Book Review: Dosym Satpayev, et al., The Twilight Zone: Traps of the Transition Era
| DOI | 10.1177/0020881718763186 |
| Published date | 01 July 2016 |
| Date | 01 July 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
328 Book Reviews
Dosym Satpayev, et al., The Twilight Zone: Traps of the Transition Era
(Almaty: Alliance of Analytical Organizations, 2013), p. 356.
DOI: 10.1177/0020881718763186
The Twilight Zone: Traps of the Transition Era is a collective work written by the
group of eight well-known political scientist of Kazakhstan headed by Dosym
Satpayev, director of the Risk Assessment Group. Although the book is product of
the group of authors, there is no distribution of chapters. Indeed, The Twilight
Zone: Traps of the Transition Era is a ‘collective publication by Kazakhstan’s
political analysts’ as mentioned in the book summary.
The book starts with the authors’ definition of the term ‘twilight zone’, which
is described as a stage in development of any political system, when the question
‘What’s next?’ emerging from fear of the future becomes more important than
‘Why?’ generally this situation appears during the period of transition of power.
Some political systems have well-established procedure for change of the leader-
ship with little impact on the state. However, in countries like Kazakhstan, with
centralized political system and high personification of power, this process can
have serious consequences. Kazakhstan is the only country in the post-Soviet
space that did not experience transition of power. The first President of the
Republic of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbaev, who is seventy-seven years old,
has been heading the country for almost three decades. Consequently, questions
like ‘When?’, ‘How?’ and ‘What’s next?’ disturbs minds of people – from ordi-
nary citizen and ruling elite to a foreign investor. In other words, ‘twilight zone’
is a period of political uncertainty of post-Nazarbaev era, and The Twilight Zone:
Traps of the Transition Era is a unique attempt made by the scholars of Kazakhstan
to analyse the possibilities of transition of power in Kazakhstan in the near future.
The book consisting of four chapters can be divided into two main conceptual
parts, where the first chapter, ‘Dawn and Twilight of the Gods’ in Closed Political
Systems, and the second chapter, ‘The King is dead, long live ...?’ Foreign
Experience of Handover of Power in Transitional Societies, provide theoretical
ground. In order to predict scenarios and understand them, the authors start from
conceptualization of change of government in different parts of the world. It helps
reader to comprehend nature of transformation of power through different exam-
ples before discussing Kazakhstan’s case. Authors begin from the simple state-
ment ‘people always fight for power’ and go further to explain the basics of power
transition in different regimes. The main idea is to explain succession of power
and its practice with special reference to authoritarian regimes, so the reader
understands ‘why?’ this process is important and complicated in such societies.
Authors present their classification of power transition based on analysis of so-
called ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ scenarios of transition in different countries around the
world, the ‘colour revolutions’ in the post-Soviet space, and the ‘Arab spring’.
One of the uniqueness of the book lies in detailed facts, so every concept and idea
articulated by the authors has plenty of examples.
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