Does the Passport Matter? Statelessness and the Border Life in the Southern Kyrgyzstan

February 11, 2014

Elina Troscenko, University of Bergen

Abstract: Today’s world order of nation states implies a division of territories and people into nation states. However, there are over twelve million people who fall out of this established system. These people do not have citizenship of any state. They are stateless. It is estimated that in Kyrgyzstan there are over twenty thousand stateless people. Statelessness in Kyrgyzstan has resulted both from a Soviet period policy legacies, citizenship laws of the post-Soviet nation states and the existing distance and disconnection between the state and people. Providing a general introduction on the concept and issues of statelessness, this presentation will look at some aspects of statelessness in Kyrgyzstan. Based on an ongoing PhD project that focuses on stateless people residing in the border region of Kyrgyzstan, a preliminary ethnographic material on life in border area and on people’s everyday life concerns with identity documentation will be presented.

Bio: Elina Troscenko is a PhD candidate at the department of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. She holds a Master of philosophy in Anthropology of Development from the University of Bergen and her previous work has been focused on ethnic relations and boundary creating processes between Latvians and Russians in post-Soviet Latvia and on the identity maintaining mechanisms among internally displaced people in Georgia. From 2010 – 2012 she worked as a project coordinator at the Rafto Human Rights Foundation. Her current PhD project is a part of a research group “Eurasian Borderlands” in which various scholars are looking at border processes in Caucasus and Central Asia. Particular fields of interest are post-Soviet societies, state categorization, marginalized populations, exile, diaspora, nationalism, displacement, statelessness, and identity formation processes.

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