Infrastructural Hope: Anticipating ‘Independent Roads’ and Territorial Integrity in Southern Kyrgyzstan

This article explores the affective force of infrastructural intervention. It focuses on the construction, successful in one case, locally stalled in the other, of so-called ‘independent roads’ along Kyrgyzstan's porous land-border with Tajikistan. Chinese-built and funded through an array of international lending organisations, such roads are determinate interventions in the social life of a marginal border region. They are also the site of intense local anticipation: the object both of hope for a materially secure future and of anxieties of entrapment. The very alignments that enable a new road to come into being – the mobilising of elected representatives, the appeal to languages of abandonment and territorial loss – are themselves anticipatory and experimental moves. The category of ‘infrastructural hope’ is developed to explore this articulation of material politics with diffuse elite and vernacular desires for a territorially secure future. The article considers the implications of this entanglement for the anthropology of infrastructure and for the analysis of trans-boundary tension in Central Asia.