Going beyond defiance: redefining women's engagement in collective mobilization in central Asia

This study examines the gender dynamics of elite-challenging collective action in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, with particular focus on women's roles in pro-democratic mobilization. Existing research has often relied on narrow frameworks that overlook how women participate in contentious politics under conditions of cultural and political constraint. To address this gap, the paper introduces an Expansive Conceptualization of Collective Action (ECCA), which reconceptualizes agency as a repertoire of practices shaped by structural limits, cultural norms, and relational contexts rather than as resistance alone. Drawing on WVS survey data (n = 1,276) and employing factor and multivariate analyses, this study (a) develops and validates a new latent ECCA construct through exploratory factor analysis and reliability testing, and (b) empirically contrasts ECCA with more conventional measures. The findings highlight women's critical role in political mobilization efforts and underscore the need for broader, context-sensitive frameworks to capture gendered dynamics of collective action in hybrid regimes.