broader and somewhat hidden between the lines. As a project worked on and written in the 2010s, it serves as a reminder for the importance of healthy scepticism and nuanced criticism towards the simple political messaging that seems to dominate public discourse in our highly image-saturated, 24-h news cycle world. By taking a close look at how nation-brands are being made (or ‘practiced’), the book calls for a kind of (academic) criticism in the tradition of Foucault and others that understands critique not in a narrow sense of saying that things are not right, but in a deeper sense of wanting to understand the kinds of assumptions and modes of thought that the practices we accept rest on. This is why the reader will find detailed renditions of who they key actors are behind prestigious state-led development projects, as well as an extensive analysis into the main narrative tropes that legitimize and present those projects as given or ‘true’.
I recently had the pleasure of talking about the process of researching, writing and now publishing this book in the Nordic Asia Podcast Series of the Nordic Centre for Asian Studies (NIAS) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.