ARI Working Paper Series

Population change and migration have long been hallmarks of the vast territory now bounded by the political borders of Kazakhstan.The Silk Road network of trade and cultural exchange routes and nomadic pastoralist economies were early dynamics whose cultural imprint persists today.Profound demographic changes also followed the expansion of the Russian empire and the incorporation of Central Asian territories into the Soviet Union.Soviet-era collectivization, migration, international conflict, and forced resettlement greatly altered the demographic structure of the Kazakh SSR. Over the course of nearly two decades of independent statehood, the population structure of Kazakhstan has witnessed a state-level population decline, though with a marked spatial dichotomization of population change.This paper examines the population structure of Kazakhstan in 1989 and 2010, presents data on population change between 1989 and 2010 at the republic and administrative division level, and presents the spatial expression of intra-republic variation in population change over the course of Kazakhstan’s independence.