Disruption and decline: the gendered consequences of civil war and political transition for education in Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

The sweeping political transition from the Soviet Union to independence in Tajikistan was accompanied by a devastating civil war. Social, economic, and demographic change followed. This research examines a critical indicator of human welfare and stability at the micro- and macro-levels: educational attainment and mobility. Using the 2007 Tajik Living Standards Survey, I compare cohorts educated before, during, and after the civil war. I examine the impact of the war and the political transition on educational attainment and mobility. The findings suggest that the consequences of civil war and political transition in Tajikistan were gendered: boys’ attainment was disrupted when they lived in a conflict-affected area and were 16-to-17 years old when the war began; girls’ attainment decline was more widespread. This research contributes to our understanding of the long-term consequences of political events on human capital accumulation over the life course.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil war
• political transition
• education
• gender
• Central Asia

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge the guidance of Steven Pfaff, Nathalie E. Williams, Stewart Tolnay, Natasha Quadlin, and two anonymous reviewers in the preparation of this manuscript. Partial support for this research came from a Shanahan Endowment Fellowship and a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development training grant, T32 HD007543, to the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology at the University of Washington. Additional support for this research came from the Ellison Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington through an Irme Boba Research Fellowship.

Notes

1. International organizations have consistently prioritized increasing access to quality education as a central tenet of development (World Bank Group 2011; United Nations 2013; UNICEF 2017). Educational outcomes are associated with economic growth and stability, especially after war when the risk of re-emergence of violence is high (Collier, Hoeffler, and Soderbom 2008; Barro and Lee 2013). Low levels of education have consistently been linked to crime, employment instability, and poor health through adulthood (Masters, Hummer, and Powers 2012; Osborne and Higgins 2015; Johnson et al. 2016; Leopold 2018).

2. The author traveled to Tajikistan in July and August of 2017, conducting interviews with key informants, and using snowball sampling strategies to identify additional respondents, for a total of 10 key informant interviews. Respondents were required to have worked in the field of development in Tajikistan during the period immediately after the civil war ended in 1997. The author speaks Russian but is a non-native speaker, and most of the interviews were conducted using a mix of Russian and English. The interview data are included in this manuscript to supplement the background material collected from secondary sources. In all interviews, without exception, discussing reconstruction efforts after the war involved discussing the repair and refurbishing of schools. Many respondents provided broad insight into the informal and formal ways the education system changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as their personal opinions about those changes.

3. Several years after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, children who were school-aged and lived in areas with higher war intensity had attained one-half a year less schooling than children of the same age in lower-intensity areas (Akresh and de Walque 2008). Starting from a baseline gender gap, the authors find that the genocide primarily dampened boys’ education, narrowing the gender gap in education through a “leveling-off effect” (Akresh and de Walque 2008, 20). How long-term were these declines in Rwanda? Research suggests they persisted until 2010, after which the negative effects of conflict, including the gender gap, had disappeared (La Mattina 2018).

4. Comparable evidence comes from Guatemala, where schooling years for girls declined more sharply during the civil war than they did for boys (Chamarbagwala and Morán 2011).

5. This dataset is publicly available from the Tajikistan State Statistical Agency and archived by the World Bank (Ref. TJK_2007_TLSS_v01_M). Dataset downloaded from www.microdata.worldbank.org on 5 March 2018.

6. The geocoded event dataset (GED) is publicly available at https://ucdp.uu.se/ and is regularly updated.

7. The unparalleled recovery of school infrastructure in GBAO (shown in Table 1) likely reflects the investment of the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) in the Ismaili communities in GBAO. The AKF provides indirect and direct investment in Shia Ismaili Muslim communities primarily concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South Asia (Karim 2014). The political and social context in which this recovery occurred has been shaped largely by the Ismaili Muslim community in this region, with a specific emphasis on gender equality, relative to more conservative Muslim practice found in much of the rest of Tajikistan (Breu and Hurni 2003; Bliss 2006; Waljee 2008). During my 2017 fieldwork in Tajikistan, interviews with Pamiri people in Gorno-Badakhshan, as well as prominent social scientists in the region, retrospectively corroborated these accounts.

8. Note that although in cross-national studies, “rough terrain” has been modeled as a determinant of the onset of civil wars (Fearon and Laitin 2003), altitude was not strongly correlated with conflict events in bivariate correlations comparing districts in Tajikistan.

9. Potential cases include Moldova, Georgia, Chechnya, and Dagestan, for example.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [Institutional Grant P2C HD042828 (University of Washington)].