Journal
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY
Volume 23, Issue 6, Pages 731-764Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.03.004
Keywords
Uzbekistan; Kyrgyzstan; border; nationalism; geopolitics; gender
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In 1999 the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary became a brutal reality in the lives of borderland inhabitants, when it became the key issue in a crisis of inter-state relations. Mainstream explanations have suggested that the Soviet boundary legacy and convergent post-Soviet macro-economic policies made conflict inevitable. Drawing on critical geopolitics theory, this paper questions the implicit determinism in these accounts, and seeks to augment them by a political analysis. It suggests that 'the border crisis' was the product of the interaction of complex domestic power struggles in both countries, the boundary itself acting as a material and discursive site where elites struggled for the power to inscribe conflicting gendered, nationalistic visions of geopolitical identity. It concludes by insisting upon a moral imperative to expose and challenge the geographical underpinnings of state violence. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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