ABSTRACT

Security is the second category of interventions pursued under the name of peacebuilding and for the end of peace in Tajikistan. In Chapter 2, I explored the discursive invocation of security in the International Community’s peacebuilding, particularly its statebuilding discourse, and specifically with respect to the dangers ascribed to Tajikistan. Security practices in post-accord peacebuilding most often involve ‘leftover’ tasks under the rubric of Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) as well as a new agenda of tasks under the title of Security Sector Reform (SSR). Yet as discursively constructed practices their exercise is contingent on other strategies at play in global politics. SSR initiatives are frequently pursued not only in terms of peacebuilding but merge with the maxims of counter-terrorism and international security cooperation. However, this chapter will tell quite a different story of DDR and SSR in Tajikistan than that envisioned in these international objectives – be they for peacebuilding or counter-terrorism. It explores the re-establishment of ‘security’ in terms of processes of securitisation and the simulation of sovereignty. As representations and simulacra of sovereignty emerge or collapse so too, by extension, does the legitimate order of which they are central properties. Thus, before addressing the empirical work of this chapter, I will explore what it is about the nature of security that makes its subject, the sovereign, often identified as ‘the state’, not a fixed entity but a work forever in progress.