As its premise, this report supports the notion that life in a state’s border region is closely entwined with life within the two neighbouring states simultaneously rather than just one state: networks snake back and forth across borders, economic exchange makes use of a borderline, neighbouring political systems influence domestic policy, and local political negotiation employs the presence of an international boundary in sometimes surprising ways. Thus, for example, we are able to appreciate the ways in which political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan fundamentally affects the socio-economic opportunities of ethnic Kyrgyz in neighbouring Tajikistan; or how the ‘pacification’ of Afghanistan influences the new connectivity of the Pamir region. In other words, a state’s border policy never takes place in a socio-political vacuum. Borderlanders, that is, those groups living in the vicinity of a border, do not simply accept rhetorics of control by a state and reorientate their lives along permissible avenues of exchange. They can adapt to or struggle against this rhetoric, but their social networks transcend official categories demarcating states and administrative units. Locally held cognitive maps of borderlanders and their inhabitants as well as actually practised boundary crossings will take the officially demarcated boundary into consideration, but will also ignore it where this is deemed beneficial locally.....
Controlling Borderlands?
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