ABSTRACT
During the second half of the twentieth century, inter-republican boundaries between the Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republics were repeatedly adjusted, as land was loaned for new infrastructure projects, residential settlements grew and parity commissions adjudicated on agricultural and pasture use between neighbouring collective farms. With independence in 1991, these border readjustments have created a host of juridical and practical obstacles to governments and local populations alike, leaving significant stretches of new border juridically indeterminate and formally disputed between neighbouring states. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research in the Ferghana Valley, this chapter tracks this ‘unfinished history’ of border delimitation in Soviet Central Asia and its contemporary legacies. Developing the analytic of ‘unsettled space,’ the chapter approaches international borders in Central Asia as the outcome of contingent political events and long histories of struggle. It argues that the national-territorial delimitation of 1924–1927 should be seen not as a single and conclusive moment of border-drawing but as the first iteration of an ongoing story of twentieth-century border-moving in rural central Asia, which has continued well beyond the Soviet Union’s demise.
