Tajikistan

We are seated in seminar room in Dushanbe with twenty-four professors from eight universities across Tajikistan. Two small electric heaters, their coils burning bright red, keep the late February cold at bay inside the Ministry of Health’s Republican Healthy Lifestyle Centre. We have the appointed cream of the crop. One or two are deans and a few others heads of their respective disciplinary departments. From the eyes of the organizers, we count ourselves lucky to have five women and a strong showing of younger scholars, though seated each day in the corner, occasionally drifting in and out of late afternoon naps is a kind, extraordinary, and always enthusiastic 70-year-old head of the department of Scientific Communism now re-titled the Political Science.

The Intertajik war lies five years in their past and our seminar probes the challenges of conflict resolution and peacebuilding in this Central Asian country…