Introduction: 30 years of Central Asian studies – the best is yet to come

Marat, Erica

doi:10.1080/02634937.2021.1994921

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…For example, inquiring into the everyday practices of sustainable food production (Jehlicˇka 2021), geographies of land ownership, or slow violence in land grabbing across Central and Eastern Europe (Kušić 2020;Vorbrugg 2019) has already contributed to the reanimation of the peripheral knowledges, in parallel with some new exploratory connections with the postcolonial scholarship from the South (Galuszka 2021; see also Müller 2021). Moreover, historical and contemporary accounts of the effects of Russian/Soviet territorial politics have been discussed in Anglophone scholarship extensively (Artman 2013;Bichsel 2021;Kassymbekova 2011;Lazarenko 2022;Shelekpayev 2018; see also Marat 2021) but only recently started to inform global theorizations. This allowed for reclaiming local knowledges from their post-Soviet area studies 'containers' while at the same time recapturing the emancipatory potential of socialism to inform a new decolonial project (Kušić, Lottholz, and Manolova 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

More-Than-State Ontologies of Territory: Commoning, Assembling, Peopling

Smirnova

Golubchikov

2023

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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The idea of territory as a bounded, state-centric enclosure has been recently confronted with the help of decolonial insights. This paper attempts to overcome the resultant dichotomies between the statist and organic readings of territory by demonstrating how the making of the Russian state has been contingent on decolonial narratives and territorial imaginaries that have far exceeded the notions of the state as such. The Russian political geographic traditions have historically allowed for the coexistence of multiple and heterogeneous conceptions of territory, which were varyingly assembled to fit specific geo-political intentions. This paper delineates three ontological origins of the Russian territory that have consequently played key part in shaping the Russian territorial politics: (i) the ontology of commoning, deriving inspiration from communal land use and the collective autonomy of the peasant society, (ii) the ontology of assembling, grounded in the anthropogeographical imaginary of the 'borderless' Eurasian landmass and its nomadic livelihoods, and (iii) the ontology of peopling, grounded in the taxonomies of modernization and rational distribution of human subjects. Scrutinizing the interplay of these ontologies extends the understanding of the porosity and plurality of the concept of territory and offers insights into the roots of Russia's own geo-political worldviews and their coloniality.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

More-Than-State Ontologies of Territory: Commoning, Assembling, Peopling

Smirnova

Golubchikov

2023

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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Making Sense of Central Asia Sources of Epistemic Uncertainty

Elmuradov

2023

SpringerBriefs in Political Science

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Central Asia is in flux, and so are the perspectives and angles of intellectual inquiry, as are the modes of and approaches to the scientific investigation of the region. This paper sets out to discuss the role of academic positionality essential to this flux—caught between modernity and tradition—and reflects on one of its striking effects, epistemic ambiguity. In light of knowledge-related turns in the social sciences, notably, the epistemological twists and turns entailed in postmodernist, postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist critique, the study of academic positionality and its implications in the Central Asian context is a worthwhile pursuit.

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