ABSTRACT
Official elite accounts of Tajikistan’s peace seek to present a government which is not just legitimate, but predestined to determine national progress (Fatoev 2001: 104). International discourses, by contrast, increasingly losing hope in Tajikistan, present a government which is ‘weak’, illegitimate and maintained largely by the ‘war weariness’ of the population. In this vein one long-term observer of Tajikistan argued at the beginning of this decade that the regime would remain illegitimate until certain substantive and procedural sources had been established.
