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The Caucasus has been torn by conflicts since 1988, and some of these conflicts became large-scale wars due to the usage of heavy weapons. These relatively short wars resulted in major distractions, casualties, and displacements, and this includes ethnic ‘cleansing’ across the region. Together with violence, economic downfall and the breakdown of ties with international communities occurred. Humanitarian emergencies in the South Caucasus were due to the breakdown of the multinational Soviet empire. This chapter begins with the different conflicts in the South Caucasus, both national and territorial, as well as the economic structure and developments. Social and political structures are also presented. The situation, especially the severity, of the humanitarian emergencies in South Caucasus is also provided. The chapter concludes by providing studies as to how improvement in the standards of living may be achieved in the South Caucasus.

This chapter examines the nature and consequences of the attention paid to the South Caucasus, or lack thereof as the case may be, by the United States, European Union and Russia. It then analyzes ongoing processes of state-building in each of the region’s three states and how the attendant domestic and international challenges of such processes have facilitated opportunities for Iran and Turkey to expand their commercial and strategic ties with each other. The chapter ends with an examination of relations between Turkey and Iran, uneasy neighbors that compete on several fronts but also cooperate out of necessity. It highlights the unfolding of a new game of geostrategic competition and rivalry by these two regional powers over the South Caucasus. Turkey’s favoured tools of competition and rivalry have been its soft power and pipeline politics, and Iran’s are commerce and natural resources.

This chapter examines the role of things in the reproduction of a public—the first condition of sovereignty defined in Chapter 2—during the Early Bronze Age in the South Caucasus. “A public” here means a self-recognizing community that is not maintained exclusively through face-to-face interaction. It is thus in large part an assembly of strangers who are made familiar to one another through an assemblage of publicity—forms of mass mediation and sites of encounter, such as those Benedict Anderson described as fundamental to the imagination of modern nations. The suggestion that material things are critical to the creation of a public follows closely Hannah Arendt's conception of humanity as Homo faber.

In the Late Bronze Age, the polities in the South Caucasus developed a new assemblage directed toward transforming charismatic authority into formal sovereignty. This chapter examines the assembling of this political machine, which drew the civilization and war machines into an extensive apparatus of rule, one that resolved the paradox at the heart of the joint operation of both. This novel political machine did not supersede the war and civilization machines. Rather, the political machine cloaked their contradictions, allowing the relation of the one to the many to persist as a “mystery” of sovereignty. The political machine not only provided the instruments of judicial ordering and bureaucratic regulation but it also transformed the polity itself into an object of devotion, securing not simply the surrender of subjects but their active commitment to the reproduction of sovereignty.

Chapter 4, first, explores the goals of Turkish nationalist foreign policy; and then explains how the Wilsonian principal of ‘self-determination’ was interpreted in Eastern affairs at the end of Ottoman and Russian Empires as non-European powers. It highlights why other social movements – i.e. the rise of local congresses in Anatolia as a reaction to the Allied and the Bab-i Ali’s (Sublime Porte) plans – were crucial in applying the principle of self-determination to the emergence of the Turkish nation that is generally ignored in the Western literature on Turkey. The last section focuses particularly on the formulation of a nationalist foreign policy towards the Bolsheviks in the expectation of resolving the territorial clashes between Turkish and Armenian nationalist claims over their perceived historic homelands, and establishing an area of security in Turkey’s eastern borders.

As middle powers with regional aspirations, Iran and Turkey see the South Caucasus region as an ideal arena for expanding their reach and influence. As post-sanctions Iran finds greater space for diplomacy and trade, the ensuing competition between the two neighboring countries is likely to intensify in the coming years. For both states, trade and soft power are the most viable tools for expanding their influence. In the long run, the competition in trade is only likely to benefit the three states of the South Caucasus. But it is also likely to keep the multiple conflicts that have ravaged the region over the last several decades — especially between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia and Georgia, and even the historic animosity between Turkey and Armenia — frozen and without a solution in sight.

This chapter focuses on the soft power of Turkey, comparing its engagements with the states of the South Caucasus (and Central Asia) to the countries of the Middle East. The chapter argues that for Turkey, the use of soft power was a tool to re-establish relations with, and acquire acceptance in, its neighborhood. In the case of the South Caucasus, Turkey attempted to reconnect with a region that it was cut off from for a long time due to the Soviet era and the Cold War. In the Middle East, there was an effort to redefine its engagement after a decade of securitization of its foreign policy in the 1990s. Although soft power increased Turkey’s visibility and presence, it is unclear if it changed the nature of Turkey’s influence, which remained highly limited when faced with the realities of hard power politics, unable to influence the regional actors it targeted.

This chapter refers to how World War II and its aftermath were experienced in the Soviet Union and, particularly how geopolitical conflicts intersected with national consciousnesses, relations, and politics in the South Caucasus. It discusses the Soviet leadership that tested the boundaries of its power by fostering national liberation movements among Kurds and Azeris in Iran and advancing territorial claims against Turkey. It also mentions the national actors in Soviet republics that repurposed discourses of national extraterritoriality for their own nation-building, which reignited dormant national disputes in the Caucasus and consolidated transborder alliances and insecurities. The chapter examines how the Bolsheviks created exceptions to the rule by using korenizatsiia policies to exploit cross-border ethnic ties and expand Soviet influence abroad.

This chapter is about collective identity and how practitioners define this highly complex topic. Two main patterns emerge from the corpus. Practitioners’ main concerns while discussing the concept of ‘European’ identity are as follows: to differentiate between European neighbours and the neighbours of Europe, and to account for the European credentials of the South Caucasus or Kazakhstan. In addressing differentiation between the neighbours, practitioners draw on geography, culture, history and economic ties to distinguish between countries which are in Europe and those which are not. At the same time practitioners make explicit distinctions between the key EU policies: the European Neighbourhood Policy and the enlargement policy. They also build up the category of the ‘European’. When they offer accounts of the South Caucasus and Kazakhstan, one practitioner relies on a heredity account of the European civilization, while others seek to justify, in different ways, the European-ness of the Caucasus and potentially Kazakhstan.

This chapter focuses on a concrete case study in Turkey’s close neighborhood. It examines the exceptional role played by a social and religious organization that is unique in the Muslim world, namely the movement of Fethullah Gülen. The following questions are addressed: To what extent did the Gülen movement contribute to the development of Turkey’s soft power in both the South Caucasus and the Middle East?; reciprocally, how did the Gülen movement benefit from the government’s support and prestige to develop its own influence? Finally, the chapter questions the durability of the bond between Gülen and Turkey’s soft power through the lens of the clash between Gülen, the charismatic leader of the hizmet movement, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the Turkish executive power since 2002.

This chapter explores Russia's political encounter with Armenians from its expansion into the South Caucasus in 1801 to its fateful entrance into the First World War in 1914. It argues that Russia tried to harness the stateless and dispersed Armenian diaspora to build its empire in the Caucasus and beyond. The chapter also talks about how the tsars relied on the stature of the two most influential institutions of the Armenian diaspora, the merchantry and the clergy, to accomplish several goals. It provides a background of Russia's project of diplomatic power from Constantinople to the Caspian Sea, economic benefits of Russia, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire from the Armenian merchant's transimperial trade networks, and political advantage taken from the Armenian Church's extensive authority within far-flung Armenian communities. The period discussed in this book follows the evolution of “Russian” perceptions of “Armenians” alongside the dual processes of tsarist empire-building and Armenian nation-building.