"The border as a social paradise and a dead end" in the report of Guzel Sabirova

A member of the Centre for Youth Studies Guzel Sabirova presented her work: "The city at the border. Geographic distance as a social paradise and dead end: stories about the history of space in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan" at an international seminar on the Eurasian borders in Istanbul.

"Now the discussion over boundaries in the social sciences is being developed actively - says Guzel, - but this is one of the only few projects in which an attempt was made to compare the social processes that accompany the appearance, disappearance and redefinition of boundaries. Following the results of those seminars collective monograph will be published, including problematisation and comparison of the different borders in Eurasia. Here presented Georgia and Abkhazia, Russia and Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Ukraine."

In the presentation, Guzel made an attempt to show how city that is not located directly on the border, but has a direct connection to redefining of borderland. The report is based on the data collected in Karakol, a city in the north of Kyrgyzstan, in the foothills of the Tien Shan. Karakol was founded in the middle of the XIX century as a military and administrative center of Russian Turkestan, part of the defense border line of Russian Empire. In the memoirs of city old residents border position in the context of the Soviet past appears as a spatial metaphor for its progressiveness. In Soviet times, Karakol was the starting point from where the mountain and China expeditions took start, and a major industrial center. Centralized supply attracted to Karakol lot of immigrants from Central Russia and Ukraine. Today the city is in crisis due to geopolitical (collapse of the Soviet Union), economic (industrial decline) and social (emigration) reasons. Hense the transformation of borderland meanings: the border in the eyes of the inhabitants of Karakol becomes synonymous with the dead end, hopelessness and distance of the city from the major social and economic life of Kyrgyzstan.