Fluid legalities: Human-fish relations and water governance in Uzbekistan’s Zarafshan River Basin

This article explores water governance in Uzbekistan’s Zarafshan River Basin through a socio-legal analysis of human-fish relations. Building on scholarship that conceptualises fish as vessels embodying the biochemical, ideological, and economic forces of riverscapes, this article follows their movements through the domestic and international regimes that govern water, revealing how law, custom, and informal exchange shape everyday life along the river. Ethnographic research illuminates a post-Soviet landscape marked by legal pluralism: While international conventions introduced after the USSR’s collapse largely reinforced Soviet-era governance systems, decades of institutional decay – compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and mounting food insecurity – have opened new spaces for local agency. Humans and fish have formed more-thanhuman assemblages to navigate this turbulent socio-political, environmental, and economic terrain. Uzbek citizens leverage their relationships with fish to reinterpret and contest water governance, asserting agency beyond formal law, while fish depend on human interventions for survival. This article overall introduces fish as a medium for tracing how legality and life flow through Central Asia’s fluid landscapes.