Russia’s war against Ukraine triggered profound shifts in material and immaterial post-imperial entanglements across the former Soviet space. Yet the scale of these socio-economic and cultural changes remains undertheorised to date and cannot be adequately captured by state and elite-centred analyses alone. Through the prism of ‘vernacular geopolitics’, this research project addresses ongoing transformations in the Russia-Central Asia affective space and their relationship to perceptions of sovereignty and political legitimacy. Based on fieldwork observations and qualitative interviews with business communities, labour migrants, and cultural activists in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the project explores their shifting socio-spatial practices and discourses and how they affect the geopolitical image of Russia and the Central Asian states. It also looks at the concrete implications of these practices and discourses for transnational trade, business networks, sanctions evasion and financial circuits as well as diasporic communities and labour movements, cross-border educational and medical services, and familial connections.

• What geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts has the full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered from a distance in Central Asia?
• How do non-elite actors respond to transformations in transnational trade and labour movements, business networks and diasporic communities, familial connections, and the transit economy of parallel imports, triggered by the war?
• Which implications do shifting popular socio-spatial practices and discourses have for perceptions of sovereignty and the political legitimacy of domestic regimes?

• Multi-sited ethnography
• Participant and non-participant observation
• Qualitative interviews with target groups in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan
• Mass media and official discourse analysis