Securing Central Asian Frontiers: Institutionalisation of Borders and Inter-state Relations

This article develops the message that the artificially introduced administrative borders during the Soviet era, which were subject to the processes of re-delimitation after 1991, whether for reasons of security, administration, mutual distrust or the population’s ethnic attachment, have become results and means of political manipulation and pressurisation. This has resulted in further pushing regional states to follow mutually exclusive policies. Although for most of these states, border delimitation is not an objective but a declared way of achieving their security, the process of delimitation detailed below casts doubts on whether border delimitation, even if successful, would actually mean increased security for the region under the prevailing conditions of unilateralism and mutual distrust.