Tajik National University, Dushanbe. Public Domain / Wikipedia. Some rights reserved.The academic community has initiated a debate on the growing challenges to academic freedom in Tajikistan. Scholars are concerned with the peculiarities of conducting field research in the wider context of Central Asia, as discussed in the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) Taskforce on Fieldwork Safety in 2016, as well as at the CESS Regional Conference in Bishkek in 2017.
In Tajikistan, however, the focus has been on some notorious incidents of persecution and detention of researchers. Especially since 2015, the increase in the politicisation of the scientific profession, beyond the usual self-censorship, forced some scholars (myself included) to leave the country. These developments are directly related to the Law on the Leader of the Nation adopted in 2015, which legalised the supreme status of the President of Tajikistan over the people and the state, as well as secured him and his family immunity from prosecution.
Some contributions to the recent debate by Malika Bahovadinova, Karolina Kluczewska, and Nazira Sodatsayrova consider that ethical shortcomings by researchers are the main cause of the challenge of doing research in the authoritarian environment of Tajikistan. I concede to this point, and to what these scholars define as the power hierarchy between foreign scholars and their local partners. We cannot ignore the fact that a significant proportion of academic grants goes to specific fields of academic enquiry according to priorities set by both western policy-makers and local elites.
