The New York Times carried an article today describing the resurgence of polygamy in Tajikistan. According to the article:

But then came the breakup of the Soviet Union and Tajikistan’s civil war, which claimed as many as 100,000 lives in the 1990s, an overwhelming majority of the victims men. Since then, as many as a million Tajik men have migrated to Russia to work, according to Tajik and Russian government statistics, leaving behind a stark imbalance of men and women in this nation of 6.5 million people.

Seizing on this disparity, men have begun to practice polygamy openly, citing Islamic law and the desire among women for partners to justify the illegal practice. Tajiks say polygamous marriages can now be found in nearly every apartment block in Dushanbe, and few Tajik families seem to be without a recent example.

It should be noted, however, that in many cases the multiple wives are not necessarily living together. According to Konstantin Parshin:

… many of these seasonal workers have already settled down with second families in Archangelsk, Krasnoyarsk, or Vladivostok. Still, most of the men keep taking care of their Tajik wives and children, most of whom live in Dushanbe, Khojent, and Isfara.

So because of drastic out-migration and the civil war, there are simply more females to go around. Because polygamy was outlawed by the Soviet Union, it is only just coming back into style. Technically the laws are still in the books, but they are now rarely enforced.

This trend is not limited to Tajikistan, either, though it is particularly strong there. Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan have both considered legalizing the practice in recent years. Polygamy is practiced legally throughout the Arab Middle East (it is only illegal in Tunisia), and illegally even in America. One NGO estimates that there are 30,000 Mormon polygamists living in the US; for comparison, that is enough to populate the Tajik city of Khorog.

There are several consequences to this trend. While Tajik men may get away with taking multiple wives, they are not legally recognized. Nargiz Zakirova is quoted by EurasiaNet:

In these second [or third] marriages, there are of course, children. These children, like their mothers, are deprived of any rights. This is a big source of the problem. In order to identify legal fatherhood, there are many documents that should be collected. Some men deny their paternity, and not all men give their names to children from second or third wives.

Furthermore, one study finds that polygamy negatively correlated with economic development, a finding that is not limited to Islam.

Gould says the study on polygamy showed that the correlation between polygamy and Islam is not as strong as the linkage between polygamy and the level of economic development.

“We do some empirical work using data from [Ivory Coast] in Africa,” he says, “and you find there even within Christian communities that there is polygamy, and the predictions of our theory are relevant for them as well as for Muslims.”

It will be interesting to observe how Tajikistan (and the rest of Central Asia, for that matter) chooses to deal with this issue. Stricter enforcement would likely be counterproductive, especially given Tajikistan’s religious division, and simply legislating against it clearly isn’t having any real effect. Gould and the other authors of the study linking poor economic development to polygamy recommend subsidizing education because,

If there is a firmer link between a country’s wealth and its human capital, governments will encourage men to devote themselves to finding a single, educated woman and fathering only a few children — rather than having several wives and many children.

Perhaps such an approach could be effective, there is not exactly a flood of aid dollars into Tajikistan a the moment, and it presupposes that the elimination of polygamy is a laudable objective (follow this link for an interesting discussion of the ethics of polygamy). Gould and his fellow researchers successfully demonstrate a correlation, but not causality; they show that polygamy is a byproduct of under-development, not a root factor.