Centering Borders

In an interesting essay named “Travels in the Margins of the State, Everyday Journeys in the Ferghana Valley Borderlands”, Madeleine Reeves describes the journey of Saodat-opa from the village where she spent her married life to her childhood home where her parents and brothers live. Saodat opa had been married to Illkhom aka thirty years ago when they had met as foreign language students in Leninabad, now Khujand and had left her family home to live with her husband. The two hundred kilometer distance separating the two villages had never been considered large till the establishment of independent state borders and the attempt of the state to assert territoriality and foster the perception of ‘otherness’. As Saodat opa travels through Batken in Kyrgyzstan to cross into the Tajik border transformation in everyday geographies become apparent. Restrictions at state borders have become a part of everyday reality for people in the Ferghana Valley who wish to move from one part to another to get to the local market, visit friends or relatives who now happen to be citizens of a different state or even to reach ancestral burial grounds. Yet, this study of the travel of an Uzbekistani Tajik from Sokh rayon in Uzbekistan to the industrial town of Komsomolsk in the Tajik SSR, her family home, illustrates how even in the face of restrictions imposed by the three nationalizing states that now share the valley common cultural practices dominate interaction among the people. Reeves argues that while the transformation of everyday geographies is a reality for the many individuals who now live at ‘the margins of the state’ it is mediated at the local level by a large reservoir of common experiences and shared cultural practices. Reeves’ essay however, is in contrast to most writings on the Ferghana today that tend to focus on conflict as endemic to the valley and support their argument through a plethora of myths and prejudices that exist about ownership of land among the people. In the light of changes in political geographies, with the construction of clearly demarcated political spaces within securitized borders of states, these have assumed new salience.

For those who study the relationship between politics and geography, lines on the global map acquire a significance of their own. Yet, there remains the understanding that the framing of the relationship between nation, people, ethnicity and territory by the state is inevitably different from those of borderland dwellers. In addition, contested maps mean that there is often debate on the exact location of the lines dividing the states. In the mental map of most of the inhabitants living at the borders a clear demarcation does not exist and ethnic divisions, so important to discourses of national independence, is foreign to most. In any case the border of the functional state is even more contorted and people moved employment and residence backward and forward over borders during their lifetimes.

The divergence between the cartographic division of national space and the everyday experience of the ‘border’ however is not merely of academic interest. How state assertions of ‘territorial integrity’ should translate into the movement of goods and people across the state’s edge is a question on which daily life invites reflection. How to have ‘secure’ borders that can nonetheless allow free trade across them? How to prevent resources from being siphoned out illegally, without this entailing draconian document checks every few kilometers? How to sustain relations with friends and relatives across a border when transport is increasingly fragmented along national lines? What to do with uncultivated territory, the jurisdiction of which is contested, in a situation of acute land shortage? How to balance limit and flow, connection and separation, inclusion and exclusion? All of these are issue that one is constantly confronted with given the fact that the border is a site where contradictions between the ‘securitization’ of the border and local livelihoods and movements are constantly in tension.     

The study of borders has undergone a transformation during the past decade. This is reflected in an impressive list of conferences, workshops and scholarly publications. This has been partly in response to the emergence of a counter narrative to the borderless and de-territorialized world discourse which has accompanied much of globalization theory. The study of borders has moved beyond the limited confines of the political geography discourse, crossing its own disciplinary boundaries, to include sociologists, political scientists, historians, international lawyers and scholars of international relations. While geographers have sought to place the notions of boundary within other social theoretical constructs, other social scientists have attempted to understand the role of space and, in some cases, territory in their understanding of personal, group, and national boundaries and identities.

Recent studies include analyses of the postmodern ideas of territoriality and the `disappearance’ of borders, the construction of socio spatial identities, socialization narratives in which boundaries are responsible for creating the `us’ and them and the different scale dimensions of boundary research. These can be brought together within a multidimensional, multidisciplinary framework for the future study of borders. However, this meeting of disciplines has not yet been successful in creating a common language or glossary of terms which is relevant to all scholars of borders. Central to the contemporary study of borders are notions such as `borders are institutions’, the process of `bordering’ as a dynamic in its own right, and border terminologies which focus on the binary distinctions between the `us’ and `them’, the `included’ and the `excluded’. Borders should be studied not only from a top-down perspective, but also from the bottom up, with a focus on the individual border narratives and experiences, reflecting the ways in which borders impact upon the daily life practices of people living in and around the borderland and transboundary transition zones. In positing an agenda for the next generation of border-related research, borders should be seen for their potential to constitute bridges and points of contact, though they have traditionally been seen as constituting barriers to movement and communication.
Anita

15th October 2017