Understanding Ethnopolitical Conflict

Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia Wars Reconsidered

E. Souleimanov

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137280237
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically evaluates the growing body of theoretical literature on ethnic conflict and civil war, using empirical data from three major South Caucasian conflicts, evaluating the relative strengths and weaknesses of the available methodological approaches.

1

Introduction

Caspian oil diplomacy, post-Soviet geopolitics, and ethnopolitical conflicts are the three main factors that, since the end of the 1980s, have shaped the fate of the South Caucasus,¹ a multiethnic region which lies at the strategic crossroads of Europe and Asia: a region where Turkey, Russia, and Iran have historically striven for dominance. In the post-Soviet era, a host of the region’s unresolved domestic and interstate conflicts, coupled with the ambitious plans of some nations to tap the Caspian’s vast oil and natural gas resources and transport them to world markets – along with some other nations’ no less ambitious initiatives to hamper these plans – have condemned the South Caucasus region to the unenviable status of becoming one of the neuralgic hotspots of what Zbigniew Brzezinski has termed the “Eurasian Balkans.”

With regard to the region’s relationships with its surrounding areas, what has been going on in the volatile South Caucasus is far from limited to its own borders; regional developments in and around Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have had far-reaching impacts upon events in Anatolia, in the Iranian highlands, in the region to the north of the Greater Caucasus Range, and in the Central Asian area. Thus, energy security within the context of the extraction and exporting of Caspian oil and natural gas; organized crime and the smuggling of drugs and weapons along with the ever greater successes of criminal gangs of Caucasian provenience; and ceaseless politically or economically motivated emigration from the region – these have all become topics which now make systematic research on the problems of the South Caucasus relevant.

Amongst these various issues, the particular questions arising from the civil wars and ethnopolitical conflicts that have so shaped regional politics within this region have assumed particular importance with regard to the overall security of both the South Caucasus and its adjacent areas.

The South Caucasus

This is not the first book on ethnic conflict in the South Caucasus. Yet, it is one of few that merge empirically oriented case studies of regional ethnic conflicts with broader theories of civil war and ethnic conflict. Indeed, over the past two decades, a host of books have been produced that have sought to highlight the dramatic upsurges of ethnic conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia. As these works have turned out to have been of varying quality, and have focused on local conflicts from different angles, this literature may be subdivided into two principal categories: purely empirical studies, on the one hand, and, on the other, theoretical studies in which South Caucasian conflicts have figured as case studies to underpin the authors’ own theoretical assumptions.

With regard to the first of these two categories, books by regional authors have been numerically dominant. Written mostly in local languages or in Russian, these have mainly been attempts to trace chronologically the evolution of local conflicts; often, they have been characterized by a predetermined intention to define local conflicts either as examples of national liberation movements or as cases of dangerous ethnic separatism. Accordingly, the authors’ normative conclusions are easily foreseeable, given their ethnicity. In fact, with rare exceptions (Nodia), work authored by South Caucasian specialists has often been marked by low methodological standards and by the aforementioned normativity and ideological overtones, the combination of which has significantly reduced their scholarly value. Indeed, South Caucasian authors are renowned for their tendency to perceive local conflicts and interstate politics from within specific ethnocentrist and nationalist positions (Chirikba, Nuriyev, and Svarants), a phenomenon which also generally prevails among Russian authors (Zverev and Malysheva) and post-Soviet scholars. Needless to say, the scholarly value of the overwhelming majority of these studies is debatable.²

Interestingly, during more recent decades, a trend has become established within the relevant scholarly literature to link the emergence of ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus region with the broader operation of great-power politics in the Caspian region – particularly as regards the extraction and transit of Caspian oil and natural gas to world markets, this particularly so in the light of broader geopolitical competition over the region, given its position as a strategically key crossroad. However, this approach by academics has entailed a number of pitfalls when it comes to the scrutinizing of local ethnic conflicts. First, the internal dynamics of such conflicts have tended to remain largely neglected in favor of an overemphasizing of the much broader structural dimension of geopolitical competition over the Caspian region, with its vast mineral resources: viewed from this perspective, local conflicts have often been understood as mere outcomes of “The Great Game” that has been going on between Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the United States ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This point of view has ignored the fact that during the second half of the 1980s, when ethnic conflicts first broke out in Azerbaijan’s and Georgia’s periphery, these countries were still integral parts of the Soviet state. Even as recently as the initial years of the 1990s that saw the intensification of local ethnic conflicts, the factor of Caspian geopolitics was either absented, or its importance was still marginal. Elkhan Nuriyev’s (2007) study, The South Caucasus at the Crossroads: Conflicts, Caspian Oil and Great Power Politics, is indicative of this kind of symbiosis. The author’s heavily ethnocentrist position, coupled with his overtly anti-Armenian sentiments as well as analytical weaknesses within his text and an overemphasis on the great-power politics argument, inevitably casts doubt on the book’s relevance for the study of regional ethnic conflicts. A much more successful book of a similar scope was authored by Kamiluddin Gajiyev in 2003: Geopolitika Kavkaza (The Geopolitics of the Caucasus). This book has remained one of the best and least-biased Russian-language studies on the internal and foreign policies of the South Caucasus nations, wherein attention is also paid to local ethnic conflicts. However, the author’s Russo-centrist approach dominates the study, especially when it comes to explaining the causes, evolution, and outcomes of the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia. Significantly, throughout his book, Gajiyev attempts to avoid consideration of the controversial topic of Moscow’s involvement in regional ethnic conflicts: this inevitably reduces the overall value of his findings. More recently, an empirically plentiful book on the Caucasus conflicts, Polygon of Satan: Ethnic Traumas and Conflicts in the Caucasus, which is rich with numerous testimonies from the conflict zone, and which focuses primarily on local ethnonationalist narratives, was published by Anatoly Isaenko, a U.S.-based historian of Russian descent. In the field of Russian-language scholarship, the work of Sergey Markedonov stands out for its well-balanced approach to exploring regional politics, which is evidenced by his 2010 book, Turbulentnaya Evraziya: Mezhetnicheskie, grazhdanskie konflikty, ksenofobiya v novykh nezavisimykh gosudarstvakh postsovetskogo prostranstva (Turbulent Eurasia: Interethnic, Civil Conflict, Xenophobia in the Newly Independent Republics of the Post-Soviet Space). As the title of the book suggests, Markedonov chose to address a large and diverse area from a variety of perspectives, hence the South Caucasus conflicts received only partial coverage.

Within the Western academic community, different problems and approaches have prevailed. In the first half of the 1990s, once the world came to discover the significance of this part of the former Soviet Union, it was the region’s intrastate conflicts which first attracted the attention of the Western media, academics, and the policy-making communities. However, for Western specialists of the early post-Soviet period, a number of intellectual restraints existed which hampered their understanding of the region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union was initially still viewed as a monolithic geopolitical space; a relatively narrow circle of Western experts attempted to navigate through the peculiarities of particular ex-Soviet regions. In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, the cold war era field of Soviet studies – swiftly transformed into post-Soviet studies – remained the domain of specialists in Russian (Soviet) studies, with a newly established circle of political scientists focusing primarily on transitional or democratization studies. Caucasus-related issues, among which regional ethnic conflict and civil war occupied a significant place, were basically approached through the prism of ex-Sovietologists whose reflections on the area were characterized by the largely Russo-centrist attitudes of specialists in Russian (Soviet) studies or by the attitudes of an even-narrower circle of scarcely informed political scientists who lacked substantial empirical knowledge of the region. For the former group of scholars, notwithstanding all the peripeteia of the post-Soviet period, Russia still attracted the most attention, as Russia was heir to most of the territories and resources of the Soviet Union: the largest nation-state on the globe which possessed nuclear arms, and whose strength and unpredictability still caused international concern as far as its internal political evolution – and the international political repercussions thereof – were concerned. By contrast, the significance of the South Caucasus region with respect to global security was seen as miniscule as compared to that of Russia – let alone to that of the Middle East, the Far East, South Asia, or Europe. However, the region’s seemingly marginal standing in world affairs was contradicted by the immense internal political complexity that has always characterized this multiethnic area, with its specific culture, perplexing loyalties, intricate history, and turbulent ties with its neighbors. All of this differentiated the South Caucasus – and Central Asia, too – from the rest of the former Soviet Union, which was still largely associated with Russia, where the majority of ex-Sovietologists had received their training on. This consideration was all the more acute in the case of political scientists – specialists in comparative politics, ethnic conflict, and a range of related subdisciplines – whose attempts to conceptualize local events within this region were often marked by their lack of solid factual knowledge of the region’s perplexing issues. Symptomatically, even a knowledge of Russian, let alone of local languages – so crucial to an understanding of the region – has been a perennial problem for many Western academic observers.

Nonetheless, a number of authoritative empirical accounts of ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus, authored by Western scholars, have emerged relatively recently. Michael P. Croissant’s (1998) book, The Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict: Causes and Implications, was one of the first to deal with the roots and evolution of a local conflict in a complex manner. In subsequent years, it was followed by a body of scholarship which sought to shed light on the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh (Cornell), Abkhazia, and South Ossetia (Coppieters) in a clear and balanced way. Focusing on the region’s ethnic conflicts and civil wars from a variety of perspectives, these writers have contributed a great deal to our understanding of the causalities which have linked conflict onset and escalation, while also paying significant attention to local specifics. South Caucasian ethnic conflicts have been at the center of the scholarship of Stephen Blank, Martin Malek, Olga Oliker, and a number of other Western observers who have focused on the broader security-related implications of local conflicts. For instance, Svante Cornell’s monograph, Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus, published in 2001, has remained an encyclopedic treatment of local ethnic conflicts, domestic politics, and the wider geopolitics that shaped the region during the 1990s. Thomas de Waal’s journalistic accounts – including his Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War (2004) – stand out from the list of books dealing with the Caucasus conflicts. De Waal’s book largely seeks to provide deep insight into local conflicts from the perspectives of individual human fates.

Surprisingly, as mentioned above, only a small portion of the scholarship devoted to South Caucasian ethnic conflicts has sought to bring together empirical case studies with theories of ethnic conflict and civil war. As of today, Cristoph Zürcher’s The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus (2009) has come the closest to merging the specifics of local interethnic conflict with wider contemporary theory. Curiously, in this authoritative work, Zürcher only focuses on attesting to the relevance of theoretical findings which emanate from quantitative scholarship on the causes of civil war – thereby paying no attention to what I term process-based or escalation-based theories. Hence, despite our having carried out research on a similar topic, in an identical time span, he comes to quite different conclusions: a result that is conditioned by the somewhat different focus of his work, as he concentrates on the issues of statehood and ethnic conflicts across the whole of the Caucasus. Stuart J. Kaufman, in his brilliant Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (2001), elaborated on three case studies of the South Caucasus conflicts: he utilized empirical material from Moldova and the former Yugoslavia in order to support his theory on the symbolic (identity) politics of ethnic wars – his findings are largely supported by this monograph.

In the meantime, a new study on the Caucasus conflicts has recently appeared, authored by Vicken Cheterian. In his War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier (2011), Cheterian provides an authoritative account of local ethnic wars, one which is enriched by informed insights into regional history and politics and which is framed by conceptualizations of mass trauma, mobilization, and repression as the sources of local conflicts.

Theories of ethnic conflict and civil war

During the post-World War II cold war era, little attention was paid to internal regional conflicts. In the decades preceding the 1990s, the emphasis of both academic and policy-making communities was largely on the realm of interstate war, while instances of ethnic war and civil conflict were usually interpreted through the prism of bipolar rivalry. In fact, the academic community at that time tended to comprehend such conflicts either as direct outcomes of the broader Soviet–American confrontation, or at best only insofar as regional conflicts could be viewed as being linked to the ongoing conflict between the two global superpowers. What was really seen to matter in intrastate conflicts was the possible impact which they might have upon the fragile balance of power between the Communist and Capitalist world orders. Accordingly, neither the proximate causes nor the internal dynamics of small-scale civil wars or local ethnic conflicts were of much interest to the mainstream scholarly community.

Nonetheless, as early as at the turn of the 1970s, a number of studies emerged in which attempts were made to conceptualize the peculiarities of protest and rebellion on the intrastate level. At the forefront of multidisciplinary research emanating from within a variety of the social sciences was Ted Robert Gurr, a political scientist whose authoritative Why Men Rebel (1970) largely shaped the field of intrastate conflict studies in its incubatory phase. Focusing primarily on the sociopsychological causes of civil war, Gurr initially anchored his work at the crossroads of previously established relative deprivation theory, bringing in aggregate demographic and geographic data in order to operationalize his variables. From then on, the tradition of combining a microanalytical focus (individual motivations) with macroanalytical research (utilizing cross-national data) established itself – a tradition which subsequently was further elaborated upon by both quantitative and qualitative scholarship.

Initially, contextually rich narratives of ethnic conflict and civil war dominated the emerging field: these sought to explore the causal linkages between various forms of violence, illustrating in specific cases what it was that caused conflict, why and how conflict escalated, and which forms of outcomes were most likely to result. The qualitative approach was further strengthened during the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, when the fear of bipolar war entailing a destructive nuclear conflict on a global scale came to nothing, while a wave of civil wars and ethnic conflicts erupted within the remnants of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. During this period, a set of theories emerged – or re-emerged from within the previous scholarly tradition – to reflect recent experiences of intrastate conflict. Several crucial theories of ethnic conflict and civil war were (re)formulated during the 1990s – including those based on the premise of manipulative leaders (Gagnon) and those based on identity, or symbolic, politics (Kaufman).

Narrative explanations as such, however, differed from place to place when it came to generalizing on the root causes of civil war, since for many political scientists, economists, and sociologists, the capacity of qualitative studies alone to construct a complex and all-encompassing theory of civil war was disputed. Following the quantitative turn in social science research, scholars across these various fields – with economists playing a leading role among their colleagues – began utilizing cross-country statistical data in order to trace the causes of civil war, largely in an effort to purge social science research of ideological indoctrination, political preferences, and personal bias. At the turn of the century, and during the previous decade, a number of findings were made public, with two academic teams – those of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, and James Fearon and David Laitin – heavily shaping the research. It quickly became apparent, however, that econometric studies were flawed in that they failed, on more than a few occasions, to give an unambiguous understanding of causal mechanisms: the relationship between independent and dependent variables of civil wars provided by large-n quantitative studies was not sufficiently clear, allowing for a range of sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations. Additionally, such studies proved technically incapable of taking into account the time, or process, factor – that is, the evolution of intrastate conflicts which often precede eruptions of civil war; at the same time, these studies also displayed a range of other shortcomings, given the rich texture of civil and ethnic conflicts, and the traditional limitations of quantitative research. Besides this, the utilization of even slightly different concepts of civil war and other definitions pertinent to the field seemed to exercise a considerable impact upon the outcomes of research.

Prompted by what some have viewed as the attainment of the natural limits of quantitative research to inform or enlighten, a new trend has recently established itself within the domain of civil war and ethnic conflict research, a trend which advocates a return to qualitative studies, or at the very least a combination between quantitative and qualitative approaches with respect to the study of the interrelated phenomena of civil war and intrastat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Theorizing on the Causes of Civil War and Ethnopolitical Conflict
• 3  The South Caucasus: A History of Identities, an Identity of Histories
• 4  Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia: The Ascent of Ethnopolitical Conflict
• 5  War and Diplomacy: Ethnopolitical Conflicts as a Factor in the Foreign Policies of South Caucasian Countries (199194)
• 6  Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index