MULTI-SCALAR TERRITORIALIZATION IN KAZAKHSTAN’S NORTHERN BORDERLAND

Abstract

Terms used in the study of people/place bonding too often circumscribe thinking to either the most readily conceived and tangibly experienced scale of place – home/neighborhood – or to the most politically prevalent scale of place – the state. In doing so, researchers ignore the influence of places that help constitute identity between and above the aforementioned scales. A more elastic conceptualization of place attachment allows for mutability of place-identities and their capacity to be both multi-sited and varying in scale. With a long history of ethnic Russian habitation from the Tsarist through Soviet eras, the northern oblasts of Kazakhstan emerged as a borderland of potential irredentism akin to eastern Ukraine. Calls for secession and annexation have, however, been minimal thus rendering the region’s amalgam of place identities a ready case for considering relational geographies of borderland place-attachment.

Keywords:

• Borderland
• identity
• homeland
• kazakhstan
• place attachment
• Russian, territorialization

Notes

1. Khrushchev’s 1954 ‘gifting’ of Crimea to Ukraine has been portrayed as an historical wrong to be righted within Russia (Coynash and Charron 2019). Moreover, the Soviet delineation of the Kazakh ASSR/SSR and Russia border occurred in stages of ‘exchange’ between 1930 and 1965 with a final border agreement registered in 2005.

2. Sevastopol holds special meaning for Russians since the Crimean War (1853-1856). It’s role as a base for the Black Sea Fleet also plays into Russian place attachment (Biersack and O’Lear 2014; Charron 2016).

3. A natural/civilizational divide between the Russian Empire and the “West” was asserted by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Snyder 1998).

4. Autochthonous is a problematic term in place attachment research. Though beyond the scope of this paper, it is a relevant topic for future research.

5. For comparison across time see 1998 survey by Barrington (2001, 138).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Association of American Geographers [Summer Research Scholarship]; University of Kansas [General Research Fund].