by Darren Byler

When Tursun decided to become a police officer in 1992, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime.^[1] The state had just opened up a pathway for Uyghur high school students who excelled in Mandarin and political theory to study in elite policing academies and other schools in Eastern China (Grose 2019). At the end of the 6 years of training, a secure posting in an urban police department was virtually guaranteed. For someone who came from a village near China’s border with Kazakhstan, it promised a way out of rural poverty and, Tursun believed, a way of creating a more just society. But at the time Tursun was not yet fully aware of the fact that resource disputes between native Uyghurs and newly arrived Han settlers in the desert oases of Southern Xinjiang was one of the reasons why he was being trained to join the Xinjiang police force.

As I write in my book Terror Capitalism (2022), the intensification of policing in Northwest China, coincided with a development of a Han migrant settlement campaign to “Open up the Northwest.” This campaign which centered on natural resource extraction and industrial farming in the ancestral lands of the Uyghurs in the Southern part of the region precipitated flashes of violence related to land theft, systemic ethnic discrimination and new restrictions on Uyghur autonomy. In April 1990, in the community of Barin, a village near the city of Kashgar, tension over access to irrigation and land, boiled over into a brief farmer-led Uyghur insurgency (Roberts 2020). A detachment of armed police and military arrived within several days and opened fire on the farmers who occupied a community government building armed primarily with hunting rifles and farming tools. Those who I interviewed who were in the surrounding communities at the time said that bodies of the insurgents were loaded in trucks and taken away.

But there was a more fundamental change in the community beyond the disappearance of those directly involved in the uprising. Now, it appeared, that state authorities viewed the majority of Uyghur villagers in the surrounding communities as “troublemakers” simply because of their ethnicity and their proximity to the farmer uprising. Over the next several months nearly 8000 people were officially arrested (Roberts 2020). Vast numbers of people in the prefecture were forced to attend self-criticism sessions and study political ideology. They were asked to search their hearts and consider how they might have contributed to a lack of loyalty to the Party’s mission to develop and extract regional economic resources for the benefit of “the masses.” Did they consider Uyghur possession of their own lands more important than contributing to the wealth of the county? Didn’t they know that when they questioned the settlement and land distribution policies they were challenging the correctness of the Party?

Uyghurs in this community said that it felt like the Maoist ideological campaigns that had ended with the Cultural Revolution in 1976 were returning, but that this time they were pointed not at “counterrevolutionary” enemies who supported the “capitalist road,” but rather at Uyghurs who opposed the preferential treatment for Han settlers in the new state-directed export-oriented capitalist economy. They came to understand that they were seen as impediments to the development of what was now becoming an internal settler colony in China’s post-Cold War economic rise. In the new social order, civilization itself was equated with state-led market development. Over the next two decades Uyghurs came to see how a discourse of terrorism could be used to deem them both an internal enemy of the state and of the civilized world in general if they opposed this disempowering form of development (see also Fischer 2013).  As always-already potentially terrorists Uyghurs could be framed by an internal otherness that justified drastic policing measures and eventually led to mass internment and imprisonment. Over time, the specter of the terrorist produced a fear-driven economic and political logic for the state, and the corporations it partnered with, that resulted in billions of dollars of investment in counter-terrorism surveillance in Uyghur communities.

As social theorist Michael Dutton has argued (2005), since policing in China emerged out of this revolutionary context of the 1950s, rather than, for example, the hunting of slaves as in the United States or the pacification of the working class in Britain, Chinese policing was organized primarily around a friend or enemy distinction—with “friend” (pengyou) figured as the revolutionary masses, or the people, and the enemy figured as foreign imperialists and domestic counterrevolutionaries. Importantly, because of the revolutionary impulse of Chinese policing the latter category of enemies could at times be rehabilitated through education and carceral punishment if they were able to recognize the liberatory potential of socialist mass struggle.[2] They were, regardless of their ethnicity, still potential “compatriots” (tongbao) in the multi-national Chinese revolutionary project. But what happens when such compatriots are deemed “separatists” or “terrorists”? This is the central question this essay will explore.

Mao’s 1957 essay on the “Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” supplies a rationale for making fine distinctions between enemies and wayward friends. This sorting and productive capacity of policing as a tool of educating and persuading provided an opening for “thought work” (sixiang gongzuo)—communal struggle sessions where those deemed out-of-line proclaimed self-criticisms and professed their new understandings of Maoist thought. Such targeted individuals were often placed under concentrated surveillance in reeducation and labor camps as internal enemies, or at a minimum, they were stigmatized in their home communities and they were viewed as compatriots who had failed in their revolutionary resolve. Their fellow community members were tasked with observing their progress, looking for any slip-up in submissive attitudes. At the end of the Maoist campaigns in 1976, the spectrum of what counted as friend was expanded to include former political prisoners and these “wayward friends” were reunited with the masses through a process called “rehabilitation” (pingfan). This process was organized by “rehabilitation committees” (pingfan weiyuanhui) who considered formal appeals those on watchlists and petitions of family members on their behalf, and organized periods of close surveillance in the communities where the wayward friends returned.

Throughout the 1980s democracy movements, particularly on college campuses, accompanied an emergence of capitalist production and export-oriented economy. And for a time, it appeared as though the category of the internal enemy was on the verge of disappearing. Then in 1989 that prospect collapsed with the mass killing in Tiananmen Square and subsequent disappearances of thousands of democracy activists—mostly Han college students, but also Uyghur and other ethnic minority young people—all of whom were deemed internal enemies of the state.

With the violence in Barin in 1990, as noted at the beginning of this essay, a further reorientation of “enemies” and “friends” distinctions toward Muslims in Xinjiang demanded a new police force that was equipped to decode Uyghur opposition to the state—elaborating a new sub-category in the friend-enemy continuum—“separatists” (Ch: fenlie zhuyi zhe; Uy: bölgünchi)—and  the threat it posed toward settler claims to possession of Uyghur lands (Tynen 2020). Over the next decade, teams of state workers, would be tasked with surveilling families in communities where discontentment was most pronounced. As one of these surveillance workers put it, “We worked for months on end without any days off, rummaging through the villages and homes of Uyghur farmers, making lists of names of so called ‘separatists’ and reporting their names to the upper-level officials. As human surveillance workers we searched people’s homes, sometimes even at late night hours, looking for any suspicious books that might be spreading a ‘separatist” ideology’” (Ayup 2022, 27).

In Xinjiang the term separatist, which emerged in Chinese state discourse in relation to Taiwan’s autonomy in the 1950s, rose to replace the Maoist term “counterrevolutionary” in the 1980s as changing cold war dynamics and the turn toward a market economy following Mao’s death made “national unification” (Ch: guojia tongyi) with Taiwan appear to be more of a possibility. The term was extended by Chinese state discourse beyond Taiwan to discussions in Tibet and Xinjiang in the 1990s in response to the rise to international prominence of the Dali Lama and Tibetan government in exile. As the Dali Lama garnered support in India and the endorsement of international celebrities, the Chinese authorities worried that the Free Tibet movement might spark a “ethnic separatist” revolt within      China’s borders. This fear was given more force with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the independence of the Central Asian republics. In Xinjiang these factors solidified a shift toward policing the perceived Muslim “separatist” threat (Becquelin 2000).

Chinese leaders viewed the Barin Uprising as a sign of Uyghur desires for greater self-determination. Increasing Han settlements in Uyghur majority areas had the benefit of both gaining access to natural resources, but also, as a result of the fracturing of the Soviet Union—China’s long-term rival—building new avenues for Chinese markets in Central Asia and attending to the resource needs of Chinese manufacturers. These economic and geopolitical factors precipitated a change in policing in Xinjiang—a change that Tursun, the Uyghur police officer whose story begins this essay, would be a part of.

But, of course, historical changes are difficult to recognize at first, especially when they are orchestrated behind closed doors in the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security. About the time Tursun graduated from the police academy another major incident occurred. In 1997, near his home village in Ghulja, Uyghurs protested the breakup and arrest of a youth organization that taught Islamic and Uyghur moral behavior and traditions (Roberts 2020). Although the state denies this figure, it is likely that more than 100 Uyghurs were shot in the streets and more than a thousand more were taken away, arbitrarily detained in an opaque process that ranged from “reeducation through hard labor” in camps to more formal imprisonment. Some Uyghurs fled across the border to Central Asia, eventually fleeing to Afghanistan to escape extradition back to China only to be turned over to the U.S. military and sent to Guantanamo Bay where they were eventually released without charge.

When Tursun graduated with a degree in policing science in a Chinese-language policing academy the next year, he found himself thrust almost immediately into a hunt for phantom “separatist gangs” like the protestors who organized the marches. Throughout the Xinjiang police force, officers were tasked with implementing a “hard strike campaign”—part of a series of campaigns that would culminate, as I will explain below, in the “People’s War on Terror.”  One of Tursun’s roles was to act as interpreter and translator, turning Chinese language policing science and directives into action in Uyghur communities by interpreting Uyghur confessions for Han police commanders. His beat was nearly exclusively in Uyghur neighborhoods and villages where he was often accompanied by a non-Muslim partner. He was to be the eyes, ears, and voice of the state.

Then, almost immediately after September 11, 2001, a new category in the friend-enemy continuum was introduced in Chinese policing rhetoric and theory. “Now we were supposed to call them ‘terrorists,’” Tursun told me in Uyghur, interjecting the Chinese word for “terrorist” (Ch: kongbu fenzi). “The vast majority of the groups we found were not separatists or terrorists at all. These were labels we gave to people who committed other crimes, or didn’t commit any crime at all, but who had no one to defend them.” As Gardner Bovingdon (2010) shows in an encyclopedic index of state documents from this period, terrorism charges proliferated in the 2000s with crimes as minor as a Uyghur neighbor accused of stealing a cow from a Han settler being labeled a terrorist activity. Eager to associate the “Uyghur problem” with the Global War on Terror, Chinese officials removed most instances of the term “separatist” from official histories of the 1990s and replaced them with the term “terrorist.” The new term had a different utility. In the post-9/11 context “terrorism” allowed the Chinese state to position itself as an ally to the West and Central Asian republics in the global war against so-called Islamic “extremism” and terrorism. By offering Central Asian republics policing technology, training, and intelligence in addition to infrastructure development projects and trade incentives, Chinese authorities used a security framework to build strategic economic and political relationships that would eventually turn into its ambitious Belt and Road Development Initiative.

Even more importantly, back in Xinjiang the terrorism label also hardened the “enemy” categorization of Muslims who opposed state-directed development and settlement of their land. No longer were “enemies” viewed simply as counterrevolutionaries or separatists, that is, those who were nevertheless compatriots and who could potentially be rehabilitated.

For Tursun, “discovering” hidden terrorists became a primary objective. Police units that identified such “gangs” were given large rewards. From Tursun’s perspective, it was as though the policing came to serve a larger disinformation campaign. By “discovering” terrorists, the police units fulfilled their obligation in the crackdown and concealed the structural factors that caused Uyghur protest in the first place. Over and over again Tursun observed or participated in turning informants, forcing them to identify “terrorists,” and using them to break up community networks:

We had a policy which encouraged people to spy on each other. Often they did this for money, or because we threatened them or their families. Of course we knew that a lot of our tips were just false accusations. Some people did that for money, while some people did that to take revenge on others. But we would arrest people regardless of the truth of information. For example, if four or five people gathered together for activities such as visiting a friend or attending a funeral and someone said it was an illegal gathering to teach Islam or plan violence we would arrest everyone who attended and label the host the ringleader. Everyone knew that at a funeral, people are required to conduct religious rituals. This is normal since Uyghurs are Muslim. But the spy would exaggerate and say it was extremist or terrorist. People who were being accused have no way to prove that they are innocent. Often they ended up being sentenced to 4 or 5 years in prison or “education through hard labor” camps. The informant was given money and we received our commendation. This was so common.

Tursun found this form of state violence morally repugnant. “Most Uyghurs I met were disgusted by the very idea of terrorism,” he said, “They wanted a peaceful life, a better world for their children.” But he worried that a generation of Uyghur young people who grew up in this atmosphere, where disappearances of Uyghur community leaders became so common, would lash out. Indeed, as Sean Roberts has shown, in some instances the “terrorism” label became a self-fulfilling prophecy (Roberts 2020). While not the norm in Uyghur crimes labelled as terrorism, in a handful of cases in 2013 and 2014, Uyghurs did attack Han civilians in organized suicide attacks. These specific attacks did appear to meet international standards of what constitutes a terrorism crime—though even they may be more appropriately understood to be horrific incidents of mass murder that arise from colonial circumstances. Soon after the terrorism label arrived, Tursun tried to quit his job as an officer. He was told that he needed to serve at least 10 years before he could even begin to consider early retirement. Because he had been granted access to state secrets, quitting would be a slow process. He was told he could be arrested if he quit without a justifiable excuse.

Over time it became clear that the hopes Tursun had for criminal justice reform would never happen. When he first joined the Public Security Bureau he thought that the presence of college-educated Uyghur officers would help improve the situation. Instead, he saw his fellow Uyghur officers, many of them who he had known for over a decade be worn down by the system. He saw many turn toward alcoholism and become withdrawn from their families. Uyghur police officers were treated with deference and fear by other members of the Uyghur community. It was good to have a friend who was a police officer, since the officer might be able to protect them from the counter-terrorism system by vouching for them. But this friendship was a guarded, political relationship. After all it was a relationship with the eyes and ears of the state, and what stood between being deemed a terrorist-enemy and a friend.

Even though Tursun was eventually able to leave the Bureau and, through a loophole in the system, escape to Europe, he knows that had he stayed he would have been pressed into service of the mass internment camp system that was put in place in the mid-2010s. “At this point I can’t say that every Uyghur retains some aspect of their humanity,” he said quietly. “Some Uyghur officers will do anything to show their loyalty to the government, no matter what kind of suffering they cause. All they care about are the benefits and power they get from their position. I know there are some Uyghur police who feel bad about the torture that Uyghur detainees are going through now in the camps, but the percentage of those who care are not that high. At this point they are numb.”

Although policing in China began in a revolutionary moment and was driven at first by Maoist “counterrevolutionary” politics, in the 1990s and 2000s in Northwest China it gave way to colonial-capitalist and counter-terrorism logics that participate in familiar forms of ethno-racialization and dehumanization found in post-9/11 policing systems and counter-terrorism around the world in which Muslims are racialized as deviant others. Although, they emerge from different histories, extrajudicial detention and surveillance of refugees and other unwanted populations from Kashmir, to Palestine, to France and the United States produce similar effects at differential scales (Byler 2022). As China was pulled into a global capitalist economy and the logic of developmentalism settled on a Han-centric mythos of China’s reemergence as a global power, the revolutionary multi-national inclusiveness of China’s framing of political struggle was deeply diminished.

In 1990s China the Maoist frame of friends and enemies was folded into a concern with “unifying” the country to benefit the masses—understood as the Han majority to the East and the Han settlers who came to the frontier to claim resources for them. Here “friends” came to be those who supported this project, and “enemies” became Uyghur “separatists” who protested these settler claims. Then, in the 2000s, the discourse of Uyghur “separatist” enemies hardened into “terrorists.” Over time, the possibility of full citizenship as “friends” has severely narrowed for Uyghurs. Since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been warehoused in an expansive prison system for alleged terrorism crimes (Byler 2022). Hundreds of thousands more whose “extremism and terrorism activities are not serious” have been placed in internment camps for reeducation (United Nations 2019). After an intensive period of Chinese language assimilation, ideological indoctrination, and brutal punishment, they are placed in securitized factories where they labor apart from their families and under intensive forms of technological and human surveillance. Together these carceral systems result in the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II. Uyghurs, as always-already “enemy” terrorists have become internal others, marking a turn from compatriot rehabilitation to new policing technologies of control and incarceration derived from global models of the war on terror.

Darren Byler is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. His current research is focused on policing and carceral theory, infrastructure development and global China.

Works Cited

Ayup, Abduweli. 2022. The Detainment Factory: A Memoir. Manuscript.

Becquelin, Nicolas. 2000. “Xinjiang in the Nineties.” The China Journal 44: 65-90.

Bovingdon, Gardner. 2010. The Uyghurs: Strangers in their own land. Columbia University Press.

Byler, Darren. 2022. Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dutton, Michael. 2005. Policing Chinese Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fischer, Andrew Martin. 2013. The disempowered development of Tibet in China: A study in the economics of marginalization. Lexington Books.

Grose, Timothy. 2019. Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity. Hong Kong University Press.

Roberts, Sean R. 2020. The War on the Uyghurs. Princeton University Press.

Tynen, Sarah. 2020. “Dispossession and displacement of migrant workers: the impact of state terror and economic development on Uyghurs in urban Xinjiang.” Central Asian Survey 39.3: 303-323.

United Nations (UN). 2019. Information Received from China on Follow-Up to the Concluding Observations on its Combined Fourteenth to Seventeenth Periodic Reports. 8 October. Geneva: Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Available from: undocs.org/CERD/C/CHN/FCO/14-17.

References

[1] Although “Tursun” is now living in Europe, he has asked me to use a pseudonym to protect his identity from Chinese authorities and the stigma associated with his past work as Xinjiang police officer.

[2] Dutton (2005) relies quite heavily on Carl Schmitt’s theorization of political struggle in his analysis of Chinese policing. Scholarship on Maoist intellectual and grassroots history since Dutton’s important contribution to Chinese political theory shows that the generative potential of Maoist framings of revolutionary struggle demands a re-examination of Schmitt’s work and the fascist context it reflects.

by Florian Mühlfried

Border studies are somewhat obsessed with issues of fluidity and mobility. This may be the reason why many post-Soviet borders, which have hardened after the collapse of the Soviet Union remain largely understudied (for an important exception, see Reeves 2014). The consolidation of these borders has not always been driven by militaristic claims or state security concerns, but has also been enacted “from below”. In his study of the Turkish-Georgian border, Mathijs Pelkmans (2006) has shown how the Laz people, a population divided by Soviet borders, emphatically embraced the opportunity to reunite with their kinfolk once the border was opened in the wake of the “collapse” of the Soviet Union, only to realize that decades of spatial separation had lead to cultural and social alienation between the two groups. When such experiences of alienation became overwhelming, Pelkmans argues, the Laz on both sides of the borders tried to keep their cross-border neighbors away, thus reinforcing the border by generating cultural and social barriers by transforming taken-for-granted practices of hospitality into thinly-veiled expressions of animosity.

The border between Georgia and the Russian Federation in the Caucasian mountains is another such example, albeit with a different twist. While in the case of the Turkish-Georgian border the locals took an interest in tightening the border as a means of keeping distance from those on the other side, most people living on the Georgian-Russian border had no such interest. A case in point are the Tushetians, a subgroup of the Georgians who speak a dialect of the Georgian language and historically reside in a remote mountainous area bordering Chechnya and Dagestan within the contemporary borders of the Russian Federation. Presently consisting of about 15,000 inhabitants, many Tushetians live in the Georgian capital Tbilisi or abroad as labor migrants. Many still engage in a traditional sheep breeding economy, making use of summer pastures in the Caucasian highlands and winter pastures in the lowlands. These winter pastures are situated on the border with Azerbaijan, but formerly also included lands on the other side of the border in Dagestan. In order to support these traditional economic forms, Tushetians continue to engage in trade across a fluid northern border.

However, when the Soviet Union began to dissolve, they began patrol this border, dressing in Soviet uniforms provided with Georgian state emblems and eventually becoming officially sanctioned as the first official border guards of the Georgian state. How did this come about? The following sketch of the history of the policing of the border between Northeast Georgia and the Russian Federation is meant to illustrate the captivating effect of putting on a uniform and acting in the name of the state. 

Mobilisation

Mutual raids have been frequent events for villagers in the alpine regions of the Caucasus, as testified by the numerous defence towers and castles that provided at least temporary shelter for those attacked during such incursions. The attackers were often neighbours, located in adjacent villages, but belonged to different ethnic groups. One such example considers a mountainous region stretching along the northeast range separating the North from the South Caucasus – and the Russian Federation from the republic of Georgia. On the southern side, this region is inhabited by Tushetians; while the residents of the northern side belong to one of the many ethnic groups of Dagestan and are predominantly Muslim. Despite nominal differences in religious affiliation, Tushetians and their neighbours to the north share many cultural practices as well as customary law.

Under the Soviet Union, both sides and their respective populations belonged to the same state. And although it is said that the chopped-off hands of enemies displayed on Tushetian house walls as trophies were not infrequent sights well into the 20^th century, at least in the last decades of the Soviet Union, the practice of raiding had practically come to an end. When the Soviet state started to break apart around 1990, the practice of raiding returned. The population most affected were the Tushetians, because most of them resided in the lowlands for much of the year, due to their traditional economic practice of transhumance (a form of mobile pastoralism based on a seasonal movement of livestock). Another decisive factors was a Soviet resettlement program in the 1950s that declared that remote regions in Georgia such as Tusheti had no viable economic prospects (neperspektivnye) and forced the inhabitants to resettle in more “promising” regions for economic development (Pallot 1990: 657–660, Jähnig 1983: 38, 52). By contrast, their northern neighbours in Dagestan, called “Leks” by the Tushetians, lived in the region year long. Tushetians, in turn, blamed the “Leks” for breaking into their houses and stealing valuables, as well as for cattle theft. According to Tushetian contemporary witnesses the raids increased during the following winter of 1991, requiring action to be taken.

Tushetian men began to patrol the border, yet could not entirely control it, due to a lack of manpower and the roughness of the terrain. In order to address this problem, Tushetian representatives got in touch with the Georgian state ministry of defence. The latter was only gradually re-establishing itself after the civil war of 1991/92, during which criminal gangs had taken control over large portions of the military and police forces. Besides, the security, or even the very existence of the Georgian state was threatened by violent conflicts with the Russian Federation, which took place in the secessionist, self-proclaimed republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia during this period. Within this context, any initiative to control the border was welcomed by the Georgian state authorities. Consequently, the Tushetian brigades got officially sanctioned as the first border guards of post-Soviet Georgia by the Georgian ministry of defence. Their first uniforms still largely stemmed from the Soviet period, but they received some official looking badges and better equipment from the Georgian capital Tbilisi – and, more importantly, the authorisation to represent a state.

In addition to policing the border, however, the Tushetians took another action to improve the situation: the resumption of micro-diplomatic ties with their northern neighbours. For this purpose, the head of the Tushetian council (sabch’o), the local political representative body that derived from its Soviet predecessor and maintained its name, got in touch with representatives from Dagestani villages where he expected the raiders to live. Those representatives were soldiers of higher rank or village administrators (or both), but the crucial factor for their informal political authority was their status as elders. All the elders in a community taken together constituted an institution referred to as jamaat.[1]

Preserved in the archive of the Tushetian village council, two protocols (dated 1991 and 1994) recounted meetings of administrative bodies in Dagestan and eight letters written in Russian, which were exchanged between the council of Tusheti and the jamaat of Xusheti[2] between 1993 and 1995. These protocols and letters document political and legal procedures for criminal cases. The first initiative was taken by a Tushetian delegation sent to the region of Xusheti in order to contact the local jamaat. Acknowledging the complaints of their southern neighbours, the elders promised to punish the raiders and to prevent future criminal acts. For this purpose, they revived a pre-Soviet tradition that required every adult male villager to swear on the Qur’an that they would refrain from attacking the Tushetians and seizing their property. Additionally, they reported 13 names of robbers to the Tushetian council and told the council to get in touch with state representatives in Makhachkala (capital of Dagestan) “in order to punish severely the robbers by the [civil] law.”[3] The cases of cattle theft were also resolved by means of face-to-face negotiations, sometimes with the aid of the Tushetian border guards. As stated in a letter from “the administrator of Xusheti” from 1995, the Tushetian border guards kept two cows from their northern neighbours as a kind of deposit for cattle stolen and held on the other side of the border.

 

Immobilisation

The events of 11 September 2001 had a profound impact on politics across the world, including in Tusheti. In addition to Russian claims that Chechen fighters were taking refuge in the Georgian mountains during the second Chechen-Russian since 1999 and that the Georgian state was either unwilling or incapable of controlling its borders, now Al Qaida and even Bin Laden personally were suspected of residing on Georgian territory. The hot spot of the day was Pankisi, a valley neighbouring Tusheti and bordering Chechnya. The local population, who go by the name Kists, had fled from Chechnya in the 19^th century, and many of them maintained close ties to relatives on the northern side of the Caucasus mountains.

In the second half of the 1990s, the Georgian government effectively lost control over this region. There was widespread corruption involving Georgian state officials, drug trafficking, money laundering, reports of radical Muslim propaganda, and military training for Chechen fighters and their allies. In the years to come, an Arab and an Algerian citizen residing in Pankisi without Georgian visas were imprisoned by Georgian police forces. Some of the foreign trained fighters also fought in the second Chechen war.

The Georgian government at that time attempted to dismiss the accusations, but with limited success. As the Russian government threatened to invade Georgia in order to arrest the Chechen and Muslim fighters, then president Shevardnadze appealed to the US government for support. With its strategic interest in the Caucasus and support for the Georgian political orientation towards the West, the US provided assistance in the form of military aid and training. In spring 2002, approximately 200 Special Operations Forces were sent to train and equip four 300-man Georgian battalions with light weapons, vehicles and communication devices. With this kind of support, the Georgian army was able to invade the Pankisi gorge in summer 2002 and reassert state control.

The Georgian military and its capacity to control its national borders were monitored and fostered by the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE). Having already started their mission to Georgia in 1992, the OSCE was mandated to observe and report on movement across parts of the border between Georgia and the Russian Federation from late 1999 until the end of 2004. While the area of operation initially only covered the border between Georgia and the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation, it was extended in subsequent years to the Ingush and Dagestan segments of the Georgian-Russian border.

In the heyday of the OSCE mission to Georgia, plenty of employees from all over Europe had focused their binoculars on the Russian side of the border. The monitors could testify that any kind of border transgression had clearly come to an end. With the beginning of the new millennium, the two sides of the Caucasus had been effectively disconnected. Locals from the Northern Caucasus could no longer go shopping in Omalo, as they had done in the 1990s, and the Georgian shepherds could no longer use pastures in Dagestan, as they had done for centuries. Any kind of trans-boundary diplomacy had to be enacted via state authorities and direct negotiations were no longer possible. Moreover, the Tushetians could no longer decide for themselves whom to allow on their territory and whom to reject.

In the course of an OSCE training program – and possibly related to it – the organisational structure of the border guards underwent significant changes. In 2006, their affiliation was changed from military to police, thus bringing the personnel under control of the Georgian ministry of internal affairs and thus coordinating their actions with other forms of policing. In recent years, the recruiting and placement criteria have also altered. In the beginning, local affiliation was seen as an advantage for border guards because of the local expertise and social embeddedness of the soldiers. After a while, this policy was dismissed as disadvantageous. Consequently, the border guards today come from all parts of Georgia, with Tushetians in the minority. What began as an effort to police the border “from below” ended (and in some ways resulted) in a consolidation of policing authority in state hands.

Conclusion

The Georgian state the Tushetians sought to protect was envisioned as both a presence and an absence: a presence in the performances of physical control over territory, an absence in the practice of regulating the social, religious and legal relations with the neighbours. But the state the Tushetians invoked once they put on Georgian uniforms was a captivating one that, over the course of time, didn’t make any concessions: The intentions of its subjects ended at the borders it defined. The uniform the Tushetians voluntarily assumed in order to strengthen their status, in turn, became a captivating force of their own dispossession. Whereas initially, they hoped to increase their bargaining position in a more structured relationship with their neighbours, they later had to realize that representing a state can take various meanings in various contexts with different, sometimes paralyzing consequences. One such consequence was that Tushetians could no longer attend religious festivals alongside their Muslim neighbours, as they have done for centuries. Another consequence was that they were no longer capable of settling conflicts directly with their counterparts on the other side of the border, and that routinized practices of creating social bonds across lines of ethnic, religious and regional affiliation such as sworn brotherhood could no longer be practiced.

What this case also illustrates is that acting and speaking in the name of the state occasionally causes unanticipated and unwanted consequences. What was initially expected to increase the scope of agency eventually paved the way for its very limitation. One obvious reason for this is that uniforms reproduce chains of command, and thus their use inadvertently stratified and solidified a hierarchical system. In the turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and re-making of statehood in post-Soviet Georgia, central authority was rather weak and left much room for non-state actors to take state affairs in their own hands; this was the case for Tushetians. With the consolidation of centralized power, their superiors from the Georgian government based in the Georgian capital prioritized security concerns over local interests. This quest for security, in turn, was supported by Georgia’s Western allies such as the European Union and particularly the Unites States.

Moreover, Tushetians began to invoke a new conception of statehood during this period. For centuries, Tushetians have guarded the northern border to Georgia, alongside other groups who live in the Caucasian mountains such as Khevsurs. In addition to the presence of self-armed forces ready to ward-off incursions, signal towers were erected by the locals, but not least in the interest of the political power holders in the lowlands to communicate the danger of an approaching enemy. Such border guarding, however, consolidated these local populations’ autonomy vis-à-vis the state centre by increasing their bargaining power because they acted outside of a chain of command. The Georgian state which began to consolidate amidst the chaos of the 1990s, however, was unwilling to accept these fluidity borders. In an ironic twist, Tushetians provided the very legibility needed to pave the way for the state apparatus to regulate their lives(cf. Scott 1998).

Florian Mühlfried is full professor for social anthropology at the Ilia State University in Georgia. His publications include the monographs Mistrust: A Global Perspective (2019) and Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (2014) as well as the co-edited volumes Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus (2018) and Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia (2012).

Works Cited

Jähnig, Wolfgang. 1983. Die Siedlungsplanung im ländlichen Raum der Sowjetunion mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Konzepts der ‘Agrostadt’. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot.

Mühlfried, Florian. 2014. Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia. Oxford, New York: Berghahn.

Pallot, Judith. 1990. „Rural Depopulation and the Restoration of the Russian Village under Gorbachev.“ Soviet Studies 42 (2): 655–674.

Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Reeves, Madeleine. 2013. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press.

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

References

[1] For more details on the history and functions of these jamaats, see Mühlfried 2014: 133ff.

[2] Xusheti (also called Iusheti in one letter) is an unofficial name of a region in Dagestan bordering Tusheti. It is used in the letters as a self-designation of the respective jamaat, and by the Tushetians in colloquial conversations. However, it is not testified for in official sources.

[3] It is unknown to me, if this punishment was ever enacted. I also cannot verify if they were punished by the jamaat according to religious law, as stated by the head of the Tushetian council in an interview.