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Twenty-five years since the end of Tajikistan's civil war in 1997, dreams and aspirations of international development and cross-border mobility in the country's Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province, colloquially called "the Pamirs," have evaporated. Once the mountainous region was envisaged to have a prosperous postwar future ahead of it, with emerging trade links to China and Afghanistan, substantial funding from international nongovernmental organizations, and support from wealthy Muslim institutions. Today, as the Tajik government mounts a violent campaign to eradicate opposition, people in the Pamirs are surrounded by closed international borders and an ever-shrinking space in which to participate in Tajikistan's politics and economy.

AbstractIn this article I set out to explore the Tajik-Afghan frontier in Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan region as a "contact zone" in which different actors engage in communicative encounters. Against this backdrop I take the construction of bridges across the Tajik-Afghan border river as a point of departure to analyse how these actors envisage processes of globalization. Following Pennycook, I argue that a focus on language as local practice reveals that the Tajik-Afghan frontier is marked by a high degree of different languages, but also by multiple meanings within and beyond these languages. As a result I maintain that highlighting the locality of languages at the Tajik-Afghan frontier provides an opportunity to frame language as tied to specific communicative encounters in semiotized time and space.

Автор анализирует проблему сохранения и развития памирских языков, которые до сих пор остаются бесписьменными и лишены общественной функции. Пишет об их роли в процессе этнической мобилизации населения Горно-Бадахшанской автономной области на рубеже 1980-1990-х гг., разбирает нормативные документы Таджикистана о языках, рассматривает планы возрождения памирских языков и политические условия, которые определяют пути решения обозначенной проблемы. ; The author analyzes the problem of the preservation and development of Pamiri languages which still don't have written variants and are deprived of social function, tells about their role in the process of the ethnic mobilization of the population of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region at the turn of the 1980s-1990s, tackles the normative documents of Tajikistan about languages and considers the plans of the Pamiri languages revival and the political conditions which determine the ways of solving the designated problem.

This study is based on fieldwork undertaken in Badakhshān province of Afghanistan in 1968 for the purpose of collecting musical data. A summary of the basic musical styles and instruments current in the area can be found in the,author's Instrumental Music in Northern Afghanistan.The focus of the present article is the type of Persian verse set to music by the folk singers of Badakhshān. Principally, this includes a description of the texts of the most common folksong form of the region, the felak, drawn from singers of the Faizābād (central), Darwāz (northern), Shughnān (northeastern), Wākhān (eastern) and Keshrn (western) regions of Badakhshān province.

Abstract
Despite overwhelming interest in the role of social capital in international development, attention to the interplay of community-based development aid with local collective-action dynamics in Central Asia and particularly Tajikistan has remained limited. This paper investigates donor-induced local institutions for collective action in rural Tajikistan with a focus on the introduction of a community-based health insurance. Social capital and collective-action theories are used to interpret results from qualitative research in two Rushan District villages in the Gorno-Badakhshan region. By highlighting the role of donor embeddedness, and the perceived legitimacy of different decision-making structures, the article contends that the perception of such externally-induced change depends on the community's capacity to reach beyond the intra-communal solidarity network through bridging and linking capital. The findings suggest this can be fostered by addressing trust, and the role of effective development brokers, with due attention to power relations within communities and towards external agents.

Locating Pamiri communities in Central Asia / Carole Faucher and Dagikhudo Dagiev -- Identity formation, borders and political transformations -- Geography, ethnicity and cultural heritage in interplay in the context of the Tajik Pamiri identity / Sunatullo Jonboboev -- Pamiri ethnic identity and its re-emergence in post-Soviet Tajikistan / Dagikhudo Dagiev -- Transformations and lost in the Wakhi language / Sherali Gulomaliev -- The Tajiks of China: identity in the age of transition / Amier Saidula -- Archaeology, myths, intellectual and cultural heritage -- A Badakhshani origin for Zoroaster / Yusufsho Yaqubov and Dagikhudo Dagiev -- The Silk Road castles and temples: ancient Wakhan in legends and history / Abdulmamad Iloliev -- Nasir-i Khusraw's intellectual contribution: the meaning of pleasure and pain in his philosophy / Ghulam Abbas Hunzai -- Religious identity in the Pamirs: the institutionalisation of the Ismaili dawa in Shughnan / Daniel Beben -- Forgotten figures of Badakhshan: Sayyid Munir al-Din Badakhshani and Sayyid Haydar Shah Mubarakshahzada / Muzaffar Zoolshoev -- Social cohesion, interactions and globalization -- Blessed people in a barren land: the Bartangi and their success catalyser Barakat / Stefanie Kicherer -- Promoting peace and pluralism in the rural, mountainous region of Chitral, Pakistan, Mir Afzal Tajik / Ali Nawab, Abdul Wali Khan -- A "shift" in values: mother's educational role in the Gorno-Badakhshan Region / Nazira Sodatsayrova -- Project identity: the discursive formation of Pamiri identity in the age of the internet / Aslisho Qurboniev -- Religious education and self-identification among Tajik Pamiri youth / Carole Faucher

Рассматривается вопрос о роли региональных кланов Таджикистана в политической жизни страны. Клановая структура характерна для всех центрально-азиатских республик, однако только в Таджикистане противоречия между ними привели к затяжному внутреннему конфликту. В результате войны произошло перераспределение властных ресурсов, сменился правящий клан. Однако до сих пор основной проблемой современного Таджикистана является соотношение общереспубликанской и местной власти, причем не в пользу первой. ; This article examines the role of regional clans in Tajikistan political life. The clan structure is typical for all Central Asian states but only in Tajikistan clan contradictions led to the long internal conflict. The matter of Tajikistan national boundaries has two aspects: external and internal. First, the historical boundaries of modern Tajikistan do not correspond to the territory settled by ethnic Tajiks. In fact Tajik people are divided between three states: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Second, the main problem of modern state is internal heterogeneity and fragmentation. Many researches consider that such isolation of the regions is determined by geographical location, cultural and language differences can also be mentioned, but the most important is the level of economic development. There are five main regional clans in Tajkistan: Leninabad (Khujand, Sughd), Kulyab, Hisor, Garm and Gorno-Badakhshan (Pamir). During the Civil War the first three were united against the last two organized in the United Tajik Opposition (the so-called "democratic and Islamic coalition"). The results of the Civil War were ambiguous. On the one hand, the war ended by long negotiations between belligerents resulted in a compromise General Agreement. On the other hand, it was only the change of the ruling clan: the Kulyabis came to power instead of the Khujandis. The main problem of modern Tajikistan is correlation of republican and local authorities, not in favour of the former. Officially Tajikistan is a unitary state; each region is subordinated to the central government (except for Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province), but in reality the central government does not control all the territory. However, the current political situation is not only inter-clan confrontation. The clan hierarchy was undermined during the Empire and Soviet periods, but was not destroyed. It all resulted in some mix of modern trends and traditional distribution of power. In the long term the clan-winner needs to take into consideration the interests of the opposition to stay in power. Paradoxically, the Civil War and the long negotiation process helped to establish a relatively free political regime unlike the neighbouring Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

This article aims to contribute to exploring the relationship between economic niches and identity structure by studying the case of Pamiri businessmen seeking to take advantage of the proximity of China and Afghanistan. The Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous region (GBAO), a mountainous zone isolated from the remainder of Tajikistan, shares a border with Afghanistan and China and is populated with Pamiri and Kyrgyz minorities dissociated from the Tajik majority. The region primarily depends on agriculture but also enjoys certain new economic opportunities related to its geographical location. The development of small-scale trade with neighboring countries has hastened post-Soviet spatial transformation. Geographical mobility can be large in scope -- as in ethnic "repatriation" and labor migrations -- but can also be small (e.g., negotiating the daily crossings of new state borders) or consist in symbolic membership in a transnational community or popular knowledge of other countries -- for instance, through contacts with foreigners. Hence current economic and geopolitical reconfigurations needs to be articulated in terms of popular representations of geography and to follow changes in the "mental map" of Central Asian populations. Adapted from the source document.