Drawing on extensive and carefully designed ethnographic fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley region, where the state borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikizstan and Uzbekistan intersect, Madeleine Reeves develops new ways of conceiving the state as a complex of relationships, and of state borders as socially constructed and in a constant state of flux. She explores the processes and relationships through which state borders are made, remade, interpreted and contested by a range of actors including politicians, state officials, border guards, farmers and people whose lives involve the crossing of the borders. In territory where international borders are not always clearly demarcated or consistently enforced, Reeves traces the ways in which states' attempts to establish their rule create new sources of conflict or insecurity for people pursuing their livelihoods in the area on the basis of older and less formal understandings of norms of access. As a result the book makes a major new and original contribution to scholarly work on Central Asia and more generally on the anthropology of border regions and the state as a social process. Moreover, the work as a whole is presented in a lively and accessible style. The individual lives whose tribulations and small triumphs Reeves so vividly documents, and the relationships she establishes with her subjects, are as revealing as they are engaging. Border Work is a well-deserved winner of this year’s Alexander Nove Prize.

Central Asia is a region singularly marked by attempts to transform social life by transforming place. Drawing together established scholars and a new generation of historians, geographers and anthropologists, this volume brings empirical specificity and theoretical depth to debates about the politics of place-making in this diverse region, making an important contribution to Central Asian studies and a distinctive regional comparison to the ‘spatial turn’ in social analysis. Case studies draw on archival research and oral history to explore the workings—and unintended consequences—of policies aimed at sedentarizing, collectivizing and resettling populations as a means to fix and territorialize space. The book also examines ethnographic studies attuned to the role of movement in sustaining social life, from Soviet-era trade networks that linked rural Central Asia and the Russian metropolis, to pilgrimage routes through which ‘kazakhness’ is articulated, to the contemporary moralization of migration abroad in search of work. Rather than analysing ‘flows’ as abstract processes, the book enquires about effortful activity, material infrastructures, political relations and social habits through which people, ideas, knowledge, skills and material objects move or are prevented from moving. As such, it offers new insights into the complex intersections of movement, power and place in this important region over the last two centuries. This book was originally published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.

With fresh and provocative insights into the everyday reality of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia, this volume moves beyond commonplaces about strong and weak states to ask critical questions about how democracy, authority, and justice are understood in this important region. In conversation with current theories of state power, the contributions draw on extensive ethnographic research in settings that range from the local to the transnational, the mundane to the spectacular, to provide a unique perspective on how politics is performed in everyday life.

"In July 2007, the European Union initiated a fundamentally new approach to the countries of Central Asia. The launch of the EU Strategy for Central Asia signals a qualitative shift in the Union's relations with a region of the world that is of growing importance as a supplier of energy, is geographically situated in a politically sensitive area - between China, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and the south Caucasus - and contains some of the most authoritarian political regimes in the world. In this volume, leading specialists from Europe, the United States and Central Asia explore the key challenges facing the European Union as it seeks to balance its policies between enhancing the Union's energy, business and security interests in the region while strengthening social justice, democratisation efforts and the protection of human rights. With chapters devoted to the Union's bilateral relations with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and to the vital issues of security and democratisation, 'Engaging Central Asia' provides the first comprehensive analysis of the EU's strategic initiative in a part of the world that is fast emerging as one of the key regions of the 21st century."--BOOK JACKET.

In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as ‘affect theory’. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this ‘affective turn’ through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

Central Asia is characterised by state fragility and associated with drug traffic and instability. Social Orders and the defining borders have often changed in this region. What are the functions of borders today in the light of parallel state and nation building processes? How do borders impact the attitudes of the borderland population? And most notably: What are the drivers of and the constraints for transborder interactions? The author analyses these questions along the rather new state border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and at border strips between these states and Afghanistan -- once separating two geopolitical regions. The authoritarian regimes in Tajikistan and, even more so, in Uzbekistan contain their state building projects against allegedly destabilising influences from abroad. However, in border regions far from state influence interdependencies may also be the basis for legal interactions.

Development Zones in Asian Borderlands maps the nexus between global capital flows, national economic policies, infrastructural connectivity, migration, and aspirations for modernity in the borderlands of South and South-East Asia. In doing so, it demonstrates how these are transforming borderlands from remote, peripheral backyards to front-yards of economic development and state-building. Development zones encapsulate the networks, institutions, politics and processes specific to enclave development, and offer a new analytical framework for thinking about borderlands; namely, as sites of capital accumulation, territorialisation and socio-spatial changes.