The Interaction between State Social Policy and National Cultural Heritage and its Impact on Society’s Mentality

The interaction between state social policy and national cultural heritage has become increasingly relevant in the context of digitalisation, demographic transitions, migration, geopolitical conflicts, globalisation, and changing patterns of social relations. These processes have implications not only for individual cultural expressions and formal institutions, but also for collective identity, social cohesion, intergenerational transmission, adaptation, and resilience. This issue examines the relationship between social policy, cultural heritage, and society’s mentality across diverse institutional and socio-cultural settings. The contributions consider how state policies shape cultural values and practices, while also examining how cultural heritage influences social attitudes, belonging, identity, education, migration, professional development, and responses to crises. Particular attention is given to Central Asian and Eastern European contexts, where post-Soviet transformations, migration, demographic change, digitalisation, and geopolitical developments have generated new challenges for cultural continuity and social resilience. In addition, a cultural analysis of student youth attitudes towards gender roles in southern Kazakhstan tests whether urbanisation reorders inherited value systems. I argue that cultural heritage is neither simply inherited from the past nor entirely determined by state policy. Rather, it is continuously reproduced and transformed through interactions among individuals, families, communities, institutions, and states. The study highlights the importance of considering cultural heritage as a dynamic social resource in the development and implementation of contemporary social policy. The issue is widened further by three contributions that carry this argument beyond the post-Soviet space. A critical analysis of the everyday moral ethics of Shaikh Hamiduddin Nagauri (1192–1274 AD) in the Hindu–Jain environment of thirteenth-century Rajputana; a review essay on social group work in Indian society asks whether a professional method formed in the Global North can be reconstructed from within another cultural, familial and spiritual tradition; and a commentary on ecological abuse reframes environmental degradation as a form of systemic violence whose testimonies are registered through ecofeminist and Indigenous epistemologies. Read alongside the Central Asian and Eastern European studies, these contributions confirm that cultural heritage functions as a dynamic social resource across markedly different institutional settings, and that its relationship with social policy is reciprocal rather than one-directional.

Central asia · Collective identity · Demographic change · digitalization · Eastern Europe · Ecofeminism · Indigenous epistemologies · intergenerational transmission · Migration · National heritage · post-Soviet transition · social cohesion · social group work · social resilience · state social policy · Urbanization · Cultural Identity and Heritage · Social and Cultural Studies · Social Policy and Reform Studies