This year marks the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the first in a series of inter-ethnic and secessionist wars to arise in the final years of the Soviet Union, among others in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Chechnya.
Three decades onwards, most of these conflicts remain stubbornly unresolved: the Minsk Group has not been able to achieve a normalisation of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan; the 2008 Russo-Georgian war has put both Abkhazia and South Ossetia firmly outside of Tbilisi’s control; and part of Moldova’s territory is still governed by the de-facto republic of Transniestria.
Meanwhile, the North Caucasus has been imperfectly ‘pacified’, and new conflicts have emerged in Ukraine.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
· Implications for/of theories of ethnic conflict and civil war
· Evolving nationalisms and national identities
· The geopolitical context of post-Soviet ethnic conflicts
· Gender and ethnic conflict
· Postcolonial perspectives
· The roles of history and historiography
· Secession, sovereignty and the status of de-facto states
· The environmental consequences of ethnic conflict
· IDPs, refugees and human security
· The (in)effectiveness of existing negotiating formats and peacebuilding initiatives
· Religion and ethnic conflict
· Impacts of territorial conflict on regime politics and interactions with democratization
Those interested in participating are invited to send a maximum 250-word abstract to k.oskanian@bham.ac.uk before 15 April 2018.
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Kevork Oskanian, PhD (LSE)
Lecturer
University of Birmingham
Department of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS)
Muirhead Tower, Room 520
0121-414.7535
k.oskanian@bham.ac.uk
Latest/Upcoming Publications:
Oskanian, K. (2018) ‘A Very Ambiguous Empire: Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 70 Nr. 1, 26-52, availableathttps://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2017.1412398
Averre, D. and Oskanian, K. (Eds.) (2018, Forthcoming) Security, Society, and the State in the Caucasus. London: Routledge.
Oskanian, K. (2018) ‘Russia’s Polycentrism, from Europe to Eurasia’ in Murray, D. and Brown, D. (Eds.) Power Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Mapping a Multipolar World? Oxford: Routledge, pp. 173-190.
Oskanian, K. and Averre, D. (2018) ‘Security and Democratisation: the Case of the South Caucasus’ in P. Flenley and M. Mannin (Eds.) The EU and its Eastern Neighbourhood:Europeanisation and Its Twenty-First Century Contradictions. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
