Boundary issues in Central Asia.

• Author: Gavrilis, George
• Position: Book Review

By Necati Polat Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, Inc., 2002, 282 pages

When Central Asia's states became independent, political analysts were pessimistic. All indicators seemed to predict conflict in one form or another: The states were poor, ethnically mixed, in need of drastic economic and political reform and had inherited boundaries that were at best arbitrary, and at worst officially disputed. One decade later, Central Asia's states have made variable progress in resolving their border issues and have engaged in bilateral and regional forms of cooperation. While some states have been more willing than others to cooperate across borders, most of Central Asia's boundary disputes are in remission. But is this remission a permanent one?

Necati Polat's ambitious work-based mostly on secondary English language sources and a few works in Russian--attempts to inventory and analyze the principal boundary issues affecting Central Asian states and their neighbors. The topic is admittedly a difficult one to approach. Covering events spanning two centuries, the author discusses a variety of issues: territorial disputes, potential separatist ethnic conflict and the (mis)management of the region's water resources. Polat promises to answer nearly two dozen related questions by combining perspectives from international law, international politics and political geography. Fortunately, he guides the reader by answering these questions in installments, and he divides the book into three well-packaged sections: "Border Issues," "Ethno-Border issues" and "Transboundary Waters."

Underlying these sections is the author's persepective that the international legal context, multilateral cooperative agreements and regional institutions temper the willingness and ability of states to revise boundaries that historically were imposed upon them. The first of the three principal sections, "Border Issues," logically begins by going back in time to demonstrate the arbitrariness of boundary-making and imperfect delimitation agreements that Russian and Chinese imperial conquerors crafted in the region during the 19th century. This section provides some adequate maps and proceeds quickly through time to explain the Sino-Soviet disputes of the 1960s. This narrative establishes for the reader the complexity of border disputes and related problems that the Central Asian states inherited at the time of independence. These disputes were the focus of various multilateral...