The threat of radical Islam has been used by the Tajik government as a way to promote discriminatory policies based on a misinterpretation of the causes and extent of radicalisation in the country, ...argues Edward J Lemon. He analyses the Tajik government's rhetoric and policies to show how it has created a situation of insecurity for the country's citizens.
Research on state repression generally focuses on what states do to populations within their own borders. However, recently scholars working at the intersection of comparative politics and ...international relations have begun to systematically analyse states repressing their populations outside their borders as part of their foreign policy. Variously called transnational repression, extraterritorial repression, or sometimes global authoritarianism, the focus is on the motives, methods, and effects of states extending repressive practices to their citizens abroad. Much of the research in this area has developed theories and findings using fieldwork and interview-based methods. Recently, however, multiple researchers and research groups have produced cross-national publicly available event data on transnational repression. This research note explains the main features of those datasets, including their scope, sources, structure, definitions, and strengths and limitations. In addition to descriptive introduction, it discusses the challenges associated with gathering data on transnational repression as well as suggestions for moving forward. The main aims are to introduce available data on transnational repression to researchers interested in working in this area and to highlight issues they may confront in gathering new data.
Between 500 and 1000 citizens of Tajikistan have travelled to take part in hostilities in Syria and Iraq. The majority of these transnational activists are recruited in Russia, where over one million ...Tajik citizens live and work. In this article, I examine the politics of the Tajik government’s response. I answer three questions: how has the Tajik government reacted to its citizens joining the Islamic State? How has the foreign fighter phenomenon proved useful to securing the authoritarian regime? How have these, often illiberal, security practices shaped the lives of those they affect? Tajikistan’s government has responded to the Islamic State with a series of policies aimed at securing the regime. By conflating Islamization with radicalization, the Tajik government has extended its security practices to many more individuals than those directly involved with the Islamic State. Tajik counter-terrorism is based on all three forms of power identified by Michel Foucault. It is sovereign as it aims to protect the government and Tajikistan’s territory. It is disciplinary as it punishes those who are accused of “extremism”, offering a warning to others. And it is biopolitical because it involves the management of populations and individual subjects through practices of self-regulation.
Faced with common threats to their regimes from independent civil society, organized opposition groups and protest movements, authoritarian governments in the former Soviet Union have learned from ...one another and adopted similar policies to consolidate their power. This article examines the process of authoritarian policy transfer in three fields: peaceful assembly, civil society and political participation, focusing on Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The article examines the role played by the Commonwealth of Independent States- Inter-parliamentary Assembly, the body charged with legal harmonization in the former Soviet Union and ignored thus far by scholars of authoritarian diffusion.
Through causal process tracing and the use of document comparison software, we compare 34 laws and decrees. Our findings indicate that diffusion is no illusion in the former Soviet Union. Autocrats have adopted similar legislation in all three fields, with the greatest degree of convergence in laws related to extremism, terrorism and operational searches, all of which are used to pursue political opponents. Russia is usually, but not always, the policy innovator. The region's poorest states - Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - both dependent on Russia in economic, political and security spheres display the highest levels of legal harmonization with the former Soviet centre.
The Chinese Communist Party has unleashed a campaign of repression against Turkic minorities residing in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). This campaign does not stop at China's borders. This ...study introduces the Transnational Repression of Uyghurs Dataset, which contains 7108 cases of Uyghurs being targeted in 44 states from 1997 to 2021, the largest public dataset on transnational repression published to date. Unlike other regimes, the Chinese state has been indiscriminate in its persecution, often pursuing apolitical diaspora members on account of their ethnicity rather than political activism. China's transnational repression of Uyghurs has expanded rapidly in recent years as domestic repression has increased in XUAR. We documented 238 incidents from 1997 to 2014, and an additional 6870 events since 2014. The paper argues that globalization is producing a new trend of transnational minority persecution, offering new insights for our understanding of twenty-first century genocides and minority persecution.
This article examines the relationship between youth, the family, and the authoritarian state in Tajikistan. We argue that the state works through both young people and the family in its attempts to ...produce loyal citizens through values education that focuses on patriotism, national identity, and allegiance to the state. We examine how the government frames this relationship through discourse analysis of 13 speeches by President Emomali Rahmon, an analysis of the content of laws on education and youth, a close reading of the official training program of the course "Family Education," and an ethnographic study of a "Girls' Competition."
The armed rebellion of Deputy Defense Minister Abduhalim Nazarzoda in September 2015 was a critical moment in the post-war history of Tajikistan. The rebellion, which the government blamed on the ...Islamic Renaissance Party, formed the justification for the Supreme Court to classify the party as a terrorist organization and arrest its leadership. While the government framed the events as a coup attempt, supported by the IRPT, the narrative had inconsistencies and Nazarzoda had been loyal to the state since the end of the civil war. Using the ideas of Carl Schmitt, who argued that sovereignty lies in the ability of a strong executive to monopolize decision-making, define when there is an emergency, and how to resolve it. In this case, president Rahmon used the the sense of emergency and threat created by the "coup" attempt to dismantle the IRPT and then have himself legally declared "Leader of the Nation."
Counter-extremism has become an important tool for the authoritarian government of Tajikistan to consolidate its position. In this article, we argue that counter-extremism is not purely about ...destructive acts, such as banning groups or arresting individuals: it is productive, too. Using a Foucauldian understanding of disciplinary power and biopower, we argue that counter-extremism in Tajikistan is an attempt to produce secular, docile citizen subjects who are resistant to extremist ideas. Using ethnography and discourse analysis, we focus on the way in which these practices are gendered, targeting the bodies of those deemed 'dangerous'. Counter-extremism, we argue, is exercised not only by the state but also by citizens, who monitor themselves and others for signs of radicalization. Although some support state secularism, most merely accept it. A smaller group resist practices that target certain forms of religious belief and practice. We explore these everyday forms of resistance against disciplinary power and biopower.
