Description
Scholarship on statehood often frames migration and movement as challenges to the coherence of the modern state system; in contrast, this paper engages the case of 19th and 20th century Tajik state formation to explore the potential to reconceptualize movement and migration as constitutive of statehood. The paper begins by examining historical patterns of migration in present-day Tajikistan, situating these movements within the broader arc of Tajik state formation amid imperialism. Namely, I review late 19th and 20th century migration patterns into, out of, and within Russian Turkestan, the Emirate of Bukhara, and Soviet Tajikistan. Discussion draws upon primary reports from Russian military ethnographic missions to Eastern Bukhara in the 1880s-90s, as well as archival and secondary literature regarding forced resettlement programs into the Vakhsh Valley in the 1920s-30s and around the construction of the Nurek Dam in the second half of the 20th century. I leverage this analysis to argue that histories of movement and migration play constitutive roles in the formation of the Tajik state, both materially in the movement of human bodies and discursively in terms of the ways that identity language and practices build up around these processes of movement and migration. Ultimately the paper demonstrates the need to nuance broader theories of the state and its formation to account for these complexities in historical perspective.
