Eurasian Borderlands Research Project

Eurasian Borderlands Research Project

The areas of this research project represent a region that straddles Eastern Europe and Asia and where some of the last decades’ most momentous historical events have both unfolded and affected people’s life-worlds in tangible ways: the collapse of the Soviet Empire and of bordering Communist States followed by the emergence of new nation states and new center-periphery; minority-majority conflicts. We have witnessed how new forms of identity politics have unfolded in these areas involving a struggle for representation and what may appear as a conflict between secular and religious models of representation. These historical changes have produced new religious landscapes; new economic landscapes, new modes of interaction, new systems of meaning; and the flow in ideas, goods and people managed by various forms of border regimes.

The Eurasian Borderland project is headed by Dr. Tone Bringa and it is a comparative ethnographic study of post-Soviet peripheries, including southern Russia, Georgia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The project received financing from the Norwegian Research Council in February 2012 and it includes one postdoctoral and one PhD scholarship. In addition, the project has recruited two master students and one PhD student to conduct research on borderland issues in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In our investigations we are concerned with the ethnography of the everyday activities of people living at the territorial limits of nation states with a focus on their border crossings. While borders are seemingly universal territorial and political structures, borders become embedded in local communities, and border practises are shaped by socio-cultural processes. The ways that border operate, and their impact on people’s movement and everyday concerns, then, will vary with region and geographical locations. In that sense, borders encompass simultaneously legal claims of national territorial sovereignty, and localised practises continuously in the making.

There have been relatively few efforts to conduct borderland studies with an explicit comparative ambition. While a number of separate studies have been carried out along post-Soviet borders, there have not been conducted post-Soviet borderland studies that explicitly aim at synchronic and diachronic comparison. This project is an attempt to fill this gap by a comparative exploration of local and regional developments on both sides of borders in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Eurasian continent has over time been politically, economically and culturally shaped by imperial contestation. Many of the cultural and religious differences one may observe in post-Soviet peripheries have long histories that can be traced back to the development and territorial expansion of the Ottoman, Russian, Persian and Chinese/Mongolian empires and civilizations. An ethnographic and comparative project that focuses on borders across this continent thus invites historically informed analyses of border and frontier developments.