Maxat Kassen is a Professor of Political Science at the Eurasian Humanities Institute (Astana, Kazakhstan), former head of the Foreign Information Service at the Kazakh National Information Agency - Kazinform (2003-2004), former Fulbright Visiting Scholar to the University of Illinois at Chicago (2011-2012), and fellow of the Annenberg-Oxford Summer Institute at University of Oxford (2011). His research chiefly focuses on government technologies, globalization of open government phenomena, digital politics and digital diplomacy. He has published more than 40 academic articles in various prominent journals and is the author of two books, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers and Routledge.