Tajikistan’s Atomised Peace: Approaching Conflict Management from the Ground Up

ABSTRACT

By analysing constitutive everyday peace practices, the article shows that poor socio-economic conditions, rather than political grievances and aspirations, are major sources of an actual and potential discontent in present day Tajikistan. It is argued that peace is atomised in a way that it is upheld through state withdrawal from welfare provision and an ongoing, ever more deepening fragmentation of the social fabric in the context of the precarity accompanying the country’s integration into the global political economy after the Soviet collapse and the subsequent civil war (1992–97). Nevertheless, individuals themselves navigate, domesticate and mitigate conflicts from the ground up.

KEYWORDS:

• Tajikistan
• civil war
• peace
• conflict
• society
• ethnographic peace research

Acknowledgement

I am very thankful to my research participants for their trust, anonymous reviewers for detailed and constructive comments, Anna Kreikemeyer for her tireless reading of earlier drafts, constant guidance and creating a truly collaborative spirit on this Special Issue, as well as JISB Editors for support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Karolina Kluczewska is a visiting research fellow at the DFG Collaborative Research Center SFB/TRR 138 ‘Dynamics of Security’, Justus Liebig University Giessen, and an associate senior research fellow at the Tomsk State University. Previously, she worked at the Tajik National University and University of Paris 13. She holds a PhD degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews. Her research interests concern development aid and localisation of global governance frameworks in Central Asia.

Notes

1 All names were changed.

2 A term commonly used in the former Soviet Union (Russian: politehnologiya). It refers to various tools of political manipulation which allow leaders to gain social legitimacy and remain in power.

3 Common local prefix denoting respect a woman deserves based on her age and experience.

4 See also Tadzhikistan i mirovoe obshchestvo. President.tj. Accessed 27 March 2020 http://www.president.tj/ru/taxonomy/term/5/166.

5 Terms used by these individuals are provided in original. Language is an important component of everyday peace in that by describing social cohesion it contributes to creating it.

6 Our closer interactions were possible only because of our shared gender.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the following projects: ‘Contested Global Governance, Transformed Global Governors? International Organisations and “Weak” States’ funded by the French National Research Agency (grant number ANR-16-ACHN-0034), ‘Tomsk State University Competitiveness Improvement Programme’ funded by Tomsk State University (grant number 8.1.27.2018), and the Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 138 ‘Dynamics of Security’ funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant number 227068724)