SUMMARY:

In contemporary Kyrgyzstan, where until the late 2000s the only asphalt road in the southwest of the country ran across the borders of neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the construction of “bypass roads” that create loops around the territory of the neighboring state have become crucial to the imagination and material articulation of territorial integrity. In a region where large tracts of the border await conclusive delimitation, the construction of bypass roads has also proved to be politically contentious. Drawing on ethnographic research in a region of recent and prospective road construction, this article considers the ambiguous affects elicited by new road infrastructures in a region characterized, since the 1930s, by land exchanges and repeated attempts at territorial re-delimitation. Drawing together debates about infrastructural “enchantment” with recent work on the affective potentials of place, the article explores how past projects of spatial transformation haunt new initiatives to transform landscapes. It considers how the multiplicity of political projects layered on the landscape generates the affective qualities of the prospective road as a space, at once, of hope and of dislocation.