Public opinion towards China in Central Asia is commonly framed as a story of backlash, driven by fears of land grabs, debt traps, and economic displacement. Focusing on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, we show that these factors do not structure attitudes as prevailing accounts suggest. Drawing on the Audience-Context-Cues (ACC) framework, we argue that views of Chinese engagement emerge from the interaction between individual predispositions, interpretations of material conditions, and exposure to competing narratives. We test five hypotheses using 32,650 observations from 14 nationally representative waves of the Central Asia Barometer from 2017 to 2023. The analysis relies on survey-weighted generalised linear models with country and wave fixed effects, controlling for demographic characteristics, region, ethnicity, employment status, and media consumption. We find that perceived economic benefits, especially employment creation and infrastructure improvements, are the most consistent and significant predictors of favourable attitudes towards China. By contrast, perceived economic risks, including concerns about debt dependency and land acquisition, have weak and uneven effects. Interestingly, geopolitical concerns, particularly fears that closer ties with China could strain relations with Russia, are some of the most robust predictors of negative sentiment. Rather than signalling backlash, attitudes reflect material gains and regional power dynamics.
Challenging the common understanding in the relevant literature, this study reconceptualizes resilience to hybrid threats as a politically mediated process rather than purely a matter of institutional capacity-building. To examine how policy frameworks and political rhetoric interact to shape resilience, it traces Georgia’s security culture in the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian war. Through intertextual discourse analysis, the article cross-examines the institutional architecture of digital resilience, encompassing cybersecurity (systemic), media regulation (protective) and media literacy (empowerment) measures, with the government’s shifting rhetoric (2023–2025), while interview data provide contextual insights. The analysis reveals a discordant security culture manifested in fragmented governance and discursive struggle over resilience. Although formal policy frameworks normatively align with the West and consistently identify Russia as the principal security threat, governmental rhetoric portrays the same Western actors as sources of foreign interference and prioritizes political autonomy over cooperation while still invoking commitments to the constitutionally enshrined Euro-Atlantic trajectory. This dichotomy between institutional design and political discourse results in strategic ambiguity. It suggests that in hybrid regimes formal frameworks may function symbolically to signal external alignment, while practice is determined by short-term political calculations and discretionary authority, leaving institutions and societies vulnerable to evolving forms of foreign interference.
Thousands of nationals, referred to as foreign terrorist fighters and their families, who travelled to Syria and Iraq with the Islamic State and other groups, had remained in detention sites in north-east Syria from 2019 to 2026. This situation created humanitarian and security dilemmas for states of origin. While many governments resisted large-scale returns, Central Asian states repeatedly repatriated their nationals, though their approaches differed in scale, scope, and framing. To explain repatriation variation in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, this article analyzes the interplay of societal norms and traditions, state identity and branding narratives, and state security threat construction. The research draws on 63 semi-structured interviews with front-line practitioners, officials, international civil servants, and academics, conducted in 2022-2023 and 2024-2025. The findings indicate that repatriation strategies expanded when narratives of belonging, family responsibility, and preventive security aligned. When these factors conflicted, strategies became more securitized and limited in scope. The analysis also identifies recurring blind spots in gendered and age-based categories that undermined individualized assessment. The study contributes to debates on post-Soviet governance by linking counterterrorism to legitimacy, social order, and threat construction, and by specifying scope conditions under which similar dynamics may shape repatriation elsewhere.
