The media-savvy political scientist has emerged as a potential successor to Kazakhstan’s president. But his vision of a modern nation comes with strict limits on dissent. From Eurasianet.

To hear Yerlan Karin tell it, it was never his goal to get to the pinnacle of Kazakhstan’s somewhat opaque political pyramid.

“Initially, I didn’t plan on being in government service,” he told a business podcast in November 2023. He thought his foray into politics “would be temporary.”

Yet in late August, Tokayev appointed the 50-year-old ex-political scientist to the newly resurrected post of Vice President of Kazakhstan, putting him in position to become the 73-year-old Tokayev’s successor.

“That Yerlan Karin became vice president was expected,” Andrey Cherbotaryov, a political analyst at the AlternativaCenter for Current Studies in Almaty, told local media. “I don’t doubt that after a certain period, the current vice president could become the third leader of Kazakhstan.”

However, it may be a while before any transition takes place. The Supreme Court ruled this summer that the new constitution approved by voters in March allows Tokayev to run for another term in 2029.

Karin exemplifies the new elite that has risen up around Tokayev since the Bloody January unrest in 2022 prompted the president to clear former President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his allies out of government.

Karin and other figures of Tokayev’s “New Kazakhstan,” like 45-year-old Prime Minister Oljas Bektenov and 46-year-old parliament speaker Aibek Dadebay, are relatively young technocrats who began their political careers after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The vice president has proven himself media savvy, whether taking his turn on a polygraph for a television show, or shooting the breeze on podcasts. He exudes a vibe that’s part professorial and part cool dad.

“I try to keep up with the trends,” the father of six explained on the Dope Soz podcast in October 2021, after admitting he listens to Drake and before he revealed his top Netflix shows. And, yes, he reads comments on his social media posts.

Though Karin may differentiate himself sharply from the stereotypical staid, Soviet-trained apparatchik, in fact, the break is not so stark.

A New Face, Familiar Instincts

Like many in government, he seems suspicious of watchdog groups seeking to hold officials accountable for their actions, seeing them as pursuing agendas often at odds with government aims. The government’s civil society critics “have little interest in discussing the positive changes in Kazakhstan” so they can keep “making money,” he alleged in a March 2025 interview with Qogam News.

“Unfortunately, there are many of these organizations [and] people that parasite off, in the literal sense, certain situations and certain problems,” he claimed.

Originally a political scientist who studied terrorism, Karin cycled back and forth for two decades between the think tank world, academia and political posts. Stops included the prime minister’s office, regional government, Dariga Nazarbayeva’s political party and Nazarbayev’s administration, before he landed at the head of a state TV channel in 2017.

Tokayev hired Karin in 2019 as an advisor and promoted him to the top of the ranks of the administration amid Bloody January and its aftermath.

Karin, with his doctorate in political science and a lengthy record of research publications, embodies the social contract of the Tokayev era: the promise of expert governance in exchange for narrow democratic options.

Karin has been described as one of Tokayev’s closest confidants and, while his official brief has always been vague, he’s emerged as the administration’s chief theorist, giving meaning to the president’s reforms and rollbacks. Throughout his tenure in Tokayev’s inner circle, he has emphasized the development of a stronger national identity.

From Political Scientist to Power Broker

Karin was born to a factory worker father and a seamstress mother in 1976 just outside Shymkent, but the family soon moved to Aktobe in western Kazakhstan.

His parents would leave early in the morning, well before school started, so his mother would sit young Yerlan in front of the television as she left, Karin recounted in a 2013 Astana TV documentary. It was always the news, he said. “As a kid, I knew all the main secretaries of the [Communist] Party,” he said. “I lived by the political news, as it turned out, from childhood.”

In the mid-1990s, Karin taught history and geography in an Aktobe high school before he received a doctorate from Al-FarabiKazakh NationalUniversity in 1999 and founded a think tank with his friend, Dosym Satpayev, who remains among the country’s most prominent political analysts.

“We already knew then that he was someone with big ambitions, presidential ambitions,” Tolganay Umbetalieva, an Almaty political scientist who overlapped with Karin at university, told local media.

After a 2011 suicide bombing in Karin’s hometown of Aktobe caused a flare-up of violence in Kazakhstan that was eventually linked to Islamic extremism, Karin turned his research to terrorism. He had a stint as a visiting professor at AmericanUniversity in Washington, D.C., in 2013 and 2014.

“[One] of the key problems was the identity crisis of young Kazakhstanis,” Karin said later. “And why did that crisis happen? Because transformative processes in society are taking place very quickly here.”

Defining Kazakh Identity — and Its Limits

Those themes have carried over to Karin’s role in Tokayev’s administration.

“Our society needs a constructive ideology,” he said on the Dope Soz podcast. “I want to cultivate freedom, freedom of thought.”

When discussing his vision of “shared values,” Karin tends to emphasize a unique Kazakh-ness and more openness to modernity.

The former history teacher is an avowed aficionado of Kazakh history. He has a collection of arrowheads filling several cases. He co-wrote a book about Kazakhstan’s ancient stone statues called balbals. And, he has paid special attention to the development of Kazakhstan’s film industry.

And, Karin recounted, when he was head of the national broadcaster Qazaqstan, long-time staff were taken aback when he decided to air flamboyant Q-pop boy band Ninety One’s music videos.

Their music “is what teenagers are thinking about,” Karin said on the podcast.

Both facets of Karin’s identity-building project and calls for free thought have limits, or, “redlines,” as he wrote in a June 2024 newspaper op-ed. Those redlines demarcate discussions of interethnic and religious relations, language and foreign policy. It should not be considered censorship, just an appeal to reason, Karin has said.

As prosecutions of journalists, opposition politicians and activists rolled on, civil society representatives disagreed.

Though Karin is now a heartbeat away from Kazakhstan’s presidency, observers caution not to assume the last rung of the ladder is already in hand.

“In my view, the president himself doesn’t know how the [transfer of power] will happen,” said pundit Asylkhan Mamashyly. “There’s no guarantee that tomorrow, today’s vice president will become the president.”

Alexander Thompson is a journalist based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, reporting on current events across Central Asia. He previously worked for American newspapers, including the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier and The Boston Globe.

This article originally appeared in Eurasianet. Republished by permission.