Final CFP AAG 2016: Shifting the Frontiers of Eurasia

Part of the Asia Symposium, “Highlighting Asian Geographies,” organized by the Asian Geography Specialty Group (AGSG)

Organizers: Mia Bennett, UCLA (mbennett7@ucla.edu); Andrew Grant, UCLA (angrant@ucla.edu)

Co-Chairs: Alexander Diener, University of Kansas (diener@ku.edu); Jeremy Tasch (jtasch@towson.edu)

Discussant: Stanley Toops, Miami University (toopssw@miamioh.edu)

The last five years have witnessed the rise of a multi-polar geopolitical order in Eurasia. Russia, China, India, and the US have all moved forward with their own regional projects. While Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union has foundered somewhat, it counts Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in its fold and puts forth a vision of reintegrating parts of the former Soviet Union. As China, the world’s largest economy, seeks to build ports and railroads in places like Pakistan and Burma to further secure trade linkages and transportation infrastructure, it has pledged $40 billion for its “One Belt, One Road” project, which could also potentially be supported by the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The US has proposed its own “New Silk Road” initiative, hoping to increase trade between India and Afghanistan.

These regional projects are both remaking the political economy of the region and recasting the roles of borderland provinces and states. Once deemed vulnerable “shatter zones” (Rieber 2014), many of these peripheral places are now seen as integral spaces for connecting new global production and trade networks and for exerting political influence. Reeves’ work in the Ferghana Valley, which finds a “fear of ‘things out of place’” and a desire among local and international conflict interventionists to “bring order to a region deemed chaotic” (2005: 67) could be scaled up to consider how and why states seek to reshape and reorder the fuzzy frontiers of Eurasia. Effects on these borderlands often go hand in hand with states rhetorically recasting the history, intention, and legitimacy of their regional roles; Megoran and Sharapova (2013) have found that Mackinder’s 20th-century term “heartland” has returned to contemporary geopolitical discourses. But the effects are more than simply rhetorical: The ways that powerful Eurasian states are attempting to expand their geopolitical presence is causing greater state penetration into “peripheral” lands, resulting in increased resource extraction, infrastructure development, and, in some cases, human migration. This transformation poses pressing questions: are these states’ projects mutually compatible? Are these material and discursive changes successfully re-orienting frontier regions? And finally, are these projects triggering local resistances?

***Please send an abstract by November 18 to the session organizers.***

References

Reeves, M. (2005). Locating danger: konfliktologiia and the search for fixity in the Ferghana Valley borderlands. Central Asian Survey, 24(1), 67-81.

Rieber, A. (2014). The Struggle for the Eurasian borderlands: From the rise of early modern empires to the end of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Megoran, Nick, and Sevara Sharapova, eds. 2013. Central Asia in International Relations: The Legacies of Halford Mackinder. London: C. Hurst and Co. Ltd.