The cover picture of Madeleine Reeves’ book Border Work shows a wagon on wheels standing on a dusty roadside. The wagon is painted in military camouflage patterns. Its colours resemble those of an aerial photograph of the Ferghana Valley, with its green irrigated areas, brown dry hills, white snow-capped mountains, and blue bodies of water. “Kyrgyzstan” features in Cyrillic characters on the wagon’s road-facing side. On the back of the wagon is a barely visible inscription. It says that this is the border control post of Samarkandek, a village located on the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border. In the foreground we see two women and a man, probably waiting for a lift to visit relatives or friends. No border personnel are visible in the picture. We are left to wonder if this post is actually manned, and if control procedures are in place. There is no indication of where Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan respectively lie either. What is more, the picture conveys considerable uncertainty as to whether we would still find the wagon in the same place the next morning, or if it would have wheeled off to a different spot.

In the book Reeves tells us that we should not take for granted the lenses through which we would normally look at the photographed scene, and with the help of which we interpret the uncertainties arising from it. Mobilising Pierre Bourdieu’s statement on the difficulty to think of the state outside of the normative powers of its own categories, Reeves radically questions assumptions on the boundedness of states, on the constitutive difference of their political borders, and on the coherence of power through which their personnel operate. Our narratives and methodological strategies are strongly shaped by these assumptions which rely on the conceptual and ontological stability of the state and its borders (page 15). At the same time, the author suggests, it is precisely these assumptions which fail to account for, and tend to render us blind to the social interactions which perpetually produce these very categories in multiple sites, through messy processes fraught with instable and often precarious controversies. It is by exploring tangible sites of social interactions and material manifestations such as those depicted on the book cover that Reeves seeks to undo the theoretical and conceptual conundrums surrounding the state and its borders.

Reeves’ fascinating and persuasively written ethnography explores the borders of the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, today part of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The history of these borders’ geography dates back to the Soviet period, but has also been clearly influenced by ethnicities, modes of life and forms of production dating to the eighteenth-century Russian conquest (pages 68-73). By and large, the three states have adopted the borderlines of the former Tajik, Uzbek and Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republics. These borders were initially determined through “national-territorial delimitation” (1924-1927), but experienced a number of important subsequent alterations over the lifespan of the Soviet Union. The borders of the Ferghana Valley have regularly been depicted by academic and policy-oriented literature as too complicated in terms of their spatial patterns, too arbitrary with respect to the population groups they unite or separate, and not sufficiently delimited with regard to ambiguities arising from shared spaces.

Reeves takes issue with these types of statements and respective explanatory patterns. However, she does not seek to disprove whether they correspond to an “existing reality” or to perceptions of the “local population” in the borderlands of the Ferghana Valley. Rather, she engages with the ideational background and normative assumptions pertaining to the perhaps most frequently mobilised idea of the political: the state. She suggests that existing analyses mostly follow an institutionalist account of a “strong-weak state” paradigm to account for the empirical complexity of overbearing and at the same time fragmented manifestations of the state in Central Asia. This paradigm is predicated upon an a priori ontological status and analytical separation between state and society (pages 11-12).

In her analysis, Reeves counters these institutionalist accounts by means of two conceptual moves. Firstly, she denaturalises the ontology of the border and the state as pre-existing categories. This permits her to carefully trace and reassemble the processes which actually produce and stabilise these very categories. Secondly, she questions the taken-for-granted existence of boundaries and separations for concepts such as “state-society”, but also empirically, for the border as depicted in the photograph on the book’s front cover. This allows the author to uncover the contingent and highly normative procedures involved in projecting and stabilising difference. Her analytical gaze privileges multiplicity and complexity, as well as flows and indeterminacy, without however losing sight of processes of fixation. Her account is written in an elaborate and beautiful style which tacks between dense and close-up ethnographic narration of encounters with people and places, and more conceptual and analytical sections.

The book is composed of a series of six chapters titled 'Locations', 'Delimitations', 'Trajectories', 'Gaps', 'Impersonations' and 'Separations', throughout which a unique cartography of the border gradually unfolds. This has little to do with a conventional mapping of rivers, mountains, settlements or roads. Reeves’ is a conceptual, as well as semantic cartography. It invites us to reflect on the processes and complexities of borders and, ultimately, of the state. The chapters are preceded by an introduction which provides the geographical and historical context of the study, explains its main objectives and presents an account of the ethnographic fieldwork. A short conclusion synthesises the main insights of the book and puts them into a wider context.

Throughout the chapters, Reeves presents us with a very rich and dense ethnography. Her fascinating insights on the Ferghana Valley borderlands bespeak of the systematic, long-term, on-site fieldwork that she has carried out, but also of her genuine personal interest and commitment to listen to and to understand the lives of her interlocutors. In the course of the book, we meet border guards, traders, farmers, taxi drivers, teachers, NGO workers, demobilised soldiers, and sometimes several (and many more) of these figures united in the same person. Reeves’ theoretically informed analysis draws on case studies from very different geographical and historical settings. This approach encourages comparison and makes the book relevant far beyond the field of Central Asian Studies. The book’s message is that the search for fixity inspired by normative accounts of statehood, ethnicity and territory (rather than the often criticised indeterminacy) may be a dangerous enterprise in the Ferghana Valley. Delimitation by means of infrastructure and property rights “[…] risks generating further uncertainty at the very point that it is intended to foster clarity” (page 248).

While all of the chapters would deserve a more sustained discussion, it is perhaps 'Trajectories' (Chapter 3) and 'Impersonations' (Chapter 5) which are the most powerful ones in Reeves’ book. In 'Trajectories', the author traces the real and imaginative geographies of people in the Ferghana Valley with a focus on mobility and residence prior to and after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. She looks into the history of places on the example of a small town formerly classified as “settlements of urban type” which benefitted from priority provisioning during the Soviet period. The chapter insightfully demonstrates the history of uneven distances between center and periphery throughout the Ferghana Valley during that period, as well as their radical transformation over the past 20 years, or so. The chapter defies any notion of the Ferghana Valley as an isolated “container” with an even territory, but shows how the various interconnections, as well as lingering fantasies of the past combined with mnemonic politics produce a structured territory with fluctuating bounds.

In 'Impersonations' (Chapter 5), Reeves turns to those who “man” the border. She reveals the highly precarious work that border guarding involves, its embeddedness in deeply violent rituals of military traditions, as well as the subjectivity-producing moment of becoming at the border. This is exemplified by the cold thrill of the moment of encounter at the border, when all parties including border guards, borderlanders and visitors struggle to make sense of each other. This is a moment of suspense, but also of suspension, as the fields of possibility for making claims fluctuate considerably throughout the process of gauging, probing, pretending, checking, charming, imploring and threatening. Whose appeals have the greatest reach? Whose claims are more likely to be backed up? Which actions succeed in acquiring the status of legitimacy, and which ones are likely to be sanctioned as transgressions? In this chapter the ambiguity, contingency and, at the same time, possibility of the border almost painfully materialize.

In Border Work Reeves seeks to render complexity, not simplification. She grounds her argument for this choice very carefully in theory, and follows it to the letter throughout her analysis. At times, the sheer wealth of information is overwhelming, and readers unfamiliar with the region might not easily digest Reeves' manifold detailed stories and grasp the analytical point that she is trying to make. But this is perhaps the only plausible way to do justice to the “messiness of real life” (page 243) in the Ferghana Valley. Border Work is a brilliant ethnography which has much to offer to those interested in the state and its borders.