Borders and political authority in the Western Pamir had always been contested by imperial powers. Between the 17th and 19th century, several semi-self governing statelets, including
Darwaz,
Shughnun-Rushan and
Wakhan, ruled over the territories that are today a part of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in Tajikistan and
Badakhshan Province in
Afghanistan. In the late 19th century, the emirates of
Kokand and then
Bukhara held political authority over the region until the Western Pamir was colonized by
Russia, completed in 1896. Although Russia and the
British empire in 1896 denominated their shared border through the Pamir, which resulted in the creation of the
Wakhan corridor, other regional powers like China and
Afghanistan, but also the ruling elites of Badakhshan, Bukhara,
Kashgaria and
Kashmir equally worked for expending their influence in the Pamir. So, the
Sarykol range has been demarked de facto as
Eastern border in 1894 between the
Qing empire and the
Russian empire. This imperial history still has relevance nowadays as it determined contemporary southeastern borders of the present-day autonomous region.
Soviet Union The Tajikistani Badakhshan as distinctive polity with its contemporary Western borders and the Russian designation GBAO was created as autonomous republic in 1925. Later in 1929, this was changed to
autonomous oblast, of the
Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic (Tajik SSR). The Soviet Orientalists' obsession with categorization of peoples led to the fixation of among others the identity category of Pamiris, or 'Mountain Tajiks' in the Soviet ethnogenesis. During the Soviet Union years, a lot of resources had been allocated to Gorno Badakhshan as borderland of the Soviet Union, for instance through privileged access to higher education and the construction of infrastructure like the Pamir highway in 1935, which is still remembered nowadays as a time of modernity. Therefore,
people from the Pamirs used to have facilitated upwards mobility and access to political offices in the
Tajik SSR. In scholarly discourse, this is regarded as a measure to safeguard loyalty to state socialism of the subjects at the strategically important Soviet 'frontier'.
Since Independence When the
Tajikistani Civil War broke out in 1992, the local government in Gorno-Badakhshan declared independence from Tajikistan. Many politically active Pamiris later joined the democratic political movement
La’al-e Badakhshan during the Tajik Civil war, which demanded autonomy and democratic rule for the region. Regionalism was an important structuring factor in the Tajik Civil war, so that the Ismaili identity became a key marker of mobilization. La'al-e Badakhsan joined the
United Tajik Opposition in 1997. Because of that, they were subsequently targeted by the
popular front, which constituted the later government and then excluded from the political sphere of independent Tajikistan. The Gorno-Badakhshan government later backed down from its calls for independence. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Ismaili development organization
AKDN delivered supplies to Gorno-Badakhshan from Kyrgyzstan, which prevented the starvation of the population during the civil war. While the AKDN itself frames this engagement as temporary measure, many of the inhabitants demand a permanent presence of humanitarian aid. Many see it as continuation from the provisioning of goods during the Soviet times. This shared experience of Soviet and Ismaili development aid together with the neglect and crackdown by the Tajik state led to people perceiving themselves as Pamiri rather than Tajik. In 2011, Tajikistan ratified a 1999 treaty to cede of land in the Pamir Mountains to the
People's Republic of China (PRC), from the Chinese state perspective ending a 130-year-old border dispute and China's claims to over of Tajik territory. At other instances Chinese scholars claimed control over the entire
Pamir Mountains. However, the government of the
Republic of China (ROC) based in
Taipei does not recognize this treaty and continues to claim the territory, as reflected in its official maps. Whereas the government of Tajikistan celebrates the ceding of land as diplomatic victory, many Tajikistani scholars, opposition and parts of the population contest the existence of a 'dispute' altogether, seeing Badakhshan's territory in its entirety belonging to Tajikistan.
Clashes erupted on 24 July 2012 between the Tajik military and militants loyal to the former warlord
Tolib Ayombekov, after Ayombekov was accused of murdering a Tajik general. On 18 May 2022, around 200 anti-government demonstrators, led by
Mamadboqir Mamadboqirov, blocked a road in
Rushon which led to the regional capital
Khorog. The violent clashes between Tajiikistani military and the GBAO population in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021 and in 2022 are peaks in the steady militarization of the region. Spectators assess these actions by the government as strategy to gain full political control over the formerly autonomous Gorno-Badakhshan, as well as over the informal opium trade, culminating in the assassination of several influential local leaders. This violates the Tajik peace accord. In May 2022, Tajik government forces killed 40 civilians protesting against the torture and murdering of the youth representative Gulbiddin Ziyobekov. The Tajik interior ministry stated that the protestors attempted to "destabilise the social and political situation" in the region. Many of the protestors, but also journalists and human rights activists were detained in the subsequent cover-up. Additionally, the government seized properties and kidnapped even oppositional Pamiris abroad. Genocide watch is stressing the polarization and the persecution of Pamiris through the government. == Districts and geography ==