Conflict Transformation in Central Asia
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Conflict Transformation in Central Asia

Irrigation disputes in the Ferghana Valley

Christine Bichsel

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Conflict Transformation in Central Asia

Irrigation disputes in the Ferghana Valley

Christine Bichsel

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About This Book

This book provides the first systematic analysis of peace-building in Central Asia for inter-ethnic conflicts over water and land in the Ferghana Valley based on concrete, in-depth and on-site investigation.

The core analysis centres on peace-building projects in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan by three international aid agencies –an international NGO, a bilateral governmental donor and a multilateral agency – and the shared approach which the donors developed and used for conflict transformation. Using ethnographic case material, the author critically examines both the theoretical assumptions guiding this approach and its empirical outcomes when put into practice. Building on existing work in conflict transformation and the ethnography of international assistance in Central Asia, the book sheds light on Western attempts to transform the post-socialist societies of Central Asia and provides fresh empirical data on and insights into irrigation practices, social institutions, and state and identity formation in the Ferghana Valley.

The book provides a novel and innovative approach to the study of development assistance and peace-building. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of Central Asian Studies, post-Soviet Studies, Development and Peace and Conflict Studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2009
ISBN
9781134035175

1 Introduction

Since the 1990s, Central Asia1 has been perceived as a place in danger of violent conflict. In particular the Ferghana Valley, a large intramontane basin shared by Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, became the focus of both academic and journalistic conflict analyses, as well as practical attempts to mitigate the perceived potential for violence. A field study commissioned by a non-governmental organisation (NGO) accordingly characterises the Ferghana Valley as ‘a culturally rich and diverse area with the potential for real growth in many spheres, but also the undeniable potential for dangerous divisions’ (Mercy Corps 2002:3, emphasis added). Such ‘dangerous divisions’, the project document concluded, were constituted among other factors by organised inter-ethnic violence, a confusing and provocative system of increasingly militarised borders, spiralling poverty and a disintegrating, outdated agricultural, social and industrial infrastructure. This portrayal of bleak prospects for the Ferghana Valley in project documents of international peace-building sets the frame for this book.
The same NGO makes up part of the international aid directed at the new Central Asian states soon after independence from the Soviet Union. Such aid has largely taken shape along the tenets of economic liberalisation, privatisation and democratisation. Its focus and direction derived on the one hand from the ideological opposition between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ during the Cold War. At least in the beginning, aid attempted to expel the remains of communism, correct state socialist ‘misdevelopment’ and bring the new states on the track for democracy and market economy (Wedel 2001). At the same time, international attempts at neo-liberal reform for Central Asia became part of the ‘new architecture of aid’ after the end of the Cold War (Mosse 2005b: 3). Such reform should no longer come about merely through discrete projects, but by financial support of governments in developing overall strategies for governance reform or economic growth, as well as implementing programmes in sectors such as health, education or agriculture. In sum, while international aid has formerly attempted to manage economic growth and technology transfer, it now focuses on the re-organisation of state and society to deliver on aid’s objectives (Mosse 2005a: 3–4).
These ideas are equally reflected in the new form of peace which should govern conflict-ridden societies. The end of the Cold War gave rise to altered explanations of conflict and violence, summarised as ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 1999). These new wars are no longer seen as shaped by the ideological struggles between East and West and proxy confrontations, but conceived along the lines of struggles for scarce resources, inherent cultural and ethnic hostilities or unregulated economic competition (Richards 2005). Common to these conflicts is that they are perceived to be a feature of the Global South, and therefore conceived of by Northern policy makers as an image of a new danger emanating from under-development and lack of order (Duffield 2001a). The idea of peace-building is a response to such an image and should counter these tendencies. It is guided by the idea that liberal political and economic structures as well as democratic forms of governance will not only bring about peace, but also ensure its endurance (Richmond 2005). Accordingly, it is no longer only military means which will bring about such ‘liberal peace’; it becomes a domain of international aid in its new form.
With this book, I provide an empirical study of peace-building in Central Asia at the convergence of new forms of aid to the postsocialist space and the promotion of ‘liberal peace’ to the Global South. I examine three aid projects, one each by a bilateral governmental donor, a multilateral agency and an international NGO. My focus is on the peace-building activities of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Mercy Corps International (Mercy Corps) in the Ferghana Valley over the period of 2000–2006. These aid agencies focused on the mitigation of conflicts over natural and other resources between rural communities differing in ethnic affiliation. The book centres on their concepts and practices to mitigate such conflicts in the Ferghana Valley.

Dangerous divisions in the Ferghana Valley

There are, of course, variations to the theme of conflict and the case for peace-building in the Global South. For Central Asia, a body of academic and policy-oriented literature began to focus on the danger of conflict as of the late 1990s. While differing in details, the authors concurred that the Ferghana Valley exposes a high potential for violent conflict. They base this potential on evidence of past violent episodes and/or present tensions that may result in violence. In other words, these writings depict the Ferghana Valley as a ‘host of crises’ (Slim 2002) or a ‘flashpoint of conflict’ (Tabyshalieva 1999: vii). This literature argues that the potential for conflict is comprised of a broad array of interlinked conflictive factors (environmental, social, political, economic, religious, demographic, military, and criminal). As a rule, authors support their argument with reference to privileged insights and first-hand evidence from a hitherto little known region (see Lubin et al. 1999).
Such concerns were not entirely new by the end of the 1990s. Rather, they expressed earlier fears of the post-Soviet Central Asian states rent asunder or going astray. Released from the quasi-colonial law and order of the Soviet Union, analysts wondered whether the new states could cope with the multiple social, political and economic challenges they faced. Moreover, seen to oscillate between Islamic and secular state models, it was feared that they could become part of a so-called Muslim fundamentalist ‘arc of instability’ stretching from north Africa to western China (Akiner 1993). The literature on the Ferghana Valley reiterated previous concerns about destabilising ethnic mobilisation and nationalism for the post-Soviet space (see Tishkov 1997). Nationalist movements were seen to become an important characteristic of the new states, and the increasing salience of ethnic identity—apparently long dormant during the Soviet Union—a cause for surging conflict.
Concerns about inter-ethnic conflict found a receptive environment during the 1990s, nurtured by the violent disintegration of former Yugoslavia and the civil war in Rwanda. Interpretation of these wars as ‘ethnic conflicts’ and analogies to perceived causes gave rise to speculations about similar incidents in the Ferghana Valley. More generally, academic research on ‘ethnic conflict’ proliferated during the 1990s, and an increasing number of scholars cast their studies in this mould (Gilley 2004:1155). Later, the events of 11 September 2001 and the specific discourses on terrorism they engendered by associating Islam with political violence brought into view the fact that Central Asia is primarily inhabited by people of Islamic belief. This reinforced the perception that radicalisation and militancy along the lines of political Islam could emerge from an economically disadvantaged and marginalised Ferghana Valley.
What distinguishes the literature on conflict in the Ferghana Valley emerging as of the late 1990s from prior works is its distinctly ‘agentive’ nature, in the sense that authors describe a state of affairs requiring action or intervention (Hobart 1993:2). It stresses the need for a remedy to the current situation and its trends, and hints at the dire consequences awaiting Central Asia without adequate measures being taken. Lubin et al. (1999: xx) caution in their book titled Calming the Ferghana Valley that, ‘Without early intervention, there may be no alternative than belated attempts at conflict resolution’. Authors mostly assign competence and legitimacy for such an intervention to international organisations and Western donor governments. Tabyshalieva (1999:42) contends that, ‘the Central Asian states will likely falter in attempts at cooperative integration without Western assistance’. She stresses the need for preventive action, in line with Schoeberlein (2002:470), who states that, ‘Engagement from the international community will be required to avert the increasing tensions and the outbreak of proliferating regional conflict and chaos’.
These recommendations for conflict mitigation were swiftly taken up by aid agencies. Starting from the late 1990s, aid agencies promoted a wide range of activities in the Ferghana Valley, including early warning systems, media and and micro-lending programmes, border management training, access to social education projects, mediation networks and dialogue processes, micro-business justice, civil society initiatives and democracy building (see De Martino 2001). The three aid agencies in the focus of this book were part of this cluster of peace-building activities. Among the variegated ways of addressing conflict, SDC, UNDP and Mercy Corps focused on concrete cases of communities with past experience of, or risk for, inter-group violence primarily over land and water. By doing so, they followed up a core concern of the literature on conflict in the Ferghana Valley, aptly summarised by Slim (2002:511): ‘In the short term, they [aid agencies] must focus on the localities where water-based conflicts have taken on an ethnic character and which, if not addressed, might provide the spark for region-wide interethnic violence.’
The three aid agencies2 in the focus of this book have various backgrounds (see Appendix). The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation is a governmental donor organisation which coordinates international development activities of Switzerland as a part of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Mercy Corps International is an international NGO which acts in this case as an implementing agency for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Finally, the United Nations Development Programme is a multilateral aid agency and represents the UN’s global development network in Central Asia. While these three agencies have implemented a multitude of projects in Central Asia, I focus in this book on three of them only. With regard to SDC, it is the Regional Dialogue and Development (RDD) project, active over the period of 2002–2005 in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In the case of Mercy Corps, I look into the Peaceful Communities Initiative (PCI) implemented in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and later also Tajikistan. For UNDP, I focus on the Preventive Development Component (PDC) and later Preventive Development Programme (PDP) conducted over the period of 2000–2005 mainly in southern Kyrgyzstan, but also in northern Tajikistan (see Table 1.1).
The literature on conflict in the Ferghana Valley and these three aid projects expose a number of linkages. At the level of individuals and networks, these linkages are not difficult to establish. In terms of empirical data, a part of this literature draws on interviews conducted with representatives from SDC, Mercy Corps and UNDP. Conversely, a number of authors have written field studies, given policy advice, or conducted workshops and trainings in the framework of RDD, PCI and PDC/PDP. In some cases, authors’ empirical data even stemmed from their assignment as consultants. Finally, it is likely that authors drew on interviews with the same key informants and shared research sites for empirical data. I suggest that these links and networks shaped a specific perception of conflict as well as a particular practice to mitigate it. This is the starting point for this book and at the same time the nexus which it sets out to analyse.

Discourses of danger and conflict in Central Asia

This book is not the first publication to engage with this cluster of ideas and practices related to conflict in Central Asia. Soon after its emergence, the literature stressing the potential for conflict in the Ferghana Valley was subjected to acade-mic critique for engendering an image of a dangerous region by overstating the risk of violence and social unrest. Megoran (2000) pioneered this critique with his book review titled Calming the Ferghana Valley Experts. The book offers a thorough review of the publication by Lubin et al. (1999) for its methodological shortcomings, anecdotal evidence and superficial analysis. Furthermore, Megoran criticises the authors for their promotion of Western political, economic and cultural values – ‘democracy’ and ‘market’ – without explicitly stating their relevance to conflict prevention. Later, Megoran (2005) extended his critique to the practice of conflict prevention through fostering civil society. His critical examination of the language used in the academic and policy-oriented literature exposes its Orientalist features and the unequal power relations underlying the discourse of conflict in the Ferghana Valley as well as the promotion of ‘civil society’ by the West in Central Asia.

Table 1.1 Aid agencies and projects

Megoran’s second contribution was part of a special issue of the Central Asian Survey on conflict in Central Asia. Thompson and Heathershaw (2005:4) suggest conceiving of Central Asia’s portrayal as a place at risk for conflict as a ‘discourse of danger’. They situate this discourse within a particular set of unequal relationships of knowledge and power. With this, they suggest that Western development agencies, researchers and ‘experts’ claim a privileged relationship to understanding reality, and an implied obligation to remedy ills which can only be seen from this privileged position. Moreover, Megoran (2005:93) locates the ‘discourse of danger’ in specific relationships of power, within which only one party (the West) has the financial resources and the cultural and political legitimacy to reconstruct the society of the other. Thompson and Heathershaw (2005:4) argue that the ‘discourse of danger’ distorts the actual realities of Central Asia by providing simplified accounts which reduce the complexity of lived situations and limit the set of possible interventions. This needs to be countered, they suggest, by deconstructing this discourse, tracing its consequences and engaging more closely with the actual lived experiences.
Within this special issue, Reeves (2005b: 67) postulates that the portrayal of a conflict-ridden Ferghana Valley results from its projection against normative accounts about the relationships between territory, ethnicity and citizenship. She suggests that perception of the ‘mismatch’ between nations and states, and related threat assigned to territorial ambiguity and undemarcated borders have their origins in reified concepts of the nation state. Heathershaw (2005) argues for Tajikistan that the dominant international paradigm of peace-building prevents international actors from recognising and engaging with the plurality of discourses to build peace which prevail in Tajikistan itself. Jackson (2005) and Macfarlane and Torjesen (2005) question prevailing perceptions of extensive trafficking of drugs and humans, as well as small arms proliferation in Central Asia with empirical counter-evidence. At the same time, they direct attention to the misguided policy decisions resulting from such unfounded perceptions. I myself have argued that international actors subscribe to a form of ‘harmony ideology’ for conflict transformation in the Ferghana Valley (Bichsel 2005).
A special issue in the Communist and Post-Communist Studies attempted to take to task the challenge voiced by Thompson and Heathershaw (2005) and to engage with the actual realities ‘on the ground’ with an enquiry into conflict sources and dynamics (Sandole 2007:258). It concludes that conflict centres on two groups of factors: first, the inability of the new states to deal with arising social and economic problems and inequalities; second, the political nature of national identity building in Central Asia based on a definition of the nation in ethnic terms (Korostelina 2007:124). The special issue stresses that there is a distinct need to address conflict in the Ferghana Valley lest the ‘discourse of danger’ could become a self-fulfilling prophecy as Islamic fundamentalism, nationalism and tribalism are ‘real’, and not merely perceived (Sandole 2007:261).
This brief and certainly not exhaustive overview shows the intense debate on the nature of conflict in the Ferghana Valley—or whether it exists at all. Moreover, it illustrates the competing opinions on who should talk about conflict, the way it should be talked about, how it should be substantiated (or else discarded), and how it should be mitigated. With this book, I address an aspect which has so far received rather cursory attention: the peace-building practices put into place to counter the danger of conflicts perceived, and their manifest outcomes in the Ferghana Valley. A part of these practices constitute the projects by SDC, UNDP and Mercy Corps over the period of 2000–2006. I understand them as an integral part of this particular discourse on conflict in Central Asia in the sense of a set of cumulative ideas and practices which I shall investigate in the course of this book. For this purpose, I undertake an ethnography of aid of these three peace-building projects.

Ethnography of aid for peace-building

With ethnography of aid, I refer to a specific form of academic engagement with international aid of the ‘more developed’ to the ‘less developed’ countries, of the ‘North’ to the ‘South’, and since the end of the Cold War also of the ‘West’ to the ‘East’. While ethnography is a widely used term, in this context it is used for research which neither privileges nor stops at the level of textual analysis, but engages with how aid is enacted as a social practice with assigned meanings and lived experiences. Such an ethnographic approach towards the study of international aid is commonly referred to as ‘ethnography of aid’, ‘ethnography of development’ (e.g. Crewe and Harrison 1998, Mosse 2005a) or ‘aidnography’ (Gould 2004a).
This approach to some extent responds to disenchantment with earlier critiques of international aid which voiced fundamental scepticism of ‘development’ (e.g. Sachs 1992, Escobar 1995). It conceived of the idea of development which guides international aid as a historically produced discourse shaping the perception of both those who develop and those who are to be developed. While these analyses produced important insights about the historical constitution of the idea of development, they conceived of it as a ‘development discourse’ based on a single set of ideas which speaks with an authoritative and all-powerful voice. Moreover, the predominant reliance of textual analyses without inquiry into actual social and material consequences failed to grasp the phenomenon. Finally, such analyses were often based on the assumption of a strong dichotomy between the developers and the developed, glorifying at times indigenous knowledge in populist portrayal (e.g. Grillo 1997, Cooper and Packard 1997:10).
In this sense, rather than conceptualising international aid as a totalising machine, Moore (1999:674) suggests to conceive of it as a complex articulation whose outcomes are not guaranteed or foreclosed, but rather historically contingent. He stresses the need to focus on ‘how discursive practices inscribe development in grounded contexts: how disciplinary effects confront not docile bodies but the situated cultural practices and sedimented histories of people and place; how they are reproduced, resisted, or reworked’ (Moore 1999:658). Disaggregating the monolithic nature of ‘development’ also meant that factors other than international donors could b...

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