Discursive hedging under external identity polarisation: Kazakhstan’s accession to the Abraham Accords

How do middle powers engage politically polarising international initiatives without importing external identity polarisation into domestic politics? This article examines that question through the case of Kazakhstan’s accession to the Abraham Accords. Drawing on a corpus of 27 official documents published between April 2023 and January 2026, it applies directed qualitative content analysis with a rule-based codebook and document-level co-occurrence analysis using Jaccard similarity measures. The findings show that Kazakhstan embeds accession within a stable legality–de-escalation narrative anchored in UN-centred legalism, diplomatic dialogue, and normative balancing through reaffirmations of the two-state solution and civilian protection. References to the Abraham Accords cluster most closely with mediation, strategic balance, and bridge-building rather than with identity-based or religious-solidarity framing. The article conceptualises discursive hedging as a communicative mechanism within broader hedging practice rather than as a separate subtype of foreign-policy strategy. The findings suggest that Kazakhstan uses familiar legal and humanitarian language to reduce the symbolic weight of accession itself. The article’s contribution, therefore, lies in showing how established diplomatic vocabulary is organised to make a politically sensitive act of joining appear limited, procedural, and non-exclusive rather than as a visible alignment.