final draft submitted

Sovereignty as a Resource: Performing Securitised Borders in Tajikistan’s Pamirs Tobias Kraudzun

FINAL DRAFT SUBMITTED To cite this article: Tobias Kraudzun (2017): Sovereignty as a Resource: Performing Securitised Borders in Tajikistan’s Pamirs, Geopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2017.1284817 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1284817

GEOPOLITICS http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1284817

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Sovereignty as a resource: Performing securitised borders in Tajikistan’s Pamirs Tobias Kraudzun Centre for Development Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

ABSTRACT This paper scrutinises the translation of sovereignty into daily actions at the border. The Soviet Union established a heavily securitised and sealed border, which was perpetuated in post-Soviet, civil war-stricken Tajikistan by assigning the task to the Russian Federation’s border forces. After having taken over this task, the slowly recovering postconflict state tried hard to maintain its own border control. Drawing on interviews with borderland people, it discusses the convergence of Tajikistan’s strong claim but weak support for sovereignty, with the daily life of the borderland people. It will be shown how – given the Pamirs’ special status as a border district – far-reaching sovereign authority of state agents, aiming to provide security at the border, has been translated into arbitrary actions ensuring individual benefits, and has been hidden by intransparency. I argue that the lack of adequate support from the central government encourages state representatives at the border to reinterpret the sovereign power assigned to them in order to serve their own individual benefits and purposes. Instead of being used to maintain the state territory, the sovereignty’s power is diverted to serve individual interests, in the end serving to destabilize the border, the opposite of the intended purpose.

Introduction This paper deals with the subject of border and the concomitant borderlands. It focuses, in particular, on the people living in such an area, where geopolitical strategic thinking has resulted in the creation and maintenance of closed borders. It looks at the lives of people living in a harsh mountainous environment, where the people had been, and continue to be, heavily dependent on the interregional exchange of goods for their basic needs. Using the example of the Pamirs1, this paper will explore the opportunities and restrictions for everyday life that arise from the persisting status of closed border districts, along will the ramifications of political and structural changes that influence that border.

CONTACT Tobias Kraudzun (@) [email protected] (p) Centre for Development Studies, Freie Universität, Malteserstr. 74–100, Berlin 12249, Germany.

2 After the end of the Cold War the Iron Curtain was lifted and the prototype of a sealed border, the impermeable dividing line between East and West, was expected to be relegated to history. The predominant discourse of globalisation and deterritorialisation promised a borderless world with tremendous advantages resulting from unlimited trans-border trade.2 However, not all borders became permeable after the great ideological antagonism had subsided. Today, the impact of global changes on borders is, like David Newman states, “… as geographically and socially differentiated as most other social phenomena.”3 While the east-west borderlands in the converging European Union became the arena of trans-border cooperation, sub-dividing the fading Soviet Union meant the emergence of new international borders. These were established between the successor republics to replace pre-existing demarcation lines of merely administrative function between the former Soviet Republics. Now, these borders constitute major obstacles to any economic exchange, in contrast to the inner-Soviet subdivisions that did not previously hamper intensive Soviet economic integration. In the Pamirs, not only the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan boundary was created, but also the Tajikistan-Afghanistan boundary remained perpetually sealed. However, militias from the two civil-wars-stricken countries frequently violated it.4 The promises of the market system, which spread quickly throughout the postSoviet world, did not reach the people in the Pamirs. Instead, they just felt uncoupled from the post-Soviet economic developments, when the halting of the Soviet supplies coincided with the isolation of the Pamirs due to the emerging civil war in Tajikistan’s west. The geopolitical importance for the Russian Empire that colonised the region had resulted in a complete closure of the borders with China and Afghanistan. This was enforced under Soviet rule since the 1930s. As a result, the whole of the Pamirs, comprising about half of the Tajik Soviet Republic’s territory, became a special status province, subdivided into several border districts, that was closed, which detrimentally affected regional mobility and exchange patterns.5 The Pamir borderland people’s experience of state sovereignty6 has changed over time. They remember very well the paradigm of a “border under lock and key”, as a security guarantee for the Soviet development project.7 They also recall vividly the shortage of everything after the Soviet supply lifeline had run dry, and the resources provided by the Russian Border Forces. Their reality today includes the endeavour to sell livestock, as their only production, and to buy their goods in the favourable market of Osh, which is now located behind a newly established border. Scrutinising their shared memories as historiographies of boundaries, or as “boundary biographies,”8 could help to explain (de)materialisation processes of boundaries, as Nick Megoran has shown for the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan boundary.

3 Experienced sovereignty depends on the actions of those who are in place to enforce it and the borderland people who want to make their living despite the constraints of the border. Madeleine Reeves bemoans the, “... near total eclipse of border guards from the ethnographic literature – despite the constitutive role of these and other state agents in forging a distinct borderland society.”9 The intentions for deviant behaviour can be manifold and go beyond the explanatory pattern of disobedience against the nation state’s border regulations. Understanding the behaviour of all actors10 at the border is crucial for understanding the everyday experience of sovereignty which is, following Reece Jones, a “…translation between state strategy and local tactics, [where] the claim of sovereignty is deployed, renegotiated, and reinterpreted every day.”11 Concerning the scope of these actions, he conceptualises it as “spaces of refusal.” State actors pursuing state strategies should not be understood, according to Donnan and Wilson, as “… unitary structure, an actor just off the stage whose face is never seen but who has the ability to constrain or enable the actions of others.”12 The aim of this paper is to understand how the realities of the breakdown of the Soviet economic system, the persisting strict regulations of the border districts, as well as how the changing reinterpretation of state sovereignty influence the agency of both state actors and borderland people in today’s post-Soviet Pamirs. How does the outcome of these actions affect the presumed function of state sovereignty at the border to serve the goal of securing the state territory? The findings in this paper are based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the Pamirs since 2003, including several long field stays between 2007 and 2009 (14 months) and repeated follow-up visits through 2016. Information is derived from topic-specific interviews with key and knowledgeable informants about the transformation of state institutions, people’s borderland experiences, local and trans-regional economic relations, and political frame conditions. Examples to illustrate the interdependency between the border district’s frame conditions and livelihood strategies were drawn from a sample of 70 households selected to record their life histories. Details about historical contexts are based on data collected from regional archives, which also helped provided insights into the current context.

Borderlands as Social Space Boundaries are crucial for the sovereignty of territorial nation states. They became increasingly a matter of scholarly interest in the 20th century. Attempts during the first decades sought to interpret the boundary either as physical phenomenon like Friedrich Ratzel’s “natural barriers;”13 tried to distinguish them in defined categories to be summarised in terminologies

of geographical separation lines;14 or functionalised them according to the roles they play for nation states to fulfil legal, fiscal, control, military, and ideological functions.15 As a rule, boundaries have long been studied without considering the people whose daily lives are influenced by their vicinity. Later, perspectives were broadened from the dividing line itself to the social interactions that take place in relation to it. A common theme focused on the economic and social interactions with the border as an institution of the modern nation state, established to secure its territory and to control trans-border movements. It is the border,16 with the existence of the state boundary as a structural precondition that poses as the arena for everyday social and cultural practices.17 Borders are determined and sanctioned by the state in order to, “… serve to establish, demarcate, and maintain a territory.”18 Yet, it is how local people understand the sense of the border locality, which leads to their agency in relation to border institutions.19 Everyday practices of the people resulting in interactions with border institutions constitute lived spaces that need to be investigated in order to understand the effects of the presence of the border. The term of borderland is used in the literature to conceptualise the spatialities along the margins of the state. Borderlands encompass transition zones along the clear-cut lines of the boundary and represent the special history of border regions resulting from shifting relations between the central power and the social reality of the people living at the border.20 They are either described from the state power’s perspective of controlling the border for maintaining the nation state, or from the borderland peoples’ perspective of challenging the hegemonic claims of the usually faraway central power. Judith Miggelbrink synthetises both perspectives, seeing borderlands as, “… the effects of dynamic and overlapping socio-spatial practices, expectations, perceptions and decisions based on, referring to and resulting from a state's bordering politics”21 Mostly depending on these politics, every borderland including both sides of the boundary can be located at a certain position on a continuum between a full cross-border integration and a situation of complete borderland alienation.22 The Pamirs clearly constitute an example of a closed border. Its historical function as a geopolitical frontier limited any cross-border exchange for several decades and alienated the borderland people from each other, who had previously been connected through ethnic and kinship ties. The concept of sovereignty is crucial for the agency of territorial nation states at their borders. However, it has been proven that real-world state sovereignty cannot be captured by a universal definition, but has to be grasped through its components. Therefore, Weber and Biersteker suggest when analysing a sovereign territorial state to be willing to be “… questioning each of its components - territory,

5 population, authority, and recognition - and the practices that constitute, delineate, and organize each of these components individually and collectively."23 Especially at the state borders, sovereignty plays an important role. The boundary also constitutes the dividing line of the different meanings of sovereignty – how it is perceived before the boundary and beyond. Sovereignty can manifest as “supremacy of power or authority” at the border within its space of jurisdiction, aiming to prevent border transgressions by others. Outside this space, beyond the boundary, sovereignty conveys “… self-rule and the capacity for independence in action.”24 Persisting excessive power over the borderland people forms the particular background of this case study. Following Agamben, it is “… the state of exception [that] opens the space in which the determination of a […] particular territory first becomes possible.”25 The state of exception that helped the Soviets to defend the territory of the Pamirs during the power struggles in the aftermath of the October Revolution, was made permanent when dangers were persistently perceived by the Soviet sovereign in the Pamirs as coming from outside the borders. Wendy Brown argues that the state responds to persistent dangers with “power beyond accountability,” which can even be directed towards their own population.26 Accordingly, the state agents’ claims to exert (excessive) power over the people and how the borderland people deal with it, needs to be understood to analyse the encounter of sovereignty with peoples’ everyday lives. At the border, state sovereignty is challenged in multiple ways. Like all people, households of the borderlands try to earn their livelihoods from available resources. Doing this, however, often necessitates the evasion of the restrictions of the border institutions and the use of trans-border exchange as a resource. On the other hand, representatives of state authority like border guards, possibly follow their own agendas in favour of personal gains. As a result, sovereignty is turned into reality by the agency of both borderland people and border officials. However, it would not be an easy task to evaluate the agency of both the borderland people and the border officials morally. Following Madeleine Reeves, “… an a priori distinction between state-sanctioned and not state-sanctioned, does not help for the understanding of violence at the border.” She suggests that one should take into account that, “… military service produces as normal a mode of power that operates through the reproduction of uncertainty about the location of law.”27 Historical legacies influence present realities in the borderland. The strict border regulations in the Pamirs originated from the ideological and geopolitical importance of the Soviet Union’s external border, resulting in a permanent state of emergency in the border districts. Even after this border largely lost its ideological and political significance as a result of Tajikistan’s independency, most of these normative legal regulations and institutions of a border district remained in force or, at least persist to be performed.28

As a consequence, people living in the border district question the legitimacy of these regulations. The constraints conflict with people’s everyday requirements to earn a living under the harsh conditions experienced in a peripheral mountain region. On the other hand, state actors are encouraged to use sovereignty delegated to them in the form of anachronistic border regulations as a power resource while interacting with the borderland people.

Historic legacy: the Pamirs as the Soviet Union’s external border The location and meaning of the border in the Pamirs originated historically from the encounter of the Russian Empire with the British Empire in High Asia during the last decades of the 19th century. The contemporary boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was established and fixed in two agreements made between Russia and the United Kingdom in 1873 and 1895. As a result, the territory of the contested Pamir frontier zone between Russia and British India was granted to the Russian Empire and delimited by a new boundary that divided Russia’s area of influence from the territory of Afghanistan, which became a neutral buffer zone between the two empires29. Controlling border traffic proved to be crucial for the implementation of the Soviet administration. A struggle for power broke out in the region in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Communist party commissars sent from Soviet Turkestan’s centre Tashkent and counter-revolutionary groups entering the border from Afghanistan both struggled to gain the favour of the people in the Pamirs. By that time, the inefficiency of the border control was hardly a hindrance to the frequently occurring illicit crossings. Numerous people escaped the Soviet Pamirs to avoid persecution or their compulsory dispossession by the Soviet regime. Many of them returned after some time, and the Soviet authorities presented their remigration as an argument for the popularity of the socialist approach.30 The transport of contraband goods was another popular reason for undocumented border crossings. Subsidised (and therefore cheap) goods from the emerging Soviet supply organisations became preferred items for smuggling. Opium and tea were the main trading commodities going in the opposite direction.31 During the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the Soviet regime was trying desperately to contain the frequency of border crossings and the amount of contraband goods transported across those borders.32 Full control over economic activities via state-led allocation of resources was necessary for the establishment of the socialist economy. Therefore, unregulated trans-border flows of private capital, labour, and goods could not be tolerated. The Soviet regime gave a high priority to formalising border control. A border strip (pogranichnaja polosa) of 22 km in depth running along the Soviet Union’s entire land and sea boundaries was created by the Soviet regime in 1923. This strip was put under the control of the border guard of the State Political Directorate

7 (GPU/OGPU), which was granted an unlimited right of search and seizure. Districts containing parts of the border strip were defined as border districts (pogranichnij rajon). When the distribution of internal passports to Soviet citizens started in 1932, the residents in these border districts were required to have special documentation. Later in 1934, the border strip was relabelled the border zone (pogranichnaja zona), where even economic activities of state enterprises had to be closely monitored by the border troops under the Chief Directorate of Border Troops, and later under the supervision of the Committee for State Security (KGB).33 Despite all these legal regulations, gaining control over the app. 5000 km southern border of Soviet Central Asia was no easy task for the Soviet border forces. In most sections of the Pamirs, the boundary stretched through inaccessible terrain, which was unknown to the non-local border guards. The Soviet planners realised that it was unrealistic to seal the border by forcing the households to dismiss their existing regional trans-border supply networks against their will. Their strategy was rather to win over the local population by integrating them with the vision of a secure border. This Soviet propaganda would have remained largely ineffective, however, if it had not been backed by material support. Every endeavour was made to improve the supply to the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province (GBAO, see fig. 1)34 of food and the provision of goods, channelled via the railheads of Andizhan and Osh.35 The Soviet regime tried hard to escape the dilemma of the urgent need to stop border crossings (which meant affronting the people by brutally punishing border crossings) and not winning them over because of the prevalent counterrevolutionary influence. On one hand, the Soviet regime was aware that the nonlocal border guards were dependent on the knowledge of the local people to effectively guard the border, and they also knew that their support was not certain without winning the hearts and minds of the local people. On the other hand, they would have had little chances to win their hearts and minds as long as the people were influenced by counter-revolutionary forces that were frequently infiltrating the border. Although the Boundary Commission of Soviet Central Asia’s political administration (SredazBuro) certainly did not like the frequency of incursions across the border, they urged the commanders of the Pamir border forces to act very carefully, avoiding affronting the people who were still sceptical about the new system and preventing mass migrations to Afghanistan.36 Finally, the reorganisation of the border guards, including the improved equipment of border posts along the boundaries with Afghanistan and China, made the previous attempts to completely close the border successful. After some years of frequent skirmishes between border guards and people trying to cross the border unofficially, by the end of the 1930s, the border control

Fig. 1: Map of the border zone and the territory transferred to China after the 2002 bilateral agreement located in Murghab District (Own design, based on SRTM3v4 elevation data, own field observations and satellite images taken between Oct 2007 and Oct 2013)

regime seemed to work efficiently.37 However, the Soviet regime was aware that the control of the vast border district was still dependent on appropriate infrastructure, efficient administration, and last but not least, the peoples’ loyalty and knowledge. The border zone along the Chinese boundary became prominently visible as a result of a historical specifity. When the boundary between the Czarist Russian Empire and China was agreed upon in 1884, it has been delimited in a legally binding manner only in its northern part, where the empires met at that time.38 When Russia occupied the Pamirs completely, it extended the boundary by continuously following the watershed of the Sarikol Range as the dividing line, ignoring China's claims of large parts of the area. This was tolerated by China, until the tensions increased in all regions with disputed territories in the aftermath of the 1968 Sino-Soviet border conflicts in the Far East.39

9 Consequently, the Pamir border guards were restructured and reinforced again in 1973. The result of these measures is still visible today: Beginning in the 1970s, an electrically secured, barbed-wire fence was set up adjacent to the external boundaries of the Soviet Pamir. Due to the unsettled territorial claims, it was built to limit a buffer zone at a distance of several kilometres from the Sarikol Range, constituting from then on the de facto boundary for the local people, who were physically hindered from entering the border strip. This border zone (“sistema”) excluded the collective farms from valuable pasture areas, which comprises a substantial 14% of the district's territory (see figs. 1 and 2). To settle the inherited border dispute between (Soviet) Russia and China, bilateral Sino-Tajik negotiations resulted in a final demarcation of the provisional boundary between the states. Items of the agreements, contracted in 1999 and 200240, were the cession of two territories of app. 150 and 980 km² to China (see fig. 1). This brought disagreeable effects for the pastoralists of Karakul and Rangkul who had used the pastures on the land handed over to China.

Fig. 2: Closed borders in the open mountain landscape of the Eastern Pamirs: The electrically secured, barbed-wire fence, called “sistema” (“sistema elketrosignalizacija”, vernacularly “the system”), delimits the border zone adjacent to the Tajikistan-China and Tajikistan-Afghanistan boundaries (Photograph taken by the author near Markan-Suu in the Eastern Pamirs in June 2010).

Sovereignty, actors, and practices in the border district In this subsection, I will show how post-Soviet Russia maintained the tight control of a system of closed borders, followed by a sub-section depicting the effects of the borders being taken over by the Tajik Border Forces. After having explained the frame conditions, I will then introduce practices of mutual benefit that help integrate the border into the local economy. The effects of the imbalance of power, where force is used as a resource, are named in the final sub-section. ‘Outsourced’ Sovereignty: Russia’s mission for a persistent border regime Tajikistan declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and gained its formal sovereignty. Nevertheless, Russia’s security agencies continued to stretch its security interests to the Soviet Union’s former limits. One focus was Central Asia, where Russia was particularly worried about the spreading of Islam as a political movement. Two developments gave rise to additional concerns: 1) The downfall of President Najibullah strengthened the Mujahidin forces in Afghanistan and 2) a civil war broke out in Tajikistan just after it gained independence. Although the latter was caused by internal political instabilities in Tajikistan and was triggered by a conflict between regional elites about power, Russia became increasingly involved in the conflict, aiming to repel the Islamic forces in the conflict.41 Russia continued to control the borders after Tajikistan’s independence. The 1992 Collective Security Treaty signed by the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) laid the foundation stone for a 1993 bilateral agreement, assigning the mandate for securing Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan and China to the Russian Federal Border Forces (RBF).42 Accordingly, Russia, as an external actor, financed and operated infrastructure as well as the troops necessary to control Tajikistan's share of what was now seen as the external CIS border43 until Tajikistan’s Border Forces (TBF) took over between 2003 and 2005.44 The local economy benefitted considerably from the policy of the RBF of drawing about 75% of the forces from the local population. Therefore, many local people were hired as contracted border guards, as well as civil servants. With an extraordinary high salary by local standards and other benefits, every employed soldier and labourer usually became the main source of contribution to the household income.45 A former head of Murghab District assessed that in the district centre of Murghab 20–30% of the households benefitted in this way. Furthermore, the comparably affluent Russian border guards purchased many products at the local market. A considerable share of external support for the region consisted of supplies (mainly fuel and coal) that were originally intended for the RBF, but were sold by soldiers for their own gain. Above all, RBF supplies often made it possible

11 to operate public infrastructure like the landline telephone system, whose generators worked with fuel supplied by the RBF.46 Official goals and personal gains: Illicit drug trade and border control Keeping combatants from Afghanistan’s warring parties out of the post-Soviet space and preventing drugs from flowing into Russia were the main tasks of the RBF. Smuggling illicit drugs – Afghanistan's most valuable product – to the new markets in post-Soviet countries promised enormous profits. Opium and opiates were abundant because opiate production rose considerably when the Soviet army loosened control in Afghanistan and left the country.47 By that time, the RBF de facto exercised a kind of outsourced control of the Russian Federation’s (RF) border. Their main goal was to limit the availability of illicit drugs in Russia, where many people welcomed them to deaden their sorrows about the effects of the economic ‘shock therapy’ in the early 1990s. The RBF – being comparably well equipped – seemed to work rather effectively: many local traffickers were caught during the thorough searches at the numerous checkpoints, and mostly served long prison sentences. However, Pamir interlocutors who observed the crossing of suspicious cars that were not searched at the checkpoints began to suspect that some members of the RBF were also involved in drug trafficking. After the handover, the TBF were poorly funded and not well organised. After the RBF left the country, Tajikistan became responsible for ensuring the control of its borders with its own forces and funds. International assistance sought to strengthen counter-trafficking capacities by trying to increase the abilities of Tajikistan’s security forces. Tajikistan’s Drug Control Agency (DCA), founded earlier by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), was increasingly supported to counter trans-border drug trafficking. As a reaction, the amount of casual trafficking (and selling) by individuals decreased, whereas smaller, more cohesive and more professional trafficking groups took over.48 State officials claim that the trafficking has almost ceased now. They point out decreasing seizures and praise their ostensibly reinforced and professionalised security structures for the success after they took over the task. In fact, seizures resemble just a small share of opiates smuggled through Tajikistan. UNODC representatives assess that barely 1-2% of heroin and about 4% of opium trafficked through Tajikistan are confiscated by law enforcement institutions.49 They presume that “… large parts of the political and law enforcement establishment in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are seriously undermined by the involvement in the drug trade.”50 This corresponds to a statement of the head of Tajikistan’s Drug Control Agency, Rustam Nazarov, who regretfully admitted that, “… all drug trafficking groups are covered by law enforcement officers.”51

Most drugs are seized in the vicinity of the boundary by the border guards. Given the limited flow of goods at the border crossings, it would be difficult to conceal substantial drug movements. So, the trafficking groups try to smuggle them in hard to access sections of the approximately 1,300 km section of Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan, where approximately 7,000-8,000 border troops (of which 6,000 are conscripts) are on guard trying to prevent the trafficking.52 However, the seizure of drugs may be hampered for two reasons: 1) Firstly, conscripts are not paid well and are poorly trained and 2) the officers, a smaller group, often have wide-reaching opportunities to act independently for their own gain. In Gorno-Badakhshan, the success of state-led persecution of drug trafficking was even more limited. Although the GBAO part of the border is more than 70% of the entire Afghanistan-Tajikistan border, the whole province accounts for just 2% of total seizures.53 The drug trade evolved with the outbreak of the Tajik civil war in 1992, when state control vanished in GBAO. After bloody assaults were launched on Pamiri54 communities in Southwest Tajikistan by forces of the pro government militia Popular Front for Tajikistan (PFT),55 people fled to the Pamirs and to Afghanistan. In the ongoing civil war, Pamiri commanders formed a militia from local volunteer fighters and led them to defend the mountain province against the allied PFT and government forces. In doing so, they became part of the United Tajik Opposition (UTO). These local commanders established linkages across the TajikistanAfghanistan border. Mainly young Pamiri men had fled across the border to Afghanistan because of the Tajik conflict. There, they managed to organise weapons and ammunition. These supplies reached the Pamirs mainly over the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border, as the few road linkages to the Pamirs through Tajikistan were unreliable for military supplies of a warring party.56 As a side effect, the establishment of illegal border crossing movements also eased illicit drug trafficking over this previously sealed border.57 Commanders, who had to manage military operations and weapons supplies, welcomed the additional income source from drug trafficking, which helped finance the defence of their region against the pro-government forces. Ordinary borderland people also became involved in drug trafficking. The dissolution of the Soviet economic system left most people with uncertainties about their future perspectives. People who had the necessary resources and felt familiar with the procedures of crossing the border to Kyrgyzstan tried their luck with smuggling drugs. Road traffic between the two former Soviet republics was very scarce at that time, but another operation indirectly eased the transport of illicit drugs; the Aga Khan Foundation58 established an enormous humanitarian supply program for the region, sending hundreds of trucks with goods each month from Osh to the Pamirs. These trucks were usually empty when going back, and their drivers – originating from the large Soviet transport company PATU59 – were

13 familiar with crossing the heavily controlled border. Many drivers managed to hide drugs in small quantities in their trucks, though many of them were also caught during the thorough searches at the numerous checkpoints of the RBF, resulting in long-term prison sentences. Post-conflict power-sharing agreements helped institutionalise drug trafficking networks. The civil war was largely ended after the 1997 peace agreement, which mandated a quota of 30% former UTO commanders in government organisations at all levels. In border regions like GBAO, this meant that former commanders were now delegated sensible tasks like enforcing the border control. It is not surprising that trafficking networks persisted easily where they could build on the capacities of law enforcement organisation employees. Since the end of the civil war, in Khorog it became an open secret that some of the former commanders are still involved in drug trafficking. However, in recent years, their control of the smuggling routes through the Pamirs has been repeatedly challenged by military operations carried out by elite troops under central command.60 As a general tendency, the share of narcotics trafficked through Western Tajikistan has increased since the end of the civil war. Thus, spontaneous and fluid networks still account for a certain portion of the total volume of drugs trafficked.61 Missing inputs for maintaining the border institutions The disrupted external inputs after the pullback of the RBF resulted in palpable effects, both for the local economy and the operation of the border forces. The TBF, which took over the task of guarding the border after the end of Russia’s mandate, were insufficiently financed and equipped to maintain the extensive infrastructure necessary for controlling the border. In the first years, resources ranging from fuel to cars to execute border patrols were missing. Even food supplies were insufficient in the beginning: people from the settlements in the vicinity of the border force barracks remember border guards (mostly young conscripts from all over the country) often asking them for bread and other food.62 Additionally, the ceased external inputs resulting from Russia’s withdrawal ended the hiring of local staff. Border guards from the Pamirs quit their contracts, as their compensation from the RBF was many times higher than was the case under the TBF. This created a significant income gap in many local livelihoods. Consequently the border zone adjacent to the boundary played (and plays) a crucial role for the self-supply of Tajikistan’s insufficiently funded border guards. Being in charge of excluding local people from accessing the fenced border zone, they were – sufficiently equipped with weapons – able to hunt protected wildlife for meat and trophies without being observed, let alone being persecuted. After three decades of Soviet conservation policies, wildlife stocks had recovered, so that wild animals like the world-renowned Marco Polo Sheep (Ovis ammon polii) were abundant in the Eastern Pamirs in the first years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The supply of the TBF eased over the years, but the border guards’ practice of (mis)appropriating natural resources remained. Tajikistan's economy continued to recover from its collapse during the years of civil war. The state was increasingly able to raise pensions and state employee wages, as well as to maintain border control infrastructure and to supply border guards properly. However, local people still observe border guards continuing practices of shooting protected wildlife in order to improve their diet.63 Ensuring trans-border trade: Sovereignty and local power relations at the border crossings The establishment of standardised procedures at the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border facilitated regular trade of goods. After the 1997 peace agreement, the central state regained control over the whole country. The boundary line controlled by the external RBF was transformed into a 'regular' border operated by authorities of the Tajik State. This included a loosening of traffic restrictions in the Pamirs, so that traders became active. The first attempts at trade in the late 1990s were mostly suitcase trade, which was widespread in the post-Soviet countries;64 the traders’ activities became increasingly differentiated in terms of the capacities of traders and transporters.65 Experienced traders organised journeys at their own expense and started to offer the all-inclusive service of freight forwarding. For example, in Osh, the goods were handed over to someone by individuals and small traders, and the entrepreneur was solely responsible for transportation and settling trouble at roadblocks and at the borders. Meanwhile, the Tajik State started to establish customs procedures and to control trade by imposing duties on increasing numbers of product categories or banning some of them from trade altogether. Regular passages allowed the freight forwarders to learn how to negotiate with the officials in order to ensure the passage of all entrusted goods at road blocks and border crossings, while avoiding time consuming searches and official customs fees and taxes. Offering freight forwarding at a fixed rate, below the (hypothetical) costs of fees and taxes, seemed to be an ambitious endeavour. These negotiations resulted in a system of mutually agreed, informal payments to the respective authorities at the border crossings. Several freight forwarders interrogated during fieldwork, reported that their negotiations with border authorities usually resulted in informal payments to the latter that were calculated depending on the amount and, especially, the category of the goods. The traders’ service to transport and pass the goods across the border, regardless of applicable border regulations, is paid for by their clients, who consist of individual households and retailers at the Murghab Bazaar. The payment is usually calculated according to the weight of the transported goods,66 and the rate is mainly equivalent among the transporters. This system of international freight transport proved to be a

15 reliable transport service, regardless of the unpredictable import/export regulations or taxation policies of the state. As a result, the system of informal freight forwarders helped to secure the Pamiri people’s livelihoods and their supply with goods. The dissolving of collective enterprises in 1999, and the subsequent distribution of the remaining livestock to the population of the households, resulted in the emergence of ‘new pastoralists' who had formerly been employed as herders, bookkeepers, and teachers. Although not all households were successful in livestock breeding after the privatisation, the overall number of animals recovered and many herders were increasingly able to sell the herd surplus.67 Animal prices in this region were abundant as the supply of livestock is low, as to be expected, so breeders seek to sell their livestock in Kyrgyzstan, predominantly in Osh, where meat is in strong demand. Therefore, wealthy herders and professional livestock traders are additional groups of individuals that started to undertake roundtrips to Osh on their own account in order to sell their livestock and, on the way back, to supply their own households and those of their herdsmen with goods. Unfortunately, the Tajik Government decided to consider livestock as a part of the country’s strategic reserve and, accordingly, banned it from being exported. Since 2000, the local administration has stopped issuing export permits for yaks in general, and for sheep and goats above very limited numbers.68 The supply of goods by trans-border trade has also been constrained: several imported goods are imposed with high customs duties, including fundamental ones like fuel, as well as luxuries like alcohol and tobacco products. Likewise, Kyrgyzstan banned basic foods from being exported temporarily, e.g. flour in late 2008, when the world market prices for foods skyrocketed.69 Normally, all of these restrictions would cause livelihood and/or supply crises for the households in Murghab District. Though ambitious freight forwarders, in symbiosis with underpaid border officials, enable a steady flow of livestock products, foods, and goods, notwithstanding changing import/export policies of the state. No amenities in taxation and customs duties have been granted to the comparatively disadvantaged region, and state employees continue to be underpaid. This resulted in negotiations between border crossers and officials, encouraging them to establish a culture of informal border operations that provide mutual benefits to both parties. Sovereign authority as a resource for appropriation practices Exclusive rights in the border zone are often reinterpreted by border and security forces to serve their own interests. The vanishing of the tight Soviet system of control of their activities encouraged these forces to develop appropriation practices of natural resources and private livestock. Ensuring self-subsistence of the initially under-supplied border guards was not the only reason for illegal hunting of protected wildlife. As ordinary people are mostly excluded from

entering the border zone, security forces have no witnesses when they hunt for these wild animals to either improve their personal diet or to generate additional income through selling the meat. Even further, they ‘rent out’ weapons to members of their personal networks who then go hunting illegally with the consent of the people who are, by definition, in charge of enforcing the law. Access to the border zone along the border changed over time. During the Soviet period it was granted to a group of handpicked sovkhoz70 herders that were necessary to make use of the vast pastures behind the fence. The dissolution of the sovkhozy and kolkhozy71 brought independent farmers who sought access to these productive pastures. Although the ideological reason for a sealed border has disappeared, agents of the border and security forces still like to use the narrative of the border as a security threat. By claiming that access to the border zone still has to be tightly restricted, they strengthen their negotiation position when bargaining with people about the conditions for granting them access to the border zone through the issuances of a permit (propusk). Payments are often part of the deal, but trust is a valuable currency as well. People who were granted a permit to use the pastures in the border zone are unlikely to complain about any illegal activities of the authorities, as they depend on these authorities to renew their permits.72 Weapons were given to the sovkhoz herders in Soviet times and predator populations like wolves were kept low by enabling herders to hunt them. As a result of the repeated reorganisation of the state and collective farms and their final dissolution in the turbulent post-Soviet transition period, many of the herders were able to maintain possession of these weapons. Today, they still use them to shoot wolves, but also to hunt protected wild animals in order to obtain additional meat for themselves and their households. Possession of a weapon is strictly prohibited by law, which means that the security forces have been given an easy reason to search herders’ tents, to look for weapons. However, instead of reporting discoveries, leading to a lawful criminal prosecution, security forces try to use the situation to extort livestock or money from the concerned household, or at least to oblige the herder to remain silent over the security forces’ arbitrary activities elsewhere. In the long run, they expect that people who are granted access to the border zone will be loyal to them (cf. fig. 3). In some cases, border and security staff has gone too far. Young men, relatives and neighbours from the same settlements as the harassed herders in the pasture camps, formed temporary militias to protect the herders and save their own and the settlement neighbours’ livestock from being seized. In some cases, disputes over arbitrary confiscations of livestock have even led to spontaneous arrests of the corresponding security staff by the herders’ supporters. However, none of these people delivered to the public prosecutor’s office have been held accountable for their misdeeds in the end.73

17

Fig. 3: Confiscated yaks in the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border zone. Border guards claimed that the animals were stopped because they were going to “violate the border.” The owners from Murghab District later reported that when they tried to get the animals back, they had to leave a big share of the animals with the border guards as ‘fine.’ (Photograph taken by the author at the Zorkul border guard barracks in September 2007).

Autocratic thinking of the security staff results in audacious actions. As they are sufficiently equipped with transportation and weapons, and feeling as though they will not be held accountable, several of the security staff have started to systematically steal animals in the border zone. In this strategy, security forces approach remote valley ends close to the boundary with the help of complicit herders, where male yaks are usually grazed year-round, unattended. After herding them together, the animals are slaughtered on site and the meat is transported in the cars of security or border forces to sell in Khorog. Over time, this strategy was been even extended to Chinese territory. Then, the yaks were stolen across the border from the opposite valley ends and were driven over the passes to Tajikistan to slaughter them. After being practised a few years, China’s herders increasingly complained to their authorities, which asserted claims against Tajikistan’s authorities. Fearing high-ranking diplomatic trouble, border and security forces were in dire straits to find livestock to return, as the animals were already slaughtered and the meat was sold. Now they used another audacious strategy to cover up the damage of the thievery. Claiming that it was stolen from Chinese territory, they arbitrarily requisitioned random livestock from local owners, even those outside of the border zone, and transferred it to the Chinese authorities as the return of the allegedly stolen livestock. A livestock owner recalls the requisition of many of his animals: They needed yaks to return to China immediately. Where did they look first? In the proximity of their border barracks – they took my yaks and those of my neighbour just by coincidence. […] In former times, they stole yaks from pastures in China, slaughtered them and shared the profit. But now it is our livestock that they are taking away, not secretly, but rightly before our eyes!

[…] Complaining makes no sense, I know what they will say if I try to make big noise: ‘You steal Chinese livestock, cause big diplomatic quarrels and now you make trouble. We will close down the sistema for all of you; we cannot trust you on the border.’ And the herders will blame me, if they will be kicked out.74

Now, livestock owners and their herders in the vicinity of the border feel helpless against such arbitrariness. As the marking of animals and documentation of livestock ownership is not common in the Pamirs, they unsuccessfully try to prove that the requisitioned livestock is their own. Additionally, law enforcement organisations, like the prosecutors, are in cahoots with regional administration, security, and border forces, leaving few chances for livestock owners to have their situation acknowledged and to be given justice.

Conclusion In this paper I have sought to demonstrate how the arbitrary reinterpretation of state sovereignty by its agents has restricted, and continues to restrict, people’s everyday lives in the Pamir borderland. The Soviet regime developed the infrastructure and strict regulations of the border districts. These institutions that resulted in a securitised border were built during the times of the bloc conflict, yet they continue to have an impact today. The sealed border is perpetually performed by border and security actors, even after its ideological justification has disappeared. Two developments framed the transformation of the securitised border and the agency of their actors. Firstly, following Tajikistan’s independence, the agents of sovereignty and the resources available to them changed two times. The Russian Border Forces (RBF), initially mandated by Tajikistan to control the borders, exercised a kind of ‘outsourced’ control of the border of the Russian Federation, who at that time most feared the entering of Islamic-political movements from Afghanistan into post-Soviet Central Asia and the massive flow of illicit drugs into Russia. The RBF worked rather efficiently to achieve their goal of guaranteeing security for the political-economic transformation in Russia, and the local economy also benefitted from the comparatively high level of the RBF budget. On the contrary, the Tajik Border Forces (TBF), which took over control of the border from the RBF in 2005, were seriously under-financed and under-equipped to maintain the extensive infrastructure necessary for controlling the border. The lack of almost any resources pushed the border guards to develop illicit practices of natural resources appropriation, such as hunting protected wildlife for personal gain. Secondly, the sovereign authority of the Tajik state was widely challenged in the civil war by the United Tajik Opposition (UTO), especially in GBAO. The organisation of their military supplies crossing the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border

19 also eased illicit drug trafficking over the previously sealed border. Drug trade contributed decisively to financing the defence of the Pamirs against progovernment forces and persisted, in turn being appreciated by the former commanders of the civil war as an additional source of income. Trafficking networks became institutionalised with the post-conflict power-sharing agreements providing former UTO commanders with a quota of 30% in the administration, including law enforcement and border control organisations. Under-resourcing and missing appreciation by the central government framed a self-interested agency of state representatives at the border. A common example of interaction between officials of the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border and the population is the facilitation of informal border operations that serve their mutual benefit. Border officials grant passage to individuals without checking their passports, and vital goods that are illicit, according to current state regulations, by not documenting their crossing. As compensation, the officials receive informal payments from the Pamiri people, who are dependent on the trans-border trade of these goods to supplement their perceivably poor salaries. The state, on the other hand, while not facilitating the development of the private economic sector and providing supplies to this remote region, is losing income from the duties and fees that should be imposed on border trade, as well as information over trans-border movements, which would be useful for future policy decisions. The sovereign authority designed to control the border is diverted by its agents at the border crossings in a way such that it favours agreements that allow the benefits to be shared among local actors like border officials and the borderland people. In this way, the state is losing control and losing out on financial resources at the border. Closed-border institutions build on arbitrariness and violence in the mode of potentiality. This becomes apparent in the actions of the border and security forces in the security zone along the border, and proves to be dangerous for local herders using the zone’s pastures. The special status of a border zone implies exclusive rights for these forces, with the result that they can claim far-reaching powers for their personal gains. By using their unlimited rights of search and seizure, the border and security forces are able to arbitrarily declare what is considered to be prohibited behaviour of the herders or illicit items in the pasture camps. Those finds are exploited by the forces in the border zone to extort livestock or money from the concerned households – or at least to oblige the herder to remain silent about the security forces’ arbitrary activities elsewhere. In any case, the herders depend fully on border and security forces for providing written permits to access the border zone. Feeling confident that they will not be held accountable, activities such as systematically stealing animals in the border zone seem to be obvious options for border and security forces.

Taking the practices of the agents of state sovereign power at the border as examples, I have shown that individual actions like those of state officials and borderland people are crucial to understand how Carl Schmitt’s entanglement of the “state of exception” with sovereignty at the border materialises. The sovereignty’s basic property, “power beyond accountability,” which is normally used by the state to respond to persistent dangers, runs the risk to be distorted by the agency of the border and security forces towards the people of securitised borderlands like the Pamirs. This is most threatening at the borders, because they are, “…spaces in which sovereignty, as the right over life and death, is experienced in the mode of potentiality – thus creating affects of panic and a sense of danger even if ‘nothing happens.’”75 The institutions of a securitised border are perpetually performed by all state actors at the border. The resulting strong claims for sovereign power produce high levels of potential violence. Where arbitrary shooting in the border zone can easily be transformed into a “heroic” act,76 the representatives of the state at the border get out of control. Perceived underpayment given the harsh living conditions at the borders, due to a missing appreciation of state employees by many central governments build the moral basis of these state actors. The abundance of power conceded to state actors by the strict rules of securitised border regimes – whether inherited like the system of Soviet border districts or newly established – combined with the lack of accountability for their own actions in corrupt administrations encourage the exploitation of sovereignty as a resource for achieving personal gains. Instead of using sovereignty’s authority to maintain state territory, they can use their “power beyond accountability” even to transgress the border for personal gains, thus finally destabilising the border.

Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the Volkswagen Foundation that made the empirical research in the Pamirs possible by funding the research projects “Transformation Processes in the Eastern Pamirs of Tajikistan. Changing Land Use Practices, Possible Ecological Degradation and Sustainable Development” from 2007–2010, and “Transformation Processes in the Eastern Pamirs of Tajikistan. The presence and future of energy resources in the framework of sustainable development” from 2012–2015. Many interview partners in Tajikistan have supported my enquiries. All support by interlocutors living and working in the Pamirs is gratefully acknowledged.

21

Notes

1

The high mountain area of the Pamirs covers the eastern half of Tajikistan’s territory and can be subdivided culturally and geographically in two parts. Traditionally, in the deep-cut valleys of the Western Pamirs farmers complement crop farming with animal husbandry. On the plateau of the eastern Pamirs being an extremely cold and dry high mountain desert, mainly Kyrgyz pastoralists use the scarce pastures on altitudes ranging from around 3500 to almost 5000 m for extensive livestock herding. Due to the geopolitical significance of this border for the Soviet Union, the Pamir Highway was build and material support was financed and controlled by the supranational administrative level of the Soviet Union and was channelled via the railheads of Andizhan and Osh. The post-Soviet economic hardships started to ease only in the 2000s, when remittances from migrants working abroad contributed an increasing share to the household incomes. Today, most of the working-age males in the communities are working abroad, mainly in Russia. 2 Simon Caney, Justice beyond borders: a global political theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005); Kenichi Ohmae, The borderless world: power and strategy in the interlinked economy (New York: Collins 1990). 3 David Newman, ‘Borders and bordering towards an interdisciplinary dialogue’, European Journal of Social Theory 9/2 (2006) p. 181. 4 Uwe Halbach, Rußlands Wacht am Pamir (Köln: Bundesinstitut für Ostwissenschaftliche und Internationale Studien 1993); Astrid Borcke, Spannungen an der afghanischtadschikischen Grenze und das russische Krisen-Management (Köln: Bundesinstitut für Ostwissenschaftliche und Internationale Studien 1994); Uwe Halbach, Rußlands 'Bedrohungen aus dem Süden'. (II): Entwicklungen in Afghanistan (Köln: Bundesinstitut für Ostwissenschaftliche und Internationale Studien 1998). 5 Hermann Kreutzmann, ‘Transformations of High Mountain pastoral strategies in the Pamirian Knot’, Nomadic Peoples 13/2 (2009) pp. 102-123. 6 Sovereignty here refers to the exceptionality of the agency of territorial nation states at their borders. 7 Charles Shaw, ‘Friendship under lock and key: the Soviet Central Asian border, 1918– 34’, Central Asian Survey 30/3-4 (2011) p. 331-48. 8 Nick Megoran, ‘Rethinking the Study of International Boundaries: A Biography of the Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan Boundary’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102/2 (2012) p. 14. 9 Madeleine Reeves, Border work. Spatial lives of the state in rural Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2014) p. 174. 10 For the ambiguity of this term in relation to the concept of performativity, see note 26. 11 Reece Jones, ‘Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102/3 (2012) p. 691. 12 Thomas M. Wilson, and Hastings Donnan, ‘Territory, Identity and the Places InBetween: Culture and Power in European Borderlands’, in Thomas M. Wilson, and Hastings Donnan (eds.), Culture and power at the edges of the state. National support and subversion in European border regions (Münster: Lit 2005) p. 2. 13 Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie (München & Leipzig: R. Oldenbourg 1897) p. 471.

14

Richard Hartshorne ,’Suggestions on the terminology of political boundaries’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 26/1 (1936) pp. 56-57; Samuel W. Boggs, International Boundaries (New York: Columbia University Press) p. 333; Stephen B. Jones, ‘The Description of International Boundaries’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 33/2 (1943) pp. 99-117; Ladis Kristof, ‘The Nature of Frontiers and Boundaries’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49/3 (1959) pp. 270-274. 15 Paul Guichonnet and Claude Raffestin, Géographie des frontières (Paris: Presses Univ. de France 1974). 16 To avoid confusion, I use boundary for the actual boundary line of the state, while border encompasses all institutions in the borderland to maintain territory and control crossborder movements. 17 Ladis Kristof, ‘The Nature of Frontiers and Boundaries’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49/3 (1959) pp. 270-274; Matthias Albert, ‘On boundaries, territory and postmodernity: An international relations perspective’, Geopolitics 3/1 (1998) pp. 63–64. 18 Judith Miggelbrink, 'Crossing Lines, Crossed by Lines: Everyday Practices and Local Border Traffic in Schengen Regulated Borderlands', in: Reece Jones and Corey Johnson (eds.), Placing the border in everyday life (Farnham: Ashgate 2014) p. 141. 19 Oliver Kramsch, ‘Regulating European borders: a cultural perspective’, in Veggeland (ed.) Innovative regulatory approaches coping with Scandinavian and European Union policies (New York: Nova Science Publishers 2010) pp. 71-84. 20 Gerald Blake ‘Borderlands under stress: some global perspectives’, in Michael Pratt and J. Brown (eds.), Borderlands under stress (London: Kluwer 2000) pp. 1-16. 21 Miggelbrink (note 18) p. 144. 22 Oscar J. Martinez, ‘The dynamics of border interaction’. in Schofield (ed.) Global Boundaries (London: Routledge 1994) pp. 6-10. 23 Cyntia Weber and Thomas J. Biersteker, ‘Reconstructing the analysis of sovereignty: concluding reflections and directions for future research’, in Thomas J. Biersteker and Cyntia Weber (eds.), State sovereignty as social construct (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 1996) p. 285. 24 Wendy Brown, Walled states, waning sovereignty (New York: Zone Books 2010) p. 52. 25 Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998) p. 19. 26 Brown (note 24) p. 52-53. 27 Reeves (note 9) p. 191. 28 I draw here on the approach that social behaviour can be seen as performed given the precondition that there is an audience that watches. Under this perspective, the strict regulations of the border districts can be interpreted as being merely performed by the state actors at the border, after the ideological reason for a securitised border has disappeared. The variegated facets of this approach applied to state actors in Central Asia have been documented in Madeleine Reeves, Johan Rasanayagam and Judith Beyer (eds.), Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press 2014). 29 See a detailed documentation in Hermann Kreutzmann, Pamirian Crossroads. Kirghiz and Wakhi in High Asia (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2015) pp. 89-114. 30 The struggle between Soviet and counter-revolutionary forces is documented in Bekžol Taipov, 2002. Sary Kol tarychyndyn kyskača očerkteri (Murgab: Self publishing) pp.

23 47–51; for the trans-border (re-)migration movements during the early Soviet years see Shaw (note 7) pp. 337–338. 31 Hermann Kreutzmann, The Significance of Geopolitical Issues for Internal Development and Intervention in Mountainous Areas of Crossroads Asia (Bonn: Zentrum für Entwicklungsforschung 2013) p. 13. 32 Struggle and achievements of the Soviet authorities to control the border are depicted in Shaw (note 7) p. 341. 33 Vasili Mitrokhin, KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officers Handbook (London: Frank Cass 2013) p. 305; Shaw (note 7) pp. 342–343; Andrea M. Chandler, Institutions of isolation. Border controls in the Soviet Union and its successor states, 1917 - 1993 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1998) pp. 66-78. 34 The Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province, 'Gorno-Badachshanskaja Avtonomnaja Oblast' (GBAO), was founded in 1925 to form a homogenous border province and was joined to the Tajik Soviet Republic in 1929. 35 For the influence of the geopolitical significance of this borderland on the Livelihoods see Tobias Kraudzun, 'External Support and Local Agency: Uncertain Transformations of Livelihoods in the Pamirian Borderland of Tajikistan', in: Hermann Kreutzmann and Teiji Watanabe (eds.), Mapping Transition in the Pamirs: Changing Human-Environmental Landscapes (Cham: Springer International Publishing 2016) pp. 159-179. 36 Paul Bergne, The birth of Tajikistan: national identity and the origins of the republic (London: Tauris 2007) pp. 91-92; Alisher Latypov, ’The opium war at the ‘roof of the world:’ the ‘elimination’ of addiction in Soviet Badakhshan’, Central Asian Survey 32/1 (2013) pp. 27-28. 37 Taipov (note 30) pp. 104-105. 38 Aleksej V. Postnikov, Schvatka na Kryše Mira: politiki, razvedčiki i geografy v bor'be za Pamir v XIX veke (Moskva: Pamjatniki istoričeskoj mysli 2001) p. 161. 39 For the argumentation in this border dispute see N.N., 'The disputed area of the Pamirs', Beijing review 1981/37 (1981) pp. 21-23; John W. Garver, ’The Sino-Soviet Territorial Dispute in the Pamir Mountains Region’, The China Quarterly 85 (1981) p. 115. 40 Assel Bitabarova, 'Contested Views of Contested Territories: How Tajik Society Views the Tajik-Chinese Border Settlement', Eurasia Border Review 6/1 (2016) pp. 71-72. 41 Flemming Splidsboel-Hansen, ’The Official Russian Concept of Contemporary Central Asian Islam: The Security Dimension’, Europe-Asia Studies 49/8 (1997) p. 1502. 42 The formerly Soviet Border Troops stationed in Tajikistan came as the “Group of Russian Border Troops in Tajikistan” under the command of the Russian Federal Border Forces (re)organised in 1993 (Decree No. 2318 of the President of the Russian Federation, 30.09.1993). 43 Because the entire Pamirs in post-Soviet Tajikistan continued to be classified as a border province, guarding the border included the control of all road traffic, with the right of search and seizure. 44 Splidsboel-Hansen (note 41) pp. 1508–1509. 45 A Tajikistani citizen who had served in the RBF stated in an interview, that the most attractive motivation in his view was the right to obtain Russian citizenship after three years of service. However, getting there was not easy, as the RBF were in the

position to choose their staff from many applicants. This is why, aside from a good physical condition, bribes were widespread for getting accepted by the RBF. See Reeves (note 9) p. 183. 46 Personal communication with Adylbek Atabbaev 28.05.2008 and Jurmat Ismailov 19.04.2009. 47 During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA sought to strengthen the economic abilities of the mujahidin by fostering their activities in opium production. See Hermann Kreutzmann, ‘Opium für den Weltmarkt: Afghanistans Schlafmohnanbau’, Geographische Rundschau 56/11 (2004) p. 57; Hermann Kreutzmann, ‘Afghanistan and the Opium World Market: Poppy Production and Trade’, Iranian Studies 40/5 (2007) pp. 609-610. 48 Jacob Townsend, ‘The Logistics of Opiate Trafficking in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly 4/1 (2006) p. 72. 49 In 2010, Tajikistan’s law enforcement organisations seized 985 kg of heroin and 744 kg of opium, whereas UNODC assumed that 75-80 tons of heroin and 18-20 tons of opium are trafficked through Tajikistan yearly; see UNODC, Opiate flows through northern Afghanistan and Central Asia: a threat assessment (Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2012) p. 58. However, DCA officials hold their activities during the first decade of its existence as worthy of praise; see Konstantin Parshin, ‘Tajikistan: Drug Control Agency Draws Praise and Criticism’, eurasianet.org, 01.09.2009, available from: www.eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav060209.shtml. 50 UNODC (note 49) p. 12. 51 Asia-Plus, R. Nazarov: Vse narkogruppirovki 'kryshujutsja' sotrudnikami pravookhranitel'nykh organov. Asia Plus, 25.01.2012, available from: http://www.asiaplus.tj/ru/print/115898. 52 UNODC (note 49) p. 60. 53 Ibid, p. 66. 54 The common term is used here to refer to the Pamir people of Ismaʿili faith and having a Pamiri mother tongue, constituting the majority of the Pamir population and living in the valleys of the western Pamirs. 55 Thousands of households have been resettled by the Soviets to the Tajik southwestern lowlands in order to develop cotton production. See Hermann Kreutzmann, Ethnizität im Entwicklungsprozeß: die Wakhi in Hochasien (Berlin: Reimer 1996) p. 182; Botakoz Kassymbekova, ‘Humans as territory: forced resettlement and the making of Soviet Tajikistan, 1920–38’, Central Asian Survey 30/3-4 (2011) pp. 349-70. 56 On the other hand, humanitarian supply for the people of the isolated Pamirs was brought from Osh in Kyrgyzstan (see also note 58). 57 The people living on both banks of the Pyandzh River originate from the same ethnic groups. They enjoyed connections and crossed the raging river wherever possible. After having been hindered, effectively by the complete closing of the border by the Soviets, they resumed crossing practices as soon as it became possible again after the breakdown of the Soviet border control system. 58 As a result of the disintegration of the Soviet distribution system and the civil war, the Pamiri people were not able to supply themselves with food. The “Pamir Relief and Development Program” (PRDP), founded in 1993 by the Aga Khan Foundation, sought to alleviate the disastrous supply situation and organised food supplies

25 amounting up to 25,000 tons yearly. After the first years, yearly amounts were lowered from year to year until this humanitarian relief programme ended completely in 2004. 59 The transport company ‘Pamirskoe avtotransportnoe upravlenie’ (PATU) was founded in the 1930s by the Soviet Central Government exclusively to transport Pamir supplies. As a result of several expansions it operated several hundred trucks. 60 An example is that one of the former Pamiri commanders of the UTO, Tolib Ayombekov, was the chief of the Ishkashim company of the border guards, until he was removed following accusations of organising the murder of the head of the regional branch of the state security service (GKNB), Abdullo Nazarov, in 2012. The fact that a full-scale military assault was launched to apprehend some of the individuals allegedly responsible for the murder, suggests that the operation was primarily aimed at threatening local power networks. For a detailed collection of media sources covering this military action, see www.pamirs.org/RECENTMILITARY-ACTION-IN-KHOROG.pdf (accessed 01.12.2016). 61 Trafficking networks seemed to evolve spontaneously when traffickers from Afghanistan needed local support for forwarding the products into Tajikistan, see Rustam Qobil, 2013, ‘Recruiting drug couriers from Tajikistan’, BBC Uzbek, 16.01.2013, available from: www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-21024235. 62 Some similar accounts are quoted in Reeves (note 9): a former border guard in the RBF gives a vivid comparison of military service in RBF from his experience (p. 186) and recalls accounts of the supply situation under both forces. On one hand, the conscripts serving in the TBF partly had to offer workforce to the local population in order to get enough food (pp. 185-6). On the other hand, he describes an incident when two of his RBF officers were taken hostage by local people and, “… only released when they were presented ‘a carload of flour and a carload of sugar’ from the military supplies,” (p. 198). 63 Personal communication with a number of livestock owners, who do not want to be named, held on 24.02.2015 in Shaymak and on 26.02.2015 in Rangkul. 64 See the vivid account documented in Tobias Kraudzun, ‘From the Pamir Frontier to International Borders: Exchange Relations of the Borderland Population’, in Bettina Bruns and Judith Miggelbrink (eds.), Subverting Borders. Doing Research on Smuggling and Small-Scale Trade (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2011) p. 180. 65 Since 2004, the first official Tajikistan-China border crossing allows the flow of goods coming from China. However, this crossing plays a minor role for the peoples’ food supply, as the import of Chinese foods is largely prohibited; see Till Mostowlansky, 'The Road Not Taken: Enabling and Limiting Mobility in the Eastern Pamirs', Internationales Asienforum 45 (2014) pp. 153-170. However, as it is the case in the Pamirs, border regions do largely not participate in economic activities related to the new China-Central Asia cross border flows; see Henryk Alff, 'Getting stuck within flows: limited interaction and peripheralization at the Kazakhstan–China border', Central Asian Survey 35/3 (2016) pp. 369-386. 66 Alongside with rising petrol prices and increasing claims for informal payments at the border, these transport tariffs rose considerably from 3 TJS to 10 TJS within the last decade.

67

For more details of the development of private pastoralism, see Tobias Kraudzun, ‘Livelihoods of the ‘New Livestock Breeders’ in the Eastern Pamirs of Tajikistan’, in Hermann Kreutzmann (ed.) Pastoral practices in High Asia. Agency of 'development' effected by modernisation, resettlement and transformation (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands 2012) pp. 89-107. 68 Osh is the most important market for selling livestock (and supplying households with goods). However, the Tajik government sees these exports as being in conflict with a national strategy of (re-)developing livestock numbers following their devastation during the first decade of Tajik independence, but completely neglecting the economic realities of Pamiri livelihoods. 69 Personal communication with Adylbek Atabev 17.04.2009. For an account of the restriction of the trans-border trade by Usbekistan, which also appeared to be economically counterproductive, see Nick Megoran, Gaël Raballand and Jerome Bouyjou, 'Performance, Representation and the Economics of Border Control in Uzbekistan', Geopolitics 10/4 (2005) pp. 712-740. 70 Sovkhoz is the abbreviation for the organisational form of a (Soviet) state enterprise. 71 Kolkhoz is the abbreviation for the organisational form of a collective enterprise. 72 However, the non-transparent transfer of territory to China provoked open resistance by the local people. The transfer of territories from Tajikistan to China, which was agreed upon bilaterally to settle the inherited border dispute between (Soviet) Russia and China, was meant to be implemented in a secret manner. Later, when the agreement needed to be ratified by the Tajik Parliament and therefore became public, it provoked controversial debates about the legitimacy of transfers of territory (for details see note 40). Rangkul villagers remember that their repeated protests delayed the boundary demarcation work starting in 2006 considerably, when I interviewed some of them on 26.02.2015 in Rangkul (note 63). 73 Personal communication with a number of livestock owners (note 63). 74 Personal communication with a livestock owner, who does not want to be named, held on 26.02.2015 in Rangkul. 75 Veena Das and Deborah Poole, ‘State and its margins: Comparative ethnographies,’, in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds.), Anthropology in the margins of the state (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press 2004) p. 19. 76 A former border guard in the RBF explained how he could easily legitimate the arbitrary shooting of a passer-by into the heroic act of stopping a border violator. See Madeleine Reeves (note 9) pp. 195-6.