This talk by Dr. Claudia Eggart will take place on Thursday, June 12 at 10.30am in room A303 (PER 21)

Abstract: In my doctoral research, I examine the rise and persistence of the world’s largest container-built retail hubs: the 7Km Market in Odesa, Ukraine, and the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The work spans the timeframe from the appearance of open-air markets in the early 1990s to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (1990–2025). It first traces their role as lifelines after the Soviet collapse, when disrupted supply chains and economic hardship pushed many—especially women—into trade. By the mid-1990s, shuttle traders supplied 75% of consumer goods, forging global networks bottom-up. While many similar markets vanished, 7Km and Dordoi have endured, nowadays supporting 20,000 livelihoods in Odesa and 75,000 in Bishkek wholesaling and retailing clothing, electronics, and vehicles. Throughout the chapters of my dissertation, I examine how the markets have become crucial nodes in international supply chains, fostering international networks, economic stimulation, and inter-ethnic encounters. I illustrate the skills and ingenuity of market entrepreneurs in sustaining the markets and find new ways to keep people, goods, and capital moving despite shifting trade policies, a pandemic, and war. Conceptualizing these interactions of global political events and the micro-scale of the markets as lived geopolitics – the key theoretical contribution of my work – I show how large-scale geopolitical changes are not just experienced but actively shaped from the ground up. In this way, my research challenges both the detached perspective of classical geopolitics, and a one-dimensional focus on top-down or bottom-up dynamics, instead highlighting the mutually co-constitutive dynamics between them.

Grounded in my research on the history and survival of two retail hubs in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, the concept of lived geopolitics offers a situated, practice-oriented approach to the emerging anthropology of geopolitics, foregrounding the experiences and agency of those often marginalized in dominant geopolitical discourse. By tracing the entangled trajectories of former Soviet republics, the research challenges the treatment of these regions as isolated or derivative and instead highlights their embeddedness in ongoing reconfigurations of imperial and global power. It also unsettles epistemological hierarchies in East European area studies by decentering Russia and amplifying perspectives rooted in local histories, transregional connections, and everyday struggles for livelihood and mobility.