Nick Megoran – What happens when new international boundaries appear? The example of Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley

Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley has historically been a mosaic of social groups and identities. The emergence of international boundaries with the break-up of the Soviet Union imposed a new political geographical logic on the social fabric of the Valley. This talk explores the tensions between these two logics of ordering territory, and the effects on inter-ethnic relations. Focussing on ethnically-mixed rural villages along the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan boundary, it traces the fate of communities whose existence challenged both the new ideologies of nationalism and the analytical narratives of inter-communal tension.

Nick Megoran is a political geography lecturer at Newcastle University. His research includes the political geographies and geopolitics of post-Cold War inter-state relations, focusing on the building of nation-states in modern Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, with particular attention paid to border regions, boundary disputes and geopolitics, and the place of religion and the church in war and peace.