More Central Asian Countries Swapping Territories to End Border Disputes

More Central Asian Countries Swapping Territories to End Border Disputes More Central Asian Countries Swapping Territories to End Border Disputes Executive Summary: - Many of the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia are now taking the next and more difficult step of agreeing to swap small border areas to overcome problems created by Soviet map-making following commitments to resolve border disputes. - As this approach is applied, it will become easier for them to cooperate on other issues and help with the ethnic exclaves in the region. These places have regularly sparked violent conflicts since the Central Asian republics gained independence in 1991. - These moves are thus important in their own right, but they may prove important as a precedent elsewhere in the post-Soviet space where many borders that divide ethnic groups and ethnic exclaves still exist and remain sources of tension. The countries of post-Soviet Central Asia committed themselves last year to improving relations by resolving border disputes (see EDM, April 16, 2025). Ever more of these countries are now taking the next, more difficult step of agreeing to swap small border areas to overcome problems created by Soviet map making (Orda, March 13, 2025, June 23; Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 25). This approach will make it easier for them to cooperate on other issues in the future and help with the continued existence of ethnic exclaves in the region (see EDM, December 5, 2023). These exclaves have regularly sparked violent conflicts since the Central Asian republics gained independence in 1991 (see EDM, August 1, 2019; Orda, March 13, 2025). As such, this move is important in its own right. It may prove to be a precedent elsewhere in the post-Soviet space, where many borders dividing ethnic groups and ethnic exclaves still exist and, in some places, remain sources of tension (see EDM, November 28, 2023, April 17, 23, 2024). Many of the most intractable problems facing Central Asian countries today have their roots in Moscow’s policies during the Soviet Union. None has been more significant than those concerning the lack of correspondence between ethnic and state boundaries. In some places, Soviet officials drew the borders of these republics with little regard to the ethnic composition of their populations and frequently changed them. In others, the Soviet government established exclaves, ethnic areas belonging to one country that were entirely surrounded by areas belonging to another, which was a recipe for conflict Moscow could exploit. Most Central Asian countries have at least some problems of the former kind. At the end of Soviet rule, the region had more than 30 such exclaves (Kommersant, March 16, 2015). Most are very small and have few people living in them. Any yielding of territories to correct this situation, however, was anathema not only because the new governments and populations saw such concessions as an insult to their national dignity, but also because the international community viewed changes in international borders as dangerous and threatening. Many in the West and in Moscow acted as if the borders in the post-Soviet space had been, or had to be, treated as unchanging and immemorial (Window on Eurasia, November 4, 2020, May 21, 2021). That stance often led to divisions within the region and even to violence. Consequently, even before now, some Central Asian countries moved cautiously to resolve such conflicts by agreeing to swap territories, even though such moves remained generally unthinkable for others and the international community. Moscow commentators, for example, have blamed the West for conflicts over borders and exclaves in Central Asia (Fond Strategicheskoi Kul’tury, May 1, 2021). Faced with various impasses and open conflicts, and sensing that only territorial swaps could lead to improvements, some Central Asian governments over the last decade moved ahead despite this outside opposition. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan agreed to a swap in 2018, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan followed with another in 2023, but that accord was not immediately implemented (Window on Eurasia, August 14, 2018; Nezavisimaya Gazeta, January 25, 2023). Now, ever more of the Central Asian countries, as relations among them have improved and as border crossings are less fraught than they were, are getting into the act. Viktoriya Panfilova, who follows developments across the former Soviet space for Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta, says this development means “the exchange of territories has definitively shifted from the realm of abstract diplomatic formulas to the sphere of practical politics in present-day Central Asia” and has thus “changed the logic” of overcoming border problems (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 25). These words suggest she and others in the Russian capital now believe that more border changes there are ahead and, perhaps even more significantly, that this Central Asian development may affect other regions of the former Soviet space as well. This is particularly the case since Moscow has changed the Russian borders with Ukraine by announcing the annexation of Crimea and other Ukrainian regions as well and may soon do so with Georgia in the case of South Ossetia (see EDM, June 26). In short, what is happening in Central Asia may be both profoundly affected by and equally profoundly affecting what happens elsewhere. Panfilova focuses on two developments that have occurred over the last month. Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have moved to exchange small but equal amounts of land to bring ethnic Kyrgyz under Bishkek’s control and allow Astana to build new highways (24.kg, June 23). Two Kyrgyz villages with 2,500 residents, which had been in Uzbekistan, have been transferred to Bishkek’s control in exchange for several hundred hectares of land that will help Tashkent improve its transportation network (Orda, June 23). Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan may soon move in the same direction, some regional analysts are suggesting, given their inability to solve many of their border problems despite almost a quarter of a century of negotiations and the inherent difficulties of managing “a condominium” of the border regions, which a 2025 agreement between them established (Orda, March 13, 2025). Even the most recent territorial swaps in Central Asia have not attracted much international attention because of their sizes. Panfilova’s article may change that by raising the specter of other former Soviet republics taking similar steps. Moscow may now be willing to consider them a positive rather than a threat, as it has traditionally done when others have suggested territorial swaps as a solution to otherwise intractable problems. (This author is particularly alive to that possibility of the attacks on his proposal in 1992 for addressing the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict by transferring Armenian-populated Karabakh to Yerevan’s control in exchange for Yerevan giving Baku control of the Zangezur corridor between Azerbaijan proper and its non-contiguous Nakhchivan exclave, thus giving both countries something that they have wanted. For the origins of this so-called “Goble Plan,” see “Coping with the Karabakh Crisis,” Fletcher Forum, 16:2 (1992); and for a discussion of the fate of this idea, see Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, June 9, 2000.) The situation in the South Caucasus has now changed to the point where such an idea is moot, but some Russians remain convinced the West wants to use it elsewhere, possibly to create a land bridge between Central Asia and the Turkic republics of the Middle Volga (Window on Eurasia, March 11, 2018). Such notions are fantasies, of course. The concern about the impact of border changes in the former Soviet space is unlikely to disappear, especially if it proves that other non-Russian countries in the region should follow suit. Moscow is showing itself willing to engage in such moves, and ever more Central Asian governments have decided to resolve their border problems through such swaps.