What forms of precarity do civil society actors experience in Central Asia? What are the sources of these precarities? In this article, I synthesize literature from political science and development studies to identify five top-down mechanisms of precaritization for civil society: (extra)legal restrictions on operations, financing activities, flows of funding from the Global North, professionalization, and the sociopolitical atmosphere. I draw on twenty-seven interviews with activists and human rights defenders in Kazakhstan to consider how civil society actors navigate structural constraints on their work. In line with the literature on authoritarian regimes, I find that civil society actors who criticize the regime face precarity through coercion and bureaucratic demands. But whereas development studies scholarship has been pessimistic about the effects of professionalization, Kazakhstan's civil society actors see their technical training and pressure to formalize their organizations as beneficial to their reputation and institutional leverage.

中亚的民间社会参与者经历了哪些形式的不稳定？这些不稳定因素的根源是什么？在本文中，我综合了政治学和发展研究的文献，以确定公民社会的五种自上而下的不稳定机制：对运作、融资活动、来自全球北方的资金流动、专业化和社会政治的（额外）法律限制。气氛。我利用对哈萨克斯坦活动人士和人权维护者的二十七次采访来思考民间社会行动者如何应对其工作的结构性限制。根据有关威权政权的文献，我发现批评该政权的民间社会行动者因胁迫和官僚要求而面临不稳定的境地。然而，尽管发展研究学术界对专业化的影响持悲观态度，但哈萨克斯坦的民间社会参与者认为，他们的技术培训和使组织正规化的压力有利于他们的声誉和机构影响力。