International Conference: Beyond 1989: Childhood and Youth in Times of Political Transformation in the 20th Century

Beyond 1989: Childhood and Youth in Times of Political Transformation in the 20th Century Institute of Advanced Studies at the...

Revolution From Within: Experts, Managers and Technocrats in the Long Transformation of 1989

The programme for our collaborative conference with Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena is now available. The conference will form Imre Kertész Kolleg...

Registration Open for our British Academy Conference: Global Neoliberalism, 7-8 June 2018

Global Neoliberalism: Lost and Found in Translation British Academy Conference 7-8 June 2018 The University of Exeter and 1989 after...

Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe

Professor James Mark’s co-edited volume Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe is now available through...

The Future of the Past: Why the End of Yugoslavia is Still Important

By Ljubica Spaskovska A new socialist model is emerging in the western Balkans. Can its political vocabulary transcend the ethno-national dividing...

Writing Human Rights into the History of State Socialism

By Ned Richardson-Little The collapse of the Communist Bloc in 1989-1991 is viewed as one of the great triumphs of...

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Tag: capital city

Reinterpreting National Ideology in the Contemporary Urban Space of Astana

Dr Nelly Bekus, alongside Kulshat Medeuova (Eurasian National University, Astana, Kazakhstan) has recently published the article Reinterpreting National Ideology in the Contemporary Urban Space of Astana in the Urbanities Journal. This forms part of a Special Issue: The Dreams and Nightmares of City Development  Vol. 7 · No 2 · November 2017.

The article analyses the way in which the Soviet legacy has been combined with practices of public representation of national ideology in the space of the new capital city of Kazakhstan, Astana. It examines how cultural and political elites exploit various archaic elements of the traditional imagery of the nation in the context of modern state-building. Referring to various examples in cityscape the article aims to show how the national ideology handles tradition not as a coherent corpus of ‘inheritance’, but as a reservoir of potential symbols, which can be used creatively for the fashioning of a national image of the capital city both in the international and in the domestic arena.

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