Madeleine Reeves is a research fellow in social anthropology at the University of Manchester, where she is completing Border Work, an ethnography of the new international borders in the Ferghana Valley.
The Ferghana Valley – the rich, fertile basin of the Syr Darya that today cuts across Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – has long been seen as a region defined by its ethnic and cultural tensions: a ‘Eurasian Balkans’ divided by artificial Soviet-era borders, a tinderbox ready to ignite. This view emerged during the Cold War, but it has taken on new life since the...
There is an eerie thrill to be had from walking through the home of a deposed president. Legitimate trespassing. Private vice exposed. By the time we came to gawp on Saturday afternoon, three days after the uprising that had overthrown Kyrgyzstan’s government on 7 April, the Bakievs’ house in the capital, Bishkek, was an empty, burned-out shell. Everything sellable had been taken,...
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