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Abstract
Based on qualitative and ethnographic field research in the Panfilov District of Almaty Region, Kazakhstan, and selected supportive quantitative data, this contribution explores the dynamics of agricultural transformation along the former Sino-Soviet border since the mid-1990s. It particularly scrutinises path dependency, as well as friction, in cultivation patterns navigated by local agricultural actors in the face of changing irrigation water and infrastructural access, commodification schemes and alternative employment opportunities that are produced by emerging transborder (and increasingly globalised) infrastructures. Therefore, how do agricultural actors in Panfilov District make sense of and negotiate past and current agricultural development at the local level? The article aims to provide a reflection of what the analytical 'post-Soviet' category might still mean from an everyday life perspective in a borderland context affected by socio-political neglect and newly evolving connections alike.

This article scrutinizes the Maritime Silk Road Initiative by framing it not as a static, state-centric device to channel Chinese developmental ambitions, but by emphasizing the flexible character of its production and the provisional configuration of its materialization. It draws on assemblage theory as a conceptual angle to, on the one hand, focus on the agentive character of human and non-human 'actors' such as 'traveling' discourses of development or infrastructures to explore Maritime Silk Road Initiative's materialization 'on the ground' in its emergent rather than resultant way, on the other.