The threat of radical Islam has been used by the Tajik government as a way to promote discriminatory policies based on a misinterpretation of the causes and extent of radicalisation in the country, argues Edward J Lemon. He analyses the Tajik government’s rhetoric and policies to show how it has created a situation of insecurity for the country’s citizens….This article is based on a critical discourse analysis of sixty-nine Tajik-language media reports and four presidential speeches published between November 2013 and July 2015. For an overview of the method of critical discourse analysis, see Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (London: Routledge, 2003). Instead of selecting these texts at random, the research adopted purposive sampling, finding ‘nodal points’ (seminal texts which are often referred to by others) within the discourse. The method for finding nodal points within a discourse is outlined in Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). In order to assemble a population of articles, the author searched for ‘ISIS’, ‘extremism’, ‘secularism’ and ‘Islam’ in state-run websites Khovar.tj, Jumhuriyat.tj, President.tj and Mvd.tj. This generated 158 results between September 2013 and July 2015. Purposive sampling was then used to select the sixty-five texts. The selected texts do not merely report what has happened, but script, spin and frame events in a certain way. To gain a sense of the types of Tajik citizen who have joined Daesh, the author compiled a database of 120 militants. This database is based on open-access online sources, in particular social-media groups linked to Tajik Daesh fighters and reports in the Russian and Tajik media. The author tried to collect data on the age, birthplace, education level and place of recruitment of each fighter. In order to map the relationship between the discourse on radicalisation and practices of assertive secularism, nine months of participant observation in Moscow and Tajikistan, as well forty-five semi-structured interviews with academics, journalists, law-enforcement officers and religious leaders were conducted.