Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in 2004-05, this paper explores the relationship between violence and state assertions of territorial sovereignty by focusing on the role of border guards as transmitters of 'everyday state violence' in an area of politicised borderland between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between violence and state assertions of territorial sovereignty by focusing on the role of border guards as transmitters of "everyday state violence" in an area of contested borderland. I am interested in the place of violence both as potentially marking an exception (by asserting territorial primacy or banishing "foreigners") and of signalling in-corporation into the body politic (through, for instance, the hazing of soldiers). The ethnographic focus is an area of politicized border in the Ferghana valley, where Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have been inscribing their independence on the landscape with increasing vigour over the last decade. Here, young military conscripts charged with upholding "state sovereignty" are a common site in border villages otherwise scarred by the hasty retreat of Soviet collective farming. As well as regulating movement across borders that until recently were unmarked and largely irrelevant to daily life, border guards from all three states are now often invoked as local "strong men" to back up property claims, guard "contested territory" and regulate disputes over water.

Border crossings and checkpoints provide exceptional sites to explore the phenomenon of state violence as an element of everyday life. Borders are central to the imagination of the state as sovereign and territorially bounded. Border guards often have a central place in official demonstrations of sovereign power. And yet, studied ethnographically, from the bottom up, border encounters also reveal both the arbitrariness and contingency of state violence. In an area such as the Ferghana valley, where bribes at borders are common and the young conscripts are often intensely dependent on the friendship and goodwill of the local villagers, borders often simultaneously expose the flimsiness of the distinction between legality and illegality, "state" and "society". By looking at interactions between border guards and villagers in an area of newly-salient border, I explore the place of violence in marking the state's "edge", and in so doing, examine theoretically the relationship between sovereignty, territoriality and the everyday violence of the state.