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By Sandra Cheldelin, Ed.D., ICAR Faculty, [email protected]
From 1992 to 1997, Tajikistan experienced a multi-layered civil war that ended with a power-sharing agreement between the religious and former communist government leaders. ICAR and a local non-governmental organization in Dushanbe, the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, engaged in a two-year project to create collaborative networks with religious and civic leaders, government officials and academics from various universities to address their continuing ethnic, regional, and religious tensions.
Each spring a small delegation of faculty from ICAR went to Tajikistan—Drs. Cheldelin, Rothbart, and Paczynska, year I, and Hirsch, Schoeny and Windmueller (external evaluator), year II. Similarly, two large groups of academic, religious and governmental leaders came to Washington D.C. each fall (more than 40 total). The Tajik academics ultimately developed ten new courses, and all delegates engaged in lectures, seminars and trainings on conflict theories and intervention practices. A textbook was also published that included the translation into Tajik and Russian of more than 350 pages of mostly ICAR faculty's chapters and journal articles. A Resource Center in Dushanbe on conflict resolution was created and is housed at Tajik State University for use by national universities and local NGOs.