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Copyright of Journal of Social Sciences Research / Sosyal Bilimler Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of ODU Journal of Social Sciences Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, I utilise a contextual understanding of ethnicity and unique data to demonstrate that the ethnic Uzbek identity category is both widely available and frequently a useful means of making sense of the world in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. While Uzbek ethnicity is generally salient in both states, the context in which it becomes so varies across space. In particular, there are significant urban–rural distinctions that affect when Uzbek ethnicity is utilised to interpret the world. In addition, compared to others, rural Tajikistani Uzbeks perceive that the boundary between Uzbeks and the titular groups is particularly permeable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ruling elites can use the symbolism of major dams to gain legitimacy and bolster a sense of national identity and patriotism. The Rogun Dam in Tajikistan is a gigantic hydraulic infrastructure that if and when finished will be the tallest in the world, allowing the country to gain energy self-sufficiency. Furthermore, by projecting an image of progress and success, such a structure can contribute to creating and strengthening a nationalistic discourse even before its completion. This paper begins by introducing the concept of nation-building in relation to the Central Asian setting and then connects it with the literature exploring the interplay between water and power. Subsequently, the focus moves to the Rogun project, illustrating the main traits of the Rogun ideology and outlining the rhetorical legitimation strategies used by the Tajik government to frame the dam as a nationally cohesive and patriotic project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The UNESCO office in Uzbekistan has been relatively successful in nominating cultural practices to The Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Selection for the List conveys prestige and draws international attention to local culture that is deemed of universal value. What is striking about the first successful nominations from Uzbekistan is that they point to the inseparability of Tajik and Uzbek culture, a touchy subject for both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In this article the author looks at how the politics of ethnic cultural heritage play out through these projects, highlighting the tensions between a rhetoric of diversity promoted both by UNESCO and by the official national ideology, and practices that demonstrate a more mundane, ethnically exclusive sense of national culture. Although ostensibly celebrating the rich diversity of Uzbekistan's national culture and eschewing the strict delineation of Tajik culture from Uzbek culture, the effect of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage programmes is to perpetuate the occlusion of Tajik culture in Uzbekistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-evaluates the history of internal resettlement in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1920s and early 1930s. Rather than a purely ‘economic’ measure, as the policy has thus far been identified by historians, the programme of internal resettlement had political and military rationales to secure the republic's southern plains bordering Afghanistan. These territories were considered by Soviet leaders to be insecure and under threat. By pointing to the role of ethnic categories in organizing the resettlement and the violent manner in which the policy was conducted, the author analyses state leaders' attempts to ethnicize territories and populations in order to identify, naturalize and secure allies, within and beyond Tajikistan. Tajikistan's resettlement had internal as well as foreign-policy objectives to secure the Soviet Union's border regions as well as to spread Soviet influence abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various published reports within the issue, including a post-colonial examination of Tajikistan, an exploration of Islam in Tajikistan and a discussion of Tajikistan's approach to family issues.

'Thou hast done well: This is God Who hath brought thee here!' Isan Tīmur Hwaja (born 1948) to the author, summer village of Sang-i Milla-yi Bala, district of Sahr-i Naw, Tajikistan, 10 August 2009 On the basis of a reconstruction of the careers of a variety of religious personnel of Islam in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, from de-Stalinization to independence, this article aims to shed light on some neglected features of Islam in Soviet Central Asia. Questioning the present-day hagiographic process, and confronting the data of oral history with those of pre-modern Muslim hagiography and biographies of religious scholars, this article assesses the specific Islamic revival that has been taking place in Central Asia in the aftermath of the reopening of the Gulag in 1955-56. It also deals with the lasting Kulturkampf, engineered by the Soviet authorities, between the Fergana-born Uzbek-speaking accredited staff of the Muslim Spiritual Board on the one hand, and the Persian-speaking leaders of prominent Sufi lineages with Bukhara and Samarqand pedigrees on the other. The role of mass population transfers in this phenomenon is evoked through their impact on the disruption of the Sufi masters' sacred 'territories' (Persian: qalamraw), and the increasing role of the latter as community builders. Acting as alternative figures to pre-modern khans, the Soviet saints of Islam, who have become the objects of a rich hagiographic process, are also introduced as the bearers and transmitters of pre-modern court culture that vanished from Central Asia in the early 1920s. Special consideration is given to the mutual relationship and competition between the scholars ('ulama) of the Spiritual Board and the gnostics ('urafa) of the Sufi paths, as well as to the former's contribution to a revival of Turkic Islamic culture - notably through the comment of Chaghatay didactical literature within active, though underground, literary circles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a key event in the recent history of Central Asia: the 1950s Soviet policy of forced transfers of highlanders down to cotton kolkhozes in the Ferghana Valley. From both a historical and sociological perspective, the article analyses how the displaced population was received in the areas of destination. It sheds light on the concept of ethnicity, in the sense that these transfers were most often analysed in ethnic terms. This approach does not allow for the perception of a complex range of identities based on a nation, a region, a lineage, a religion or a language. The concept of ethnicity seems therefore limited to explain the social dynamics of nation-state formation in a region where identity appears to be multiple, changing and constantly renegotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international community claims transformative power over post-conflict spaces via the concept of peacebuilding. International actors discursively make space for themselves in settings such as the Central Asian state of Tajikistan which endured a civil war during the 1990s and has only seen an end to widespread political violence in recent years. With the work of James C. Scott, this paper challenges the notion that post-conflict spaces are merely the objects of international intervention. It reveals how, even in cases of apparent stability such as that of Tajikistan, international actors fail to achieve their ostensible goals for that place yet make space for themselves in that place. International peacebuilders may provide essential resources for the re-emergence of local forms of order yet these symbolic and material resources are inevitably re-interpreted and re-appropriated by local actors to serve purposes which may be the opposite of their aims. However, despite this 'failure' of peacebuilding it nevertheless survives as a discursive construction through highly subjective processes of monitoring and evaluation. So maintained, peacebuilding is a constitutive element of world order where the necessity of intervention for humanitarian, democratic and statebuilding ends goes unchallenged. This raises the question of what or where - in spatial terms - is the locus of international intervention: the local recipients of peacebuilding programmes (who are the ostensible targets) or the 'International Community' itself (whose space is re-inscribed as that of an imperfect but necessary regulator of world order). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peacebuilding is a contested concept which gains meaning as it is practised. While academic and policy-relevant elaboration of the concept is of interest to international experts, interpretations of peacebuilding in the Central Asian arena may depart immensely from those envisaged within the western-dominated 'international community'. This article opens up the dimensions and contingent possibilities of 'peacebuilding' through an investigation of two alternative approaches found in the context of Tajikistan. It makes the critique that peacebuilding represents one contextually grounded basic discourse. In the case of Central Asia, and in particular post-conflict Tajikistan, at least two other basic discourses have been adopted by parties to the post-Soviet setting: elite mirostroitelstvo (Russian: peacebuilding) and popular tinji (Tajik: wellness/peacefulness). Based largely on fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan between 2003 and 2005, the argument here is that none of these three discourses is merely an artificial or cynical construct but that each has a certain symbolic and normative value. Consequently, a singular definition of Tajik 'peacebuilding' proves elusive as practices adapt to the relationships between multiple discourses and identities in context. The article concludes that 'peacebuilding' is a complex and intersubjective process of change entailing the legitimation of new relationships of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bleeding of infants via the skin (pilé) and the roof of the mouth (qüm) is practiced in Badakhshan, the easternmost province of Tajikistan. Like folk practices elsewhere, pilé and qüm exist at the interstices of modern society and reflect a complex religious, historical, and social response to poverty, marginality, and the global processes associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this article, I attempt to move beyond an ethnomedical analysis by examining these bloodletting practices in the context of their contemporary meaning, as a moral response to suffering and to the social changes that have taken place in the post-Soviet period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the political condition of Tajikistan. Interaction between the discursive and institutional in political life in the country; Cause of the political conflict; Problems involved in the country's peacebuilding.

Focuses on the involvement of Uzbekistan in the Tajik civil war between 1992 and 1994 and the motivation and implications of that involvement. Background and cause of the civil war in Tajikistan; Threats to its integrity and stability as the motivation in the involvement of Uzbekistan in the conflict; Construction of a national military tradition.