Abstract
In 2019, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the oldest post-Soviet authoritarian leader, stepped down from his position as the first and the only president of Kazakhstan, the largest and most richly resource-endowed state in Central Asia. This unexpected move prompts a closer look at Kazakhstan’s political transformations, from the fall of the Soviet Union to Nazarbayev’s resignation and the early post-Nazarbayev transition under new President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. The social contract theory allows for analyzing interactions between the Kazakh elites and the people as part of a long-lasting informal agreement that started when the public had yielded their political freedoms in exchange for the state’s generous redistributive policies. The paper argues that in the late 2010s, the volatility of the global oil price and economic underperformance had significantly undermined the Kazakh social contract, weakening Nazarbayev’s legitimacy, one of the key motivations behind his “benevolent” resignation.