Politics & Power Quote by Nursultan Nazarbayev

Nazarbayev frames mass media as a post-Cold War instrument that should stop behaving like a battlefield and start acting like infrastructure. The phrasing is telling: media is imagined as something that has been "freed" from "relics" - not reformed by choice, but liberated from an outdated captivity. That word choice quietly shifts blame away from contemporary power and onto history, as if polarization and propaganda are merely leftovers, not tools still actively used.

The sentence piles up oppositions (nations and religions, rich and poor, countries and continents) in a way that feels deliberately panoramic. Its intent is diplomatic: he is asking journalists and broadcasters to validate a vision of stability where communication smooths over fractures rather than exposing them. In the late 1990s and 2000s, Kazakhstan pitched itself as a bridge state - Eurasian, Muslim-majority but secular, friendly to Russia, China, and the West. This line fits that brand: dialogue as a national export.

The subtext is where it sharpens. When a long-serving head of state tells "mass media" to serve peace, it can double as a soft demand for restraint: fewer destabilizing investigations, less oppositional fervor, more consensus. "Peace" becomes a moral claim that can crowd out messier democratic values like dissent and scrutiny. The appeal is rhetorically generous, almost ecumenical, but it also suggests a preferred media posture: mediator, not watchdog; harmonizer, not irritant. In a region where information has often been treated as a security domain, that is not just idealism - it is governance.