Tajikistan: A Political and Social History

Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer's academic history traces Tajikistan's political and social development from the late Soviet period through the 1992 to 1997 civil war and its aftermath, examining the regional and clan-based elite networks that shaped the country's trajectory and the war's combatants, including the United Tajik Opposition coalition and its Islamic Renaissance Party wing. The book discusses the wide range of published casualty estimates for the war, from figures as high as one hundred thousand in early and often-repeated accounts to a later, more methodologically grounded demographic study using vital registration data that put total war deaths at approximately twenty three thousand five hundred, twenty thousand of them in 1992 alone. Published open access by the Australian National University Press as part of its Asian Studies Series Monographs.