This lecture is co-sponsored by the UW–Madison Department of Political Science.
About the Lecture: Authoritarian regimes instrumentalize tradition, but how and why? This talk examines how secular authoritarian states, navigate the tension between formal secularism and the rising influence of entrepreneurial religious actors in the public sphere, with particular focus on Kazakhstan. Marika Olijar argues that regimes do so in the service of regime maintenance and moral authority at two levels. At the elite level, regime actors co-opt cultural intelligentsia through prestigious grants, funded symposia, and career incentives: keeping elites compliant and setting the boundaries of permissible cultural discourse but rarely reaching ordinary citizens. At the meso-level, the state co-opts religious traditionalist influencers (RTs)–figures with massive public reach on YouTube, podcasts, and state media–to do the culturally sensitive work secular elites cannot: producing pro-regime discourse that simultaneously secures the regime’s moral authority as protector of religious traditions, Kazakh culture, and family values without sacrificing its secular commitments.
This talk focuses on the meso-level mechanism. Using field interviews from Kazakhstan, Olijar first establishes what co-optation looks like on the ground, tracing how specific religious traditionalists shift their rhetoric before and after entering state-aligned platforms. She then presents preliminary text analysis of a corpus scraped from 2014–2026, showing how co-opted RTs’ rhetoric converges over time with regime-backed messaging. Cases center on figures such as Nurlan Imam and Mukhamedzhan Tazabek, whose YouTube content can be compared to that of the state-affiliated Muftiyat, exploiting channel-level and individual-level variation to identify co-optation in practice.
About the Speaker: Marika Olijar is a fifth-year PhD candidate in political science at UW-Madison. She specializes in comparative politics, post-Soviet Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. She studies religion and politics, informal institutions, and identity. She earned BAs in Slavic Studies and Political Science and a REEES Certificate from the University of Pittsburgh. She attended the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (Syracuse) and the LAPOP Summer School in International Survey Methods (Vanderbilt). She was an American Councils Title VIII research scholar in Kazakhstan (2024-25). She speaks Ukrainian, Russian, and Kazakh. She has been published in Central Asian Survey.