Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of three international indexes – the Fragile States Index (FSI), the Sustainable Society Index (SSI), and the World Governance Indicators (WGI) – as instruments for assessing political stability in Kazakhstan. In the context of growing global instability, the question of the adequacy of measurement tools acquires not only theoretical but also practical significance. The aim of the study is to identify the methodological strengths, and limitations of each index, and to evaluate their capacity to reflect the actual political dynamics. Methodologically, the article employs comparative analysis and case study. The findings indicate that each index captures only specific dimensions of stability: FSI identifies signs of state fragility, SSI measures environmental and social sustainability, and WGI assesses governance quality. None of them adequately captures the key stability mechanisms characteristic of Kazakhstan – rent redistribution, elite pacts, and external geopolitical balancing. Special attention is paid to the indexes’ response to the January 2022 Qandy Qantar events as a stress-test of their predictive capacity. The article concludes that indexes must be applied in combination with qualitative methods of analysis.