Brotherhood or Otherhood? Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Their Shared Borderland

Roles

Author: Ekaterina Mikhailova

Visualisation concepts: Ekaterina Mikhailova, Iaroslav Boretskii and Mela Žuljević

Cartography: Iaroslav Boretskii

Advisor: Jana Moser

Ekaterina: To start a conversation about how my idea of visualising conflict and cooperation between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan at large and at their borderland in particular has materialised, I would like to bring in some important background information about my research underlying this visualisation. My work with Central Asia started in 2022-2023 from my postdoctoral project at the Leibniz Institute for Eastern and South-Eastern European Studies (IOS) embedded in the KonKoop Competence Network and continues to this date, summer 2026. In that time, I have changed jobs twice and moved to the Arctic as Associate Professor of Border Studies at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. As a new Arctic resident, I felt the urge to work closely with my neighbours, Arctic indigenous people, and be involved in addressing the challenges indigenous people face in the Arctic. These collaborations have been transformative for the way I work with other regions, including Central Asia.

The first discussions of the Atlas between the KonKoop Visualisation Lab and me and the first attempts of visualisation took place back in 2023. Yet, this exchange was interrupted with my departure from the project. The exchange resumed in late 2025 and spring 2026.

Iaroslav: This project firstly brings greater visibility to a Central Asian region that has received little attention so far in the atlas – nice to see another one in the area! Moreover, it highlights the challenge of visualizing complex spatiotemporal phenomena, particularly political processes that unfold over time. How can we communicate such a thing effectively through a single scrolling module with smooth transitions? This was the question we were working on for several months producing the case.

Ekaterina: Providing a long perspective was crucial for this visualisation because if one limits their gaze to the present or even the last decade, all one could gather is the highly centralised fraternal relations between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. For understanding the complexity of this relationship and the hidden unease surrounding it, one has to extend the time horizon to the first decade since independence of the two states. My own realisation regarding the importance of early independence years for nation-building and border-making in former Soviet Union stems from my work in the project “The Transformation of Soviet Republic Borders to international Borders” (2018-2019) led by to Prof. Jeremy Smith. I was glad to bring in this perspective to the Atlas.

Iaroslav: One of the key challenges for making this visualisation was the introduction of a temporal dimension by incorporating years and the events that took place in the two countries. Ekaterina provided a list of events that needed to be positioned directly on the map canvas. I suggested to use a timeline module together with a vertically oriented map. This seemed more suitable because the timeline itself extends along the direction of the screen as the user scrolls. A vertical layout was therefore expected to improve the readability of both the map and the timeline.

Ekaterina: As a scholar working on Central Asian topics but not hailing from the region, I was cautious not to overstep my role while making a visualisation. For this reason, I opposed Iaroslav’s suggestion to turn the map, so the state border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan appears as a vertical line separating (and connecting) the two countries, with Uzbekistan on the left and Turkmenistan on the right. In my view, this solution, while creative, was not something I am comfortable with. Turning a map felt like an unintended act of imposing epistemological hegemony on the region by outsiders. As a result, we kept the conventional map orientation.

Iaroslav: In order to avoid creating an excessive number of separate map frames, the events and processes represented on the map were organized into groups that would progressively populate the visualization. This approach reduced the number of individual map canvases required and ultimately made it possible to incorporate the timeline directly alongside the map, making the temporal progression considerably easier to follow. Here, the Visualisation Lab mobilised its experience of making timeline modules gained during the visualisation of the Abkhazia case (https://visualisingconflictpeace.de/cases/infrastructure-linkages-in-patron-client-relations ).

Ekaterina: It quickly became evident that visualizing changes in bilateral and cross-border realities on a static map is misleading. Central Asia is one of the regions undergoing rapid and dramatic landscape transformations, making static maps inadequate. This is particularly evident in the ongoing desiccation of the Aral Sea. I experienced this firsthand during my visit to Moynaq in Karakalpakstan, a former fishing village once located on the sea shore, now over 150 km from the Aral Sea. I emphasized that without depicting the Aral Sea's shrinkage, our visualization would be inaccurate.

Iaroslav: To maintain accuracy, I redrew the historical outlines of the Aral Sea for different years, showing how its extent progressively diminished over time. In addition to the political, social, and cross-border processes represented on the map, this element introduces an important environmental dimension and makes the changing ecological context visible throughout the timeline.

Ekaterina: The scarcity and incompleteness of data meant that precise geolocating of facts was often far from straightforward. For example, the scope and details regarding repression in the borderland often was unknown – e.g., where exactly ethnic Uzbek families were evicted to in Turkmenistan in 2004-2005 remains unknown. The reported facts are shown on the map with a degree of detail available - on the respective side of the border or in a particular region.

One such imprecision is worth a special mention: the visualisation of changes of the boundary between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. We know that the boundary was “adjusted” in the Shumanay district in 2005, yet the information on how exactly the borderline changed remains obscure. 

Iaroslav: Uncertain location was not uncommon for events we visualised. For example, the spatial extent of the plague outbreak in 2004 remains unknown to us. In addition, the locations of certain formal or institutional events were not always evident. In such cases, it was necessary to assume a certain approximate or more abstract spatial relationship and position the events on the map accordingly. Therefore, the data has a somewhat fragmented spatial context. While many events can be linked to specific points, cities, or locations, others can only be represented through approximate or interpretative spatial references. 

Ekaterina: Yet, positioning the events on the map was only half of a challenge. Another challenge came from choosing suitable icons.

Iaroslav: The main icon source for the map comes from various contributors at flaticon.com. Several icons were generated and refined via AI (ChatGPT). Many of the events were difficult to visualize because of their specific cultural and social contexts. This became a distinct and particularly complex part of the design process, as it was difficult to develop a visual language that would represent all of these events appropriately and consistently. For instance, it was not immediately obvious how to represent cultural days taking place in different cities on the map, or how to visually communicate events such as an assassination attempt or an embassy storm. After sharing the first draft, I received more specific guidance from Ekaterina regarding how particular events should be represented or illustrated on the map.

Mela: We initially suggested to conclude the visualisation with a slider which would allow the reader to “slide” between the conflict and cooperation maps. This would allow a comparison of the maps and their juxtaposition. But Ekaterina, you pointed to critical issues with such a way of seeing in regards to the temporal perspective?

Ekaterina: While the visualisations produced for the Atlas are meant to be read side by side, it was clear to me that the usual juxtaposing tool with two images overlayed on top of each other would not work. Each visualisation presents a set of consecutive events: the first one shows the crisis dynamic which culminated in 2002 when the two states nearly came to war with each other, and the second one presents increasing collaborative activities from mid-2000s to mid-2020s. Conflating over the thirty years of interactions into a static image showing all icons from all the years of conflict and collaboration at the same time will be a misrepresentation rather than a summary, confusing rather than revealing, as both conflict and collaboration were diffused in time.

Mela: For these reasons, we decided to maintain a timeline view with several maps showing key periods of time which Ekaterina delineated. We discussed the possibility of visualising conflict and cooperation events next to each other on these period maps. However, this idea was dismissed in order to keep the focus on how the conflict was made invisible in the period of cooperation and coming together. As the conflict events were pushed under the carpet, making them visible within a cooperation map would be misguiding. The juxtaposition view would make sense in future potential visualisations if we would like to zoom into specific spatialisation patterns within the mapped events or if we wanted to zoom into specific areas of the maps for a more detailed view of how they were affected by both sets of events. Still, the uncertainty and lack of data currently makes such research difficult to undertake.