The conclusion summarises the central arguments of the book, advances the notion of ‘navigational agency’ for understand the manner in which traders contend with the fraught geopolitical across which they lead their lives and make a living, and explores the possible futures of the informal networks that bind different parts of Eurasia to one another.

The focus of this chapter is on the specific challenges surrounding fieldwork in contexts characterised by the simultaneous presence of multiple geopolitical projects and among communities that work in and across such contexts. The traders upon whom the book focuses have been routinely exposed to successive geopolitical shifts and tensions, and this distinctive level of exposure is intimately tied to their livelihoods, sensibilities and imaginations. The chapters explore how I gauged the interaction between geopolitics and my interlocutors’ thinking and sensibilities during the course of the fieldwork and developed a convivial mode of ethnographic practice. The chapter also explores the significance of mistrust to my relationships with the traders. Mistrust can play a ‘socially productive’ role in sociality and scholars stand to learn a great deal about the meaning, significance and value of mistrust to everyday life by engaging directly with the importance of this aspect of life to their own fieldwork activities.