This thesis is about how water flows are being reconfigured under Uzbekistan’s ongoing agricultural modernisation, and how this impacts smallholder farmers. I draw on document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and two case studies in the Samarkand region’s district of Jomboy, to argue that agricultural modernisation, whose adoption emerged as a result of strategic-relational processes at the national and global scales, results in hydrosocial reterritorialisation. I identify the emergence of intensive gardening and agricultural clusters as rooted in the Uzbek government’s gradually increasing engagement with international financial institutions and development aid. I argue that the new agri-model is folded into the Green Economy development strategy that Uzbekistan adopted to render its activities ‘legible’ by synchronising them with global norms. In agriculture, the Green Economy gives rise to what I call a ‘New Agrarian Imaginary’ – an ideal vision, a mental map for how Uzbekistan’s agriculture should look. Hydrosocial reterritorialisation, in turn, is a spatial and material expression of the contradiction between the New Agrarian Imaginary and its encounter with Uzbekistan’s continuously transforming structural context. Hydrosocial reterritorialisation is characterised by the dis-embedding of hydrosocial relations previously configured around Uzbekistan’s cotton production for the state order. This change marginalises smallholders as it disrupts socially mediated water contestation, characteristic of rural resource relations for most of Uzbekistan’s Soviet and independent history. For smallholders, hydrosocial reterritorialisation translates into individualisation of water use, or the reliance on groundwater resources, which I call verticalisation, a ‘slow-violent’ process. I conclude that new hydrosocial territorialities are associated with rural fragmentation and precarity and are perceived ambiguously by rural dwellers, especially women.