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Abstract

This study analyzes a land and water dispute between two rural communities in the Chimkent district of Turkestan in the context of legal transformations in the newly formed region of the Russian Empire. Despite the efforts of the tsarist administration to preserve the region's unchanged legal system, the local community adopted new rules to achieve its own goals. This was made possible by legal pluralism in Turkestan, which included Sharia and imperial law.

The dispute, which arose in the early 1870s, lasted for forty years. This protracted conflict was not static. This case demonstrates the qualitative dynamics of the selective appropriation of elements of imperial modernity: from simple appeals to administrative arbitration to the skillful use of imperial civil law and the procedural mechanisms of the imperial court. In the 1870s, communities appealed to the colonial administration within the logic of traditional arbitration, appealing to customs, long-standing ownership, and justice. By the 1910s, these same communities began invoking specific articles of imperial civil law, citing Senate decisions, and hiring professional lawyers who knew the system from the inside. This evolution was not the result of the communities' innate legal competence, but rather the accumulated experience of interacting with colonial institutions and the emergence of professional mediators.

Ultimately, by imposing imperial legal norms, the colonial administration inadvertently created tools that local communities learned to use against administrative discretion, thereby creating procedural helplessness in the very authorities that imposed them. This case demonstrates that it was precisely this legal pluralism that opened the most long-term opportunities for local initiative.