Eurasian Mirror: New Perspectives on The Russia-China Border

Abstract:In parallel to the postsocialist transformations and growing geopolitical significance of the Russia-China relationship, recent years have seen a surge of interest among Anglophone scholars in the Sino-Russian border and the borderland region around it. Working against a perspective focused on the language and decision-making of the political center, the books under review train their ethnographic and historical focus on specific local case studies to illuminate the Russia-China border as a site that produces, reveals, and sustains difference. At the same time, the border region emerges as a zone where the agency of the particular, the local, and the exceptional can assert itself against dominant, normative, or centralizing forces. Read together, these studies present the Sino-Russian border as both the key to the relationship and the space of its exceptions.