ABORNE workshop 2010 Christine Bichsel Trouble on the margins. Peace-building in the borderlands of post-Soviet Central Asia DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE OR QUOTE! Christine Bichsel Département de Géosciences, University of Fribourg, Switzerland Paper to be presented at International Workshop “Bringing the margins back in: war making and state making in the borderlands”, Ghent, 12-14 February 20101 1. Introduction This paper looks into peace-building in the Ferghana Valley, a large intramontane basin in post- Soviet Central Asia. In 2002, a document of an aid agency running peace-building projects characterised the Ferghana Valley as ‘a culturally rich and diverse area with the potential for real growth in many spheres, but also the undeniable potential for dangerous divisions’ (Mercy Corps 2002:3, emphasis added). Dangerous divisions, as referred to in this quotation, were seen by the aid agency in manifold aspects. An important one among them were the divisions as embodied in the political borders which transect the Ferghana Valley, separating the three states Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan who currently share the basin. Dangerous, in turn, refers to a particular social imaginary of the Ferghana Valley, attributed both by academic and journalistic writing, as well as by practical attempts to mitigate a perceived potential for violence. 1 Funding for research on which this paper is based was provided by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North–South: Research Partnerships for Mitigating Syndromes of Global Change. The NCCR North–South programme is co-funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. This paper has been written during a fellowship granted by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Parts of this paper have been published earlier in a book publication with Routledge titled Conflict transformation in Central Asia: Irrigation disputes in the Ferghana Valley. 1 ABORNE workshop 2010 Christine Bichsel For Central Asia, a body of academic and policy-oriented literature began to focus on the danger of conflict as of the late 1990s. While differing in details, the authors concurred that the Ferghana Valley exposes a high potential for violent conflict. They base this potential on evidence of past violent episodes and/or present tensions that may result in violence. In other words, these writings depict the Ferghana Valley as a ‘host of crises’ (Slim 2002) or a ‘flashpoint of conflict’ (Tabyshalieva 1999:vii). This literature argues that the potential for conflict is comprised of a broad array of interlinked conflictive factors such as environmental, social, political, economic, religious, demographic, military, and criminal ones (Lubin et al. 1999). A consistent concern was the perception of a ‘mismatch’ between nations and states, and a related threat assigned to territorial ambiguity and undemarcated borders (see also Reeves 2005:67). Policy recommendations for preventive action were taken up by aid agencies in the late 1990s, and since then a considerable number of peace-building projects have been implemented in the Ferghana Valley. In the present paper, I explore peace-building activities in the Ferghana Valley over the period of 1999-2006. My main focus is on the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), a governmental aid agency to coordinate international development activities of Switzerland. In addition, I also draw on the activities of UNDP and Mercy Corps with similar peace-building frameworks. This paper argues that peace-building projects conducted by these aid agencies reconfigured the processes which constitute territory in the Ferghana Valley through altering social action and material space at the border. As a consequence, they interfered with ongoing processes of post-Soviet border delimitation. The paper thus questions the presumed apolitical nature of peace-building by arguing that in its unintended outcomes it became part and parcel of state territorialisation and nation-building projects in Central Asia. The paper is positioned as an ‘ethnography of aid’ (Crewe and Harrison 1998,Gould 2004,Mosse 2005a). It approaches international aid as an ethnographic object, and seeks to 2 ABORNE workshop 2010 Christine Bichsel explain how it ‘works’. Ethnography of aid explores both the theoretical assumptions which underlie an approach which aid agencies adopt, as well the outcomes in the form of specific localised practices when approaches are applied. My research thus neither privileges nor stops at the level of textual analysis, but engages with how aid is enacted in the form of a social practice with assigned meanings and lived experiences. Empirically, I combine the analysis of project documents produced by aid agencies with data generated by interviews and participant observation. The paper draws on my fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley between 2003 and 2007 as a PhD student (14 months) and a consultant for an aid agency (3 months). In this paper, my main focus is on the constitution and the dynamics of the political borders in the Ferghana Valley shared by three successor states of the former Soviet Union. I follow Georg Simmel, who suggested that the border is not a spatial fact with sociological effects, but a sociological fact spatially expressed (Simmel 1992 in Donnan and Haller 2000). I conceive these borders as constituted by specific albeit changing underlying notions of territory. Territory, in turn, is understood as bounded space attributed with meaning. I understand it as a product of cultural work of human associations and institutions to organise themselves in relation to the social and material world (Delanty 2005:10). Bounded space implicated with meaning is therefore an expression of social relationships and informs key aspects of individual and collective identities. At the same time I conceive of it as a political achievement. In this sense, territory constitutes a spatial expression of social power to delimit space and to exert control over it (Sack 1986) as well as to define the meaning attributed to it. Accordingly, my ethnography focuses on the socio-spatial narratives and effects of peace-building in order to access the ‘processes and meanings which undergird socio-spatial life’ (Herbert 2000:550). The term peace-building denotes post-Cold War approaches to conflict and violence. These approaches are characterised by guided by an intellectual and practical framework which assumes that liberal political and economic structures as well as democratic forms of governance 3 ABORNE workshop 2010 Christine Bichsel will reduce violence and foster enduring peace (Richmond 2005,Mac Ginty 2006). Such ‘liberal peace’ in the framework of peace-building resides in respective social, political and economic regimes, structures and norms, which are often teleologically defined by the supposed state of ‘Western’ societies (Paris 1997). This conceptualisation assumes that liberal peace is an achievable ideal form for conflict-ridden societies, given that correct steps of peace-building are taken. As a consequence, agents of peace-building can foster liberal peace by ‘exporting’ its norms and values to these societies (Richmond 2005: 110). One possibility for peace-building thus becomes international aid, in the framework of which aid agencies promote ‘liberal peace’ through conducting relevant aid projects. The paper consists of six parts. After this introduction, I present the context of the borders in the Ferghana Valley. In the third part, I introduce peace-building practices on the example of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The fourth part looks into the case of Maksat and Ovchi-Kalacha on the border of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The fifth part discusses delimitation politics in the Ferghana Valley. The sixth part then reflects on peace-building in borderlands. 2. The borders of the Ferghana Valley The Ferghana Valley is an almond-shaped intramontane basin surrounded by extensive mountain ranges. At the heart of the basin are plains and steppe lands that lie at an altitude of 250–500 m above sea level. Foothills that enclose this depression are slightly higher, ranging from 500–1,300 m. The mountain ranges then reach up to more than 5,000 m in altitude. United as part of the Soviet Union until 1991, the Ferghana Valley is at present divided among three successor states. Uzbekistan holds the eastern lowlands which form in many respects the historical and cultural heartland of the Ferghana Valley. The surrounding foothills and most of the high mountain ranges are part of Kyrgyzstan. Finally, Tajikistan stretches into the western lowlands and, partially, the mountain ranges (see Figure 1). They are largely identical with the 4 ABORNE workshop 2010 Christine Bichsel inner-Soviet borders of the Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tajik Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs). Understanding the current borderlines in the Ferghana Valley will need a short excursion into the past for their historical emergence within the particular constitution of the Soviet statehood. Figure 1: Ferghana Valley Source: UNEP / GRID-Arendal (2005) The debate of how Central Asia has been divided up in republics remains central to discussions about the nature of Soviet rule and the emergence of conflicts after independence. Popular interpretations of this process often see ‘divide and rule’ strategies by Soviet leadership, and the attributed pernicious intentions to create havoc after disintegration, as an explanation for violence.