Abstract

This paper examines Turkestan as a crucial but understudied space of wartime displacement, imperial governance, and coerced mobility during and after the First World War. Focusing on the years 1914–1922, it explores how refugees and prisoners of war were incorporated into the administrative, economic, and social landscape of Russian Turkestan. While existing scholarship on the First World War has often privileged the European fronts and the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, this study shifts attention to Central Eurasia as a frontier where imperial power, labor extraction, humanitarian action, and social control intersected in distinctive ways.

The paper asks three main questions. First, how did imperial and local authorities classify, manage, and redistribute refugees and POWs across Turkestan? Second, what role did these displaced populations play in the regional wartime economy, especially in relation to labor demands and state needs? Third, how did the collapse of empire and the revolutionary transformations after 1917 reshape the status and experience of these groups? Drawing on archival materials, administrative records, committee reports, and contemporary periodicals, the paper argues that Turkestan was not merely a distant place of confinement or transit, but an active arena in which war reshaped relations between state institutions, local society, and mobile populations.

By placing POWs and refugees into the same analytical frame, this study reveals how categories of displacement were politically produced and unevenly governed. It also demonstrates that the history of wartime Central Eurasia cannot be understood only through military or colonial narratives, but must also be approached through the history of humanitarian structures, labor regimes, and the movement of people across imperial space. In doing so, the paper contributes to broader discussions on space, sovereignty, and the social consequences of war in Central Eurasia.