The Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and the Central Asian Studies Network in Germany (CASNiG) cordially invite you to the 5th annual CASNiG conference on “Human-Environment Relations in Central Asia: Flows, Frictions and Frontiers”. This year’s conference will take place in Berlin and online on 12-13 November 2024.

The conference will focus on the relations that populations across Central Asia have and develop with their environs and the variegated transformations these relations have undergone in recent years as a result of multiscalar and overlapping social, economic, political, natural, and cultural processes. Extractivism and unfettered industrialisation under authoritarian governance suffuse habitats with toxic contaminants and displace human communities and other forms of life, while violating human rights and reversing democratisation processes. Rushed urban development and infrastructure projects reduce the complexities of landscapes and the diversity of values and meanings attached to them. Climate change and changing weather patterns challenge livelihoods by exacerbating water scarcity, crop failure, and livestock death. Rampant unemployment and outmigration produce scores of migrants that move to urban centres or to other countries, where they strive to understand their new environs, while facing new forms of injustices. Rentier and repressive socio-political landscapes continue to marginalise and alienate aging, female, activist, and queer bodies, who struggle to navigate societal shifts and/or defy the prevailing social order. How do people perceive, resist, negotiate, and adapt to these changes? What forms do these transformations of human-environment relations take? How do they become known and unknown, voiced and silenced, manifested and repressed?

Conference programme (PDF)