Terms used in the study of people/place bonding too often circumscribe thinking to either the most readily conceived and tangibly experienced scale of place – home/neighborhood – or to the most politically prevalent scale of place – the state. In doing so, researchers ignore the influence of places that help constitute identity between and above the aforementioned scales. A more elastic conceptualization of place attachment allows for mutability of place-identities and their capacity to be both multi-sited and varying in scale. With a long history of ethnic Russian habitation from the Tsarist through Soviet eras, the northern oblasts of Kazakhstan emerged as a borderland of potential irredentism akin to eastern Ukraine. Calls for secession and annexation have, however, been minimal thus rendering the region’s amalgam of place identities a ready case for considering relational geographies of borderland place-attachment.

在研究人与地方之间的联系时，经常使用的术语将思想限制在最容易构思和有形经验的地方规模（家庭/邻里）或政治上最普遍的地方规模（国家）。在这种情况下，研究人员忽略了有助于在上述尺度之间或之上建立身份的场所的影响。场所附件的概念更加灵活，可以使场所标识具有可变性，并且可以同时进行多地点设置和规模变化。从沙皇时代到苏联时代，俄罗斯人一直居住着悠久的历史，哈萨克斯坦的北部州成为潜在的煽动性边界，类似于乌克兰东部。但是，要求分离和吞并的呼吁