This project explores ethnographically the materialization of a new international border in Central Asia’s Ferghana valley.  How is a new border made to ‘stick’, socially and materially, in a densely populated region of formerly Soviet Central Asia characterised by considerable historical inter-dependence and 70 years of shared statehood?  How is infrastructure that previously criss-crossed republican boundaries, knitting constituent Soviet republics into a single state, transformed into ‘national’ property?  When does a cousin become—at least according to formal classifications—a ‘foreigner’ in need of official permission to enter the neighbouring state?  When does fertilizer and cooking-oil become ‘contraband’, juridically and in popular understanding?  And how are such dynamics transformed when borders are still largely unmarked and the authority of those charged with representing the state at its edges contested?   

This study focuses ethnographically on two stretches of borderland in a densely populated and irrigation-dependent region of rural Central Asia, where Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan meet.  Most studies of international borders have focused on those sites where the physical presence of the border-as-boundary is omnipresent, and where the sovereignty of the state is often viscerally felt.  Here, by contrast, the ‘border’ is largely unmarked and, in many places, has still to be fully demarcated.  As one informant put it – ‘we only have a border on Tuesdays’ – market day, when customs officers turn up to regulate cross-border trade.   In practice, then, what we find is considerable local contestation over what difference the border should make: should villagers who find themselves on two sides of the new border, for instance, have different rights to access pastureland that both previously used but which is now the sovereign territory of one or other state?  And how do different forms of local authority entangle to resolve (or exacerbate) conflict?

Through attending to the everyday work of bordering the state – making territory ‘stick’ – the research brings new insights to debates on borders, space and competing sovereignties which have been largely Eurocentric in focus. At the same time, it brings a critical optic to discussions of conflict-potential in the Ferghana valley that have tended to sideline the role of the role of state and non-state actors in articulating and institutionalising difference.