Kanat Makhanov – Page 4

August 27, 2021

English Language as a Prerequisite for the Development of Kazakhstan

According to the annual report by Education First (EF), Kazakhstan ranks very low among other countries in terms of the English proficiency level. In 2020, it ranked 92nd in the English Proficiency Index list among 100 countries around the world [EF, 2020]. The situation looks somehow contradictory because multilingual education […]

July 19, 2021

Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine: Not In the Commonwealth Of Independent States Any More, Not In the European Union Yet

Since recently, Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia have been engaging in active mutual cooperation in their pursuit of European integration. All three states signed their respective association agreements with the “European Union (“EU”)” in 2014. On June 24, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the three countries held meetings with the […]

June 10, 2021

Studying the Public Perception of Climate Change and Environmental Issues in Kazakhstan

One of the global factors that determine the main vectors of global development in the 21st century will be climate change. Concerns about the adverse effect of human activity on the environment and notable shifts in the global climate started to rise by the end of the 20th century. Currently, […]

May 11, 2021

The Commonwealth of Independent States and Three Decades of Regional Cooperation in the Post-Soviet Space

December 2021 will mark 30 years since the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was founded. The “Agreement Establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States” signed by the leaders of the Byelorussian SSR, the Russian SFSR, and the Ukrainian SSR on December 8, 1991, gave birth to the organization [Prlib.ru, 1991]. On […]

April 19, 2021

Changing Configuration of the Global Democracy: A Brief Analysis of the Democracy Index Report

Apart from the COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 has been marked by an unprecedented decline of democracy in the world. The latest issue of the Democracy Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit registers the lowest score of the global democracy (5.37) recorded since the index began in 2006. According to […]

April 6, 2021

South Korea’s Immigration Policy and the End of Demographic Isolationism

South Korea is an outlier among high-in-come countries in terms the share of immigrants in the population. According to the UN Population Division statistics, immigrants made only 2.3% of the population of the Republic of Korea in 2019, which is nowhere near as much as other developed countries have (14%). […]

March 20, 2021

Back to European Integration: Resetting the Foreign Policy Priorities of Moldova

The election of Maia Sandu as the President of Moldova on November 15, 2020, led to drastic changes in Moldovan politics and its foreign policy. As she had declared earlier, the new President of Moldova started to take actions aimed at intensification of the European integration of Moldova since she […]

March 12, 2021

Turkey’s Place in Mongolia’s “Third Neighbor” Policy

From Turkey’s perspective Mongolia is a very distant and little-known country with a small population. There is neither maritime connection between the two, because Mongolia is a landlocked country, nor direct active land transport route. In the pre-pandemic 2019 the bilateral trade between Turkey and Mongolia barely reached $43 million, […]

February 19, 2021

The Turkic Side of Ukraine’s Political Identity: The Role of Crimean Conflict in Ukraine’s Nation-Building

Since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2014, the two countries have lived in a constant confrontation mode. It can be said that the active phase of the conflict was a continuation of the previous long-lasting controversies regarding the underlying principles of the development models of the two […]

January 17, 2021

Horizons of Oil Era in Light of the COVID-19 Crisis

One of the largest economic shocks that have marked 2020 was the tremendous decline of oil prices that broke the minimums of 2016 and reached the levels of 2003 [Markets.businessinsider.com, 2020]. In 2020, the estimated oil demand dropped by unprecedented 9.7% compared to 2019 [OPEC, 2020]. Strict quarantine measures, as […]