ABSTRACT
Civil war and its consequences have dominated Tajikistan’s short history of independent statehood. In 1992, not long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country descended into several years of political violence. While the most intense fighting had ended by 1993, a peace agreement was not signed until 1997 and renegade commanders remained at large until 2001. The ‘Kulobisation’ of Tajikistan (Akiner 2001), where cadres from the southern region of Kulob came to hold most of the key positions in government, notwithstanding the power-sharing mechanism of the General Agreement, was confirmed by Emomali Rahmon’s victory in fraudulent presidential elections of 1999 and 2006 and his subsequent consolidations of power. This chapter introduces the Tajik case in terms of an interpretative narrative of its historical origins and junctures. It provides an outline of the war and peace process from the Soviet period to contemporary post-conflict peacebuilding interventions. It is shown that while violence was not inevitable, these dramatic events evolved so that peace became war, and vice versa. In such a way, as peace has emerged out of war, Tajikistan has refused to follow the pathway of international peacebuilding towards a reformed and democratic political order.
