Pushed against the Wall: The Fight against Drug-Related Corruption in Kazakhstan

This article discusses the continuing influence of Soviet institutional legacies on police corruption in present-day Kazakhstan. Several conclusions are drawn from a qualitative analysis that featured semi-structured interviews with officials, drug entrepreneurs and other relevant actors, participant and nonparticipant observations, and qualitative content analysis of mass media reports and archival data. After Kazakhstan’s most senior political leaders recognized the urgency of anti-corruption reforms, many legal and institutional measures against drug-related corruption were introduced. These measures, however, did not fully produce the anticipated results. Data presented here indicate the causal effects of institutional legacies of the criminal justice system. Inherited from the Soviet era, these institutions continue to provide incentives for corrupt police officers from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to manipulate the legislation against heroin and marijuana trafficking. More importantly, the same informal institutional incentives seem to hinder the enforcement of newly introduced anti-corruption legislation.