Paper long abstract:

The hardening of authoritarian rule in Tajikistan and the Tajik government's continuing crackdown on civil society has led to an unprecedented movement of Tajiks seeking asylum in Europe, most notably in Poland and Germany. Media outlets have portrayed these arrivals as a refugee community fleeing persecution due to their affiliation with the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, but to-date no in-depth study of their motivations, trajectories, and backgrounds has been conducted. Drawing on qualitative research with members of the Tajik refugee communities in Poland, Germany and Austria, we go beyond existing assumptions about this particular diaspora and examine their reasons for leaving Tajikistan, the paths that led them to Europe, and their migration histories.

The asylum seeking process requires refugees to adopt a narrative of collective victimhood that leaves little room for diverse and multifaceted stories of exile. The migrant-refugee dichotomy does not do justice to the heterogeneous motivations pushing certain groups of Tajiks to seek asylum in Europe. Similarly, diasporas need to project coherence and unity in order to gain recognition, which can conceal internal tensions and contradictions.

The categories of "refugee" and "diaspora" can be a double-edged sword. In the case of Tajik asylum seekers in Europe, these categories can provide legal and political protection while at the same time marking these individuals as dissidents and thereby ex post facto turning them into political exiles whose return would put them in danger, even in cases when they were not initially fleeing persecution. This creates an ethical challenge. How can researchers portray the complexity of Tajik asylum seekers without delegitimizing their grounds for asylum and feeding into anti-refugee narratives in host countries, or supporting the Tajik government's rhetoric that paints refugees as terrorists? We will draw on in-depth interviews and focus groups with members of the Tajik refugee community to illustrate these issues.