The leaders of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan met on January 27 to jointly announce that the protracted process of delimiting the border between their two countries has come to an end. Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev traveled to the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, to mark an occasion that both leaders have described as “historic.” Persistent uncertainties about the exact contours of the roughly 1,400-kilometer-long border are a legacy of the Soviet era. Even as frontiers were chopped and changed, the question of which republic owned what land were for all practical purposes deemed a formality since the…