‘What have you done, brother Putin?’: Everyday geopolitics and Central Asian labour migration to Russia

The geopolitical positioning of Central Asia as the centre of the‘Eurasian Heartland’ has been the subject of extensive debates inacademic and policy circles over the last three decades. However,the mainstream geopolitical narratives on Central Asia tend tofocus on grand-level geopolitical players and discourses, therebyreducing the region and its populations to passive entitieswithout any agency. Not much has been said about how thesegrand-level narratives are reflected and operate within the micro-level, everyday spaces, relationships and experiences of ordinarypeople. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining theeveryday, micro-level discourses and experiences of geopoliticsamongst Uzbek migrant workers in Russia and their left-behindfamilies in Uzbekistan – a form of ‘everyday geopolitics’. Thepaper is based on a transnational ethnography of Uzbek migrantworkers in Russia and in their home village in Uzbekistan,conducted between January 2014 and November 2019.