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The international academic mobility that we hear about most often concerns moving from the non-West to the West. It is far more rare for academics to go the ‘other’ way, i.e. from Western to non-Western academia. While I have been both ways, I owe the really transformative experience of my academic mobility to Tajik academia. This essay describes three of the many aspects of this formative experience, referring to the issues of mistrust, mutual favours and the culture of mediocracy. By being confronted with new academic conventions and practices, Tajik academia made me question my own positionality. It forced me to reflect on privilege and precarity which I simultaneously embodied, and offered a new perspective on Western academic culture.

It has become common knowledge that international organizations (IOs) are struggling with local ownership of their peacebuilding and development interventions worldwide. This happens despite the local turn which gained momentum in recent years in peacebuilding research and practice. Drawing on the post-liberal debate and area studies research focusing on conflict settlement, this paper argues that the continued difficulties of IOs to engage with the local needs to be seen in the context of multiple, diverse forms of ordering, namely structured and structuring processes of meaning-making and social interactions. To illustrate this argument, the paper refers to the case of Central Asia. Conceptualizing local orderings emerging from the ground up in communities which are targeted by internationally funded projects, on the one hand, and the underlying logic of ordering characterizing IOs and their interventions, on the other, allows us to see that there are structural differences between them. Following the Ethnographic Peace Research agenda, this paper compares these two ordering mechanisms by focusing on four specific components: cultural beliefs and norms, everyday practices, institutions, and issues of power.

For many years, scholars and practitioners have been struggling with problems of local ownership in international organizations-led peacebuilding. Despite the discourse surrounding giving ownership to local communities, top-down approaches prevail in practice and often lead to counterproductive outcomes. Ethnographic fieldwork has proven that international organizsations could achieve a better understanding of local experiential perspectives on conflict and peace. Here, we point to key features of local peace and suggest how international organizations could better incorporate peaceful local agency, cope with power imbalances and advance strategies for peacebuilding from the ground up.

This thesis examines actors, interactions and normativities involved in development aid in Tajikistan. It analyses trajectories of six global paradigms which are promoted in the country by Western donors: good governance, local knowledge, local ownership, organised recruitment, women’s empowerment and doing business. The thesis advances three main themes. First, it analyses why and how national donor agencies and international organisations foster the selected paradigms in the country. Second, it highlights local actors’ perspectives on donors’ interventions and describes everyday practices of re-appropriation of the paradigms, such as compliance, brokerage and acts of subversion against donors. Third, the thesis identifies arising contestations of the paradigms by local non-governmental organisations and the government, as well as alternative imaginaries of development emerging on the ground. Theoretically, the thesis is situated within critical development studies and represents a theoretical bricolage rooted in three distinct strands of academic literature: International Relations’ research on norm diffusion, anthropology of development and the post-development theory. Methodologically, the thesis argues in favour of political ethnography. Its methodological bricolage includes action research, interviews, participant observation and visual research practices. Overall, the thesis contributes to the literature on contemporary Tajikistan; development practices in Central Asia; and critical imaginaries of development. "This work was supported by the programme ‘Around the Caspian: A Doctoral Training for Future Experts in Development and Cooperation with Focus on the Caspian Region’ within the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 under Grant SEP-210161673." -- Acknowledgements