Since their independence in 1991, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan are caught at the crossroads of competing geopolitical stakeholders and post-imperial reverberations. While there is abundant research on strategic power struggles in the region, little is known about how local communities engage with geopolitics. Through extensive, multi-sited ethnography, my work tackles the nexus of macro-scale power politics and the micro-scale of everyday life at two sites that are intricately and intensely entangled with geopolitical dynamics: the 7Km Market in Odesa, and the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek. Located in two historically related, yet vastly different former Soviet republics, I show how past configurations of labor, gender, and space have shaped contemporary infrastructures of bottom-up global trade. Built from double-stacked shipping containers, the two markets have become key nodes in a transnational network linking goods from Turkey, China, Korea, and beyond with consumers across Eurasia. As modular, dynamic, shape-shifting hubs they stimulating economic innovation and extra-economic sociality, yet their embeddedness in global supply chains also exposes traders to shifting border regimes and mobility constraints, shaped by foreign policy shifts and international conflict.

Correspondingly, my research employs a relational lens to examine the post-1991 trajectories of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, positioning these markets as laboratories for post-Soviet geopolitical rivalries. Emphasizing traders’ geopolitical awareness and the adaptive livelihood strategies reflected in both talk and practice, my approach critiques strictly top-down views of geopolitics and reductive portrayals of economic actors as mere agents of the market. Instead, I provide nuanced insights into the interplay between market infrastructures, geopolitical shifts and everyday economic practices – an intersection I conceptualise as ‘lived geopolitics.’ The concept challenges geopolitics’ classical detachment from the vernacular and its confinement to the scale of the state, by emphasizing multidirectional entanglements across scales.

Methodologically, this research is grounded in years (2018–2024) of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at retail hubs in Russia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. It combines extended participant observation in markets and container shops with diverse qualitative methods: oral history interviews with 1990s shuttle traders, semi-structured interviews with current traders and market managers, and numerous informal conversations with traders, drivers, cleaners, and food vendors. During the pandemic, digital ethnography included active engagement in social media discussions and surveys. Repeated field visits captured the evolving impacts of key geopolitical events—Kyrgyzstan’s accession to the Eurasian Economic Union, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—while fostering trust-based relationships.

My forthcoming monograph aims to contribute to social anthropology by rethinking post-Soviet markets as historically grounded, relational infrastructures embedded in global circuits. By examining communalities and differences in the developments of market trade in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan my work advances comparison as a relational mode of anthropological inquiry. Conceptualising market actors as active participants in rather than passive recipients of geopolitical change, I bring geopolitical processes into sharper ethnographic focus.