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Paper abstract:

Many Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan face a number of challenges on a daily basis. The main difficulties affect the economically active, who suffer constant pressure and intimidation from the state authorities and criminals alike. As a result, businesspeople have resorted to finding different kinds of creative strategies to keep their businesses secure. Measures include moving trading from the bazaar to the mahallas (neighbourhoods), using mobile phones for taking passenger bookings from the bus station and the airport, and avoiding selling to, or serving, potentially ‘suspicious’ clients. Uzbeks do not openly avoid developing businesses within their economic niches; rather they have tried to turn their existing niches into safer places by using practices that are not visible to the Kyrgyz community, and in this manner, safeguarding their businesses. Some businesses have been turned into ‘safe’ social projects, such as a school, hospital and madrasa. They have created ethnically exclusive zones as well as developed public services that are less likely to be targeted out of distrust.

Respondents to my research also try to use avoidance and concealment of businesses and identities, as well as using video cameras and social networks to evade contact with criminal networks. These securityscapes have developed as a reaction to different ‘anticipations’: the realities are experienced as physical violence, harassment and the seizure of Uzbek businesses. According to von Boemcken et al. “securityscapes can be understood as ‘imagined worlds’ of security and insecurity that goad and structure the lives of people as they go about their daily business.” Thus, securityscapes are based on inter-subjectively enacted social practices and emphasise the individual agency of actors in seeking security – which is especially evident if these actors do not and cannot rely on state authorities. Below I would like to discuss three cases to show how people experience and create securityscapes: 1) Against Suyun Omurzakov’s network; 2) against corruption and the system of ‘dolya’ (share, cut); and 3) balance between ‘low’ nationalism and ‘high’ nationalism.