Abstract

In the social sciences of Kazakhstan, social tension is most often defined in negative terms, characterizing society as unstable and prone to potential conflict. Consequently, the state of social tension is viewed as a phenomenon that must necessarily be eradicated. The semantic content of the concept of “social tension” varies from author to author, sometimes taking on a broader, sometimes narrower interpretation. Frequently, descriptions of social tension are almost indistinguishable from descriptions of the population’s social well-being, closely linked to the identification of a list of pressing socio-economic issues, which may subsequently lead to potential protest activities. From this perspective, over the past three decades in Kazakhstan, there has virtually been no period during which the relevance of the issue of social tension has been called into question.
This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing social tension, incorporating the examination of physiological, psychophysiological, and socio-psychological aspects, with a particular emphasis on empirical data drawn from sociological surveys. The paper advances the idea that social tension is temporally limited. Accordingly, it utilizes survey results collected during periods identified by the author as crisis periods: namely, the global financial and economic crisis of 2008–2010, which significantly impacted Kazakhstan’s economy, and the global covid-19 pandemic (2020–2022). As a control, survey results from the non-crisis year of 2024 are also presented.
The article classifies sociological monitoring indicators (based on nine questionnaire items) according to the aforementioned aspects. Based on the data, the author concludes that during 2009–2010 there were no physiological or psychophysiological causes sufficient to escalate social tension into protest activity. In contrast, during 2021–2022, a set of psychophysiological factors emerged that transitioned to the socio-psychological level, subsequently accompanied by a rise in dissatisfaction with the government’s performance and an increase in protest activity.