Sport and soft authoritarian nation-building

Authoritarian regimes have long taken an interest in promoting elite and mass sport, deploying it as both a nation-building strategy and a tool to elicit respect and legitimacy on the global stage. However, authoritarian regimes do not equally engage sport for these ends. Rather, as I argue, it is characteristic of ‘soft’ authoritarian regimes, i.e. those that rely less on overtly violent tactics of maintaining power (‘coercion’) and more on seemingly ‘positive’ tactics (‘persuasion’). Through the example of sport in Kazakhstan, and specifically the Astana Professional Cycling Team, I argue that nation-building through state promotion of sport illustrates the ways that soft authoritarian regimes such as that of Nursultan Nazarbayev perpetuate their rule. Adding nation-building as the sixth tool in the Schatz's (2009) ‘soft authoritarian toolkit,’ I demonstrate through discourse analysis and focus group research, how the nationalist performances surrounding elite sport are fundamental to allowing ordinary people to see their everyday practices and support for the ‘nation’ as something ‘objective,’ rather than intimately tied to the system of unequal power relations perpetuated by the ruling regime.

► Analyzes sport as a tool for nation-building and transnational image-making.
► Considers the relationship between authoritarianism and state promotion of sport.
► Presents the case of elite sport promotion in post-Soviet Kazakhstan.
► Gives example of the Astana Cycling Team and its popular reception.
► Concludes that sport is central to nation-building and regime resilience in Kazakhstan.