Seeing like the International Community: How Peacebuilding Failed (and Survived) in Tajikistan

Abstract

The international community claims transformative power over post-conflict spaces via the concept of peacebuilding. International actors discursively make space for themselves in settings such as the Central Asian state of Tajikistan which endured a civil war during the 1990s and has only seen an end to widespread political violence in recent years. With the work of James C. Scott, this paper challenges the notion that post-conflict spaces are merely the objects of international intervention. It reveals how, even in cases of apparent stability such as that of Tajikistan, international actors fail to achieve their ostensible goals for that place yet make space for themselves in that place. International peacebuilders may provide essential resources for the re-emergence of local forms of order yet these symbolic and material resources are inevitably re-interpreted and re-appropriated by local actors to serve purposes which may be the opposite of their aims. However, despite this ‘failure’ of peacebuilding it nevertheless survives as a discursive construction through highly subjective processes of monitoring and evaluation. So maintained, peacebuilding is a constitutive element of world order where the necessity of intervention for humanitarian, democratic and statebuilding ends goes unchallenged. This raises the question of what or where – in spatial terms – is the locus of international intervention: the local recipients of peacebuilding programmes (who are the ostensible targets) or the ‘International Community’ itself (whose space is re-inscribed as that of an imperfect but necessary regulator of world order).

Keywords:

• international community
• peacebuilding
• civil society
• humanitarianism
• monitoring and evaluation
• Tajikistan
• Central Asia

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank François Debrix, Daniel Lambach, Nick Megoran and an anonymous reviewer, for their instructive comments.

Notes

1. Hereafter the papers denote the community, collective subject or ‘self’ (Hansen 2006) of international peacebuilding as the International Community (capitalized). This approach to discourse analysis of international peacebuilding is justified at further length in Heathershaw 2007a.

2. In 2006, the last prominent oppositionist, Mirzo Ziyoev, Minister of Emergency Situations was removed from his position.

3. CAIP, running from 2002–2005 was a three-year, US$27 million, regional reconstruction programme which also worked in other perceived ‘conflict-prone’ areas in the Ferghana valley of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

4. Mercy Corps, as one of four contractors for CAIP, established a community action group (CAG) in 35 communities in Khatlon and Rasht regions. The CAG model was based on the community initiative group (CIG) employed by Mercy Corps under another USAID programme, the Peaceful Communities Initiative (PCI) in Sugd oblast. Phase one of PCI ran from 2001 to 2004 in 36 communities in Tajikistan while a two-year follow-up began in 31 new communities from 2004 to 2006. Both CAIP and PCI were also employed in the Ferghana Valley of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, also considered ‘conflict prone’ according to the International Community.

5. Personal communication, senior staff member, Mercy Corps, Dushanbe, April 2005.

6. Interview, Programme Officer, Mercy Corps, 31 May 2005.

7. Group interview, Mercy Corps Community Initiative Group, Margedar, 27 June 2005.

8. CAIP findings from a survey of 60 villages in April/May 2005, at the end of the three-year programme; PCI findings from a survey of the same number of respondents across five villages in Asht and Panjakent raiyons in June 2005, six months into the programme.

9. For a discussion of how politics gets reduced to questions of policy by humanitarian actors see Duffield (2001, ch. 4).

10. All three ‘external’ evaluators, including myself, became Mercy Corps employees and over the course of the evaluation worked very closely with Mercy Corps staff.

11. SMART objectives are those which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed.

12. Data was based on 331 completed questionnaires filled out by CAG, Youth and Womens’ group members in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Around 60 per cent of the data is from Tajikistan (MCU 2005, p. 7).

13. Following the author's involvement in this evaluation he worked to try and develop his own methodology for M&E using the qualitative techniques of ethnography and discourse analysis similar to that which has been used throughout this research. He subsequently conducted mini-evaluations for Mercy Corps and GTZ during the midway point of their programmes (see Heathershaw 2005c, d).

14. Interview, programme officer, Mercy Corps, Dushanbe, 31 May 2005.