Andijon, Uzbekistan. Photo CC BY.20: Slava Myronov / Flickr. Some rights reserved.Kanysh-Ai is an apricot-grower in Gaz village, in Kyrgyzstan’s southern Batken province bordering Tajikistan. Like for many others living in the border areas of the Ferghana Valley, apricots are the primary source of Kanysh-Ai’s domestic income. She picks apricots when the fruit change from green to orange in color and feel slightly softened but still firm to the touch. Once the apricots are washed, dried for a couple of days, and sorted, Tajikistanis come from the district centre of Isfara city in northern Tajikistan to purchase it for its further processing. While Tajikistanis often dominate the commercial apricot market, Uzbekistanis travel to the border bazaar in Hushiar village on the Uzbek side of the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border to buy apricot pits, which they then fry and salt to sell at their local market.
Located at the heart of Central Asia between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the Ferghana Valley brings together an ethnic mix from these states born out of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the imaginary borders of Soviet times became real after independence, fragmentation has led to tension and even conflict. In the two decades between 1989 and 2009, some 20 conflicts took place in the valley. A recent academic study speaks of 164 border incidents between 2010 and 2013, while over the course of 2014 alone, the Kyrgyzstan Border Troops Information Department registered a total of 37 border incidents in the region.
Various explanations have been advanced to explain conflict dynamics in the Ferghana valley, including competition over natural resources, growing nationalism in the region and the securitisation of borders. The latter has an enormous impact on daily life for many people living in the valley. Since the establishment of a new border regime, communities have experienced a constant “sense of danger” while crossing borders. As a villager from Ak-Sai on the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border said, the Kyrgyz government started putting up all sorts of posts – customs posts and border posts – and all those stop people from living.
