Dr Rico Isaacs is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom. His research interests lay at the intersection of authoritarianism, nationalism, culture and political theory in post-Soviet states with a specific emphasis on the Central Asian Republics. His work has examined the formal and informal institutional sources of support which create order and disorder in authoritarian regimes explored in his first monograph Party System Formation in Kazakhstan: Between Formal and Informal Politics (Routledge 2011). Rico’s research has also investigated the relationship between different nationalist discourses in cinema and the consolidation and contestation of authoritarianism in Kazakhstan in Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and post-Soviet Culture (Bloomsbury 2018). A forthcoming book analyses how the relationship between opposition and regime contributes to the paradox of order and disorder in authoritarian regimes through case study of Kazakhstan (Political Opposition in Authoritarianism: Exit, Voice and Loyalty in Kazakhstan, Palgrave 2021). Rico was also the co-editor of Nation-Building and Identity in the Post-Soviet Space: New Tools and Approaches (Routledge 2016) and Theorising Central Asian Politics (Palgrave 2019), and is the current serving editor of Central Asian Survey.
