ABSTRACT
Why do illiberal regimes restrict the activities of marginal and benign religious groups? Since the late 1990s, increasingly illiberal governments across the post-Soviet space have redefined freedom of conscience as freedom from the influence of ‘non-traditional’ religious groups, which range from Evangelical Christians and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to Falun Gong and Tablighi Jamaat. Examining state discourses on national and religious tradition in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, I demonstrate that these policies represent part of a broader effort to recast pluralism as a subversive threat to national sovereignty. Drawing from Bourdieu’s later work on public politics and representation, I argue that political and religious elites seek to monopolise public authority by claiming a mandate to speak for an essential and sacrosanct popular will that transcends politics. I examine the new discourses on national tradition and religious orthodoxy that result from such claims, as well as the reasons for the popularity of such populist and illiberal policies among key strata. This research is based on a corpus of public documents (legislation, court rulings and policy papers, etc.) drawn from state databases in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. I also make use of data from waves four and six of the World Values Survey.
