Helsinki’s counterintuitive effect? OSCE/ODIHR’s election observation missions and solidification of virtual democracy in post-communist Central Asia: the case of Tajikistan, 2000–2013

Since the late 1990s, the post-communist states of Central Asia, as ‘participating States’ of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, have been regularly persuaded by the organization to invite its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights to monitor their national parliamentary and presidential elections. The OSCE/ODIHR’s objectives have been to assist the Central Asian participating states in holding free and fair elections and aid in a presumed ongoing post-communist democratization process. We argue that contrary to OSCE’s assumptions, repeated OSCE/ODIHR election observations of Central Asian states with histories of fraudulent elections (as demonstrated by the case study of Tajikistan during 2000–2013) have not contributed to the flourishing of democracy and political pluralism, but rather inadvertently aided in the solidification of authoritarianism and ‘virtual democracy’ – a phenomenon we refer to as ‘Helsinki’s counterintuitive effect’. Using stakeholder interviews, we test four hypotheses in support of this general proposition.