Introduction

In Tajikistan there is some kind of peace. More ambiguously still, the environment is said to be ‘post-conflict’. Although its war, which began in 1992, formally ended with a general peace agreement of 1997, significant political violence continued until 2001. Since then the last armed groups and independent commanders have been eradicated or expelled. The incumbent regime faces no substantive opposition, neither military nor political. Social and economic life, whilst remaining desperately poor, improved considerably in the early part of the 2000s. Tajikistan’s history since independence has been dominated by war-making, peace-making and peacebuilding. How this conflict was transformed is one of the great stories of post-Soviet Central Asia. In this study I investigate how peace came to Tajikistan, and particularly how external actors have contributed to that process through their approach of international peacebuilding. In doing so, I pursue a political analysis of the emergence of legitimate order in Tajikistan’s international, national and local spaces in the years since 2000. That is, I examine the contending discourses and practices of building peace in post-conflict Tajikistan.