Beyond ‘water wars’: gendered access and the limits of testimony on the Tajik–Kyrgyz border conflict

In this research note, I reflect on how my positionality as a Tajik woman researcher shaped both my access to and interpretation of the Tajik–Kyrgyz border conflict. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2024–2025, I show how gendered kinship networks enabled access to local narratives while simultaneously exposing the constraints – surveillance, fear and politicized silence – that structure what can be said and recorded. Based on oral-history interviews with female Tajik interlocutors, I demonstrate that the conflict cannot be reduced to a ‘water war’. Instead, these narratives reveal a multiplicity of situated interpretations, as well as a dimension largely absent from official accounts: the coexistence of conflict and everyday interdependence, expressed through practices of care, exchange and mutual vigilance. By foregrounding these gendered and relational dynamics, in this note I explain both the absence and the partial, fragile nature of Tajik-side accounts in existing scholarship on the Tajik–Kyrgyz border conflict.