Turkish or European? European or Muslim? Muslim or Communist? Such were the identities that Scott Malcomson found people grappling with as he traveled through Eastern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia. Learning the languages and immersing himself in the cultures, Malcomson focused on the tensions between local and universal identity in these countries that are historically at the margins of empires and currently on the faultlines of civil war.

In these borderlands, the conflict between nation and empire plays itself out on the world stage only when it reaches crisis proportion. But the issues swirling around these outposts have remained unresolved since the land was first divided two thousand years ago by kings and despots.

In Borderlands, young Romanian anti-Semites and Muslim fundamentalists speak alongside peasant farmers and privileged schoolgirls and offer their own perspectives on the age-old conflicts. Malcomson encounters Sufi mystics in Bukhara and rootless cosmopolitans at a Bulgarian disco. Whether at a Romanian coal mine or around the neighborhood in Tashkent, he resists easy judgments; instead, he listens and learns.

Part historical essay, part reportage, part philosophical speculation, Borderlands is a stunningly innovative work that explores a world that can no longer claim fixed points of reference.