Tajik State Pedagogical University. Photo CC BY 2.0: Flickr / Prince Roy. Some rights reserved.I read with interest Edward Schatz’s and John Heathershaw’s recent article published on EurasiaNet under the title “Academic Freedom in Tajikistan Endangered: What is to be done?” While the authors rightly characterise the Tajik government’s attempts to tighten control over the academic sphere, I find their conclusions problematic. Partnerships with local institutions should be terminated, the authors argue, and the academic and ethical validity of any research conducted with such partnerships should be questioned. But by calling for the isolation of the country’s academic sphere, Schatz and Heathershaw risk further endangering academic freedom in Tajikistan.
The issues with this article and its conclusion are manifold. As it is so often the case, there is something that needs to be done about countries such as Tajikistan: something that can be done only by western outsiders. The country itself becomes the problem, and should be avoided wholesale. I would suggest that Schatz and Heathershaw are misguided in their call for Tajikistan’s isolation. This is not to say that there aren’t problems in the country’s academic sphere. But the authors’ understanding of the situation is flawed, and their proposed solutions only likely to exacerbate matters.
Reading the article, one may be forgiven if they conjure up images of a traditionally thriving academic environment in Tajikistan, with various partnerships between foreign and local educational institutions. The situation, however, is quite different. Tajikistan is a small mountainous country in Central Asia of little strategic importance (especially as the interest in Afghanistan, with which Tajikistan shares its southern border, has dwindled) and with limited economic resources. In short, few people are interested in the country, including in academia, as academic interest is also political. Those of us who study Tajikistan find ourselves marginalised in the job market, at conferences, and in academic discussions. In such a context partnerships are rare, a situation that has remained unchanged since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the country’s civil war (1992-1997).
