Kyrgyzstan’s internal borders have been redrawn more than a dozen times since 1924, each shift reallocating pasture and water among ethnic communities. This project asks what those territorial changes reveal about power, decolonisation, and state-building in a small, mountainous country caught between China’s Belt and Road Initiative, lingering Russian influence, and climate-driven conflict. The problem is conceptual: Kyrgyzstan is often treated as a niche subfield of Russian and Soviet Studies, not as a postcolonial state in its own right. The researchers will produce the first outline political history of Kyrgyzstan’s internal borders over a full century, using local archives to trace how resource reallocations affected different ethnic groups. If successful, the project will build an interdisciplinary network linking Central Asian Studies with African Studies and other regions facing similar postcolonial challenges. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven research. It will not directly change infrastructure or policy, but it could reshape how scholars and policymakers understand contested mountain regions worldwide—a growing problem as climate change and nationalist revanchism intensify.
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Kyrgyzstan sits at the heart of some of the most disruptive trends in contemporary international relations. Proximate to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is second only to Ukraine and Belarus in enduring Russia’s influence; its mountainous borderlands make it vulnerable to climate change and conflict. Yet this relatively young state, originating in the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast of 1924, is subject to much conceptual uncertainty based on contested understandings of its past. The Soviet collapse of 1991 was unexpected. Sudden independence led to an economic crisis and fuelled ethnic conflict. The population of this small mountainous country must now manage the results of Russian imperialism, Soviet-style modernisation, and now invasive global markets. What can we learn from Kyrgyzstan about the challenges of state-building alongside rapid change? Can it be productively compared to other regions struggling with postcolonial legacies? In this centenary year for Kyrgyz statehood, ‘Staggered Decolonisation’ will do two things: 1. Produce an outline political history of Kyrgyzstan, 1924-2024, focusing on territorialisation. Using local archival holdings, the project will trace changes in Kyrgyzstan’s internal borders as a means of analysing changes in the field of power; the frequent alterations to the USSR’s administrative-territorial structure always implied a reallocation of resources like pasturage and water for use by the local population. The project will assess how reallocations differed between Kyrgyzstan’s ethnic communities, interpreting change as stop-start ‘staggered decolonisation’. The findings will substantiate a theoretical analysis of whether Kyrgyzstan should be conceptualised as a postcolonial state. The resulting argument, which engages with core controversies in Central Asian Studies (CAS) today, and will develop conceptual understandings of postcolonial change, will be made in an article submitted to Past & Present. 2. Build Kyrgyzstan into an interdisciplinary network of scholars investigating patterns of state power in mountain regions across the globe. This network will be constructed via two workshops. The project will itself make a key contribution to these workshops, with its findings providing a guiding logic for the selection of other participants. The resulting international network will build new connections between CAS and other regions, such as African Studies, helping to liberate Central Asia from its limiting niche as a subfield of Russian and Soviet Studies. ‘Staggered Decolonisation’ will form the basis of a larger, longer-term project on mountainous states in comparative perspective, with special emphasis on power, territory, and decolonisation. This larger project will improve understandings of conflicted mountain regions today, a growing problem emerging from climate change, fluctuating global economic conditions, and nationalist revanchism. Thomas and Rindlisbacher will devise an AHRC Standard Research Grant bid to support this next stage of their work. A deeper analysis of Kyrgyz history will be cerntral to this new proposal, with ‘Staggered Decolonisation’ having provided the outline framework. ‘Staggered Decolonisation’ builds on an established international academic partnership with the experience and language skills necessary to fulfil the project’s aims in an efficient manner, and to disseminate findings widely. The project will build bridges between policymakers and scholars of Central Asia, decolonisation, and spatial history.
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