Madeleine Reeves

Fixing the border: On the affective life of the state in Southern Kyrgyzstan

This paper proceeds from a moment of impromptu ‘border-fixing’ in the wake of an intercommunal conflict, to explore the everyday spatialisation of the state in a rural region of Central Asia. Drawing on ethnography from the Kyrgyzstan - Uzbekistan border, it contributes to a growing concern to understand how the state is rendered ‘integral’ in everyday life. Rather than focusing on the enactments and justificatory statements of state officials, the paper explores instead the diffuse but passionate work of borderland dwellers in policing the state edge in a context of political upheaval. ‘Territory’ in this reading is not just an a priori attribute of the state, nor only the product of official imaginings and interventions, but the site, too, of everyday practical and symbolic work, a vehicle for claims making and the means of performative enactments of belonging and difference. The paper calls for greater attention to the ‘ordinary affects’ that are elicited by borders and boundedness and the need to bring discussions of territoriality into conversation with a literature on the affective life of the state. Doing so, it argues, will both enrich our understanding of everyday state formation and give us greater purchase on the role of events in rupturing and reconfiguring state space.

Staying put? Towards a relational politics of mobility at a time of migration

Most research on labour migration from Central Asia has explored the motivations and strategies of those who move. Comparatively less attention has been given to the experience of family members who stay behind. This paper draws on ethnographic research amongst the wives of migrant husbands in a site of gendered out-migration in eastern Uzbekistan to explore diverse experiences of ‘staying put’. Whilst spousal absence is experienced by some women as expanding the possibilities for social and spatial mobility, for others it can exacerbate the degree of control exerted by in-laws. Through this ethnography the author argues for a relational politics of mobility: that is, attention to the ways in which the movement of some can constrain (or compel) the mobility of others. Gendered out-migration is both embedded in, and transforms, the domestic organization of honour (nomus), in ways that are socially consequential. In Central Asia, the author argues, a richer understanding of labour migration can be gained by bringing different scales of movement into the same analytical frame and by attending ethnographically to the habitual production of place.

Locating danger: Konfliktologiia and the search for fixity in the Ferghana valley borderlands

It has become commonplace, in a scholarly discourse dominated by accounts of Central Asia as the battle-ground of elemental forces and a focal point for ‘civilizational clash’, for the Ferghana Valley to be identified as the mythical epicentre of such contention. Recent policy-oriented reports on the region have characterized the valley as being caught ‘in the midst of a host of crises’ where ‘signs of possible conflict are clear’, and where only ‘effective conflict prevention’ might just manage to ‘push the Ferghana valley away from the precipice to which it is now heading’. It is my aim in this paper neither to re-visit the catalogue of ‘crises’ facing the Ferghana Valley, which have been well-explored elsewhere, nor simply to dismiss the potential for conflict in the region as the fiction of alarmist, ideological, or under-informed outsiders. My intension, instead, is to explore a particular element of the more general ‘discourse on danger’ to which other contributors to this volume allude, an element that has become central not only to academic and journalistic discussions about the potential for peace and conflict in the valley, but also to a variety of local and internationally-initiated conflict prevention interventions in the region. This element I refer to as the fear of ‘things out of place’, from which logically follows a fetish of fixity, a desire to bring order to a region deemed chaotic. The region is discursively cast as ‘dangerous’ and ‘crisis-ridden’, I maintain, because it does not fit into normative accounts of the ‘proper’ relationship between territory, ethnicity and citizenship—accounts that have become crucial in processes of post-Soviet nation-building and to the social science discourses that have developed in their wake. Central to this normative account is a conception of territorial ambiguity as an incubator of danger: the undemarcated border a metonym for latent conflict in the region and minority populations, a potential threat to the ideal of a loyal, culturally united citizenry. Drawing upon participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted in the regions around the Tajikistan–Kyrgyzstan border in the Samarkandek zone (Batken and Soghd regions) and the Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan border area around the Sokh enclave, both of which have been identified as potential ‘flashpoints of Central Asian Survey (March 2005) 24(1), 67–81

Materialising State Space: ‘Creeping Migration’ and Territorial Integrity in Southern Kyrgyzstan

Behind the beautiful façade of independence and the loud, sombre pronouncements of 2,200 years of Kyrgyz statehood, an ugly reality is concealed. Kyrgyzstan as a state does not even have its own borders, and the borders that we do have more often have just an administrative character, so our neighbours can move them about just as they like. And yet—territorial integrity and borders—aren’t these supposed to be the very foundation of any state? (Kalet 2006, p. 1)

Introduction: contested trajectories and a dynamic approach to place

In April 2011, in a climate of on-going political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan, deputies of the Jogorku Kengesh, the Kyrgyz Parliament, debated a draft law that would accord special status to a number of ‘strategic’ villages located along the country’s southern border with Tajikistan. Motivated by concerns at ‘creeping migration’ – that is, the purchase or construction of homes in an area of undemarcated borderland by citizens of Tajikistan – the draft law seeks to stabilize people and place, shoring up a border that is cast as dangerously porous and liable to shift through the illegal sale and purchase of private land plots. The proposed law, like others before it, penalizes those who illegally sell property at the border to citizens of neighbouring states. It also includes measures to ‘strengthen the military-patriotic preparation of the population’ of territories accorded special border status; to create the conditions to discourage Kyrgyz villagers from migrating away; and to encourage the movement into these border villages of Kyrgyz citizens from elsewhere in the country (Proekt, Article 4). Collectively, as the preamble to the draft law suggests, such measures are intended to ‘strengthen the border territories of the Kyrgyz Republic; to guarantee her national security and to protect her territorial integrity and the inviolability of the national border’ (Proekt, preamble, my translation). This draft law is a timely reminder that movement is at once a basic human capability and the target, potentially, of governmental intervention. In this instance the threat of one kind of movement (the migration of Tajik citizens to ‘contested’, un-demarcated territory) is countered by promoting another kind of movement (the state-sponsored resettlement of Kyrgyz citizens from elsewhere in Kyrgyzstan) so as to stabilize territory and ‘fix’ the border. There is a long history to such state-sponsored movements in Central Asia and of the ‘sedentarist metaphysic’ that informs them: the idea that distinct human groups (‘cultures’) are properly rooted in fixed, bounded places (Malkki 1992, p. 31). But such dynamics are never smooth or uncontested, precisely because place itself is lived, and lived differently: it is a sedimentation of histories, of ‘stories so far’, as geographer Doreen Massey (2005, p. 89) puts it. The regions of Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan borderland on which the proposed law focuses are characterized by multiple, overlapping and sometimes competing histories of forced and voluntary settlement and resettlement; of border drawing and re-drawing; of the leasing and reclaiming of land; and of competing claims of historical primacy, which make contemporary attempts to fix space both politically delicate and socially fraught (Bichsel 2009, Reeves 2009a). Some of these traces are visible in maps of the region, which reveal enclaves and semi-enclaves where borders have been moved over the last 80 years, settlements with more than one name and intricate borders winding between – and sometimes right through the middle – of

Anticipating Failure: Transparency Devices and their Effects

The article explores the politics of making worlds legible, transparent and actionable through devices that governments and international organisations mobilise in the quest to achieve moral certainty about their activities and decisions. Through an analysis of three distinct examples, we examine the effects of such attempts to open things up in the name of the public good: the performance metrics that are part of the UK governments ‘Transparency Agenda’; ‘conflict mapping’ as part of Kyrgyzstans internationally sponsored programmes of Preventive Development; and the procedures of Perus National System of Public Investment (SNIP) through which public investments are regulated. We explore these three as instances of what we call ‘transparency devices’. It is to past moral failures – of wrongdoing, conflict or corruption – that these devices react and consequently it is the anticipation of future moral failings towards which they are then oriented. Each device does so by establishing matters of fact as moral certainties through technical settlements carried out in ‘public’. But in their enactment of social realities, such devices are also generative of what we call collateral effects and affects. First, technical settlements require establishing what is to be included/excluded but such stabilisations are only fleeting, always and already partial, and provisional. As such rather than alleviating uncertainty they come to amplify it. Furthermore, while they can be understood as neoliberal techniques of producing active, rational witnessing subjects who take responsibility for ensuring moral futures, they are also generative of affective dispositions of suspicion and hypervigilance; fostering subjects with a greater awareness of that which is yet to be revealed. We suggest that they should not be considered weaknesses, but rather that uncertainty and hypervigilant responsibilised subjects call for the continuation of more of the same and thus are a source of the very authority and legitimacy of transparency devices.

Infrastructural Hope: Anticipating ‘Independent Roads’ and Territorial Integrity in Southern Kyrgyzstan

This article explores the affective force of infrastructural intervention. It focuses on the construction, successful in one case, locally stalled in the other, of so-called ‘independent roads’ along Kyrgyzstans porous land-border with Tajikistan. Chinese-built and funded through an array of international lending organisations, such roads are determinate interventions in the social life of a marginal border region. They are also the site of intense local anticipation: the object both of hope for a materially secure future and of anxieties of entrapment. The very alignments that enable a new road to come into being – the mobilising of elected representatives, the appeal to languages of abandonment and territorial loss – are themselves anticipatory and experimental moves. The category of ‘infrastructural hope’ is developed to explore this articulation of material politics with diffuse elite and vernacular desires for a territorially secure future. The article considers the implications of this entanglement for the anthropology of infrastructure and for the analysis of trans-boundary tension in Central Asia.

Roads of Hope and Dislocation: Infrastructure and the Remaking of Territory at a Central Asian Border

SUMMARY:In contemporary Kyrgyzstan, where until the late 2000s the only asphalt road in the southwest of the country ran across the borders of neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the construction of “bypass roads” that create loops around the territory of the neighboring state have become crucial to the imagination and material articulation of territorial integrity. In a region where large tracts of the border await conclusive delimitation, the construction of bypass roads has also proved to be politically contentious. Drawing on ethnographic research in a region of recent and prospective road construction, this article considers the ambiguous affects elicited by new road infrastructures in a region characterized, since the 1930s, by land exchanges and repeated attempts at territorial re-delimitation. Drawing together debates about infrastructural “enchantment” with recent work on the affective potentials of place, the article explores how past projects of spatial transformation haunt new initiatives to transform landscapes. It considers how the multiplicity of political projects layered on the landscape generates the affective qualities of the prospective road as a space, at once, of hope and of dislocation.До конца 2000-х гг. единственная асфальтированная дорога на юго-востоке Киргизстана проходила через границы соседних государств Таджикистана и Узбекистана. Начавшееся в 2000-х строительство объездных дорог, которые бы огибали территорию соседних госу-дарств, стало критическим моментом формирования воображения и материальным выражением территориальной целостности. Более того, в регионе, где значительные участки границы все еще нуждаются в окончательной делимитации, строительство объездных дорог оказа-лось политически взрывоопасным предприятием. Статья Мадлен Ривз представляет результаты этнографического исследования в регионе начавшегося и планирующегося дорожного строительства. Автора ин-тересует неоднозначное воздействие дорожного проекта в крае, который с 1930-х гг. характеризовался земельными обменами и постоянными попытками территориального передела. В свете дискуссий об “очаро-вании” инфраструктуры и новых работ об аффективном потенциале места Ривз рассматривает, как прошлые проекты пространственной трансформации сдерживают нынешние инициативы переопределения пространства и как наслоение политических проектов на ландшафт формирует аффективные свойства планирующейся трассы как одно-временно пространства надежды и дислокации.

Time and Contingency in the Anthropology of Borders: On Border as Event in Rural Central Asia

Engaging with anthropological literature on ‘critical events’, this chapter attends to the experiential contingency of new international boundaries to argue for a temporally variegated account of border in rural Central Asia. Focusing on the experience of a single family at a time of heightened tension along the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan boundary in 2013–14, it shows how border here came to materialize less in permanent infrastructures of state presence than in new prohibitions on trans-boundary movement and on the ‘flying visits’ of security personnel. Such events demonstrate the need to explore the multiplicity of disparate, non-synchronous practices, from road-building to prohibitions on foreign trade and from vigilante road-blocks to the presence of Special Forces, through which living ‘at the border’ becomes as much an experiential as a cartographic fact.

Taking stock, looking forward

Regular readers of Central Asian Survey will notice that there have been some significant changes at the journal over the last few months. We have moved to a new, on-line system of article submission and review. We have introduced a new annual prize to celebrate the work of junior scholars, named in honour of German anthropologist, Irene Hilgers, which will be announced at the Central Eurasian Studies Society Conference (CESS) in Princeton and in the December 2016 issue of the journal. We have revised the system of rotation into and from the Editorial and International Advisory Boards, and brought in new members on to each to better reflect the changing demographic of our scholarly field. And we’ve got a new format for both print and on-line formats of the journal, to facilitate online reading and the following-up of references. The most significant change, however, is the retirement, in March this year, of Deniz Kandiyoti from the role of editor, after eight years of service. Deniz’s commitment, care and energy have been instrumental in advancing the journal’s scholarly profile, increasing its readership, and streamlining the system of peer review. For a relatively small and dispersed field such as ours, scholarly journals have a critical role to play in fostering a sense of intellectual community. It is my sincere hope during my tenure as editor to continue Deniz’s work by bringing cutting-edge scholarship on the region to print from diverse disciplinary and regional traditions of scholarship. An area studies journal is at its most effective if it is a forum where the quality of analysis, richness of empirical material, and clarity of writing mean that readers can step outside their disciplinary silos to read what it is that the historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, geographers and economists might be writing too. To recognize this is certainly not to suggest that authors should compromise on the theoretical rigour that they might deploy if they were writing for a disciplinary journal. Rather, the challenge for contributors is to write in such a way that the interested non-specialist will be able to understand the contours of a debate or the stakes of a scholarly controversy without being overwhelmed by the kinds of disciplinary jargon or taken-for-granted debates that might be assumed were one writing only for members of one’s sub-field. We have some excellent examples of this kind of writing in this issue of the journal. Isaac Scarborough’s article, which was the co-winner of the graduate student paper prize at last year’s CESS conference, provides an important new interpretation of the reasons for the descent of Tajikistan into civil war. Through a forensic analysis of growing economic crisis facing the Tajik SSR during perestroika, Scarborough shows the insufficiency of arguments framed exclusively in terms of rising nationalism resulting from the political liberalization of perestroika. David Lewis focuses on the on-line response to the violent events that occurred in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan, in December 2011 to illuminate the discursive strategies used by authoritarian regimes to produce hegemonic accounts of events, even at times of political upheaval. By exploring the discursive feedback between bloggers and the state, Lewis shows how the Kazakh political elite was able to ‘find discursive echoes among influential