About

We aim to explore contemporary environmental debates, practices, and discourses beyond the Western liberal model by focusing on local communities, state interventions, and resource exploitation in the Eurasian region. In particular, we examine the impact of the Soviet and colonial legacies, neo-liberal interventions, and recent conservative trends as hybrid factors that influence the way the environment is approached today in this region. The Eurasian space, which we explore, comprises Russia and India, and the countries and regions between these two major powers (Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent).

The project focuses on the question of identity and its relationship with space in human-nature encounters. We want to understand if local communal projects redefine modern identity forms such as citizenship or propose alternative ways of viewing community and identity in a post-secular world and in the times of the Anthropocene.

In order to answer these questions, we zoom in on empirical case studies of local environmental initiatives in Russia, Kazakhstan (post-Soviet space) and India, Bangladesh (post-colonial context) from a comparative perspective. We use the comparative ethnographic method in two sub-projects:
1) extractive practices, indigenous communities, and sacred sites; 
2) volunteer engagement for the preservation of natural sites.

The comparison between empirical case studies of local environmental initiatives will allow us to uncover the similarities and differences between the effects of two modernization paths (Soviet and colonial) on human-nature encounters and the local responses from below to new trends in the Eurasian region (resource extraction, conservatism, de-globalisation, and the re-territorialisation of identities). 

The research goals include:

• studying the global-local interface of social identity-development by focusing on the micro-level of local communities and their environmental activism in the Eurasian region.
• studying traits of of conservatism and anti-Westernism in local, community-based environmental initiatives in the Eurasian region (which differs from most scholarly debates in that field, which are often focused on the ideological, state and discursive level).
• applying a comparative approach to the study of environmental initiatives by local residents and indigenous communities in the Eurasian region. In particular, we want to study how local communities, for example religious or ethnicity-based, oppose “placeless” capital flows and resource extraction to defend a particular landscape or territory.
• exploring the types of imaginaries local environmental projects give rise to: future utopias, past community bonds and mythologies, decolonial and “rewilding” projects.
• studying comparatively, how post-colonial and post-socialist conditions, in particular through the effects of non-Western modernization path-ways and human-nature relations (the legacies of Soviet modernity and colonialism), affect collective identity making during civic engagement by local communities in the Eurasian region.
• on a theoretical level, combining the lens of post-colonialism and post-socialism in order to capture adequately the ways in which identity is experienced and conceived in relation to local space and nature (e.g., such as the re-enchantment of human life by local religious communities questions the knowledge boundaries set by enlightened rationality).