Talk by Nick Megoran (Newcastle University) on What happens when closed borders reopen? A hopeful example from the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan interface'

Cambridge Central Asia Forum invites you to a talk by

Nick Megoran, Newcastle University

on

'What happens when closed borders reopen? A hopeful example from the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan interface'

Date: 2 February 2024

Time: 11am-1pm

Venue: Room SG2, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT 

Zoom Registration: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrf-uhrz8sG9ToxANGS2trU5JbGLSpmw-A

Biography: Nick Megoran is Professor of Political Geography at Newcastle University. He has been conducting research on nationalism, nation-state building and ethnic minorities as viewed from borderlands in Central Asia for nearly 30 years. He has written numerous articles on these topics and authored or co-edited a number of books including Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary (Pittsburgh, 2017), Central Asia in International Relations: The Legacies of Halford Mackinder (Hurst and Co, 2013) and is currently writing a book called Whatever Happened to our Borderless World? (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

Abstract: Much recent work in border studies has been focussed on the violence of border closures. In an age of right-wing populism and xenophobia this is important but reflects western-centric preoccupations. There are other processes taking place in the world that sometimes get missed. This paper tells one of them, based on 25 years of fieldwork in a village on the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan boundary. Dissected by new boundaries and borders in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with new political leadership since 2016 a gradual reopening of previously-closed crossings has occurred. This has happened without any of the damaging consequences that the politicians who closed the borders in the first place warned of.  This example suggests that we should decentralize the analysis of the border fortification processes by not simply studying the violence of closures but also the hopeful possibilities for re-openings.

Everyone is welcome.