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Tajikistan's Virtual Politics of Peace

SINCE THE FORMAL END OF ITS POST-SOVIET CIVIL war in 1997, Tajikistan has found something proximate to peace and simultaneously been the object of international peacebuilding. Yet peace and peacebuilding are practically related in complex ways. It is problematic to simply assume that the partial achievement of the former is due to the partial completion of the latter. Moreover, the practices and discourses of this peace are far removed from both negative peace (the simple absence of war) and positive peace (the existence of emancipatory structures and cultures of non-violence). It is perhaps better to discuss not the building of peace but the emergence of legitimate order (Heathershaw 2009). Tajikistan has order in that it has established of rules and practices of governance. This order is legitimate in that it is widely resigned to in public discourses and practices which accept its basic validity. It is emergent in that it is not a state but a process and thus incomplete and highly contingent. This emergence of legitimate order has taken place despite a lack of the very things that both rational choice institutionalists and liberal peace theorists would expect to see. That is, it has taken place amidst the breakdown of the power-sharing mechanisms that were introduced in the 1997 peace agreement (as opposition commanders have gradually been removed from their positions), the absence of formal institutional structures of conflict management (substantial regional autonomy or consociational arrangements for example) and the increasing concentration of power to President Emomali Rahmon, his family and his inner circle fromDanghara.Moreover, the interregional, ideological and inter-personal conflicts of the 1992–1997 civil war have not simply disappeared, nor have they been channelled into formal institutions, but they have nevertheless been superseded by a ‘peace’—a new order of hegemonic governance. This peace is in part sustained by an informal economic order of exchange founded on corrupt privatisation and land reform (Zürcher 2004), the capture and reappropriation of international aid (Nakaya 2008) and the enormous social impact of seasonal labour migration (Olimova & Bosc 2003). However, what such materialist