Minorities in the South Caucasus

The South Caucasus comprises an area of about 186,100 km2, straddling the border between Europe and Asia. This region, which includes the former Soviet States of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, was also known as Transcaucasia, but it was renamed for the purposes of detaching the region from Russia’s influence. This bundle thus revolves around the South Caucasus, which, historically, has represented one of the most diverse and conflict-ridden regions in the world as a result of a combination of factors, including inter alia ethnonationalism, ethnopolitical conflicts as well as power-political games.  

Back in 2002, Natalie Sabanadze focused her ECMI Working Paper on ethnopolitical rivalries to comment on the conflicts of Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia-Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It is in this context that Sabanadze seeks to evaluate the international involvement that the region attracted on the occasion of those ethnopolitical confrontations, with the aim of identifying its general impact as well as examining how it applied in each case. Moreover, while elaborating a comprehensive historical analysis of the roots of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict in his contribution to JEMIE published in 2004, Bruno Coppieters points at the question of identity and security as triggering elements for the conflict between both territories. Their problematic relationship under Soviet leadership, as Coppieters reminds us, gave rise to a feeling in which both the Abkhaz and the Georgians perceived that their culture and national identity were under threat.  

It is noteworthy that JEMIE published in 2003 a Special Issue entitled ‘The South Caucasus: Ethnopolitical Conflict and Prospects for Conflict Prevention’, which counted on two contributions that assessed the role of intergovernmental organizations and its management capabilities in the Georgian-Abkhazian and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts respectively. In this vein, Susan Stewart devotes particular attention to the contribution of the UN Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) to the management of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict. Particularly, Stewart explores the development of the UN mission as well as its coordination efforts with other UN agencies for the purpose of assessing not only the impact of mediation and stabilization efforts in the conflict in question, but also ascertaining the viability of UN interventions in similar conflicts in the future. For her part, Nadia Milanova examines the OSCE normative context in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which she described as a mixture of separatism and irredentism that represented the most complex pattern of the territory-identity linkage. In her contribution to the JEMIE Special Issue on the South Caucasus, Milanova aims at assessing the impact that the principles and norms of OSCE have on the dynamics of conflict and on the efforts that are made towards its resolution.  

Lastly, Tom Trier, the ECMI Regional Director in the Caucasus, supervised and coordinated a manual published in 2011 on issues concerning ethno-national minorities in the South Caucasus. The compiled material was developed with a view to serving as a training toolkit and reference collection to be used by national and international organizations as well as government and other stakeholders for project development in the region.  

 

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