Borders, Belonging, and the Territorial

Madeleine Reeves University of Manchester Border Work, Belonging and the Territorial ‘Fix’ ESF Exploratory Workshop: Borders Through Time and Space Draft paper for workshop discussion: not for reposting or redistribution “Unfortunately people’s mentality hasn’t changed. Although we are all independent states since 1991, the citizens have remained the same old citizens of the Soviet Union! They used to have common pastures, common water and bore holes, common energy sources, and they think all of that can still hold, but it can’t! We have sent notes [of complaint] to the Tajik foreign ministry…Until matters are resolved we have decided to close the border, with the goal of protecting the safety of our citizens and those of the neighboring state” (Jontoro Satybaldiev, Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, at a Press Conference on January 16th 2014). “It’s a difficult situation, that’s why people don’t like it. Here you’ve got a Tajik, and the wall of his home is like that [showing with his hands] and the Kyrgyz house is just here, sharing a wall. And here you’ve got a Tajik home, and so on. So how are you going to divide all of that? There is no way you can divide them [ich bölüshkö tuura kelbei jatat]! Otherwise you’re going to have serious quarrels [chatak] appearing.” (Pirmat-ata, whose house is built on “contested” territory, summer 2004). In this presentation I want to foreground the social and material work of making borders ‘stick’, and the stakes of such work for questions of belonging and collective coexistence in a region of undemarcated international border. What might spatial justice look like in a region of so-called “contested territory” (spornaia territoriia), when the grounds for determining territorial parity are disputed? And how do official concerns with security and territorial integrity, of the kind voiced by Satybaldiev in January this year, intersect with local understandings of what constitutes a fair or “right” (tuura) distribution of water and land? In the Isfara valley, one of Central Asia’s most densely populated and geographically complex, social justice is understood to be bound to topography in particularly powerful and consequential ways. The river that sustains livelihoods and waters domestic garden plots along the length of the valley tacks back and forth multiple 1 times between the jurisdiction of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. So does the single north- south road running up to the mountains. The valley is home to one of the world’s largest extra-territorial enclaves, Vorukh, with a population of around 30,000. Extensive sections of the international border here remain to be officially delimited and demarcated twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In official discourse this indeterminate territory is referred to as “undescribed” (neopisana) or simply as “contested” (spornaia). Whole villages and village districts, including Pirmat- Ata’s, have been built on land that was loaned “for long-term use” (na dolgosrochnoe polzovanie) between collective farms during the late Soviet period, the status of which, now that that the nominal loan has expired, is unclear. In recent months, attempts by Kyrgyz authorities to build a new bypass road that would circumvent Tajikistani territory in the Isfara valley have turned the undemarcated border here from a “matter of fact” into a “matter of concern” in Latour’s (2005) sense: that is, as an unstable object that is temporarily “gathered” as a site of controversy. On January 11th, when Kyrgyzstan resumed construction of a bypass road on territory that Tajikistan deems disputed (but Kyrgyzstan doesn’t), territorial disagreements that had largely been discussed behind the doors of inter- governmental meetings took on violent local form. Kyrgyz and Tajik border troops exchanged gunfire near the villages of Khodji-Alo (Tajikistan) and Kök-Tash (Kyrgyzstan), leaving eight border guards wounded, each accusing the other side of violating international norms and entering the neighbouring state without permission. This escalation of military presence and military force in a region that was only minimally patrolled in the mid-2000s has been accompanied by an increasingly vocal public commentary, with Kyrgyzstan’s Vechernii Bishkek newspaper accusing Tajikistan’s border services of willfully reducing the territory of the Isfara valley by 500 hectares in its map of the region, and the head of Tajikistan’s border service in turn condemning the “seizure, expansion and appropriation of the territory of Tajikistan by citizens of Kirgiziia”, which had illegally turned the village of Vorukh into an enclave in the 1950s (REFS). Amid mutual accusations of violation of the border regime, topography has itself become front-page news in national capitals, complete with competing maps of where the inter-state the border here really lies. 2 My aim in this paper is not to dissect this current escalation of tension, nor to weigh in on the debate over where the border does or should lie, so much as to historicize the search for parity (paritetnost’) and territorial integrity (territorial’naya tselostnost’) in this region of formerly Soviet internal border, and in so doing, to think anthropologically about the category of “territory” itself. The story that I trace here concerns the repeated renegotiation of inter-republican borders between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the late Soviet period, and the way that this past inflects contemporary concerns over territorial parity, existential security, and the threat of so-called “creeping migration”. While much attention has been given to the national-territorial delimitation of 1924- 27 and its role in consolidating (or even constituting) Central Asian “nations” where they did not previously exist (Hirsch 2005, Gorshenina 2012, Haugen 2003, Abashin 2005), much less attention has been paid to subsequent exchanges of land between constituent Union republics of the USSR, and the way that these served both to normalize a particular conception of the right relation between people and territory, and to foster concern that a relocation of people would also entail a relocation of border. While the long-term consequences of the original national-territorial delimitation should not be under-estimated, I argue that it should be seen less as a singular process of territorial fixing than the first in an ongoing process of territorial renegotiation that continued right up until the final years of Soviet Union’s existence, and now beyond. If the first phase of territorialisation was primarily concerned with “consolidating” populations that were deemed lacking in national consciousness through the creation of putatively national (natsional’no-odnorodnye) republics, it is the second phase, marked by population resettlement, inter-kolkhoz land transfers and the search for industrial agriculture in the post-war period that are crucial to understanding the origins of contemporary territorial indeterminacy. Today in the Isfara valley, the de facto distribution of homes, schools, and in some cases entire villages, simply does not match any of the readily available maps of the region (including the version of border represented by google maps). The village of Tojikon, for instance, which has a school and medical centre under the jurisdiction of Tajikistan, established after land was “loaned” (arendaga berilgen) from Kyrgyzstan to Tajikistan in 1982, does not figure at all on late Soviet maps, and figures, unmarked), 3 as lying in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan respectively according to the maps issued by these authorities. But there is something more, and it is this aspect hat I want to dwell on here. For as well as fostering a disjuncture between actual de facto land use and the cartographic boundary between Union republics (and later between independent states), the process of drawing and re-drawing maps; of refiguring the border to catch up with the “real” distribution of people and homes, and in so doing making up for past failures in mapping the border, has served, ironically to turn ethno-territorial determinacy—having a border that is delimited, demarcated, contiguous and materially present on the landscape—into a proxy for spatial justice itself. In government reports and policy interventions, determinate borders come to be seen as the key to harmonious trans-boundary relations, even as in practice, it is the very ambiguity of administrative regulation that has enabled border markets to flourish and local residents to move about relatively unhindered in the first decade and a half of independence. Moreover, the tendency to redefine borders according to de facto land use (fakticheskoe zemlepolzovanie) has produced particular, highly ethnicized conception of territory, according to which the resale of now-privatised homes and land-plots between citizens of one state and the other is interpreted as marking a shift in the border itself: an instance of “creeping migration” that undermines the territorial integrity of the state (Reeves 2008, Bichsel 2013). Anthropology, territory and territorial “integrity” To unpack this argument, I want to dwell for a moment with the category of territory. In contrast with the flourishing anthropological literature on space, place and landscape, “territory” seems to be a word out of anthropological fashion. When it is invoked, it is usually to qualify something else: we have territories of rights (or topographies of justice), territories of difference, territories of desire. But there is little that could be said to constitute an anthropology of territory: an anthropology, that is, of the way that space is transformed into territory—and how this occurs differently in different political configurations (though see Moore (2005) for an important exception). Part of the reason, perhaps, has to do with the fact that “territory” is a term intimately bound up with the state: invoking it can imply a 4 privileging of a state-centric perspective, or an assumption that there are unambiguous “insides” and “outsides” to the political order: the “territorial trap” well critiqued by John Agnew (REF) with regard to the disciplinary field of international relations.

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