Henryk Alff
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1506779 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Henryk Alff |
| NOMBRES | Henryk |
| APELLIDO | Alff |
| FIRMA | ALFF H |
| AFILIACIONES | Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2577-0928 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 82 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2013 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
On the frontline towards resource independence
Sowjeterbe statt Nachhaltigkeit
Kazakhstan is pursuing an agricultural policy rooted in Soviet tradition. Large farms are seen as the engines of modernisation. They enjoy more state support than family farms. Agriculture is primarily practised in those areas of cultivation that were established in the 1930s and are marked by monocultures. Despite declining productivity, soil degradation, and the negative social and ecological consequences of monocultures, the diversification of…
Path Dependencies of (Un-)sustainable Land Use in Central Asia
Across Central Asia, agricultural and agroforestry practices have been shaped by a high-modernist approach since about the 1950s, with the aim of overcoming ecological limitations. Negative repercussions of this approach still affect local developments, but a shift towards resource-conserving production systems faces constraints—many of which relate to so-called ‘path dependencies’, i.e. historically-evolved institutions constraining the current …
Is the New Path a Modified Old Path
This article reviews the Soviet legacy in relation to contemporary cotton production in south-western Tajikistan and asks why farmers are still locked in to Soviet cotton production policies and practices despite post-Soviet regulatory, societal and environmental changes. With hindsight on Soviet agricultural production policies in Central Asia, this contribution scrutinises the perception of smallholder dehkhan farmers towards continued cotton p…
Maize-farming Forever
Based on qualitative and ethnographic field research in the Panfilov District of Almaty Region, Kazakhstan, and selected supportive quantitative data, this contribution explores the dynamics of agricultural transformation along the former Sino-Soviet border since the mid-1990s. It particularly scrutinises path dependency, as well as friction, in cultivation patterns navigated by local agricultural actors in the face of changing irrigation water a…
Old stereotypes and new openness
Since the Soviet breakup, rural communities in the Kazakhstan–China borderlands have faced cataclysmic social, economic, and ecological transformations. Collective and state farms have been replaced by precarious smallholder agriculture suffering from a decline in financial inputs and the deterioration of infrastructure. At the same time, dynamic transformations of border permeability (and trans-border reconnections) between Kazakhstan and China …
Coexistence or competition for resources? Transboundary transformations of natural resource use in China’s neighborhood
Over the past three decades, rural places along China's land borders have faced interconnected processes of sociopolitical, economic, and ecological change.These changes, along with an increase in transboundary investment by actors from China in infrastructure on the one hand, and in agriculture and resource extraction on the other, are locally met with a combination of suspicion, fear, and desire for future prosperity.This special issue scrutini…
Pfadabhängigkeiten in der Bioökonomie überwinden? Landwirtschaftliche Intensivierungsprozesse aus sozial-ökologischer Perspektive
Der Wandel zu einer „bio-basierten“ Wirtschaft, wie er in nationalen und internationalen Bioökonomie-Strategien propagiert wird, kann nur mit tiefgreifenden Veränderungen landwirtschaftlicher Systeme zur Steigerung der Agrarproduktion einhergehen. Besonders in Ländern des Globalen Südens gingen solche Prozesse jedoch meist mit unbeabsichtigten – oder in Kauf genommenen – negativen Konsequenzen wie Umweltdegradation oder die Verschärfung gesellsch…
Negotiating coastal infrastructures
Portuguese decolonization in the Indian Ocean World
Portuguese decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: history and ethnography." Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
On the move
Belts and roads every- and nowhere
This article scrutinizes the Maritime Silk Road Initiative by framing it not as a static, state-centric device to channel Chinese developmental ambitions, but by emphasizing the flexible character of its production and the provisional configuration of its materialization. It draws on assemblage theory as a conceptual angle to, on the one hand, focus on the agentive character of human and non-human ‘actors’ such as ‘traveling’ discourses of develo…
Assemblages and complex adaptive systems
In human geography and beyond, assemblage thinking has increasingly gained attention as a perspective from which to investigate the emergence and dynamics of more-than-human entanglements. Similarly, in the interdisciplinary field of social-ecological systems analysis, theories of complex adaptive systems have been employed to investigate how social and ecological dynamics and actors interact with each other on different scales. Nonetheless, desp…
The multi-dimensionality of space - an analytical framework for the empirical investigation of the production of place
The spatial-conceptual basis of the construction of place across the social sciences, including in human geography (and particularly in the field of area studies), has long been questioned and criticised for its strong grip on territorial and container-like thinking on spatiality.Alternative spatial dimensions, such as scale, place and networks, have been put forward by a range of authors.Building on these critical perspectives, this article prop…
Order at the Bazaar
Trading on Change
Postcards from Stanland. Journeys in Central Asia
The peculiarities of living in the newly independent republics of the former Soviet south since the late 1990s have evoked considerable journalistic creativity (of often questionable quality) among
Trading Worlds. Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers
Trading Worlds. Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers." Europe-Asia Studies, 69(7), pp. 1128–1129
The Art of Neighbouring
1 Apart from the Friendship Highway, at least half a dozen roads now reach the Nepal border or end very close to it.Four of them extend into Nepali territory, and two of them cross the Himalayan range.In the east, one road leads from Sakya to the upper Arun valley and almost down to the border at Kimathanka.A branch of this road leads to Riwu and is motorable almost
Getting stuck within flows
For more than two decades, the Sino–Soviet border was almost hermetically closed to the exchange of people and goods. In the late 1980s, however, exchanges resumed at a remarkable pace between the immediate border communities of Zharkent, in Kazakhstan, and Chinese Khorgos. But this situation was short-lived. Currently, trade turnover in consumer goods between the two countries is conducted primarily via the hub bazaars of Urumqi, in China, and A…
Flowing goods, hardening borders? China’s commercial expansion into Kyrgyzstan re-examined
The Dordoi Bazaar, in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, has in the past 15 years become a prime example of the increasing impact of China’s rapid development in this structurally and politically weak post-Soviet state and in relation to its people. Chinese-made consumer goods, worth several billions of US dollars annually, have been re-exported overland via Kyrgyzstan to wholesale and retail clients across Eurasia. However, the hardening of the stat…
Profiteers or moral entrepreneurs? Bazaars, traders and development discourses in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Drawing on recent ethnographic research, this article explores key aspects of contemporary discourses on the bazaar trade–development nexus in Kazakhstan. Wholesale traders at the Bolashak Bazaar in Almaty, part of the Barakholka bazaar agglomeration and one of the country's largest markets, have forged particular practices and visions of entrepreneurial development over the last two decades. These have been impacted by state-imposed modernisatio…
Chinese migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe
Migration processes and paradigm changes evolving between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and developing and transitional states since the beginning of the reform era are receiving increasing
On the fringes of the Harmonious Society
Since 1949, Tibetans and Uyghurs generally have been perceived as the two most problematic members of the PRC’s great family of peoples and been the targets of ‘carrot and stick’ measures designed to facilitate their integration into the PRC. In recent years, a solution to the problem of Xinjiang and the Tibet has been sought in accelerated economic development, yet this is perceived by both groups with great suspicion. Addressing this situation,…
Renegotiating Integration
This article explores the highly disputed modes of migration and integration of Mongolia's Kazakhs after the break- up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Over the past two decades, Kazakh migrants from Mongolia and their kin, still living predominantly in the remote Bayan- Ölgiy aymag [province], have developed transnational social networks. During multi- sited ethnographic fieldwork from 2006 to 2009, interviews with migrants and their relatives in an…
Getting stuck within flows
For more than two decades, the Sino–Soviet border was almost hermetically closed to the exchange of people and goods. In the late 1980s, however, exchanges resumed at a remarkable pace between the immediate border communities of Zharkent, in Kazakhstan, and Chinese Khorgos. But this situation was short-lived. Currently, trade turnover in consumer goods between the two countries is conducted primarily via the hub bazaars of Urumqi, in China, and A…
Flowing goods, hardening borders? China’s commercial expansion into Kyrgyzstan re-examined
The Dordoi Bazaar, in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, has in the past 15 years become a prime example of the increasing impact of China’s rapid development in this structurally and politically weak post-Soviet state and in relation to its people. Chinese-made consumer goods, worth several billions of US dollars annually, have been re-exported overland via Kyrgyzstan to wholesale and retail clients across Eurasia. However, the hardening of the stat…
Belts and roads every- and nowhere
This article scrutinizes the Maritime Silk Road Initiative by framing it not as a static, state-centric device to channel Chinese developmental ambitions, but by emphasizing the flexible character of its production and the provisional configuration of its materialization. It draws on assemblage theory as a conceptual angle to, on the one hand, focus on the agentive character of human and non-human ‘actors’ such as ‘traveling’ discourses of develo…
The Art of Neighbouring
1 Apart from the Friendship Highway, at least half a dozen roads now reach the Nepal border or end very close to it.Four of them extend into Nepali territory, and two of them cross the Himalayan range.In the east, one road leads from Sakya to the upper Arun valley and almost down to the border at Kimathanka.A branch of this road leads to Riwu and is motorable almost
On the fringes of the Harmonious Society
Since 1949, Tibetans and Uyghurs generally have been perceived as the two most problematic members of the PRC’s great family of peoples and been the targets of ‘carrot and stick’ measures designed to facilitate their integration into the PRC. In recent years, a solution to the problem of Xinjiang and the Tibet has been sought in accelerated economic development, yet this is perceived by both groups with great suspicion. Addressing this situation,…
Profiteers or moral entrepreneurs? Bazaars, traders and development discourses in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Drawing on recent ethnographic research, this article explores key aspects of contemporary discourses on the bazaar trade–development nexus in Kazakhstan. Wholesale traders at the Bolashak Bazaar in Almaty, part of the Barakholka bazaar agglomeration and one of the country's largest markets, have forged particular practices and visions of entrepreneurial development over the last two decades. These have been impacted by state-imposed modernisatio…
Assemblages and complex adaptive systems
In human geography and beyond, assemblage thinking has increasingly gained attention as a perspective from which to investigate the emergence and dynamics of more-than-human entanglements. Similarly, in the interdisciplinary field of social-ecological systems analysis, theories of complex adaptive systems have been employed to investigate how social and ecological dynamics and actors interact with each other on different scales. Nonetheless, desp…
Coexistence or competition for resources? Transboundary transformations of natural resource use in China’s neighborhood
Over the past three decades, rural places along China's land borders have faced interconnected processes of sociopolitical, economic, and ecological change.These changes, along with an increase in transboundary investment by actors from China in infrastructure on the one hand, and in agriculture and resource extraction on the other, are locally met with a combination of suspicion, fear, and desire for future prosperity.This special issue scrutini…
On the move
Old stereotypes and new openness
Since the Soviet breakup, rural communities in the Kazakhstan–China borderlands have faced cataclysmic social, economic, and ecological transformations. Collective and state farms have been replaced by precarious smallholder agriculture suffering from a decline in financial inputs and the deterioration of infrastructure. At the same time, dynamic transformations of border permeability (and trans-border reconnections) between Kazakhstan and China …
Is the New Path a Modified Old Path
This article reviews the Soviet legacy in relation to contemporary cotton production in south-western Tajikistan and asks why farmers are still locked in to Soviet cotton production policies and practices despite post-Soviet regulatory, societal and environmental changes. With hindsight on Soviet agricultural production policies in Central Asia, this contribution scrutinises the perception of smallholder dehkhan farmers towards continued cotton p…
Renegotiating Integration
This article explores the highly disputed modes of migration and integration of Mongolia's Kazakhs after the break- up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Over the past two decades, Kazakh migrants from Mongolia and their kin, still living predominantly in the remote Bayan- Ölgiy aymag [province], have developed transnational social networks. During multi- sited ethnographic fieldwork from 2006 to 2009, interviews with migrants and their relatives in an…
Chinese migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe
Migration processes and paradigm changes evolving between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and developing and transitional states since the beginning of the reform era are receiving increasing
On the fringes of the Harmonious Society
Since 1949, Tibetans and Uyghurs generally have been perceived as the two most problematic members of the PRC’s great family of peoples and been the targets of ‘carrot and stick’ measures designed to facilitate their integration into the PRC. In recent years, a solution to the problem of Xinjiang and the Tibet has been sought in accelerated economic development, yet this is perceived by both groups with great suspicion. Addressing this situation,…
Profiteers or moral entrepreneurs? Bazaars, traders and development discourses in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Drawing on recent ethnographic research, this article explores key aspects of contemporary discourses on the bazaar trade–development nexus in Kazakhstan. Wholesale traders at the Bolashak Bazaar in Almaty, part of the Barakholka bazaar agglomeration and one of the country's largest markets, have forged particular practices and visions of entrepreneurial development over the last two decades. These have been impacted by state-imposed modernisatio…
Getting stuck within flows
For more than two decades, the Sino–Soviet border was almost hermetically closed to the exchange of people and goods. In the late 1980s, however, exchanges resumed at a remarkable pace between the immediate border communities of Zharkent, in Kazakhstan, and Chinese Khorgos. But this situation was short-lived. Currently, trade turnover in consumer goods between the two countries is conducted primarily via the hub bazaars of Urumqi, in China, and A…
Flowing goods, hardening borders? China’s commercial expansion into Kyrgyzstan re-examined
The Dordoi Bazaar, in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, has in the past 15 years become a prime example of the increasing impact of China’s rapid development in this structurally and politically weak post-Soviet state and in relation to its people. Chinese-made consumer goods, worth several billions of US dollars annually, have been re-exported overland via Kyrgyzstan to wholesale and retail clients across Eurasia. However, the hardening of the stat…
Trading on Change
Postcards from Stanland. Journeys in Central Asia
The peculiarities of living in the newly independent republics of the former Soviet south since the late 1990s have evoked considerable journalistic creativity (of often questionable quality) among
Trading Worlds. Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers
Trading Worlds. Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers." Europe-Asia Studies, 69(7), pp. 1128–1129
The Art of Neighbouring
1 Apart from the Friendship Highway, at least half a dozen roads now reach the Nepal border or end very close to it.Four of them extend into Nepali territory, and two of them cross the Himalayan range.In the east, one road leads from Sakya to the upper Arun valley and almost down to the border at Kimathanka.A branch of this road leads to Riwu and is motorable almost
The multi-dimensionality of space - an analytical framework for the empirical investigation of the production of place
The spatial-conceptual basis of the construction of place across the social sciences, including in human geography (and particularly in the field of area studies), has long been questioned and criticised for its strong grip on territorial and container-like thinking on spatiality.Alternative spatial dimensions, such as scale, place and networks, have been put forward by a range of authors.Building on these critical perspectives, this article prop…
Order at the Bazaar
Negotiating coastal infrastructures
Portuguese decolonization in the Indian Ocean World
Portuguese decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: history and ethnography." Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
On the move
Belts and roads every- and nowhere
This article scrutinizes the Maritime Silk Road Initiative by framing it not as a static, state-centric device to channel Chinese developmental ambitions, but by emphasizing the flexible character of its production and the provisional configuration of its materialization. It draws on assemblage theory as a conceptual angle to, on the one hand, focus on the agentive character of human and non-human ‘actors’ such as ‘traveling’ discourses of develo…
Assemblages and complex adaptive systems
In human geography and beyond, assemblage thinking has increasingly gained attention as a perspective from which to investigate the emergence and dynamics of more-than-human entanglements. Similarly, in the interdisciplinary field of social-ecological systems analysis, theories of complex adaptive systems have been employed to investigate how social and ecological dynamics and actors interact with each other on different scales. Nonetheless, desp…
Pfadabhängigkeiten in der Bioökonomie überwinden? Landwirtschaftliche Intensivierungsprozesse aus sozial-ökologischer Perspektive
Der Wandel zu einer „bio-basierten“ Wirtschaft, wie er in nationalen und internationalen Bioökonomie-Strategien propagiert wird, kann nur mit tiefgreifenden Veränderungen landwirtschaftlicher Systeme zur Steigerung der Agrarproduktion einhergehen. Besonders in Ländern des Globalen Südens gingen solche Prozesse jedoch meist mit unbeabsichtigten – oder in Kauf genommenen – negativen Konsequenzen wie Umweltdegradation oder die Verschärfung gesellsch…
Path Dependencies of (Un-)sustainable Land Use in Central Asia
Across Central Asia, agricultural and agroforestry practices have been shaped by a high-modernist approach since about the 1950s, with the aim of overcoming ecological limitations. Negative repercussions of this approach still affect local developments, but a shift towards resource-conserving production systems faces constraints—many of which relate to so-called ‘path dependencies’, i.e. historically-evolved institutions constraining the current …
Is the New Path a Modified Old Path
This article reviews the Soviet legacy in relation to contemporary cotton production in south-western Tajikistan and asks why farmers are still locked in to Soviet cotton production policies and practices despite post-Soviet regulatory, societal and environmental changes. With hindsight on Soviet agricultural production policies in Central Asia, this contribution scrutinises the perception of smallholder dehkhan farmers towards continued cotton p…
Maize-farming Forever
Based on qualitative and ethnographic field research in the Panfilov District of Almaty Region, Kazakhstan, and selected supportive quantitative data, this contribution explores the dynamics of agricultural transformation along the former Sino-Soviet border since the mid-1990s. It particularly scrutinises path dependency, as well as friction, in cultivation patterns navigated by local agricultural actors in the face of changing irrigation water a…
Old stereotypes and new openness
Since the Soviet breakup, rural communities in the Kazakhstan–China borderlands have faced cataclysmic social, economic, and ecological transformations. Collective and state farms have been replaced by precarious smallholder agriculture suffering from a decline in financial inputs and the deterioration of infrastructure. At the same time, dynamic transformations of border permeability (and trans-border reconnections) between Kazakhstan and China …
Coexistence or competition for resources? Transboundary transformations of natural resource use in China’s neighborhood
Over the past three decades, rural places along China's land borders have faced interconnected processes of sociopolitical, economic, and ecological change.These changes, along with an increase in transboundary investment by actors from China in infrastructure on the one hand, and in agriculture and resource extraction on the other, are locally met with a combination of suspicion, fear, and desire for future prosperity.This special issue scrutini…
Sowjeterbe statt Nachhaltigkeit
Kazakhstan is pursuing an agricultural policy rooted in Soviet tradition. Large farms are seen as the engines of modernisation. They enjoy more state support than family farms. Agriculture is primarily practised in those areas of cultivation that were established in the 1930s and are marked by monocultures. Despite declining productivity, soil degradation, and the negative social and ecological consequences of monocultures, the diversification of…
On the frontline towards resource independence
Geography (18 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Economics (11 obras) · China (8 obras) · Sociology (8 obras) · Economy (7 obras) · Law (7 obras) · Politics (7 obras) · Agriculture (6 obras) · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations (6 obras)