As Ben cogently illustrated in his series on the national delimitation in Central Asia (in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), the establishment of national borders in the region was hardly the arbitrary and unilateral division by Stalin that so many have claimed it to be. Still, few would make the converse argument that the current borders perfectly represent existing nationalities and ethnicities in Central Asia.

The Center for Global Development, a Washington DC think tank, recently published a working paper about the impact of artificial borders on development. The study is by Alberto Alesina, Bill Easterly (controversial author of The White Man’s Burden), and Janina Matuszeski. The study defines artificial states as “those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by people on the ground.” I will not go into the details, but the authors detail their empirical method for determining whether or not a country falls into this category; their metric is quite interesting, and worth a read.

Basically, the study correlates various measures of political and economic success with artificiality. Almost across the board, the study finds that artificial borders “are a significant hindrance to the political and economic development of the independent states that followed the colonies.” Interestingly, the study found no correlation between artificiality and war.

Although most Central Asian countries more or less fall into the category “artificial states” as defined by this study, it seems likely that these countries are nonetheless outliers in at least some of its findings.* For example, variables such as literacy – something the Soviet Union did rather well – must have been significantly impacted by inclusion of the Central Asian countries, despite the fact that the study found a significant and especially strong correlation between artificial borders and illiteracy. If the dataset is made public, it will be interesting to see the statistics of Central Asia as a region against regions more commonly thought of when discussing partition, such as Africa, Palestine, and the Indian subcontinent.

In one instance, the study does reference Central Asia indirectly:

…citizens can rearrange the borders of artificial states. Indeed this happens; just look at the breakdown of the Soviet Union. In fact it is quite possible that as time goes by many currently straight borders will become squiggly as they are rearranged. Relatively newly independent countries have had “less time” than countries which have been never colonized to carve their borders as a result.

The implication being that, over time, countries within the former Soviet Union may rearrange their borders to more accurately reflect the distribution of ethnic populations. Perhaps this is why President Karimov is so keen on making Uzbekistan Uzbek.

*As far as I am aware, the dataset used in this study is not publicly available. Consequently I am not actually positive the Central Asian countries were included in this study, but because of the above reference to the Soviet Union, I am assuming they were.