Author Response on the Book Review Roundtable

摘要

First of all, I would like to thank all the reviewers for taking the time to read my book and their intriguing comments on its content and to Civil Wars for agreeing to publish this review panel. After Payam Foroughi informed me about the review roundtable in 2017, I started rereading the Origins of the Civil War in Tajikistan, bracing myself for the reviews and anticipating critique on issues I would address in a different form today. I expected criticism for at least three themes and topics: First, I had (and still have) the impression that I did not elaborate the issue of contingency sufficiently and fully, both from the empirical and the theoretical points of view, and in particular the link between agency and contingency in the specific historical constellations (for instance, the rise of field commanders in the early days of the civil war). Second, I should have invested more time and space for discussing masculinities in Soviet and post-Soviet Tajikistan, particularly the relevant social imaginaries, the institutional context and importantly the relational aspects of masculinity. Finally, I should have expanded the section on the autobiographical sources and elaborated in greater detail the particularities of the source genre.