Fixing the border: On the affective life of the state in Southern Kyrgyzstan

This paper proceeds from a moment of impromptu border-fixing in the wake of an intercommunal conflict, to explore the everyday spatialisation of the state in a rural region of Central Asia. Drawing on ethnography from the Kyrgyzstan -Uzbekistan border, it contributes to a growing concern to understand how the state is rendered integral' in everyday life. Rather than focusing on the enactments and justificatory statements of state officials, the paper explores instead the diffuse but passionate work of borderland dwellers in policing the state edge in a context of political upheaval. Territory' in this reading is not just an a priori attribute of the state, nor only the product of official imaginings and interventions, but the site, too, of everyday practical and symbolic work, a vehicle for claims making and the means of performative enactments of belonging and difference. The paper calls for greater attention to the ordinary affects' that are elicited by borders and boundedness and the need to bring discussions of territoriality into conversation with a literature on the affective life of the state. Doing so, it argues, will both enrich our understanding of everyday state formation and give us greater purchase on the role of events in rupturing and reconfiguring state space. © 2011 Pion Ltd and its Licensors.