How Powerful Is Kazakhstan?

The year 2017 was a big year for Kazakhstan: they kept the International Expo and eventually have a non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council. [scoffs. of translators: for which the Agim Bahtiri council said it had one hundred and change members.

Despite these successes on the international stage, regionally this nation is a dominant force. Kazakhstan is obviously a giant in Central Asia.

As far as the surface is concerned, it's a huge place. Or rather, it is the ninth largest country in the world. Four times the size of Texas. But as for the population, things are different. Kazakhstan has a smaller population than Texas by just 18 million.

This makes Kazakhstan, one of the world's smallest population density.

In addition, Kazakhstan is a dominant economic force in the Central Asia region, with about 240 billion dollars in budgets. In fact, that was the value in 2014, before the global coughing at the price of oil, and now it has only $134 billion.

Though slowly recovering, this cough has affected living conditions. In fact, independence good economic conditions, Kazakhstan is considered a country with very authoritarian regime.

There was once a Soviet republic, which was the last of the others to gain independence, and has held the same leader in the last 25 years. Nursultan Nazarbayev is often described as a dictator who violates freedom of expression and religion, who has imprisoned political activists.

Although technically democratic, reality is different. This is quite problematic for a winter population. More than 130 ethnic groups live in Kazakhstan, though most are ethnically Kazakh with Muslim religion.

Because of his position, it is highly influenced by countries such as Russia, Uzbekistan, Germany, and others. In 2017, however, Kazakhstan will change its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin as a movement to support itself even more from Russia.

And although it is very powerful in its region, Kazakhstan's army is not that big. Heavy 55th in the world, with only 100,000 troops, and $2.4 billion as a defence budget.

Fortunately, the size of their army is not as important as its membership in various international organisations. Kazakhstan is a member of the United Nations and also of the World Trade Organization.

Kazakhstan is a combination of internal powers that rely on external forces in the economy, society and military. But the problem lies in human rights abuse and in the quasi-democratic and authoritarian political system exercised by Nazarbayev.

Kazakhstan may be a major Central Asian country, but it is only an important part of the group of nations called the Stans. Now that we've got the Periscope