Dr Rico Isaacs is a Professor of International Politics at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom. His research interests lay at the intersection of authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, and political theory. 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). Dr Isaacs’ research 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). He has co-edited three volumes, Nation-Building and Identity in the Post-Soviet Space: New Tools and Approaches (with Abel Polese, Routledge 2016), Theorising Central Asian Politics: the State, Ideology & Power (with Alessandro Frigerio, Palgrave 2019), and The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia (Routledge 2021, with Erica Marat). He also co-authored the textbook Politics: An Introduction 3rd Edition (with Barrie Axford, Victoria Browne and Richard Huggins, Routledge 2018) and is the current serving editor of Central Asian Survey.Read more about this authorRead less about this author