In the book "Tajikistan; Difficult path of development" the problems of state building, economic and social development of Tajikistan at the present stage are considered. Martha Brill Alcott, Lead Fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Russia and Eurasia Program in Washington and Co-Director of Carnegie's Al-Farabi Project on Central Asia in Almaty (Republic of Kazakhstan), specializes in transition issues in Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as security issues in the Caspian region as a whole. For more than twenty-five years, she dealt with issues of interethnic relations in Russia and the states that were previously part of the Soviet Union, and traveled extensively in this region and South Asia.