| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Tajikistan's peace is symbolic not just in that it conceals an alternative reality but in that its symbols often indicate the absence of the object which they ostensibly represent-and the presence of its antonym. These signs are constructive of the kind of peace that has emerged in Tajikistan over the last decade and a half. Yet, as this essay has demonstrated interpretively, symbolic politics in Tajikistan is in some respects enveloped by a virtual politics of peace and peacebuilding where such a rendering of presence and absence is illusive. This substitution of an object's fixed meaning by shifting markers which develop a life of their own is an inherent ambiguity found in signs of international peacebuilding and national stabilisation.
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