The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia 2021056557, 2021056558, 9781503632059, 1503632059

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The Neighborhood Effect: From Empires and States to Regional Resiliency
2. How to Study Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions
3. The Imperial Roots of Armed Conflicts in Eurasia
4. The Habsburg Empire and the Bosnian Province
5. The Ottoman Empire and Eastern Anatolia
6. The Russian Empire and Transcaucasia
7. Paired Peripheries and (C)old Conflicts
8. Peace by Proxy: The Neighborhood Effect in Turbulent Times
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

The Neighborhood Effect

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The Neighborhood Effect The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia

Anna Ohanyan

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2022 by Anna Ohanyan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ohanyan, Anna, author. Title: The neighborhood effect : the imperial roots of regional fracture in Eurasia / Anna Ohanyan. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: L CCN 2021056557 (print) | L CCN 2021056558 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503632059 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503632066 (ebook) Subjects: L CSH: Security, International—Eurasia. | Imperialism—History. | Regionalism (International organization) | Eurasia—Foreign relations. | Eurasia—Politics and government. | Eurasia—Ethnic relations—Political aspects. Classification: L CC JZ6009.E83 O33 2022 (print) | L CC JZ6009.E83 (ebook) | DDC 355/.03355—dc23/eng/20220318 L C record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056557 L C ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056558 Cover art: Vardan Gabrielyan, Carpets N3, oil on canvas, 100x90cm. Cover design: Rob Ehle

To my daughters: Isabelle, who buys an extra copy of each favorite book; Elise, who teaches me about leading quietly, patiently, and with values; and Helen, who wants to be a pilot because she is scared of flying.

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Contents

Preface  ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 The Neighborhood Effect: From Empires and States to Regional Resiliency

1

2 How to Study Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions

31

3 The Imperial Roots of Armed Conflicts in Eurasia

61

4 The Habsburg Empire and the Bosnian Province

89

5 The Ottoman Empire and Eastern Anatolia

115

6 The Russian Empire and Transcaucasia

149

7 Paired Peripheries and (C)old Conflicts

188

8 Peace by Proxy: The Neighborhood Effect in Turbulent Times

230

Notes  253 Bibliography  257 Index  277

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Preface

I found myself, one bright summer morning in 2021, at a very unlikely place for me. I had decided, on an impulse, to attend a public lecture at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Armenia, on the slopes of the majestic but dizzyingly tall peaks of Mount Aragats. This public outreach workshop was being led by the director of the observatory, Dr. Areg Mickaelian. I had come to try to buttress my astrophysics bona fides, in the hopes of impressing my astronomy-obsessed teenager, Isabelle Ani. Byurakan continues to be, after all, among the foremost observatories of its time, having in its storied history risen above Cold War politics to host the likes of Carl Sagan, Marvin Minsky, and Frank Drake as a part of mankind’s quest to survey galaxies, quasars, and, yes, even possible signs of extraterrestrial life. My own, more earthly concerns with politics and governments seemed light-years removed from the observatory’s affairs. Until, that is, Dr. Mickaelian made an offhand comment that jolted me back to the messy realities of today’s South Caucasus. “The Byurakan Observatory has always been a regional center,” he said. “And who knows, had we invested more in regional projects like Byurakan in the recent past, perhaps the war [the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war] would not have happened.” He was right. The Byurakan Observatory is one of the few concrete attempts at regional cooperation in the area. In 2015, harking back to the spirit of Carl Sagan and the observatory’s role in East-West détente during the Cold War, Byurakan had become a formal regional host facility under

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the auspices of the International Astronomical Union. In this capacity, it has brought together, in Armenia, scientists from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Iran, and (notably for this research) Turkey, whose government has no diplomatic relations with Armenia and which continues to be seen by many Armenians as an unrepentant and existential threat. Astrophysicists, it seemed, may have found a way to align these diverse stars in a way that continued to elude more earth-bound politicians and statesmen. My visit to Byurakan reinforced my thinking about this book in two main ways. First, it highlighted the untapped potential of regional diplomatic infrastructure in these sorts of conflict regions. Second, something about the approach to the study of astronomy mentioned by Dr. Mickaelian has stayed with me: “Space is like a time machine,” he explained. What we see in the night sky is both past and present at the same time. Can history be thought of in the same way, as the threading together of past and present in a time machine of sorts? How can we avoid being overly deterministic about the power of historical forces at the same time as we excavate the past to identify solutions to our contemporary problems in the social and political world? In his first point, about Byurakan’s regional diplomatic prospects, Dr. Mickaelian was alluding to Byurakan’s potential to be a hub in a broader network of cooperative regional infrastructure that is currently nonexistent in the South Caucasus. For several reasons, I was pleasantly surprised to hear this perspective in Armenia. I have been traveling to conflict regions such as the South Caucasus and the Balkans throughout my career, studying the opportunities and challenges that are inherent in efforts towards regional diplomacy. I have found that notions of regional development and diplomacy often elicit more skepticism and doubt in the South Caucasus than they do in settings such as the Balkans. Dr. Mickaelian’s intuition about regional initiatives echoes a central theme in the vast scholarship on comparative regionalism and geopolitics. And it is the lack of such regional diplomatic capacities in the South Caucasus region that I and many others have feared would lead to destabilization. In my earlier work I have referred to the South Caucasus as an “institutional desert,” due to its dearth of regional diplomatic infrastructure. Such infrastructure remains largely absent today, and the question of why that is has motivated this work. Why does regionalism take root in some areas but not others? What are the key aspects that drive the regional fabric of

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connectivity? Is it even desirable? These are among the questions explored in this book, as elements of the general concept of the “neighborhood effect.” The policy message in this book is deceptively simple: neighbors matter. Despite its simplicity, this message, grounded in evidence and a review of the scholarly literature on the topic, stands in stark contrast to the foreign policy priorities practiced by smaller states in fractured regions such as the South Caucasus or the Balkans. Policymakers and government officials in these regions have often been quick to highlight relations within their neighborhoods primarily as stepping-stones to larger global markets and political power centers further abroad, never as a desirable goal in their own right. This approach is often justified using grand narratives of geopolitics or national security, neglecting more local concerns such as domestic borderland constituencies. Nevertheless, the roots of this sort of regional fracture often lie on former imperial peripheries, from which they have been carried over into contemporary policymaking and modern regional power groupings. Understanding the nature of these origins is critical to the strategic management of the emergent multipolarity in world politics. This book aims to offer a fresh approach to the familiar challenge of building functional regional security orders and peacebuilding systems in post-Cold War Eurasian politics. At its core, it is an attempt to understand the peculiar difficulties that have beset the establishment of regional groupings and regional structures in the post-Soviet space. Indeed, across hundreds of interviews conducted over the past decade throughout the Balkans, the South Caucasus, and Russia and at the European Commission in Brussels, it became clear that my interlocutors either viewed the regional dimensions of security provision for the newly independent small states as impractical and unrealistic, or dismissed them outright as dangerous. More characteristic of the foreign policies of the new states has been a fixation on pursuing larger geopolitical patrons and extra-regional alliances. The Neighborhood Effect explores many of the questions that were raised in my previous work on regional dimensions of security and peacebuilding (Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management, 2015; Russia Abroad: Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond, edited, 2018). Those studies looked at the politics of building meaningful regional security systems in conflict zones, identifying the key markers of regional fracture as a legacy as well as a deliberate foreign policy tool used by hegemonic powers. In many ways, those works highlighted the apparent disconnect we continue to see today between comparative regionalism and security

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studies, particularly when it comes to understanding the politics of regional engagement in conflict zones. This book, while continuing to investigate the specific mechanisms of regional fracture, also raises new sets of important questions. With Eurasia as their backdrop, to what extent are such fractured regions historically constructed, reflecting an imperial legacy inherited before the state system emerged and consolidated across the continent? Does regional fracture contribute to contemporary armed conflict and insecurity, and if so, how? How should we think about the regional roots of the contemporary state system in world politics? What do these questions mean in terms of policy? And do they even matter? This work on the imperial legacies inherent in contemporary armed conflicts can perhaps be thought of in a similar vein to Dr. Mickaelian’s description of our present night sky as a sort of time machine, comprising light originally emitted in vastly different eras by different stars. Parts of Eurasia remain trapped in a vicious cycle of violence, state weakness, and authoritarianism. Breaking out of this sequence requires a deeper dive into history and a recognition that the imperial foundations of regional politics do indeed matter in the quest for solutions to contemporary security challenges and in the cultivation of sustainable and socially just peaceful relations within and among nations. The Neighborhood Effect departs from the conventional scholarship in comparative regionalism that has treated deepening regional engagement as an evolutionary process culminating in institutionalized and integrated regions comprising administratively strong states. This canonical view has often advocated policies for investing in top-down regional organizations. Using a comparative historical analysis, this book challenges those prescriptions. It argues that the regional fabric of the communities that make up the former peripheries of diverse Eurasian empires predates the state system, rather than follows from it. This study, working with this empire-aware lens and the regional fracture theory that develops from it, shows how the neighborhood effect in Eurasia has vacillated, over time, between regional fracture and regional resilience rather than unidirectionally evolving toward integration. I also highlight here the role of non-state actors and the political agency of grassroots actors, both of which remain generally under-theorized and under-studied in political science and international relations. Considering the spectrum of fracture and resilience in regional terms and over time, this work aims to offer a new framework for thinking about ethnic conflict, its management, and peacebuilding practice in the Eurasian conflict beltway.

Acknowledgments

A scientific approach to the social world requires that the questions we ask drive the methods of inquiry that we choose. Students of social inquiry are told this very early in their careers. Of course, this turns out to be easier said than done. In my academic career, I have tried my best to practice such question-driven social science, and this book reflects that philosophy. The ideas explored here first emerged from a question I posed in my previous work, an edited volume titled Russia Abroad: Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond, published in 2018. The anonymous reviewers of that work encouraged my initial explorations of the imperial roots of today’s fractured regions of Eurasia. I followed their feedback, for which I am grateful. That is how The Neighborhood Effect was born. In the process of pursuing the answers to my questions, The Neighborhood Effect has taken me further outside of my comfort zone than my previous research had done. And on this journey, exhilarating yet daunting, I have been fortunate to have a supportive network of historians and social scientists on whom I have relied. To probe the imperial dimension of regional fracture, I employed comparative historical methods of analysis. A historian friend of mine cautioned me early on, in jest, that “historians do not like political scientists,” a predicament over which we shared a good chuckle. But the truth is that there is a gulf between these fields, and methodological tribalism remains a real issue. In many ways, this has gotten in the way of using truly interdisciplinary

xiv Acknowledgments

approaches to tackle very complex social problems. With this book, I hope to take a step towards a more holistic approach to understanding and preventing armed conflict, with greater attention to its imperial roots. Specifically, this work is driven by my desire to understand and explain why some political regions in Eurasia failed to cohere after the end of the Cold War, while others emerged with relative resilience. These questions inevitably led me to the study of empires and imperial histories. For their thoughtful guidance and orientation on that front, I am grateful to Melissa Bilal, Lerna Ekmecouglu, Varak Ketsemanian, and Ara Sanjian. And for their deep expertise, critique, and careful review, I am indebted to Bedross Der Matossian, Richard B. Finnegan, Todd Gernes, Stephen Badalyan Riegg, and Alan Whitehorn. Their perspectives and immense knowledge as historians and scholars have enriched this book in innumerable ways. I am also, as always, grateful to Laurence Broers, who was instrumental to my exploration of the scholarship on post-Soviet wars. His close reading and astute and insightful comments were exceedingly useful as I refined my arguments and, just as important, they helped to illuminate new research paths. Indeed, receiving feedback from Laurence has become a favorite part of the research process for me. Stephen Jones, whose keen expertise on the South Caucasus and careful review enhanced the conflict analysis sections of this book, has been a truly valued colleague in this project as well. To Mark Shirk and his colleagues at Cambridge University I also owe a debt of gratitude; the presentation of early findings of this research at Cambridge University helped me tremendously to refine the arguments and their conceptualization. In addition, the anonymous reviewers of the book pointed me in directions where I had hesitated to venture, and their thoughtful feedback added tremendous value to this work. This book would not have been possible without the support of the Fulbright Commission, for which I am grateful. The American University of Armenia in Yerevan was a wonderful institutional host during my Fulbright research, and I am grateful to Armen Der Kiureghian for opening the university’s doors to my teaching and research. I am also indebted to my colleagues at Stonehill College for their continued support. Time away from teaching, while important for the research process, always adds items to my colleague’s to-do lists. And they never grumble! Importantly, it is my students at Stonehill College that I also gratefully acknowledge. Teaching and research have long since become deeply

Acknowledgments xv

intertwined for me, and I am indebted to my students for allowing me to think out loud with them. In particular, Tim DeLouchrey, Paige Ferreira, and Chase LeMay helped tremendously with early background research as part of Stonehill College’s wonderful Student Undergraduate Research Experience program. As with much of my scholarship, my conversations with David Matz, a mentor and a friend, provided much inspiration, deliberation, struggle, and discovery. Running book ideas by David has become a state of being for me. Alan Harvey, of Stanford University Press, not only supported this project early on but also guided and stimulated my thinking on the concepts and implications of regional fracture. Caroline McKusick, also at Stanford University Press, was instrumental throughout the review process, patiently fielding my tedious questions and dealing with the myriad logistical challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. My better half, Aram Adourian, and our children, Isabelle, Elise, and Helen, have “endured” me, day in and day out. Talking about this work with them has been crucial in driving me forward. I am thankful that they put up with it. As I was writing the book during my sabbatical, the pandemic brought them all home. I have never developed the vocabulary to tell my Helen (who was nine years old at the time) that I need to concentrate or that I am “not home.” I have learned to cherish her instincts to come to me for snacks, even though she is in general a devoted Daddy’s girl. With all the constraints on the research process that family obligations can place on researchers, particularly women, it is a privilege to be able to live a fuller life by embracing and juggling both. I developed this book mostly in the hope of adding to the discourse and advocacy for peace processes across Eurasia. I felt defeated as a scholar when the 44-day war broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh in the middle of the pandemic, in the fall of 2020. I would not have been able to go on with the writing and research if it had not been for my husband, Aram Adourian. I find no words, but he knows. But it is my children’s innocence and leadership, and their vision for a just and peaceful world, that have had the largest role in keeping me disciplined and driven in this work. Becoming a mother has rendered my scholarship personal and raised the stakes of my research for me. My nowten-year-old daughter Helen’s early thoughts on the “neighborhood effect” were deceptively simple, and I conclude the book with her words of wisdom. My hope is that this work represents a small step towards fulfilling

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their hopes and visions for a peaceful world, one in which they can create, flourish, and thrive. I dedicate this book to my children, with a message best captured in a letter written in 1820 by the second president of the United States, John Adams, to his wife Abigail: “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. . . . Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.” Concord, Massachusetts September 15, 2021

The Neighborhood Effect

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1 The Neighborhood Effect From Empires and States to Regional Resiliency

Peaceful neighborhoods are often seen as a luxury in world politics, available only to states that are rich, democratic, and administratively strong. It is only such states that can build stable, prosperous regions and neighborhoods, so the dominant scholarly narrative goes. The European Union has long been the epitome of where evolutionary trends in regional politics around the world were headed. The scholarship on comparative regionalism has already established the great diversity in regional forms outside of Europe. However, the emphasis on statehood as a necessary precondition for strong regions continues to be a recurrent theme in that literature. Peaceful regions are said to have states with integrated economies and societies, boasting regional flows of tourists and trade. Borders in such regions are seamless and “smart,” designed to catch the trafficker and the terrorist without hindering economic activity (Ohanyan 2016). Regions have also been thought of as security orders, created, managed, and dominated by hegemonic powers. Such regional security orders are viewed by their supporters as a geopolitical necessity: alliance systems without which the middle powers and smaller states would plunge into perpetual insecurity. Some of these regional formations have been more successful than others in taming conflict and providing effective security for their members. Regional formations—whether fully institutionalized regional groupings like the European Union, or loosely formed and organizationally limited institutions like the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Middle East—differ; some are representative and participatory, while others

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are hegemonic, designed to cement spheres of influence between great powers (Ohanyan 2018c) or use regional hegemony for global power projection. So far, all approaches to the study of regional orders, which range from integrative and negotiated to hegemonic and coercive, have taken states as constitutive and foundational, an assumption that is challenged in this book. This work highlights the fact that regional ties—both the progressive and the perversive—often predate state formation. The regions-before-states paradigm presented here exposes the deep regional fabric that was already in place at the imperial peripheries at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, up until World War I—the regional fabric that gave rise to the political geography and institutional contours of the contemporary state system when the Eurasian empires formally collapsed. This is a novel conceptualization of regional politics in terms of explaining ongoing armed conflicts on the Eurasian continent and their policy implications. With this book, I challenge the narrative that strong states make strong and peaceful regions. I argue that a much deeper historical dive than the one currently exercised in comparative regionalism scholarship is necessary, and overdue. The imperial lens, I suggest, is transformative for the study of regional fabric and the nature of regional connectivity. Calling into question the state-centric paradigm in the existing literature, this work argues that it is strong regional ties that make for strong states, rather than the other way around. In the process, the book zooms in on the deeply communal nature of regional engagement at the imperial peripheries, while also examining such regional fabric over time. State formation in resilient neighborhoods, as opposed to fractured regions, has a better chance of institutional consolidation, resulting in lowered risks of armed conflict. The neighborhood effect, the organizing concept of this book, is multilevel, developed to illuminate the mutually constitutive nature of the societal fabric in regions and the extra-regional geopolitical rivalry between greater powers. Societal connectivity has to do with civic institutions and the nature of the social capital (whether bonding or bridging) between ethno-religious communities at the imperial peripheries. In fractured regions, this societal fabric tends and tended to be clustered, with shallow institutional connections within and between ethno-religious communities. Such patterns of regional connectivity at an imperial periphery made the region vulnerable to extra-regional geopolitical rivalry as well as to stress and attack from the imperial center. In contrast, regions that had balanced connectivity and were rich in bonding social capital, with deep institutional connections between



The Neighborhood Effect 3

communities in a region, were less vulnerable to extra-regional overlay and geopolitical competition. Such regions were more resilient and more capable of withstanding imperial pressures as well as geopolitical competition. This concept captures a range of regional connectivity and complexity, from perverse to purposeful and progressive, and from regional resiliency to regional fracture (see chapter 2). In its most resilient forms, regions manifest deeply interdependent and symbiotic societal contacts between communities, often institutionally supported and politically incentivized by external actors. Such a resilient neighborhood effect is possible when there is civic depth in a region; this is expressed in a dense layer of civic organizations within ethno-religious communities and operating across ethno-religious divides. Such organizations—political units in this work—are capable of independent agency and skilled at navigating regional terrains. In its fractured state, the neighborhood effect manifests in predation upon one community by another and intense zero-sum economic competition between communities, creating opportunities for intercommunal violence. In resiliency, the neighborhood effect manifests in region-wide collective action by all communities that is capable of withstanding stressors and crises, which are often external to the region. Whether at imperial peripheries or in contemporary state formations, the neighborhood effect has an independent impact on the security outcomes of contemporary armed conflicts of various levels of severity and intractability (see chapter 3). This book argues that resilient regional fabrics enabled powerful imperial legacies, which reverberated throughout the twentieth century. Regional resilience empowered the ethno-religious groups in such regions to avoid armed conflict in the post-Cold War period, or to temper violence when conflict did erupt. On the other side of the spectrum, clustered and low connectivity in fractured regions eroded the prospects for peaceful conflict resolution when the bipolar, Cold War-era geopolitical stability in Eurasia started to “thaw,” expressed in a chain of armed conflicts in post-Communist Eurasia. This book argues that regional ties are imperial legacies and that, as such, they predate the state system. Moreover, the chances for regional peace are higher in spaces with historical legacies and civic memories of regional cooperation, which for much of the developing world predate the rise of the state system. Pathways of regional connectivity at the imperial peripheries have shaped the patterns of armed conflict or enabled its prevention (see chapter 7). Resilient or fractured, the regional fabric at the imperial

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peripheries was also a function of imperial governance. The empirical analysis of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires, in chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively, examines the patterns of regional connectivity at the peripheries as extensions of imperial governance. To varying degrees, regional fracture, with divide-and-conquer imperial policies at its core, frayed intercommunal relations and eroded institutionalized governance at the peripheries. Indeed, it has been a staple of imperial politics to use paramilitary forces from one ethnic group to attack another (such as in the Ottoman empire) or to support one ethnic group in order to control another (such as in the Habsburg empire). The contemporary forms of such policies are no less insidious. A fraying regional fabric is the shared and historically transcendent outcome in such cases of imperial and neo-imperial contemporary politics. Fractured regional connectivity, mostly an imperial legacy, shapes and influences the onset and severity of contemporary armed conflict. There are two outcomes of the work detailed in this book. First, on a descriptive note, this study produces a methodology for comparative analysis of regional connectivity between contiguous states and imperial peripheries, detailed in chapter 2 on methods. As a historical comparative study, the framework of regional connectivity elevates imperial peripheries as political regions, showing their legacies for and continuities in current forms of regional engagement in the state system. As such, this work shows that imperial peripheries are politically constructed regions, predating contemporary forms of regional engagement between territorially contiguous states. The imperial legacies of this regional connectivity shaped the strength of the states that emerged from these imperial peripheries. In offering a new approach to the study of imperial peripheries as political regions, this book distinguishes between imperial and Westphalian (contemporary, state-based) regional forms. In the process, it helps to excavate the local agency of nonstate actors in imperial systems, while showing their legacy in contemporary regional politics. This is a step toward deepening regional studies beyond their Euro-centric bias, which has thus far defined regions as integrated states that are administratively strong and overwhelmingly democratic (Ohanyan 2018b; Ohanyan 2021). The second outcome of the work in this book is a conflict theory, applied in the context of contemporary Eurasian hot spots (chapter 7). Regional fracture theory—a subset of the comparative analysis of regional connectivity—is a conflict theory. As such, this work has shown that patterns of fractured regional connectivity, an imperial legacy, affected the onset and



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severity of contemporary armed conflicts on the Eurasian continent. The empirical section presents in-depth case studies of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. For each of these cases there is also an in-depth study of one of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century peripheries of that empire that constitutes a contemporary regional space of armed conflict. The fractured peripheries examined here are the Bosnian province in the Habsburg empire, the Eastern Anatolian province in the Ottoman empire, and the Transcaucasian region in the Russian empire. The associated conflicts studied in chapter 7 include the conflict in eastern Ukraine, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and its reverberations into the Middle East, and the post-Soviet conflicts in the South Caucasus. The analysis is carried out in paired comparisons, which entailed case studies of the Baltics and central Europe as control cases of peaceful regional rebirth from the Cold War. In sum, by utilizing a comparative regional-level analysis, this work shifts the perspective away from the imperial centers, on the one hand, and western Europe, on the other. Instead, it focuses on the select peripheries of three empires. These peripheries have been neglected, due in part to their somewhat fluid political structure and changeability, but, as sites of interethnic conflict and negotiation, they are critical to the geopolitical equation, revealing historically determined and enduring dynamics of interaction (bridging, bargaining, fissuring, and fragmenting) and, unfortunately, of conflict, genocide, and trauma, sometimes on a catastrophic scale, as in the case of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire.

The Supercontinent of Eurasia and the Imperial Politics of Its Peripheries This puzzle of how peaceful or war-prone regional formations emerge is particularly relevant for the Eurasian continent. Here, developmental and participatory forms of regionalism coexisted with hegemonic regional groupings throughout the twentieth century. This continent, along with subSaharan Africa, also holds the world’s largest concentration of unresolved armed conflict and organized violence. And nowhere is the rationale for using the imperial lens to examine regional politics more relevant than here, where several land empires have been battling for centuries and where these legacies continue to shape ongoing insecurity, whether in eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, or the Middle East. One major outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic is that there has been a slowly emerging process of

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deglobalization, including a growing chorus of voices advocating shorter, less-globalized supply chains. But regardless how far this deglobalization proceeds, the call for politics and economies to be regionally wired will only intensify. And China’s various regional initiatives may become particularly important for the continent as a whole. It is also important to understand the regional contours of connectivity on the continent in the context of this moment of shifting geopolitical rivalries and concurrent, albeit shallow, geopolitical accommodations. Against this backdrop, this book argues that the regional fabric binding neighboring middle-sized powers and smaller states is an imperial legacy. It also holds that this regional fabric will be consequential for the great-power reshuffling in this century. The nature of the regional connectivity among small and medium-sized powers will be important in determining whether the greatpower rivalries will result in more of the same, repeating old patterns and recreating old great-power habits of regional fracture, or whether a more qualitative and deeply structural transformation of the world system will begin to take place. How will China’s rise affect the contours of the world order, if at all, and how will it impact armed conflicts, large and small, and other issues of global governance? Regional fracture is an instrument that the greater powers have habitually used to control and manage their imperial peripheries and “spheres of influence” following their formal decline as empires. Whether this pattern repeats itself is now contingent on the ability of smaller states and medium-sized powers to come together in somewhat autonomous regional groupings to break the cycle. Indeed, the Eurasian continent represents the promise and the perils of our global future. It has long been considered central to world economy and geopolitics, dating back to Halford Mackinder’s (1861–1947) writings on geopolitics and geostrategy (Nalbandov 2016; Giragosian 2018). The continent is now viewed with hope and trepidation. It has dominated global political history for centuries. It drove exploration to the New World and the Industrial Revolution (Calder 2019). It has also been the site of the rise and fall of multiple empires over the past millennia. Importantly, this continent was the heart of the physical infrastructure and social networks that drove slavery and exploitation beyond its shores. And it was networks emanating from Eurasia that pushed the diffusion of statehood as an organizational form and a political entity, giving rise to territorially bounded bureaucratic statehood. The spread of statehood as a way of organizing political life has shaped contemporary modes of national governance. At the same time, the



The Neighborhood Effect 7

continent remains rife with dangerous divisions and persistent fault lines that, if left unchecked, could sap its potential global economic and political power moving forward: Eurasia, as we shall see, is in the throes of historic transition. Despite its geographic coherence, epitomized by the lack of major physical barriers separating Europe and Asia, together with important cultural continuities, the sprawling continent was long Balkanized into a maze of conflicting jurisdictions. (Calder 2019, 1)

Calder proceeds to caution that connectivity through infrastructure and institutions will determine whether the supercontinent can overcome its vulnerabilities to realize its economic and political potential. Understanding the regional fabric of areas conventionally considered peripheral and marginal in world politics, therefore, is crucial for building and managing greater connectivity in Eurasia. The comparative study of the regional fabric of such peripheral spaces over time is essential to building an inclusive and expansive understanding of Eurasian connectivity. Despite its formal decline in the twentieth century, imperialism shaped this continent into a core-periphery order (Buzan and Lawson 2015). It stratified relations between the hegemonic, great, medium, and small powers (Cooley 2005). Structural inequalities persisted between the states, metropoles, and cores of former empires, on the one hand, and their peripheries, on the other. The relations of influence that run between them, in the form of developmental assistance, military alliances, and proxy wars, to name a few, continue to shape the contours of the political economy outside of the industrialized world. Conventional definitions of empire do little to capture these ongoing inequalities and political hierarchies. Tilly (1997) expresses skepticism about the perceived decline of empire in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse; he asks whether the requiem was premature and whether the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) might not be considered alternative imperial designs. Tilly goes on to argue that “we should avoid the smug assumption that empires fail simply because they generally adopt unviable forms of rules” (2) and points out that historically, empires have been quite durable. Tilly defines empire as a large composite polity linked to a central power

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by indirect rule. He then highlights the military and fiscal control applied by the imperial core over its peripheries. In cases of indirect rule, empires offer particular and distinct military and fiscal compacts to their clients. Such differential contracting to its peripheries (Nexon and Wright 2007) works to prevent collective mobilization among the peripheries against the imperial core. Tilly (1997) also highlights the power of intermediaries, usually the elites on the imperial peripheries, who assure compliance with, tribute to, and military collaboration with the center. The lens of empire is highly relevant to the study of contemporary politics on the Eurasian continent, but a more dynamic definition may be more useful to that end. Concepts such as Russia’s “near abroad” and “Eurasianism,” and Turkey’s “Ottoman sphere” (Cagaptay 2020), understood as the “privileged interests” of these states, continue to reflect the persistence of imperial imagery, reasserting it anew in the post-Cold War period (Torbakov 2017). Perhaps the most vivid examples of such imperial imagery among governing elites translating into concrete foreign policy outcomes are the Russian incursions into eastern Ukraine and its Crimea annexation in 2014, as well as Turkey’s entry into Syria in 2019. Less visible, but equally imperial, is the deployment of geo-economic tools (Blackwill and Harris 2017) by former empires to coerce smaller states. In some cases, shared imperial history catalyzes such transactions, while in others, that shared history creates friction. The conditions under which such imperial pressures are negotiated depend on the ways in which smaller states relate to their immediate neighbors and regional neighborhoods (Ohanyan 2015; Ohanyan 2021). Strong neighborhood ties and foreign policy coordination are key to providing smaller states the ability to push back against or to develop better negotiating positions relative to hegemonic and formerly imperial powers. This has been the case for the Baltics in the post-Cold War period, discussed later in this book, as well as for parts of Latin America vis-à-vis the United States in the twentieth century (Ohanyan 2015). Against this backdrop, the more dynamic definition of empires offered by Motyl (1997) is particularly helpful for the Eurasian context, which includes modern forms of imperial politics. Motyl’s approach is distinctive because it treats the core-periphery relationship as varied and casts empires within a family of similar political units of multiethnic entities, such as multinational dictatorial states, ethnoterritorial federations, and multinational nondictatorial states. Motyl defines empires as having culturally distinct and often territorially bound cores and administrative units, as well as a



The Neighborhood Effect 9

dictatorial and coercive relationship between the elites in the core and the elites on the periphery. This definition leaves the door open to the possibility that internal democratization within the regimes in the core or at the periphery can become a catalyst to adjust, change, and renegotiate the relationship between the core and the periphery. Armenia’s relationship with Russia after its democratic breakthrough in 2018 (Ohanyan 2020b; Ohanyan and Kopalyan 2022) is a case in point. The new government, having led a mass-scale nonviolent disobedience campaign, came to power in a wave of public legitimacy, which enhanced its bargaining power relative to its hegemonic and neo-imperial patron, Russia. The regional fracture theory elaborated in the Eurasian context calls for unpacking the politics on the peripheries, capturing the range of their regional politics from fracture to resilience. Motyl’s emphasis on the cultural distinction between the peripheries and the core is also useful in analyzing the regional politics of the peripheries. And yet his approach to core-periphery relations, while cognizant of the cultural distinctness and territorial boundedness of the peripheries, is flexible: he allows that some level of territorial boundedness is key to understanding peripheries but recognizes that in contiguous Eurasian empires, in contrast to overseas empires, culturally distinct groups were not always territorially bounded. This heightened their peripheral, minority status within empires, along with the associated security risks. Therefore, the core-periphery imperial relationships analyzed in this work have both a geographic dimension (for example, the Armenian population concentrated in the Ottoman empire’s eastern provinces of Eastern Anatolia) and an institutional one (Armenians as a confessional minority scattered throughout the Ottoman empire, with varied levels of population density around the Ottoman territory).

The Argument: The Neighborhood Effect Over Time and Space Allow me here to provide a basic outline of the book’s structure, while also elaborating on the core arguments of the book. More detailed definitions of the core concepts will be developed in chapter 2. At this point, suffice it to say that the neighborhood effect refers to the nature of regional connectivity, studied at the imperial peripheries as well as in more contemporary formations within the Westphalian state system. As such, it is conceptualized as both a regional mechanism of political existence (diplomatic, military,

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The Neighborhood Effect

and economic) and a constitutive structure in the world system. Viewed as a mechanism, as a process, it refers to the ability of actors, both state and non-state, to engage with their contiguous units. Viewed as a structure, it emphasizes the coherence of units, organizations of various types, as constitutive regional systems in a given geographic area, be that a past imperial periphery or a contemporary region. This conceptual distinction between the two, however, should not obscure their mutually constitutive nature in contemporary regional politics. Much of the scholarship on comparative regionalism, however, views regions primarily as structures rather than as mechanisms or processes. Hameiri (2013) argues that the diversity of definitions of regionalism as structures has prevented seeing regional engagement as a process and has reduced it to types of institutional forms, measured by such things as the density of regional institutions and levels of regional integration. Seeing regionalism as a process, Hameiri further explains, allows us to identify empirical cases of regional engagement in varied political settings, both imperial and Westphalian. Such an approach allows us to focus on key moments of change and, hence, to trace long-term historical processes. As a process, regional engagement as regional fracture, for example, is well captured by how the successive authorities in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ottoman empire deployed Kurdish paramilitary groups to suppress the Christian, mostly Armenian, communities in Eastern Anatolia. This strategy of regional fracturing of a periphery, while serving short-term tactical goals for the imperial center, culminated in the empire’s genocidal violence against its Armenian and other Christian minority subjects (Morris and Ze’evi 2019; Klein 2011; Bloxham 2005). The Habsburg empire, meanwhile, while successful at building resilient regional peripheries elsewhere, ended up perpetuating the regional fault lines in the Bosnian province that it controlled, first de facto and then, after annexing the province from the Ottoman empire in 1908, de jure. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, particularly the Bosnian war, raged in these same terrains, largely reflecting the imperial legacies of regional fracture, as discussed in chapter 4. Chapter 2 addresses methods and presents the key dimensions of regional connectivity, ranging from fracture to resilience. The concept development offers a transhistorical framework for explaining the politically constructed nature of regions. Systems theory is used for this purpose, delineating such regions as systems and structures. Importantly, in order for regions to function as systems, connections and interactions between their constituent



The Neighborhood Effect 11

units are essential. It is this interaction and connectivity, the mechanisms of regional engagement, that give the political regions their systemic features. The framework of regional connectivity, the neighborhood effect, is applied in the empirical chapters on the Habsburg empire (chapter 4), the Ottoman empire (chapter 5), and the Russian empire (chapter 6), in order to develop profiles of their specific peripheries as regional systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The regional profiles of imperial peripheries are examined in terms of the nature of societal connectivity in multiethnic imperial domains. Chapter 7 then discusses the cases of contemporary armed conflict, probing a relationship between the state of societal ties as imperial legacies, on the one hand, and the severity of conflicts and the time lag of their onset after the Cold War, on the other. The civic depth of regional connectivity under certain imperial conditions as a historically path-dependent phenomenon is discussed in the context of the “peaceful rebirth” of the Baltics and central European countries after the Cold War. In contrast, frayed regional connectivity, resulting from regional fracture under certain imperial conditions of connectivity, is analyzed in connection with the violent unraveling and immediate post-Cold War onset of specific armed conflicts, such as the war in Bosnia and the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. In short, each empirical chapter on the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires focuses on one of their fractured peripheries, which have become contemporary terrains of armed conflict and instability that are examined in chapter 7. This reframing allows us to show regional fracture as a historical legacy and assess its impact on contemporary armed conflict and intractability. This book argues that regions as systems and mechanisms of political engagement predate the state-centric system of world politics. Much of the scholarship on comparative regionalism has been developed within this statecentric framework, focusing on region formation, mostly after World War II. The methodology of regional connectivity (fracture/resilience) developed in this work, in contrast, illuminates that connectivity under conditions of formal empires as well as nation-states. This delineation between imperial and Westphalian (state-centric) approaches to regional studies opens new frontiers for regional studies. It is a new method for conceptualizing, assessing, and measuring the regional level of analysis, which have constituted persistent gaps in the scholarship on international relations (Volgy et al., 2017). Indeed, developing this greater variability in conceptualizing the regional fabric of world politics adds to the ongoing efforts to more effectively

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The Neighborhood Effect

integrate the regional level of analysis into theories of international relations and comparative politics. The appreciation of the regional as both a mechanism and a structure broadens and deepens the study of regionalism within international relations. The treatment of regions primarily as structures, which currently dominates international relations scholarship, obscures the range of instances of regional politics in spaces that, while unintegrated in the formal sense, still possess significant regional activity and regional politics. On the other hand, an appreciation of the regional as a political mechanism of engagement reveals aspects of politics that are not formally institutionalized but that are manifest in region-wide engagement. Studies of regional activities in settings of low regional integration tend to view them as negative regional security complexes, driven primarily by criminality and other negative dimensions of regional life. But a deeper unpacking of the regional as a mechanism calls for recognizing a broader spectrum of regional actors and activities, which emerge in contexts of full and formal regional integration as well as in settings where they coexist with corrosive forms of regional politics.

Imperial and Westphalian Regionalism At this point it may be useful to delineate the neighborhood effect in the context of the Eurasian politics of formal imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside the discussion of this effect within the nation-state system that superseded that imperialism. The comparative treatment of the neighborhood effect over time and space helps to reveal how regional power hierarchies (Lemke 2002) and their imperial roots shape contemporary outcomes in regional projects. The continuity of the neighborhood effect over time, through the twentieth century in particular, highlights the fact that the regional fabric of politics is hardly a novelty in world politics: although the actors and drivers of regional engagement have changed, mostly in response to broader systemic geopolitical transformations, the basic regional contours of politics and regional relationships have remained as imperial legacies. As Fawcett (2004) acknowledges, “regionalism has always been with us. Regions as empires, spheres of influence, or just powerful states and their allies have dominated in different international systems” (436). Fawcett’s point that regional forms of politics have always existed in world politics is important. This work, however, challenges her argument that regional politics can be studied most effectively only after the end of World War I and the formation of the League of Nations. In this book, I



The Neighborhood Effect 13

advocate for a deeper historical dive, utilizing the imperial lens as a strategy of regional analysis. As discussed previously, the scholarship on comparative regionalism gravitates towards studies that treat regional politics as a relatively recent institutional innovation within the nation-state system. The debates in this context have centered on the analytical independence of regions as political categories (Ohanyan 2015). This book broadens and deepens the study of regional fabric within world politics by presenting a historical and comparative analysis of regional systems that have operated both as imperial peripheries and as contemporary regional systems between nation-states; in other words, as, respectively, both imperial and Westphalian regionalisms. They share a range of similarities in terms of how regions are made and unmade by the political behaviors and power projections of various state and non-state actors, usually over a particular geographic space. Both types of regional formation are politically constructed, but they are shaped by different types of agency, with local actors being more pronounced under imperial than Westphalian conditions. As such, the two types of region generate different causal claims for further research, the great-power effect on regional conflict or coordination being one effect among many. The distinction between imperial and so-called Westphalian regionalisms reveals the regional fabric as constitutive and preexistent for contemporary states, rather than as an aftereffect of twentieth-century nation-state politics. Fawcett (2004), for instance, highlights how regionalism has flourished in those international environments where regions have been freer to assert their own identity and purpose, and that for weaker states, regionalism has provided an access point into a global economy and world order in which smaller states are marginalized. But Fawcett maintains a skeptical position on the prospects of regional politics when the organizations of regional engagement remain “weak or new” (439). The theory of regional fracture developed in the present work, and the neighborhood effect around which it is constructed, challenge the following assumptions: (1) that regionalism is evolutionary; (2) that it is always integrative; (3) that it is ideally driven and expressed in formal institutions; (4) that it is secondary to nation-state formation; and (5) that there is a clear separation between governmental and non-state tracks in regional politics.

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The Neighborhood Effect

The distinction between imperial and Westphalian regionalisms, while expanding the historical scope of our analysis, also offers a framework for recognizing imperial instincts and the drivers of the contemporary forms of regionalism that dominate world politics, while uncovering the relationships between them. Transcending the state-centric models and moving towards centerperiphery relations exposes the ways in which great-power interactions are mutually constituted with the “minor” power regions. Taking a long view allows us to identify the mechanisms of this co-constitution (Barkawi and Laffey 2006) and the persistent path dependencies and legacies of such imperial ties on contemporary world politics. The neighborhood effect offers an understanding of regions as networks of ties of various density and structure that reflect and shape political action in a given space. Against this backdrop, it is less important to delineate specific geographic borders in a given region, attempting to map out who is in and who is out, and far more useful instead to study the mechanisms of regional engagement over time, imperial or not, while identifying the broader institutional contexts in which such regional connections become wired and frayed, made and fractured. The distinction between imperial and Westphalian forms of regionalism builds on the vibrant scholarship in international relations, which has been calling for greater awareness of the imperial roots of world politics (Halperin and Palan 2015; Barkawi and Laffey 2006; Shirk 2016; Barkawi and Laffey 2002). Indeed, empires themselves operated as regional formations of sorts, mostly predatory and extractive (Acemoglu and Robinson 2013) but still pulling together, by the sword or the word, diverse ethno-religious groups scattered across vast geographical terrains. This study of the neighborhood effect seeks to trace the value of regionally wired connections over time while also probing the political and economic costs they entailed. In an effort to decolonize regionalism, this work calls into question the generalist assertions that all types of wars, great-power confrontations, and smaller conflagrations result from the same drivers and emerge from similar incentives (de Mesquita 1990). The comparative historical analysis of regional ties offers a more nuanced approach to the study of contemporary armed conflict, one that recognizes regional specificities, particularly when it comes to imperial legacies such as regional fracture in conflict regions (Ohanyan 2018b). This work illuminates the agency of imperial peripheries and contemporary regional security complexes, demonstrating how they condition and shape the behavior of their respective centers and metropoles.



The Neighborhood Effect 15

The added value of the imperial lens on regional studies also relates to the issue of the ontological independence of regions, so widely debated within contemporary regional studies scholarship (Ohanyan 2015). The question of whether contemporary regions have independent agency in world politics, or are mere subjects to great-power politics, has been central to this debate. Regions with clearly defined contours, marked by geographic boundaries or institutional membership in regional organizations, are often viewed as recognizable regions in world politics. Even the conflict-ridden Middle East, with its plethora of regional organizations, is considered as a distinct regional entity: indeed, the presence of regional organizations is often considered, erroneously, to be a marker of regional governance (Ohanyan 2015). To reiterate: by introducing the imperial lens, I am asking whether border delimitation is a necessary marker of regional identity. Could a region with porous borders in fact be more resilient in the long run? Can a politically poorly delimited region be nonetheless highly networked and endowed with deep roots and legacies of regional social capital, thereby enjoying greater prospects of regional resiliency? While the scholarship of comparative regionalism calls for clear boundary demarcations in order to recognize the ontological independence of regions, studies in social capital point to regionally organized connectivity and engagement, which usually transcend the perceived territorial boundaries of a region. Networked politics, also prevalent in regional politics, perpetually pushes against borders and limits (Ohanyan 2015). This work rests on the paradox of this nexus. It recognizes that boundaries and borders can and do sketch the contours of regional engagement, creating a predictable framework for regional praxis. At the same time, it also embraces the power resting in a connection, social or institutional. A resilient neighborhood effect emerges in regions endowed with regional social capital. It flourishes in spaces conducive to recurrent networking that can replenish the power of regional connections and the trust and reciprocity of interaction. Rather than judging the region by the strength of its borders or formalized ties, this approach evaluates them by their ability to function on a regional basis in a way that is recurrent and reciprocal, attributes more likely to emerge in deeply and diversely networked communities, whether state or imperial. The delineation between imperial and Westphalian regional politics shows that regionalism is neither evolutionary nor integrative and that formal institutions are only one of many forms of organizing regional politics.

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The Neighborhood Effect

This revised framework sheds new light on the processes of regional formation and fracture over time, particularly within the hierarchy of imperial governance. Such an approach is also essential for unpacking the security implications of regional fracture. Without understanding the regional dynamics on the imperial peripheries, some of the ongoing protracted conflicts will elude resolution, which is covered in the policy implications section of this book (chapter 8).

Theoretical Implications The unified treatment of the neighborhood effect, under imperial and Westphalian conditions, offers specific theoretical implications, which I present below: (1) regions-before-states; (2) the old “new” regionalism; and (3) back to the future.

I present each of these themes in the context of the relevant scholarly literature, in order to integrate the neighborhood effect framework into the existing scholarship on international relations and comparative regionalism. Together, these themes make the case for a regional theory based on the neighborhood effect, which can better address the agency of local and regional actors in great-power competitions between empires and hegemonic players in the modern state system.

The Regions-Before-States Paradigm As discussed above, this book probes whether the imperial experiences of peripheries have in any way determined the political and organizational chances of such regions to (re)create their regional levels of engagement within the state system. One of the dominant frameworks in contemporary comparative regional studies treats most forms of regional engagement and institutionalized regionalism as an extension of state-level politics. The conventional state-centric narrative, emphasizing the dominance of great powers in shaping regional politics, makes the agency of regions in world politics appear null and void. By incorporating the imperial lens into studies of comparative regionalism, however, this work challenges the perspectives according to which the regional dimension of world politics is an extension of state and state-centric forms of politics. Krause (2003) and Krause and



The Neighborhood Effect 17

Williams (1996), for instance, note the tendency in contemporary scholarship to view the regional as an extension of state-level politics, citing Buzan’s work on regional politics, which argues that those legitimate states “that are firm in their own definition, and can project their own inner coherence and stability out into the community of states” (Buzan 1991, 176), are significant for region formation. This work joins the few voices, including those of Krause and Williams, pointing out that the reverse is true: the state of the regional fabric and the structure of the regional system (often peripheral in formerly imperial structures) predetermine and shape the patterns and mechanisms of state-building that follow. State weakness as an obstacle to regionalism has been explained by various factors. Weak states lack the administrative capacities required to generate and sustain regional levels of governance and engagement (Ohanyan 2015). Weak states tend to be top-heavy, with decentralized structures of public administration being largely a mirage. Weak states are also vulnerable to regime change, which means the domestic stability needed to sustain regional governance is lacking. Importantly, weak states, particularly the ones that are authoritarian, shy away from regional groupings that might create incentives for openness and democratization, thereby weakening the prospects of regime survival in such states (Lewis 2018; Roy 2008). More broadly, genuine and functional region-building in the developing world is treated with a heavy dose of skepticism by scholars because of this state weakness problem (Ayoob 1995). Indeed, the conviction that state coherence is a necessary ingredient for regional coordination or engagement is pervasive in the literature on security studies and comparative regional studies. Krause (2003), in contrast, argues that regardless of the state’s level of maturity or coherence, domestic politics matters for security-building at the regional level, and that the two are intertwined. Statehood is traditionally defined and analyzed as a political organization that has succeeded, at least nominally, in curtailing, controlling, and, ideally, extinguishing violence as a political tool. However, as Krause points out, while the institutions of organized violence have indeed succeeded in creating bureaucratic and administrative state structures, that is only true in the European experience of state-building. In most of the regions of the developing world, it was the advanced industrialized North that ended up subsidizing and supporting the military institutions of the new states, thereby removing any incentives for military institutions to bargain and negotiate with their citizenry—a process that, in the European experience,

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The Neighborhood Effect

moderated and modernized their statehood. Against this backdrop, Krause states that regional order-building, similar to domestic state-building, is a political project. He clarifies: There is no qualitative difference between building security domestically and building it regionally, for each project strives to reduce the risk of violence in the economic, social and political relations between people and groups. (105)

One of the most important implications of Krause’s work is the rationale it provides for understanding and nourishing local institutions of peaceful coexistence between communities (Shadian 2010). As I describe in the empirical chapters on the Ottoman and Russian empires, this process often comes under direct attack from the mechanisms of regional fracture practiced by the imperial center. Moreover, grassroots initiatives toward peacebuilding are viewed as extras, merely “nice-to-haves,” in the peacebuilding literature. The state-centric bias in peacebuilding is partly explained by current political predicaments, which do in fact revolve around the political elites in conflict states. But peace processes built only around engagement with such political elites, particularly in the case of authoritarian states, are rife with hypocrisy and pretense: everyone involved in building peace systems in such regions behaves as if the governing elites were driven chiefly by national interests and the needs of their broader communities, as opposed to the narrow interests of regime survival (Ohanyan 2015; Ohanyan 2018c; Ohanyan 2020a). Chapter 8 goes further into discussions of the policy implications of this point. While state weakness is an important driver of regional insecurity, the regional roots of state weakness are also significant. Understanding the quality of the regional fabric that underlies anarchy as well as that which underlies an imperial hierarchy, the subject of this study, is therefore a step towards unpacking the regional roots of state weakness. Wolff (2011) has called for regional-level analysis of state failure in order to fully capture the factors that can drive state failure as a global security problem. He defines state failure as the inability of the state to fully control the instruments of violence or claim empirical sovereignty over the territory recognized in its legal sovereignty. “Regionalizing” this understanding of state failure allows us to capture the intrusions of the great powers into regions, and the associated state weaknesses. It helps to make visible the transnational/transregional



The Neighborhood Effect 19

movement of arms and criminal networks, transnational political mobilization, and transnational state suppression, to name a few (Wolff 2011). This regional approach to state failure, then, challenges the explanation of ethnic conflict through a security dilemma induced by state failure. Instead, it is the institutional weakness of states born into the postimperial systems in various regions, perpetuated by regional fracture, that causes, catalyzes, or facilitates ethnic cleavages and their mobilization into conflict formations. These issues are discussed in chapters 3 and 7.

The Old “New” Regionalism The second goal in exploring the neighborhood effect in Eurasia is to capture historical continuities and ruptures in comparative regional and security studies, as discussed earlier. The role of local actors is critical for probing some of these historical effects. This scholarship, largely operating within a state-centric framework, has been on the defensive for much of the twentieth century (Shadian 2010). A fluidity in the definition of regions and a persistent failure to see regions as political systems has been central to the academic discourse for much of its existence in the aftermath of World War II. Realist analysis has largely dismissed the agency and independence of regions when it comes to outcomes in world politics (Kelly 2007). Liberalism’s emphasis on institutions, meanwhile, particularly on regional institutions, has brought up questions about the significance of regional institutions to the fostering of regional cooperation between states. And constructivism has contributed to this by examining the role of ideas, identities, and values in forging coherent regions. What matters for the specific goals of this work is the attention provided to non-state actors in comparative regionalism. The distinction between “hard” (state-led) and “soft” regionalism has highlighted the types of regional engagement that bubble up spontaneously from civil society actors, i.e. from below. All sides of this debate have veered towards using regional-level institutions as a measurable matrix of regional engagement, but the scholarship on “new” regionalism has offered a new narrative. Recognizing the role of non-state civil society actors in driving regionalization processes, this new direction in comparative regionalism has raised additional questions in the debate. The scholarship on “new” regionalism has inquired about whether this “new” regionalism could function independently and flourish in settings where there was no support from above, and whether “new” regionalism was a political possibility in authoritarian societies with limited domestic

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The Neighborhood Effect

engagement in civil society. Still, the distinction between deliberate policymaking by political elites and more spontaneous and grassroots region-wide engagement has added great nuance to the understanding of regions and their impact on world politics. The imperial lens and the treatment of the neighborhood effect over time raise questions about how “new” the role of local actors and non-state groups has in fact been in forging regional links. A comparative study of the neighborhood effect under hierarchies of largely imperial world politics, and under the anarchy of contemporary state systems, allows us to discern the role of non-state actors and political organizations at the grassroots level over a much longer time period than comparative regional studies allows. The imperial peripheries in Eurasia, particularly of the Ottoman and the Russian empires, reveal a rich diversity of local actors that cooperated and engaged at the regional level. Largely appearing on imperial peripheries and in imperial borderlands, this regional engagement took different forms. New research by Berberian (2019) has revealed how Armenian revolutionaries crisscrossed the Ottoman, Russian, and Iranian empires, circulating ideas and ideologies and making a direct impact on the revolutions in those empires. From constitutional assemblies of ethno-religious groups in the Ottoman empire to confessional authorities in the Russian empire and professional associations in the Habsburg empire, there is a rich diversity of local actors that carved out regional spaces of political activity. Against this backdrop, the “new” regionalism in contemporary regional studies requires a broader analysis in order for us to fully appreciate the regional politics of local actors, often the imperial minorities, before the rise and consolidation of the nation-state system in Eurasia. A comparison of the regional fabric in hierarchic systems with the regional fabric in anarchic systems demonstrates that the regional fabric of politics has vacillated between fracture and resiliency, the two poles of the continuum of the neighborhood effect discussed in this work. It also shows that consent and coercion, identified as dominant drivers of regional engagement in comparative regional studies (Fawcett 2004), tell only parts of the story. The regional motivations of local actors on the imperial peripheries included, in addition to consent and coercion, the necessity of coping with tough imperial neighborhoods. Both consent and coercion assume a clear and recognized agency of the state, which could participate in regional projects either because it was induced by hegemonic players or because it had the political freedom to do so. The study of imperial peripheries shows



The Neighborhood Effect 21

that regional engagement on the imperial peripheries helped to compensate for the administrative weakness of the imperial fringe and the governance problems arising from centralization attempts at the imperial center. “Coerced consent” captures this dynamic more accurately than the conceptually neat “coercion or consent” that is articulated in the literature.

Back to the Future In terms of theory and policy, this study is consequential when it comes to the prospects of multilaterally supported and multilayer regional structures of governance within the emergent post-American world order in Eurasia (Ikenberry 2019; Paul 2016). This historical, comparative treatment of regional connections and regional-level political activity—the neighborhood effect—matters at this particular juncture in world politics. With the American retreat, or self-sabotage of the rules-based world order it had created (Ikenberry 2019), several scenarios are possible moving forward. A rudimentary architecture of regional governance, albeit of varying organizational density and political leverage, already exists in various parts of the world. The stress on the structures of global governance since the end of the Cold War has also been formidable (Weiss and Wilkinson 2019). And yet, despite this gap between the supply and demand for global governance around the world, it is not a given that structures of regional governance will be able, or allowed, to fill the void. Regions will be central moving forward, regardless of whether the current institutions of global governance hold fast or are replaced by new ones, supported by emerging powers (Crocker, Hampson, and Aall 2007). At one end of the spectrum of such possibilities is the strengthening of regional structures of governance, which can fill the void left by global institutions. This is possible in such varied areas as peacekeeping, the environment, and global public health. At the other end of the spectrum is the possibility of regions being dominated by regional powers, seeking to dictate and impose their interests and priorities onto smaller states. Shifting alliances, bandwagoning, hedging, or wedging (Crawford 2003) will result from the restructuring of polarity in world politics. Whether a multiregional international system will dominate or be replaced by rising regional powers remains to be seen. Some argue that the possibility of greater conflict and friction cannot be ruled out (Nolte 2010). Others allow for a more peaceful path in emerging multipolarity. China’s rise and its push for connectivity on the Eurasian continent via its Belt and Road Initiative (Calder 2019), for

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example, hold the promise of providing a constraining force against rising regional powers, such as increasingly authoritarian Turkey and Russia, which have historically clashed on the continent of Eurasia. The study of regional fabric over time contributes to the analysis of the possible future of global/regional world orders. The neighborhood effect is a variable ranging from regional fracture to regional resilience (as opposed to the more dominant “integration”), and the state of this neighborhood connectivity will shape the choices of regional powers moving within this emergent multipolarity. Elsewhere, I have shown how Russia engages in regional fracturing as a strategy to maintain influence within the postCommunist space and the Middle East (Ohanyan 2018b; Ohanyan 2018c). I have also pointed out that in the long term, such a strategy carries its own risks. Fractured regions are short-term levers but also long-term liabilities for such regional powers. As a liability, fractured regions “are neighborhoods with diminished regional engagement, and limited trade flows into the region: these conditions undermine much-needed governance processes” (Ohanyan 2018b, 5). The Kremlin has learned the strategic limits of applying regional fracture to project global power: Turkey has challenged Russia’s presence in the Middle East and North Africa and, most recently, in Russia’s historic backyard in the South Caucasus, where Turkey backed the Azerbaijani military offensive against Armenian forces in the de facto state of Nagorno-Karabakh, deepening its presence in the region. That Turkey-backed Azerbaijani offensive caught Russia off guard. The Kremlin ultimately managed to broker a cease-fire, while also introducing its peacekeepers into Nagorno-Karabakh.1 But a stronger Turkish presence in the region was the price that it had to pay. In short, regional fracture as a foreign policy tool is strategically limited. Russia has already discovered this, and Turkey will do so soon. In the attempt to order and compare regional powers (Lemke 2002; Prys 2010; Nolte 2010), central factors to consider include their foreign policies in their immediate neighborhoods. Fractured regions can constrain regional powers by nourishing state weakness and shallow governance around it. The resultant fragmentation of power resources inside states challenges the external hegemon to maintain complete and predictable control over such regional states (Ohanyan 2018c, 2021). One manifestation of state weakness is the low legitimacy of political elites in states, which they compensate for by soliciting political patrons from the outside and often pulling external powers into the region (Ohanyan 2018c; Katz 2018). In addition, some



The Neighborhood Effect 23

have shown that such elites have learned to play off one geopolitical patron against another (Orenstein 2019), occasionally failing to comply with their patrons’ desires and pushing back when possible (Cooley 2014; Williams, Lobell, and Jesse 2012). The agency of smaller states, particularly if they are able to coordinate, can act as a break against regional power ambitions. Importantly, by demonstrating the variations in regional fabric across time and space, this study underscores the great diversity of political action and actors at regional levels. Departing from “regional integration” as the desired destiny in regional politics, this work instead highlights regional resiliency as a more likely and perhaps more desirable outcome in contexts of geopolitical polarization. The concept of regional resiliency highlights local agency in building regional connections, which do not always align with the preferences of their respective political elites. Using regional fracture and resiliency, the concept of the neighborhood effect allows us to offer a state-society model to explain regional engagement in a multipolar world. Rather than treating state and society as two parallel tracks of regionalism (“hard” versus “soft” regionalism, respectively), this work demonstrates the mutually constitutive and historically conditioned nature of the state and society in terms of drivers, capacities, and political willingness in their regional engagements. Whether the future looks like an unfettered and neo-feudal clash of regional hegemons or a multipolar and institutionally embedded regional governance is highly contingent on the nature of regional connections in smaller states and their societies in currently fractured regions. Developing new frameworks with which to classify, compare, and contrast the “regional powerhood” is a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition for this discourse. Prys (2010) has pointed out that academics and politicians often take for granted that regional powers will police and govern their neck of the woods, without explaining gaps in those expectations. Taking such ownership over their region can mean outright attacks on and exploitation of smaller players. But such regional ownership can also manifest as support for regional institutions and regional structures of governance. Thus far, regional powers have played a variety of roles (Prys 2010). They have facilitated regional politics (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990; Hurrell 2005) but have also blocked economic institutionalization attempts (Grieco 1999; Gruber 2000). Some have also contributed to structures of global governance and international institutions (Pedersen 2002; Narlikar and Tussie 2004; Nolte 2010). Distinguishing regional powers from one another has remained an elusive goal

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The Neighborhood Effect

in the academic scholarship, yet it is a fruitful research pathway in the context of exploring the prospects and perils of regional governance in the post-American world.

The Neighborhood Effect beyond Eurasia In this section I examine whether the scope of this argument about the neighborhood effect is specific to Eurasia, or whether it can be generalized beyond those political and geographic boundaries.2 This book does focus primarily on the southwestern conflict beltway on the Eurasian continent. However, the multilevel framework of the imperial legacies of regional fracture/resiliency developed here can be extended to other parts of the world. The formal imperialism and colonialism of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries and the global politics of the Cold War are two major forces that have shaped world politics for centuries and will continue to shape it for centuries to come. Both of these forces extended beyond Eurasia, of course, with significant differences in the way they played out on parts of the African continent, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia. The African continent and Latin America are both key to extending the neighborhood effect framework to explain contemporary security. Latin America is usually analyzed for its peaceful resolution of territorial disputes throughout the twentieth century, with the end of the Cold War having direct implications for Central American conflicts. Africa, meanwhile (particularly sub-Saharan Africa), stands out for its high level of armed conflict since decolonization, particularly since the end of the Cold War. Both regions had been subjected to colonialism, albeit expressed differently and with varied effects. I would like now to sketch out the theoretical implications of this study on these two cases. The African continent, in particular, is important in thinking about generalizing the neighborhood effect beyond post-Communist Eurasia. The “scramble for Africa” gained full steam in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the period examined in this work. Indeed, the conceptual formulation of my research on the legacies of colonial styles of government on contemporary armed conflict emerged largely from the relevant scholarship on the African continent (Wig 2016; Blanton, Mason, and Athow 2001; Besley and Reynal-Querol 2014). In terms of conflict onset and severity, Africa had the most and the worst state-based conflicts (interstate or civil wars involving states) in the world for the period of 1946–2019. The steady increase in state-based violence peaked in the early 1990s (Uppsala



The Neighborhood Effect 25

Conflict Data Program),3 followed by a steady decline, then another uptick beginning in 2012. The end of the Cold War drastically weakened the external support for many proxy wars that occurred on that continent, but the level of conflict activity continued to remain high, reflecting the local agency in driving them. The extent to which the imperial legacies of regional connectivity, the neighborhood effect, can explain contemporary armed conflicts merits closer study. At this point, few obvious observations can be made. As reported in the relevant scholarship, there were overall differences in the late-nineteenthcentury colonial style of governance in Africa between the British, French, Portuguese, Italian, Belgian, and German colonies. Still, the overarching pattern of governance in Africa was one of indirect rule (Besley and ReynalQuerol 2014), designed to control the hinterland by co-opting traditional power structures into the colonial administration. As I discuss in chapter 3, the British and French forms of colonialism have played out differently in their effects on the existing societal fabric among the various ethnonational communities on the continent. The “unranked” and “ranked” colonial styles exercised, respectively, by the British and French colonizers (Blanton, Mason, and Athow 2001) both eroded societal connectivity. Even when some of the traditional power structures were strengthened, as was the case in the British colonies, the connectivity between ethno-national communities suffered. The signature British divide-and-conquer policies worked to reinforce bonding social capital within groups, but it did so at the expense of the bridges and connections among the various communities. The “ranked” system that the French ended up creating, meanwhile, entailed the obliteration of many traditional power structures in those colonies. Within the “unranked” system of ethnic stratification, practiced by the British, ethnic divisions overlapped with class divisions, with ethnicity becoming a way to obtain socioeconomic mobility within the system and to bargain with the colonizers. In contrast, the “ranked” system, practiced by the French, did not have a “cultural division of labor” (Blanton, Mason, and Athow 2001). Instead, a highly centralized administration was established in which existing tribal institutions were obliterated and new elites were trained to implement the centralized governance imposed by France. The relevant scholarship on this topic is rich in explanations of how colonial styles shaped the contemporary propensity for conflict. In the context of this research, it emerges that both the “ranked” and the “unranked” system dramatically weakened regional social connectivity. They did so by corroding

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any preexisting bridging social capital between the ethnic communities and diluting the existing bonding social capital within specific ethnic groups. The “scramble for Africa” created a geopolitical overlay over various regions within the continent. Having once established the political boundaries among themselves, however, the European colonizers then settled, overall, into a stable geopolitical cohabitation on the continent. The governance that the European colonizers set up in these regions was largely predatory, designed for maximum resource extraction, a state of affairs that was ignited in part by the industrialization that the European economies were undergoing at the time. Combined with eroded connectivity, the European colonialism in many parts of Africa created fractured regions into which the new African states were born during the decolonization period, with few institutional conditions upon which effective state-building might proceed. In the case of Latin America, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program for the period of 1946–2019 recorded the lowest levels of armed conflict in the world, although they did mirror the general global trends. There had been significant military conflicts in the nineteenth century (Centeno 2002), but they decreased dramatically in the twentieth century. With no separatist or ethnic conflicts, most of the instability emerged from territorial conflicts and boundary disputes, driven by interstate rivalries on various parts of the continent. Bolivia-Paraguay (1932–1935) and Peru-Ecuador (1941) were the two major twentieth-century interstate wars in Latin America (Battaglino 2012). Despite authoritarianism and persistent interstate rivalries, the continent has avoided the recurrent, large-scale cycles of armed conflict that have crippled many other regions around the world. While Central America was largely engulfed and dominated by the United States throughout the twentieth century, the end of the bipolarity of the Cold War contributed to the negotiated peace settlements that ended civil wars in Central America in the 1990s (Ohanyan 2015). All of these factors led many to refer to the continent as a “zone of peace” (Miller 2005; Kurtenbach 2019; Kacowicz 1998). While the depth and durability of the interstate and domestic peace there has been questioned, the overall consensus, that the states had succeeded in avoiding militarized international confrontation and civil wars, has held. Several theories have been developed to explain the relative peace on the South American continent in the twentieth century, many of them highlighting regional drivers. The regional waves of democratization in the late 1980s and the transitions from military to democratic rule in many states have been linked to the improved quality of peace on the continent



The Neighborhood Effect 27

(Kacowicz 1985; 2005). Overall, economic liberalization and openness and the growth of regional institutions have been used to explain the regionwide systemic transformations in interstate rivalries and rapprochements between the states. More specifically, Miller has highlighted the lack of ethnic conflicts and a better fit between nations and states than in other regions as a contributing factor for regional peace in South America in the twentieth century. Similarly, democratization, periods of militarization, and involved and regionalized mediation systems through regional organizations have also been connected to the management of territorial conflicts on the continent (Schenoni, Goertz, Owsiak, and Diehl 2020). In this case, the imperial legacies as applied to regional fracture/resiliency tell a different story to explain the contemporary patterns of conflict and coexistence. In contrast to much of Eurasia and the African continent, the states of South America gained early independence from their colonizers, at least formally. The period immediately following independence was indeed violent and militarized, as was the case in Africa, as well as in parts of contemporary Eurasia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, interethnic rivalries were lacking in this case. Inequality and socioeconomic factors, which often translated into ethnic outlets and interethnic communal clashes in some of the imperial politics in Eurasia, were expressed quite differently here. In addition to avoiding national mobilization and interethnic rivalries, many parts of Latin America also escaped the geopolitical contest and confrontation between the great powers of the day. While the continent lay under the neocolonial umbrella of Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century, the emerging overlay of influence from the United States, France, and Germany lacked the kind of politicized and militarized fabric exhibited on the Eurasian imperial frontiers. The fabric of societal connectivity within various subregional spaces on the Latin American continent was, therefore, detached from the geopolitical overlay over the continent. This is a key factor that positioned this continent towards regional resiliency throughout the twentieth century, partly explaining the durability of regional peace there, even when it fell short of full engagement between the governments and societies of previously rivalrous states. Specifically, in terms of patterns of social connectivity, by the end of the nineteenth century formal colonialism had given way to neocolonial influences by the industrialized US and European powers on the continent’s young states. With high inequality between regional elites and their

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societies, cleavages and contestations started to emerge vertically, between various social organizations and the mostly landed elite. As the economies opened to American and European capital, they were limited to exporting raw materials to feed industrialization in Europe and the United States. This process was largely lubricated by the political elites of these states, often at the expense of state sovereignty. These political and economic conditions formed the early foundations of the anti-global and anti-Western movements. But they also generated the push for regional cooperation to keep the United States at arm’s length. Indeed, the early experimentation with regional integration and regional diplomacy in Latin America was often a response to the geopolitical intrusion and overlay of the imposing neighbor to the north (Ohanyan 2015). Compared with the imperial peripheries of the Russian and Ottoman empires, social relations in Latin America involved the broader categories of race and class, as opposed to the much smaller ones of ethnicity and nationhood. Nation-building started to occur within the territorial boundaries of the young states. In fact, the Latin American context is increasingly appreciated as a demonstration of the politically constructed nature of nationalism, cultivated in parallel with state-formation processes in the early 1800s (Miller 2006). There is a growing recognition that ideologies of racial mixing and racialized state structures were consequential in the processes of nationbuilding and state formation in Latin America (Miller 2006; Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt 2003). However, the more general point—that Latin American nationalisms have been forces of inclusion, rather than of exclusion as has been the case in much of Eurasia—still holds (Hobsbawm 1995; Miller 2006). Here nationalism has remained a vehicle for emancipatory politics, whether by engaging the indigenous and black communities or economically marginalized farmers, within the increasingly globalized structures of the twentieth-century world economy. These patterns of state formation and nation-building have had very direct implications for social connectivity. Sabato (2018) explains that the early post-independence experiments with establishing republican governments and popular sovereignty created the foundations for democratization in these states. Sabato challenges the traditional historiography (see Ducey 2019), which disparages elections as farcical oligarchic affairs. Instead, Sabato documents the early rise of electoral politics and the practice of arming citizens. While the former established the civic traditions of grassroots participation in politics, the latter helped to disperse the coercive power of



The Neighborhood Effect 29

the state, which reached to the provinces from the capital cities. The “civic militiamen” enjoyed political rights and served on behalf of the population, bolstering the popular sovereignty being established in these early republican states. The early interfusion of electoral politics with civic but private coercive force worked to create regional power networks in towns and provincial centers (Ducey 2019) at the expense of the highly centralized power of the landed elites. Importantly, Sabato explains that these early political practices produced a deep and dense connectivity between and within various social groups in the states. Citing Sabato, Ducey (2019) writes that a type of associative fever swept the continent at that time. By the 1850s, there were more than 1,400 associations in Mexico alone. Artisans came together in mutual aid societies to advocate for the interests of workers and farmers. The rise of public opinion and the press and the explosion of cafés created profound and sweeping social capital that cut across socioeconomic lines, which then established the basis for autonomous popular participation as a counterbalance to the political elite and the governments. These specific patterns of balanced connectivity, and of bonding and bridging social capital across socioeconomic groups, established the kernels of civic nationalism and of the early communal institutions of self-help and governance. These dimensions of social connectivity have so far remained unrecognized when it comes to explaining the early experimentation with regionalism and democratization in Latin America. The application of the regional fracture/resilience approach, the neighborhood effect, in nineteenth-century Latin America can unlock new areas of research for explaining the successful management of militarized armed conflicts and rivalries on the continent throughout the twentieth century.

Conclusion The imperial legacies of regional politics are consequential for the dynamics of contemporary armed conflicts in parts of Eurasia, which erupted and reignited in the aftermath of the Cold War. Such imperial legacies of regional politics are also impactful for the prospects of strong regional governance, against the backdrop of weakening American support for a liberal, rulesbased world order. This study calls for a deeper dive within comparative regional studies, which has heretofore been heavily Euro-centric. The comparative historical analysis of the imperial peripheries in parts of Eurasia is a step in this direction.

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The policy implications of this work are numerous. As we debate the prospects of strong and participatory regional governance within the emergent post-American world order, it is necessary to understand the imperial legacies of contemporary regional politics. This work probes questions pertaining to the prospects of regional governance within the emergent multipolar world (dis)order. How different is Russia’s new zeal for creating regional organizations around its territorial orbits from the situation, say, in Latin America? Is the European Union’s regional resiliency compromised by Brexit or the pandemic? How should we view Turkey’s turn towards neo-Ottomanism—as a neighborly overture for regional governance, or a revanchist adventure pushing towards domination and expansion? In order to manage the insecurity and turbulence resulting from the emergent multipolarity on the Eurasian continent, it is essential to have solid frameworks with which to analyze and compare such regional formations and processes.

2 How to Study Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions

Large imperial structures have blanketed much of Eurasia since its formation as a geopolitical unit. Throughout its political history, empires were the dominant form of political organization on the continent, as opposed to the state system that replaced or transformed it in various regions over the twentieth century. Much of the formal imperial collapse on the continent has been associated with the two world wars. As a result, some parts of the continent emerged from that collapse ravaged by intractable conflicts, while others survived with political stability and enduring state borders. Even to an untrained eye, it is obvious that the zones of intractable conflict currently dotting Eurasia were imperial peripheries at one point or another. Attempting to understand why some of the imperial peripheries emerged as conflict zones while others found their way into political stability has been the overarching impetus for this work. How did imperial legacies shape contemporary security systems, if at all? What are the imperial roots of contemporary armed conflicts, if any? Most importantly, what role, if any, has the regional fabric of these imperial peripheries played in directing their postimperial political life into either relative stability or renewed polarization and armed conflict? To explore some of these very large questions, I apply a comparative historical method of analysis. This method makes it possible to probe the regional fabric of imperial peripheries and the patterns of amity or comity that that fabric engendered within the emergent state system in the twentieth century. This comparative historical analysis includes, but is not limited

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to, “causal analysis, the exploration of temporal processes, and the use of systematic and contextualized comparisons” (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003, 14). This study is causal in its intention to probe the connection between the regional fabric of imperial peripheries and the intractability of contemporary armed conflicts. While the imperial roots of armed conflict have been examined in the literature (see chapter 3), there is a paucity of writing that explores the regional fabric of empires as specific legacies reverberating in contemporary areas of insecurity and violence. This causality in the method leads to an investigation of the temporal processes, which this work undertakes by examining the institutional features of regional systems, whether fractured or resilient, as they evolved and vacillated over time. In doing so, it affirms Pierson’s (2003) call for longer time horizons in the study of social processes, in order to capture those causal forces that take longer time periods in which to build. This chapter begins by situating the concept and the theory of regional fracture/resilience in the context of comparative historical analysis methodology. This is followed by a concept development section, which connects with a discussion of imperial peripheries as political regions. This section draws from social capital scholarship and produces a typology of connectivity in imperial peripheries. I then provide profiles of imperial peripheries, in terms of resilience, limited resilience, latent fracture, and the predatory periphery. The empirical cases are discussed in the context of this typology. The chapter concludes with case selection and a note on the descriptive and causal inferences that emerge from this research design.

Regional Fracture as Climate Change Building on my prior work on regional fracture theory (Ohanyan 2018c; Ohanyan 2021), I utilize the structured, focused comparison method developed by George and Bennett (2004). In presenting a comparative analysis of empires, this work does not submit new historical evidence towards the study of these complex political systems. And unpacking the granular, while a significant scholarly exercise in its own right, is only marginal in this work. Instead, by deploying a structured, focused comparison, this work is geared towards systematic comparisons of regional contexts in various empires. Theory development and the generation of new historical frameworks with which to understand and analyze contemporary problems are the objectives of this book. The phenomenon under study, then, is regional fracture. In its first



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 33

analysis of this process, my work was focused on contemporary manifestations of regional fracture, predominantly as a foreign policy strategy exercised by Putin’s Kremlin. But that research (Ohanyan 2018b) slowly but surely led me to appreciate the historical, imperial roots of the phenomenon, necessitating the comparative historical analysis that I carry out here. While in my previous work I identified the basic contours and dimensions of regional fracture in contemporary world politics, in this study I theorize the phenomenon of regional fracture, demonstrating its imperial roots and its manifestation as a mechanism and a process of imperial reproduction. At this point I primarily limit my attention to its impact on the patterns of armed conflict and their intractability, but future research can also use regional fracture theory to study imperial collapse and durability, comparative studies of imperial decline, and transitions to the nation-state. Pierson’s (2003) typology of the time horizons of different causal accounts is particularly useful here in situating regional fracture within the four types of events and processes that he outlines. First, a causal account can have a short time horizon for the cause and a short time horizon for the outcome. This is exemplified by a tornado, which builds up quickly and wreaks its havoc very quickly as well. The second possibility is a short time horizon for causes and a long time horizon for outcomes. One example is the meteorite-led extinctions of nearly 65 million years ago, in which the cause was rapid, but the outcome has taken much longer to unfold. The third possibility is that of a long time horizon for the cause and a short time horizon for the outcome, best exemplified by earthquakes: their causes build over long periods of time but the devastation takes place in only a few seconds. Finally, certain events and processes have both a long time horizon for their causes and a long time horizon for their outcomes. This is exemplified, in Pierson’s analysis, by global warming and climate change. The process of regional fracture studied in this work is best understood as one with a long time horizon for its causes to build up and a long time horizon for its outcomes to unfold, as expressed in the intractability of conflict. As with any comparative historical analysis corresponding to the “global warming” scenario, the challenge is to establish causality between causes and outcomes. Pierson points out that unless much longer temporal structures are considered, the causal effects of this kind of process will not become evident. While recognizing methodological challenges in establishing causality over long periods of time, Pierson distinguishes among three different kinds of connections between causes and effects for

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a given phenomenon: cumulative causes, threshold effects, and extended causal chains. To think about regional fracture as a cumulative cause is to appreciate that it can unfold continuously but gradually. As empirical cases reveal, this pathway has been more characteristic of the peripheries of imperial Russia, which were later absorbed into the Soviet Union. In contrast, the peripheries of the Ottoman empire have gone through vacillations, rather than gradual and incremental change, in terms of their patterns of regional fracture. As the empirical section of this book explains, the Tanzimat reform initiatives of the nineteenth century created more room for the peripheries, although their effects remained marginal (Göçek 2014). Threshold effects in the context of regional fracture can be seen, for instance, in seemingly sudden eruptions of armed conflict. The buildup of regional fracture over time reaches a threshold level to cause a given outcome, the eruption of an armed conflict, when the political opportunity presents itself. At the same time, the continuous regional fracture is also a facilitator for the political event itself. This is exemplified in President Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms, which created political openness in the Soviet Union and opened the door to political claims to national self-determination by various ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union (Cheterian 2008). The wave of armed conflict in the cause of self-determination in the twilight years of the Soviet Union was a manifestation of persistent regional fracture in those spaces, a process that the administrative system of the Soviet Union had largely inherited from the Russian empire and failed to correct or prevent. Another example of a threshold effect is World War I and the imperial collapse it accelerated or created in Eurasian empires: regionally fractured peripheries were already present, which can explain the eruption of ethnic violence between various nationalities in formerly imperial structures preceding or in parallel to World War I. The third approach to tackling the long lag between cause and effect is the extended causal chains approach. Assessing change through institutional and organizational outcomes is the preferred pathway in such cases. The challenge, in this case, lies in the difficulty of establishing causation when multiple links exist between the causes and the effects being studied. With each intervening link, Pierson observes, the probability of causation drops significantly. In assessing the effects of regional fracture on the eruption and intractability of armed conflict over time, for example, direct causality is challenging to establish because the disruption and elimination of



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 35

institutions of conflict management and governance is an intermediating factor in the causal chain. It is usually difficult to measure and assess an event or an institutional form that does not exist. Therefore, it is more fruitful to use the categories of cumulative cause and threshold effect as methodological pathways for exploring the causality between regional fracture and intractable armed conflict. Regional fracture and its consequences build up over time, cumulatively. And in this process, I argue in this book, the structural properties of imperial peripheries emerge as the key institutions that end up shaping the occurrence of armed conflict. This approach is much more structurally deterministic than any of the alternative explanations of ethnic conflict reviewed in chapter 3. As with any structurally deterministic approach, the timing of the event is hard to predict; what emerges from this analysis is the incremental buildup of the conflict. Pierson (2003) refers to this approach of explaining causality over a long period of time as “absorbing Markov chains” (194). In contrast to direct causation, in which a particular entity (x) turns into another (y) as the result of a specific process or mechanism, in “absorbing Markov chains” the causality period is much longer, and direct causation is hard to observe. Instead, x transforms into y via a series of causal links. Institutional layering over time, and/or the parallel institutional erosion of certain links, accumulate to move the system (x) into its new, transformed state (y). One way to track regional fracture processes over time and space is to identify the organizations and institutions producing the connectivity or disruption that drives those processes (Slaughter 2017). Whether under the hierarchy of imperial politics, or the anarchy of the nation-state system, these organizations and institutions are the constitutive units of analysis within regional systems. In this context, Thelen’s work (2003) on constant-cause explanations of institutional change is particularly useful. The constant-cause approach suggests that the same factors that cause the formation of an institution can also explain institutional change over time. Such constant-cause explanations for the perpetuation of regional fracture from empires to nation-states are useful for a variety of reasons. First, for the imperial cores, the fractured regions were a form of governance that was used to offset the administrative deficiencies of core-periphery relations. Always challenged to contain multiethnic societies over vast territorial spaces, the imperial cores relied on a varied mix of coercive and co-opting policies. These ranged from divide-and-conquer tactics on various peripheries, to

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differential contracting (Nexon and Wright 2007), both of which involved undermining regional resilience within the given periphery. As such, fractured regions were utilitarian systems for imperial cores, but they were also the results of power dynamics and of power imbalances between imperial cores and peripheries. Fractured regions grew and were sustained over time due to political conflict and strategic bargaining among such social actors as the religious leadership of minority communities and the institutions of the imperial core. As Thelen points out (2003), “social institutions, in short, reflect power asymmetries in a society, for it is such asymmetries that allow more powerful actors to impose their institutional preferences on the less powerful actors” (216). For ethno-religious minorities on the imperial peripheries, regional fracture also played functional roles. The governance vacuum created by the fracture strategies practiced by the imperial core provided opportunities for self-governance and self-organizing, albeit at different levels and civic depths in different empires. While regional fracture resulting from divideand-conquer tactics created a great deal of violence and intercommunal strife (as documented in the case of the Ottoman empire, for instance), it also shaped opportunities for minorities to organize and exercise certain levels of collective action within the imperial governance. It would follow from such constant-cause explanations that the mechanisms of regional fracture and the incentives for the consolidation of regional fracture survived over time, even as formal empires disintegrated and collapsed in the twentieth century. Fractured regions on the former imperial peripheries emerged as contested spaces, vulnerable to foreign domination, often by the previously imperial powers. My empirical discussions of regional fracture in the contemporary nation-state system will demonstrate that the drivers of regional fracture have shifted somewhat and that the opportunities for states and their great-power patrons (formerly imperial cores) in deploying regional fracture have also experienced some transformation. An understanding of institutional durability and rupture, often expressed in parallel formations, in the context of regional fracture over time transcending formal imperial formations, is more effectively advanced by the type of comparative historical analysis carried out in this work. It is essential to distinguish between constant-cause and path-dependency explanations in order to understand the changes and transformations in the regional fabric between communities, states, and regions throughout the twentieth century. This study of regional fracture supports Thelen’s claim that



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institutional resilience in the face of major exogenous shocks is not always linear. Instead, Thelen (2003) points out, one is always simultaneously struck “by how little and how much they have changed over time. . . . there often seems to be too much continuity through putative breakpoints in history, but also often too much change beneath the surface of apparently stable formal institutional arrangements” (211). Path-dependency explanations, i.e. institutions outliving the forces that brought them into being (Thelen 2003), are significant in explaining the institutional durability of fractured regions. The institutionalized cleavages in regions, largely imperial legacies, survived the collapse of those empires and quickly found new stakeholders and beneficiaries within the newly formed nation-state system and the parallel rise of the Soviet empire that replaced the Russian empire. Fractured regions sustained themselves through the massive exogenous shock of imperial collapse, albeit with adjusted configurations and structural changes in their composition within the nation-state system. They became markers and battlegrounds for sustained neo-imperial domination within the formally constituted nation-state system.

Explaining Regional Fracture and Resiliency Over Time and Space The concept of regional fracture developed here builds on more than a hundred interviews conducted during fieldwork in Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Belgium, and the United States. Its early formulations were applied to the study of Russia’s contemporary foreign policy in post-Communist Eurasia and the Middle East (Ohanyan 2018b). Building on that research, regional fracture is defined in this book as a political condition expressed within and between geographically proximate states within a specific geographic region. At its core, it refers to the divide-and-conquer policies historically practiced by imperial and hegemonic powers within their respective peripheries. In its extreme forms, and as a political condition, regional fracture emerges in a system in which units of political organization, state or non-state, are sparse and bare, with very few contacts and coordination among them. Such political spaces are vulnerable to external influences and overlay, rife with internal security dilemmas between subnational units, and exhibit a paucity of regional bargains between these units. In such regions, economic and political flows of regional engagement often pull in different directions, deepening regional fault lines and cleavages that can be exploited by external interventions.

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The contemporary manifestations of regional fracture in world politics are characterized by a high level of institutional complexity and a multilevel application. Regional fracture as a political condition or political practice refers to direct or mediated sets of policies that erode and disrupt ongoing regional connections between people, their communities, and their governments. Fractured regions can be historically conditioned, resulting from imperial legacies (fracture by default); or they can result from deliberate disruptions of region-wide connections (fracture by design). The opposite of regional fracture is regional resilience, which is not to be confused with regional integration (a dominant framework of comparative regionalism in the study of international relations). Regional resilience refers to a high level of capacity and will within a region, on the part of state and non-state actors, to pull together region-wide in addressing a particular problem of regional governance (such as armed conflict, crisis, environmental degradation, or economic decline). With its focus on regional integration, European Union-style, the literature on comparative regionalism has placed a disproportionate emphasis on economic factors and levels of institutionalization. Regional resilience, on the other hand, refers to region-wide models of cooperation that transcend the state-centric bias in comparative regional studies, challenging institutionalization as a marker of regional maturity. Lastly, regional integration is a linear concept, assuming evolutionary processes, while the concepts of regional resilience and regional fracture refer to a political condition, a political muscle in regional engagement, which has little to do with evolutionary paths in governance. For example, due to their intra-regional economic integration, the eastern peripheries of the Roman empire in the second century CE (Doyle 1986) were perhaps more resilient in their regional fabric than the South Caucasus and Central Asia within the Soviet empire towards the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, all roads led to Moscow in the Soviet empire, and the peripheries were connected, economically and politically, to the center of the Soviet power. In terms of its constituent units, regional fracture is expressed on different institutional planes: between states; inside states, between government elites and various other segments of society; and between states within the region and extra-regional hegemonic powers that have political stakes in the region. Fractured regions are socially constructed political systems: throughout various historical periods, imperial or postimperial, they have enabled imperial longevity (Doyle 1986) and have often served as buffer



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zones between empires, particularly on the Eurasian continent. Their systemic nature is manifested in the consistent behavior pattern they demonstrate over a long period of time, which is an indication, within systems theory, that there is a “feedback loop” resulting in a consistent behavior pattern within the region (Meadows 2008). Protracted and enduring rivalries (Goertz and Diehl 1993) are built into fractured regions, thereby adding greatly to the regional fragmentation between the communities and states within the region. The scholarship on the links between colonialism and ethnic conflict is vast, but the regional dimension of the relationship is insufficiently understood. There are two dominant forms of concept development practiced in the social sciences: (1) necessary and sufficient condition, and (2) family resemblance (Goertz 2006). The necessary and sufficient condition is the method used in this work in developing the concept of regional fracture, because it is a more effective way of distinguishing the phenomenon of regional fracture from regional security complexes or the wedging pattern of alliance politics. This approach to concept construction makes it possible to highlight the core and distinguishing dimensions of regional fracture. The family resemblance approach would be problematic here because the factors that regional fracture shares with the alternative concepts would obscure the signature markers of fractured regions. Indeed, there are specific dimensions of regional fracture that distinguish it from alternative explanations. Figure 2.1. below illustrates these dimensions and second-level indicators, for both regional fracture and regional resilience, which are grouped in terms of dimensions of the constituent units in fractured regions (states, communities, etc.) as well as of the relationships between them. Considering the units and the relationships together will allow us to develop a systems theory of regional fracture (as well as of regional resilience). The unit-level dimensions of regional fracture/resilience include, first, the organizational coherence of the constituent units within the region, and, second, the region-wide organizational density and diversity (regional social capital). Relationships between the units to be taken into account in considering fractured regions include, first, the nature of regional embeddedness in the broader geopolitical context, described as the level of hegemonic influences and overlay; second, region-wide coordination among units as well as intra-regional state bargains and security orders; and, third, the systemic coherence of regional flows. Regional fracture/resilience is a

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continuous rather than a dichotomous concept, with these second-level indicators varying across a continuum between two poles. Regional fracture constitutes the one pole, with regional resilience being the other. In short, regional resilience is the “negative” concept for “regional fracture,” and it is introduced here to sharpen the analysis of the “positive” concept of this study (Goertz 2006), namely regional fracture.

Unit-Level Dimensions of Regional Fracture and Their Indicators The organizational coherence of the constituent units within a region refers to the ability of such units to self-organize and enjoy legitimacy from their members, as well as to the extent to which the units enjoy levels of selfgovernance and legitimacy. Thus, higher levels of organizational coherence will reduce regional fracture, contributing to organizational resilience. There are different ways to assess levels of self-governance and self-organization within states or social groups. The metrics of state strength/failure can be used to assess the level of organizational coherence exhibited by regional states. For imperial peripheries lacking in statehood, the organizational attributes of social groups and community organizations can be used to assess their organizational coherence. In more contemporary fractured regions, there is at least one state in the region that lacks public legitimacy. For example, states that have authoritarian or competitive authoritarian forms of governance (Levitsky and Way 2010) tend to lack public legitimacy. Lacking legitimacy, the governing elites in such regions have the propensity to capture regional politics for their private gain, leaving the broader benefits of regional governance largely inaccessible to their populations (Ohanyan 2018b). Region-wide organizational density and diversity refers to the existence of players within states and communities that have the capacity and mobility to cross borders (if the region is constituted from states) or intercommunal boundaries. A scarcity of organizations and their lack of diversity of form is associated with higher levels of fracture in a given region. Western scholarship on international relations, with its state-centric bias, has obscured the rich forms of self-organization and civil society that often predated the rise of the state system in world politics. The ability of stateless nations to selforganize and mobilize to express their political needs, interests, and rights on the imperial peripheries or in contemporary world politics is a significant marker of regional fabric in world politics. Higher levels of organizational



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 41

density and diversity within a region strengthen regional resilience, while their presence only in lower levels tends to make the region vulnerable to fracture. Relationships among the units within this systems approach to regional fracture help to indicate the significance of the units in producing or facilitating fracture in a given region. The level of hegemonic influence is an indicator that identifies the mechanisms of influences as exercised by external players in the broader geopolitical environment in which the region is embedded. Such mechanisms can also be assessed by the frequency and durability of their application. In regions with high levels of “overlay” (Buzan and Wæver 2003), described as the ability of extra-regional powers to determine political outcomes inside the region, the external players can have direct or mediated influence over the region. When the influence is overt and direct, it can be exercised through formal bilateral alliances with the states in the region. Another example of overt and direct influence is the case of fractured regions inside or in between imperial powers, where the imperial centers can, with varying degrees of success, directly shape regional politics on their peripheries. Regardless of how it is exercised, higher levels of extra-regional influence (whether benign or perverse) will result in regional fracture, while the opposite situation will produce regional resilience and regional empowerment in world politics. Region-wide unit coordination is another indicator focused on the relationships among the units. It refers to the ability of subregional actors, both state and non-state, to coordinate their activities with one another within the region. Michael Doyle, in his comparative study of empires, argues that trans-provincial trade within the Roman empire, between its peripheries in particular, was instrumental for imperial integration and imperial durability (Doyle 1986; Kivelson and Suny 2017). Lower levels of region-wide coordination make a region more vulnerable to imperial fracture, a condition that was characteristic of the Soviet Union, where all inter-republic economic relations were routed through Moscow, the economic and political center of the Soviet empire. Higher levels of region-wide coordination are associated with regional resilience, and lower ones with fracture. Intra-regional unit bargaining (between state and non-state actors) refers to the propensity of units within the given fractured regions to form microbargains or alliances with each other and to establish mini-security orders within the region. This indicator manifests in terms of two broad extremes or types of regional orderings: clustered connections, between select players

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(a fragmented and uneven security order), on the one hand, and cohesive connections (an integrated and inclusive security order), on the other. Intraregional bargaining with a greater propensity toward clustered ordering indicates a region that is vulnerable to fracturing: such a pattern creates gaps and divisions between various groups, thereby forming political vacuums for extra-regional players to fill. Cohesive patterns of intra-regional bargaining, by contrast, are more likely to produce regional resilience. The systemic coherence of regional flows is an indicator of the extent to which economic activities between the regional subunits cohere with existing political frameworks of engagement. Regional fracture tends to be associated with incoherent systemic flows, with economic forces (trade and tourists) often pulling in opposite directions from the political elites (state or nonstate). The decades-long informal trade between Turkey and Armenia, with the border between the two countries closed and no diplomatic ties between the two, is one example of incoherent regional flows.1 In this dimension of regional fracture, higher levels of coherence are associated with resilience and lower ones with regional fracture. Thus, the negative case of regional fracture is not regional integration, but regional resiliency. In resilient regions there is a certain degree of regional coordination in the face of the great powers or regional hegemons, which allows the regional states to withstand divide-and-conquer policies while maintaining their bilateral relations with such extra-regional powers. In resilient regions, the “sovereignty bargains” (Mattli 2000) with the regional hegemons reflect an improved bargaining power for the smaller states compared to that in fractured regions. Resilient regions are characterized by regional statecraft, regional diplomatic capacities, and states with some power contestation, which generates domestic sources of legitimacy and offers instruments for withstanding great-power pressures.

The Neighborhood Effect: Profiling Imperial Peripheries as Regions The second-level dimensions of the neighborhood effect, presented above, distinguish between the units that constitute the region and the relationships between those units. Added together, these two dimensions capture the mutually constitutive relationship between the strength and the nature of civic ties on the imperial peripheries, on the one hand, and external geopolitical and economic factors, on the other. Much of the scholarship on empires, particularly in the case of the Ottoman empire in Eastern Anatolia, has



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 43

Unit-Level Dimensions

Relationships

Organizational coherence of individual units

Hegemonic influences and overlay / geopolitical embeddedness

Organizational density and diversity of units

Coordination among units, intra-regional bargaining, and security orders Systemic coherence of regional flows

FIGURE 2.1. Second-Level Dimensions of the Neighborhood Effect: Regional Fracture and Resilience. Source: Author created

suffered from a bifurcated analysis. Some historians have gravitated towards the position that the Ottoman empire weakened and collapsed because of externally supported nationalist movements, operating under the pretense of pushing for reform for the empire’s Christian and Kurdish communities (chapter 5). Others have pointed to the internal weakness of the empire, while also highlighting the rise of nationalist movements. In the second argument, it was the internal weakness that invited external intervention into the domestic affairs of the imperial state. The concept of the neighborhood effect, with regional fracture and resilience on both sides of the spectrum, offers a multilevel approach that highlights the mutually constitutive nature of internal and external factors. The geopolitical factors involved in imperial decline have been extensively researched. This approach views them in the context of the social fabric of the imperial peripheries. It notes that looking at the combination of external great-power politics and the local politics of peripheral societies in imperial states can offer a fresh explanatory perspective on conflict outcomes later in the twentieth century. Indeed, the multilevel approach to understanding the regional fabric of imperial peripheries is predicated on the mutually constitutive nature of internal and external factors. Fractured connectivity on the imperial peripheries is both a cause and an effect of extra-regional hegemonic overlay. The fluid and porous borders of imperial borderlands reflect this condition, which is discussed in detail in the empirical chapters on the three empires under study. The multilevel nature of the concept also captures the mutually constitutive nature, or codependence, of the regional fabric and the imperial center. Specifically, the existence of a strong associative fabric on the periphery does not preclude the possibility of imperial pressure from the center. Strong associative bonds on the periphery remain vulnerable to imperial pressures. At the same time, it will emerge from the empirical chapters that the pattern

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of regional connectivity is deeply ingrained in imperial governance. The case of Eastern Anatolia in the late Ottoman empire indicates how regional fracture became a mode of imperial governance. In contrast, the case of the Bosnian province in the Habsburg empire was one of delay or deprivation of regional connectivity by the imperial center: while the other peripheries of the Habsburg empire were building deep associative capacities and representative institutions, the Bosnian province was governed directly by the imperial government’s representative in the province. To put it differently, the existence of associative and resilient peripheries under imperial pressures is a possibility, but one that is not very likely: the pattern of regional connectivity at the peripheries usually reflects the mode of imperial governance in general. Imperial pressures are co-constitutive with the regional fabric on the peripheries. The nature of regional connectivity on the periphery is usually baked into the imperial governance. The second-level dimensions of the units and their attributes capture the social institutions and the strength of the civic institutions at the imperial peripheries. The density and diversity of civic institutions and the associational life of the polity that they produce have long been recognized, for instance by Alexis de Tocqueville in the context of the vibrancy of American democracy. The contemporary scholarship on civic institutions describes them as social capital and connects that social capital to trust and civic engagement in a society, as well as to improved prospects for democracy and economic growth in that society (Putnam 1994a). But the role of such civic institutions on the imperial peripheries has been underestimated in the political science scholarship, where much of the research into civic associations and civil society has focused on the contemporary state system. The diversity and strength of such civic organizations, this work argues, has played a specific and powerful causal role in dampening or facilitating contemporary conflicts and cleavages in the former imperial regions. In this work, the neighborhood effect reflects the quality of a connection, a tie, between two or more entities, whether state or non-state, over a particular regional area. The notion of social capital is applied in the context of regionalism with a specific goal in mind: understanding the mutually reinforcing nature of such ties and connections, on the one hand, and their broader regional contexts, on the other. While we know that more integrative environments are said to tame ongoing conflicts and prevent new ones, the mechanisms of crafting and shaping such environments out of fractured and frayed ties are insufficiently understood. A particular theme



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 45

in this work relates to the ways in which imperial or state-centric structures produce regional contexts that can be favorable to deep and dense connectivity—regional resilience. Social capital has been defined as a feature of social organization, “such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam 1994b, 7). Adler and Kwon (2002) define it as “the goodwill that is engendered by the fabric of social relations and that can be mobilized to facilitate actions” and to address specific social problems. Other definitions have focused on the resources that can be mobilized from networks that are rich in social capital. Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) define social capital as “the sum of current and potential resources inserted in, available from, and derived from the network of relations possessed by an individual or a social unit” (243). This approach views social capital as derived from a network of relations, but only those that possess certain existing or potential resources. Similarly, the neighborhood effect is manifest when social networks can mobilize resources and produce collective action at a regional level. Particularly relevant for this work is the pacifying quality of social capital and civic life (Chapman 2009). Civic institutions have been shown to facilitate information-sharing and lower transaction costs, enabling economic productivity and development (Chapman 2009; Putnam 1994a; Putnam 1994b). In reviewing the research on the pacifying effects of social capital, Chapman (2009) highlights how civic institutions foster democratic practices and strengthen deliberative decision-making and participatory forms of democratic engagement. Such outcomes end up delegitimizing violence by socializing the members of civic groups in nonviolent forms of participation and providing peaceful channels for voicing grievances. The bulk of the contemporary scholarship on social capital tends to view civic institutions in the context of established and institutionally contoured conditions of statehood. The concept of regional social capital challenges this conceptualization of social capital, across both time and space. It highlights the institutional strength and vitality of civic institutions under imperial conditions, some of which operated to compensate for the governance gaps created by the imperial cores. This work assesses the quality of ties within the imperial peripheries, as well as regionally between states, and does so over time. A growing body of research demonstrates that when it comes to their pacifying effects, not all connections are created equal. The distinction

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between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital is most consequential in this debate. It differentiates between social capital as internal group cohesion (“bonding”) and as cross-group connections (“bridging”), each of which fulfills specific roles in interethnic reconciliation or interethnic coexistence (Cox 2009). The dark side of social capital has been linked to organized crime in Russia (Gilbert 2009), intercommunal violence in Northern Ireland (Belloni 2009), and genocidal violence in Rwanda (McDoom 2013). Indeed, the distinction between bonding and bridging social capital has shown that the distribution of social ties, along with their density and values, does matter for the outcomes they produce. Varshney (2002) has shown that cities with intermingled networks of Hindu-Muslim communities have been much less likely to experience violence in the aftermath of high-profile incidents (Chapman 2009). Susan Allen (2009) has differentiated between the characteristics of exclusive and inclusive networks, which she argues are differently positioned towards fostering peaceful coexistence or intercommunal violence. In contrast to exclusive networks, inclusive ones have more open membership and are participatory and democratic in their decision-making. Their structures are decentralized, flat, and fluid. Trust and reciprocity guide the working of such networks, which often leads to the empowering of marginalized members of the network. The relevance of this scholarship to imperial conditions is multifold. The application of the scholarship on social capital to the study of imperial peripheries over a particular region needs to consider two features of imperial governance: the multinational nature of imperial peripheries and the institutional weakness in governance that is characteristic of most empires. Under such conditions of multinationalism and administrative weakness, civic ties have enormous political value. An examination of whether the civic institutions on an imperial periphery were bonding or bridging helps to clarify the conditions of conflict, cooperation, and coexistence, all of which have been observed on various imperial peripheries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This approach to the study of civic institutions helps to identify markers of connectivity and institutional rupture on a periphery, offering a new way to assess the predisposition of peripheries towards communal violence. This adds to the theories that associate the levels of violence in imperial peripheries to rising tides of nationalism or to divide-and-conquer policies from the imperial core, each of which has only been able to explain subsets of peripheral politics.



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 47

In addition, the study of the civic institutions at the imperial peripheries also matters in terms of the ability of those institutions to serve as instruments of governance, often filling the governance vacuum left by the imperial core at times of massive demographic movements, forced resettlements, and natural disasters. In such contexts, the social tie and the community become a survival strategy for individuals. An understanding of how such social ties emerge and endure is overdue. Aslanian’s (2014) study of Armenian silk merchants in the Iranian empire is of enormous value, as it demonstrates the mechanisms by which such communities were formed, without the support of any overarching political system, whether empire or state. Another example is the rise of guilds in the medieval town of Bruges, where it was the social capital present in these associations that guaranteed the high quality of the products their members produced. It turns out that strong social capital is a necessary ingredient for high-quality chocolate!

Regional Social Capital on the Imperial Peripheries The concept of the neighborhood effect expands our understanding of social capital, making it historically more contingent while also specifying the type of institutional environment in which it forms and functions. The regional contours of this concept integrate the spatiality, structure, and substance of social capital. In terms of spatiality, the neighborhood effect applies to a specific regional space within which the quality of social ties is assessed. In terms of structure, the concept refers to “bonding” and “bridging” forms of connectivity. A resilient neighborhood effect will emerge from the type of regional social capital that includes both strong and cohesive intra-group connections (“bonding” social capital) and connections resulting from bonding and brokerage between various groups in a given regional space (“bridging” social capital). As I elaborated in chapter 1, regional resiliency results from the existence of internally cohesive social units that have the capacity, political will, and opportunity to engage with one another. The value of both types of connections has long been recognized. Woolcock (1998) noted that constructive social and economic relations will emerge when such social ties at a local level, within and between groups, also connect with macrolevel state institutions. In short, inclusive and dense connectivity has been associated with better economic performance and democratic prospects in modern political life. Such structural attributes of social networks are particularly important under imperial conditions, as discussed in this chapter. The third dimension of regional social capital involves the substance of

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ties and the functions for which they are deployed by community members. Substance includes the specific political purpose as well as the density of such ties within a given regional space. There is a rich scholarship in sociology and political science on the effects of dense ties, which are central to strong civil societies in states, transnationally, and within imperial peripheries. A definition that is more targeted to regional social capital is the one introduced by Njøs and Jakobsen (2018). They stipulate that social capital conditions the extent and intensity of linkages between regional actors. Regional social capital, in this perspective, is assessed in terms of the existence of regional infrastructure to encourage interaction. Such interaction can be considered to be enabled (or restrained) by the “collective personality” (Malecki 2012) of a region, that is, its amount of regional social capital, emphasizing the role of actors’ relationships and whether they can—and do—interact with each other. (259)

The concept of the neighborhood effect, therefore, varies across a continuum, depending on how internally cohesive the units are, how willing they are to engage across a regional space, and what levels of bridging and brokerage they demonstrate. In this definition, regional ties and the levels of regional social capital can be assessed in terms of their social and institutional strength, their ability to mobilize resources and political action, their capacity to reciprocate an interaction, their ability to replenish reciprocal interactions, and the existence of incentives for regional engagement. The neighborhood effect will emerge as fractured in those regions where regional ties are sporadic and random; where resources and political action are mobilized in clusters within a given geographic space rather than region-wide; where interactions between social units with varying levels of institutionalization are ad hoc rather than reciprocal and recurrent; and where regional fracture is incentivized by actors external or internal to the region, with little immediate value for region-wide engagement. It is also true that regional social capital can exist in fractured regions, albeit in smaller clusters and pockets of political activity. It is regions that are endowed with deep and dense regional social capital, and with environments that support bridging and brokerage between units, that will emerge as resilient. Four possible types of regional connectivity at the imperial peripheries emerge from this discussion of social capital and civic institutions, arranged in terms of two dimensions: density, and distribution of connectivity (Figure



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 49

Balanced distribution of social ties

Clustered distribution of social ties

High density of social ties

High and balanced connectivity

High and clustered connectivity

Low density of social ties

Low and balanced connectivity

Low and clustered connectivity

FIGURE 2.2. Types of Regional Social Capital. Source: Author Created

2.2.). Each type of connectivity conditions a specific institutional structure for an imperial periphery, ranging on a spectrum from regional resilience and development to regional fracture and predatory governance, as I will discuss below.

Profiles of Imperial Peripheries Peripheries have emerged as political regions constructed by their civic institutions and pathways of mass mobilization around wide-ranging political projects, such as constitutionalism, minority rights, labor rights, cultural autonomy, and national self-determination, to name just a few. Viewing the nature of regional connectivity in comparative terms helps us to assess the extent to which the capacities of regional governance to resist fracture have varied from case to case. The empirical discussions below will show that various imperial peripheries have differed in their ability to integrate the pressures of mass mobilization and political participation, which much of the scholarship on empires tends to reduce to nationalist movements. These peripheries have also varied in their capacities to withstand such crises as forced population movements and violence at mass scale, demonstrating different levels of governance in the face of imperial weakness and collapse. The four types of connectivity presented earlier (Figure 2.2) lend themselves to four profiles of imperial peripheries in terms of their opportunities for governance and self-organization on a regional scale. To describe them, it may be useful to borrow Peter Evans’s (1995) classification of states, ranging from predatory to developmental, distinguished by their administrative capacities and political will. Developmental states have a deeply connected social fabric in their societies and a system of government that is embedded in just the right way to withstand the pressures of capture by elites and interest groups, while remaining engaged with various social networks

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in the interests of the long-term development of the state. In contrast, predatory states lack the necessary rational legal bureaucracy and the social connections with their civic institutions. In such political conditions, the state and its elites are unconstrained and are free to extract resources from society, directed towards the hereditary leadership of the state. State power is applied arbitrarily, largely in the interests of the state elites. Can such a framework, developed to explain state policy, be extended to the present study of imperial peripheries? After all, states are distinct political organizations, with a clear institutional locus of power, despite the varying levels of public legitimacy that they enjoy. While recognizing certain limitations in applying the concept of embedded autonomy to imperial peripheries, I argue that the framework of the embedded autonomy of the ruling power is relevant to, and necessary for, the study of imperial peripheries. The framework of analysis developed in this work, with its focus on the nature of regional connectivity (regional resilience/fracture), lends itself well to examining the ways in which the provincial authorities on the imperial peripheries relate to their societies. The imperial states discussed in this study all delegated a certain level of administrative and political power to their provincial governments, but with different motivations and different ways of exercising control over the provincial governance. All the cases examined here are systems of center-periphery relations, in which the peripheries played an important administrative role in imperial governance. Considering the administrative and political power enjoyed by the provincial levels of government, therefore, the embedded autonomy approach is very useful for understanding the politics of imperial peripheries. As in state systems, on imperial peripheries too the embedded autonomy of regional administrative units is a clear benchmark of effective governance: the ability of the ruling authority to mobilize resources for development and long-term planning for the public good. Like the nation-states, the imperial peripheries possessed administrative structures of governance and a rich fabric of civic life. Both of these elements are central to Evans’s theory, and very useful for explaining the ways in which the administrative powers in imperial provinces interfaced with their largely multinational civil society. The concept of the neighborhood effect, introduced in this work, helps to identify the nature of civic life on the imperial peripheries and the way in which such peripheries are connected to, and used by, the imperial centers. The integration of Evans’s state theory with the framework of the neighborhood effect and the regional dimensions of imperial connectivity



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 51

High density of social ties

Balanced distribution of social ties

Clustered distribution of social ties

High and balanced connectivity—> developmental periphery; regional resilience

High and clustered connectivity—> semi-developmental, vertical, and unequal periphery; latent regional fracture

Central Europe / Habsburg empire

Transcaucasia / Russian empire Ukraine / Western peripheries of the Russian empire

Low density of social ties

Low and balanced connectivity—> semidevelopmental, horizontal, and laggard periphery; limited regional resilience

Low and clustered connectivity—> predatory periphery; overt regional fracture

The Baltics / Russian empire

Bosnian province / Habsburg empire

Eastern Anatolia / Ottoman empire

FIGURE 2.3. Profiles of Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions. Source: Author Created

helps to explain the role of civic institutions in provincial governance and to highlight the importance of the provincial centers as loci of authority. Building on Figure 2.2. and Evans’s typology of developmental/predatory states, four types of imperial profiles can be delineated (Figure 2.3). Peripheries with dense and deep civic networks possess high and balanced connectivity, produced by bridging social capital and ethno-religiously intermingled and institutionalized ties on the political periphery of the empire. Such peripheries are balanced and inclusive in their structures. Such patterns of regional connectivity have distinct advantages when it comes to regional governance outcomes. They produce peripheries that have strong self-organization, contributing to efficiency in provincial governance (Figure 2.3, upper left quadrant). These peripheries are developmental because their communal elites, that intermediate between the community and the imperial center, are best positioned to engage the society towards governance and development. Deeper and denser institutional connectivity leads to more durable and participatory administrative structures of governance on the periphery. While imperial pressures from the center will remain a background factor, their impact will be muted on peripheries that are developmental and resilient, with higher levels of balanced connectivity. In sharp contrast, peripheries with a lower density of civic institutions

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and with bonding, as opposed to bridging, social capital produce a fragmented social fabric, usually along ethnic lines. This paucity and dearth of social connections, along with the divisions along ethno-religious lines, undermine the administrative capacities of regional governments on imperial peripheries. Such connectivity patterns make the elites vulnerable to capture by the imperial center, as well as open to geopolitical influences across the imperial border. Low and clustered connectivity necessitates the use of informal governance levers at the political periphery of the empire. Lacking formal institutions, the peripheral administration becomes ad hoc and uneven, and vulnerable to capture by the imperial center or by communal leaders, in order to advance their narrow clientelist and patrimonial goals. These are markers of predatory governance at the provincial level: in such conditions of institutional degradation over a peripheral region, the authorities are free to apply arbitrary and unchecked power. When the civil society is also bare of institutional structures, there are then few outlets for peaceful bargaining and negotiations. Such settings are conflict-prone and vulnerable to stressors from their imperial cores as well as from forces outside of the imperial state. Such peripheries can be described as predatory in their governance, borrowing Evans’s terminology, and fractured in their regional fabric (Figure 2.3, lower right quadrant). Peripheries with civic institutions and ties that cut across ethnicity, even at lower levels of density (Figure 2.3, lower left quadrant), are political spaces that have preconditions for avoiding the communal violence that may plague other peripheries. But the paucity of institutional ties disadvantages them when it comes to governance outcomes. Such peripheries are described as horizontal in their connectivity, and semi-developmental, or “laggard,” in terms of their governance outcomes and administrative structures. The regional fabric on such peripheries can be described as limited resilience. The upper right quadrant describes an imperial periphery that enjoys highly dense civic institutions, but most of which are bonding, rather than bridging. This institutional density adds to the administrative capacities in the regional governance of the province, as it offers an infrastructure for the administrative province to partner and engage with. But the bonding nature of such civil ties makes the periphery vulnerable to divide-andconquer strategies, applied either by the imperial center or by external geopolitical players across imperial borders. The nature of governance on such peripheries is semi-developmental. The institutional connections and the social capital, although it is bonding, create significant predictability



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 53

and encourage participatory governance and administration. The clustered, as opposed to balanced, connectivity, however, keeps the region fractured and vulnerable to extra-regional intrusions. Figure 2.3. was developed to distinguish between profiles of imperial peripheries in terms of the nature of their connectivity: whether the density of social ties is high or low and whether the connectivity is structured as bonding social capital (clustered connectivity) or bridging social capital (balanced connectivity). But while this diagram is helpful in distinguishing between different forms of regional fabric at the imperial peripheries, it is limited when it comes to identifying how such patterns and structures of connectivity related to the speed with which armed conflict erupted in the post-Cold War period, and the severity of that conflict. In other words, Figure 2.3 is helpful in highlighting the “ideal” connectivity that allowed a given region to avoid an outbreak of conflict in the post-Cold War period, but it tells us little about the nature of fractured regions in terms of their propensity for armed conflict after the Cold War. Different imperial peripheries were fractured differently, with distinct consequences for the outbreak of armed conflict in the post-Cold War period. To address this limitation, the peripheries under study can also be organized on a spectrum. Figures 2.4 and 2.5 show degrees and distributions of connectivity as well as how they relate to conditions of governance (whether predatory or developmental) on the periphery, with legacy effects on conflict outbreak in the post-Cold War period. To organize the cases on a spectrum, it is necessary to disaggregate the density of connectivity (high/low) (Figure 2.4) from the structure of ties (balanced/clustered, bridging/bonding) (Figure 2.5). Taken together, Figures 2.4 and 2.5 explain how institutional ties contribute to imperial governance on the periphery. Fewer institutions (lower levels of connectivity) make the periphery vulnerable to predatory governance from the imperial center, with intercommunal violence as its most immediate consequence. Yet institutions with higher institutional density but clustered/bonding social capital can have a polarizing effect on the imperial periphery, also making it more vulnerable to armed conflict. The two spectrums add up to tell a single story: a broader political context, with more inclusive and participatory politics on the imperial peripheries, expressed in dense and balanced social connectivity, orients a region away from violent conflict and early conflict onset in the post-Cold War period (chapter 7).

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FIGURE 2.4. Spectrum of Levels of Connectivity (Low to High Density of Ties) on the Imperial Peripheries . Source: Author Created

Cases, Causes, and Imperial Inferences Considering the novelty of the framework developed here, the case studies in this work can best be described as heuristic (George and Bennett 2004). As such, this study inductively presents new variables, indicators, and causal claims rather than downscaling preexisting theories in the field of international relations. I draw on my prior work on regional fracture (Ohanyan 2018b; Ohanyan 2018c; Ohanyan 2021), in which I used the grounded theory development approach (Glaser and Strauss 2012) to identify the values of independent and dependent variables, to be discussed below. As mentioned earlier, interviews with more than a hundred respondents from civil society, the business world, and governmental agencies in Western capitals and contemporary conflict regions (Ohanyan 2015; Ohanyan 2018c) constitute the backdrop for the discussion of attributes of regional fracture that I detail below. The interviews were carried out in Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Belgium, and the United States. The comparative historical analysis applied in this work allows us to identify the extent to which regional fracture is a historically constituted process: whether, as an imperial legacy, it plays any role in contemporary patterns of armed conflict. With the rise of multipolarity, this question gains a particular policy urgency, which I discuss in chapter 8. This study applies the congruence method of comparative historical



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 55

FIGURE 2.5. Spectrum of Distribution of Connectivity (Clustered to Balanced Ties) on the Imperial Peripheries . Source: Author Created

analysis, which relies on controlled comparison. In this method, experimental and control cases are selected in such a way that they are similar in all attributes but one. The theory of regional fracture/resilience presupposes a relationship between the variance in the independent and dependent variables (George and Bennett 2004). Indeed, the research design for this qualitative comparative historical analysis relies on probing the relationship between the imperial peripheries as regional systems of various institutional density and structure, their development over time, and contemporary armed conflict in Eurasia. Specifically, this qualitative research relies on descriptive and causal inference in tracking this relationship throughout the twentieth and into the early twenty-first century. Descriptive inference for qualitative research, as defined and explained in King, Keohane, and Verba (1994), entails “using observations from the world to learn about other unobserved facts.” In this study, therefore, descriptive inference is used as a method for making sense of the implications of the imperial legacies in some regions for contemporary security environments in those same regions. This does entail zooming out from the details of specific cases to determine shared patterns and differences among them. The empirical chapters on three empires and their specific peripheries are cases of descriptive inferences. They are then used as the

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basis of causal inference in order to probe the imperial roots of contemporary armed conflict (chapter 7). The descriptive inference, for three peripheries of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires, delineates specific features of their political construction as distinct regions. Identifying these dimensions of regional characteristics makes it possible to compare the regions in many respects. While all these regions were subject to external hegemonic overlay and interference, they differed in terms of the nature of their connectivity—their neighborhood effect—the causal effect of which this study seeks to ascertain. In sum, building on descriptive inference, this study also attempts to establish causal inference by identifying the mechanisms connecting regional fracture/resilience to contemporary security environments in the post-Cold War period. King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) define causal inference as learning about causal effects from the data observed. Because of the qualitative nature of this work, the cases have been selected based on the dependent variable of the onset and severity of armed conflict. To allow for maximum variance in the dependent variable, the cases have been selected along a continuum, on which the dependent variable ranges from coexistence and working peace among states and interethnic communities, at one end, and intractable and cyclical regional conflict, at the other. There are a variety of methodologies for categorizing armed conflicts, but this study deals specifically with the impact of imperial legacies on armed conflict and political violence. While recognizing the richness of armed conflict scholarship in terms of categories, this work focuses on the post-Cold War period, differentiating among conflicts in Eurasia in terms of specific values. The immediate post-Cold War period marked an imperial retrenchment, a political thaw of sorts, that created environments rife with security dilemmas in many areas of the Eurasian continent. The dependent variable in this work, therefore, involves the immediacy of conflict eruption following this imperial retrenchment; the extent to which it was or is recurring, cyclical, and intractable; and the level of severity it reached. The cases selected for this dependent variable are grouped into three categories: (1) violent conflicts that erupted immediately after imperial collapse; (2) peaceful regional rebirth in the aftermath of imperial collapse; and (3) armed conflicts that erupted with a time lag after imperial collapse, and with relatively low levels of violence.



Imperial Peripheries as Political Regions 57

Immediate conflict eruption post-Cold War / high level of casualties

Lagged conflict eruption postCold War / lower levels of casualties

Peaceful rebirth

the Kurdish conflict; the Yugoslav wars of succession; the South Caucasus conflicts

the Eastern Ukraine conflict

the Baltics; Central Europe

FIGURE 2.6. Cases Selected According to the Conflict Eruption Variables Described in This Study. Source: Author Created

The significance of the post-Cold War as a period of analysis in this study has to do with this work’s focus on imperial legacies. On the continent of Eurasia, the twentieth century was bracketed by waves of armed conflicts, mostly in regional conflict formations. The Balkan Wars preceding World War I, ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence against Christian minorities in the Ottoman empire, and the demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the Russian empire all took place before the outbreak of World War I. The collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg empires in the western parts of Eurasia altered the political map of the continent. At the same time, the reconfiguration of the Russian empire into the Soviet Union ended up enveloping the continent once again and, in the aftermath of World War II, establishing the bipolar structure of world politics. Now, following the end of the Cold War in the twilight years of the Soviet Union and the twentieth century, regions of insecurity not unlike those at the beginning of the twentieth century have emerged. Our focus on this period, therefore, allows us to examine how imperial legacies conditioned, prevented, or alleviated the negative security conditions that imperial collapse tends to generate. The cases selected for the dependent variable described above are listed in Figure 2.6. The cases are grouped into the three categories described above and are analyzed in terms of their corresponding imperial formations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first category of conflicts consists of those conflicts that erupted immediately after the end of the Cold War: the regional conflict formations in the South Caucasus and western Balkans. The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars were particularly violent, with casualties reaching 140,000. The wars in the South Caucasus also erupted in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, with

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the first waves of violence in Azerbaijan and Georgia occurring in the late 1980s. The Kurdish conflict in Turkey also formalized and crystallized in the 1980s, with the end of the Cold War impacting the political support that the left-leaning Kurdish Workers’ party (PKK) received from Moscow. More than 40,000 people within the Turkish territory died in the Kurdish conflict. In the second category is Ukraine’s war with Russia, in the Russia-backed Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine. Russia’s annexation of Crimea is also part of this conflict formation. (The Transnistria conflict in neighboring Moldova, while normally grouped separately, should also be treated as part of this regional conflict formation because of its similar imperial legacies as a Russian periphery. However, I do not cover that conflict in this book.) In the third category, the Baltic Republics and central Europe are discussed as cases of “peaceful rebirth” after the imperial collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The variance in the dependent variable is assessed through a matched pair case-control study, designed to match as many dimensions of the independent variable as possible. Widely used in epidemiology, for instance, this approach makes it possible either to confirm the hypothesized relationships or to identify new causal variables that had not previously been considered. In the social sciences, this type of comparative analysis can be traced back to Stuart Mill, who distinguished between the positive method (similarity in independent variables with a common outcome in two or more cases) and the negative method (similar independent variables associated with different outcomes) (George and Bennett 2004). This study uses the negative method of controlled comparison between pairs of cases in order to achieve greater precision in drawing causal inferences (George and Bennett 2004). The application of negatively controlled comparison to the case selection in this study offers novel ways of considering imperial legacies to contemporary armed conflict. The negatively controlled comparison used in this work disaggregates imperial peripheries as distinct units of their own. The comparison along the regional fabric of the imperial peripheries, the independent variable in the study, opened up a methodological pathway for disaggregating imperial comparisons instead of focusing only on a single empire or comparing empires as distinct and analytically tight categories. Different peripheries of the same empire are compared to other peripheries of other empires.2 The negatively controlled comparisons of the pair-matched cases, selected based on the dependent variable, are carried out in chapter 7. In the



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High geopolitical embeddedness

Medium geopolitical embeddedness

Control case

the Baltics in the Russian empire

Central Europe in the Habsburg empire

Experimental cases

the South Caucasus conflicts / Transcaucasia in the Russian Empire the Kurdish conflict in Turkey / Eastern Anatolia in the Ottoman empire

the Yugoslav wars of succession (the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina) / Habsburg empire the conflict in Eastern Ukraine / Russian empire

FIGURE 2.7. Matched Case Comparison, with High versus Medium Geopolitical Embeddedness in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Contemporary cases of armed cases are matched with their corresponding late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century imperial peripheries.. Source: Author Created

first pair of controlled and experimental cases, differential outcomes (conflicts versus peaceful regional “rebirth” after the Cold War) were selected. The cases were matched in their regional attributes as political regions on imperial peripheries. The first set of matched cases, however, was selected because of their higher levels of external overlay, or geopolitical embeddedness. The second set of matched cases has only medium levels of geopolitical embeddedness. The comparative analysis in both sets will help to determine whether the nature of regional connectivity, the neighborhood effect, matters in shaping historical patterns of conflict and comity. Figure 2.7 presents the two sets of matched cases. The pair-matched comparison, controlled for the level of external hegemonic overlay in the region as well as imperial pressures from the center, helps to mitigate the possibility of a covariance between the independent variables—the markers of regional connectivity discussed above. The pairmatched comparison offers a more granular picture of associative bonds and the ways in which they can constitute and shape security choices and policies in neighboring hegemons. In explaining imperial clashes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the associative fabric of the peripheries is usually omitted, and these regions are perceived as passive actors in imperial great-power competitions. The pair-matched comparison helps to focus on the regional associative bonds on the peripheries, accounting for imperial pressures without exaggerating their causal impact. In conclusion, the theory of regional fracture developed in this chapter

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maintains that regional connectivity matters and that it can be consequential and determinative for the dynamics of contemporary armed conflicts. Using this typology of imperial peripheries and their associated nature of regional connectivity, chapters 4, 5, and 6 present an empirical analysis of imperial peripheries, followed by chapter 7, which examines the imperial roots of contemporary armed conflicts.

3 The Imperial Roots of Armed Conflicts in Eurasia

“Would the Armenians and Azerbaijanis be fighting if it weren’t for the Russians?” was a question posed to me by a conference attendee in a coffee queue a few years ago. The question harks back to “ancient hatreds” arguments from the 1990s, but it also calls for a calibrated understanding of local or global agency in driving small wars, often at the margins of world politics. Indeed, the concept of “ancient hatreds” is a facile one, used by the media and in certain academic circles in the 1990s to explain the sudden explosion of post-Cold War conflicts stretching from the Balkans to Rwanda. More recently, the postcolonial approach to the study of politics has played an important role in demonstrating the analytical limits of that concept (Chandra 2013). But while the postcolonial approach highlights the historical roots of many conflicts, it fails to offer a systematic method for studying the historical dimensions of contemporary conflicts. Indeed, it has become apparent that there is a dearth of tools and theories with which to study the imperial dimensions and roots of the contemporary politics of armed conflicts in Eurasia. Calls to explore the imperial foundations of contemporary world politics quickly run up against disciplinary limitations in contemporary political science theories. In particular, a central tenet of contemporary theory development has been the anarchical nature of twentieth-century world politics, in which a few hegemonic powers create and dominate a rules-based world order. This bias towards describing the world system as anarchic has limited, and to a large extent undermined, perspectives that are more oriented toward the agency of medium and small powers. To theorize the local agency of

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peripheral actors, and to do so deductively, requires an appreciation of the hierarchical mechanisms of political organizations in world politics (Cooley 2005), a conceptual structure heretofore insufficiently theorized in the field. Within postcolonial approaches to political studies, some have questioned the adoption of World War I as the beginning date for the institutionalization of the current international system. Delatolla and Yao (2019) add to the critical scholarship that has been calling for a reckoning with the field’s imperial legacies, emphasizing that these legacies predate World War I and extend back well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2014; Sterling-Folker 2015; Vitalis 2015; Barkawi 2010). But even scholars who do attempt a deeper historical dive usually limit their attention to the great-power politics of Europe, which often means ignoring the profoundly important politics of the imperial peripheries (Jervis 1985; de Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson 2011; Mitzen 2013; Nexon and Wright 2007). The consequences of such approaches have included a neglect of the role of subnational and traditional institutions in world politics, especially those that predate the state system. They have also produced overly deterministic accounts of the power of nationalism in security studies, leading to erroneous assumptions about the linearity and evolutionary nature of international relations, in which empires are naturally superseded by an administrative state, perceived as a more modern form of governance. Other disciplines have been well ahead of the field of international relations in terms of more directly considering the impact of imperial legacies. In economics, the colonial impact on global economic performance has been examined extensively, as I detail below. Imperial legacies and their propensities to lead to contemporary authoritarianism have also been studied (McGlinchey 2011; Beissinger and Young 2002; Katz 2018; Nalbandov 2018). More relevant for this work within the discipline of international relations, the impact of colonial institutions on contemporary armed conflict has also recently developed as a particularly fruitful research direction. Historiographical empire studies have been crucial in motivating social science investigations into empire studies, but meaningful cross-pollination across disciplines remains rare. And, as discussed earlier in this book, comparative regional studies in particular have suffered greatly from this historical myopia. Assumptions about evolutionary trends in regional engagement and an overemphasis on formal institutions are some of the blind spots in this scholarship. One purpose of this book is to nudge the field of comparative regional studies to address these gaps.



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The imperial lens adds great value to understanding contemporary armed conflicts. Importantly, however, it is the regional dimension of the imperial lens that illuminates the imperial legacies of the contemporary armed conflicts discussed in this work. Chapter 2 introduced a specific analytical method for studying regional connectivity on imperial peripheries: it developed regional connectivity as a meso-level variable that integrates local community-level dynamics of connectivity with structural factors of greatpower rivalry. The present chapter spends more time on assessing the value of the imperial lens on contemporary armed conflicts. This chapter seeks to clarify the impact on contemporary armed conflicts in Eurasia of regional connectivity on the imperial peripheries. It begins with a rationale for applying an imperial frame to Eurasian security studies, explaining how this enriches existing theories and perspectives on the topic. The second section examines the existing theories on post-Soviet wars, some of which are cases that will be covered in chapter 7. Next, the chapter delineates the key causal claims within the regional fracture and resilience theory that was developed in chapter 2, with a focus on its value for understanding contemporary armed conflicts across contemporary Eurasia. The chapter concludes with a section profiling imperial peripheries, categorized in terms of the density and nature of their connectivity and their neighborhood effect. The primary objective of this chapter is to motivate and articulate a conflict theory from this understanding of the neighborhood effect, supplemented by a policy discussion on Eurasian connectivity moving forward.

The Rationale for an Imperial Lens on Eurasian Security Studies This section identifies some of the most commonly used arguments in Eurasian security studies, which hold the most promise for exposing and developing the imperial contours of this debate. Perhaps the most obvious rationale for the imperial lens lies in its capacity to challenge Euro-centricity in global security studies, a bias that Eurasian politics has not escaped. Barkawi and Laffey (2006) have extensively detailed the consequences of Euro-centricity for security studies, advocating for an acknowledgment of the mutually constitutive nature of Europe and the non-European world in making history. The studies of ethnic conflicts of various levels of intractability that have engulfed parts of the continent over the past two centuries have been analyzed and studied primarily in their dyadic formations, limited to

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their immediate locales. Conceptualizations of such conflicts as expressions of deeper and larger systemic inequalities in the world system have been few and far between. Euro-centricity, and the dominance of anarchy as an organizing concept in international relations, have been key drivers in sidelining any imperial lens on Eurasian security studies. Barkawi and Laffey (2006) explain how violence and armed conflict outside of the Western world have traditionally been explained by a lack of modern political and socioeconomic institutions and by underdevelopment and poverty, or by the peculiarities of local ethnic identities. On Kaldor’s work (1998), Barkawi and Laffey note that “new wars” in ambiguous border zones such as the Balkans are explained away by the absence of a cosmopolitan political consciousness. Indeed, studies of imperial legacies, while generating rich discourse in sociology and economics, have made few inroads into the fields of political science or international relations. Halperin and Palan (2015) note that “students of international relations are accustomed to thinking of the contemporary world as post-imperial, as divided among discrete political entities founded on national communities, each jealously guarding its sovereignty and power against the dangers of an anarchic world” (1). They go on to state that the reality is different because in addition to being increasingly postnational, as described by the scholarship on globalization, the world remains deeply imperial in its political fabric. “World history is imperial history” (1), the authors conclude, and call for an understanding of the specific mechanisms and institutional imprints of imperialism, particularly on how we organize our economies and forge institutional systems in peacebuilding and security. Imperial legacies matter for the patterns of contemporary conflict, migration, and nation-building; for cultural forms, artistic paradigms, and legal systems. An imperial lens on Eurasian security is particularly valuable for understanding the post-Cold War period. Many thought that the end of the Cold War also augured an end to its imperial corollaries, with a new era in the making. This has plainly not been the case. An imperial lens is today an essential prerequisite for the contemporary study of “neighborhood quality” in the peripheral regions of the former Soviet empire. Such an approach to modern Eurasian security can help to identify those structures, institutions, and values that have endured from Eurasia’s pre-Cold War imperialism. It can help to expose imperial continuities between the Cold War period and its aftermath, and it promises to reveal the bargains and political choices



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that states in peripheral regions need to be making in the increasingly fluid political environment of today. Several theoretical approaches in international relations have been applied to Eurasian security studies. The first is that of alliance politics. The end of the Cold War, a watershed process for the Eurasian continent, led to a readjustment of alliance structures between the Kremlin and its satellites. Those newly emergent states, in the Cold War aftermath, had varied levels of political autonomy from the Kremlin. They became vulnerable, to varying degrees, to new hegemonic powers vying for control and influence in the former Soviet space. The European Union, the United States, Turkey, and China quickly entered the “hegemonic marketplace,” bargaining for influence in the emergent post-Communist space. From newly available energy resources in Central Asia and the Caspian, to military bases and transportation routes, the legacy ties with the Kremlin in these newly independent post-Soviet states were quickly tested (de Waal 2019). International relations theories had to rapidly adjust in order to explain the new patterns of alliance formation, hardly expecting America’s now infamous unilateral abandonment of the very hegemonic order that it had created in the postWorld War II era (Ikenberry 2019). In explanations of the reshuffling of alliances in post-Cold War Eurasia, the imperial lens was not commonly used. Much of the scholarship on alliance politics at the time was driven by debates over the relevance of the structural theory of realism (Waltz 2008). In particular, with the seeming dominance of a neoliberal rules-based world order and market economics as the dominant model of production, some questioned whether balancing strategies vis-à-vis other states were even necessary. But this optimism and faith in liberal institutionalism during the post-Cold War period was challenged by critics focused on the continuing relevance of geopolitics. In the Putin era, Russia’s resurgence from its post-Cold War “hibernation” added credence to arguments heralding a “return” of geopolitics. Against this backdrop, the relevance of power-balancing by states, and the continuing prevalence of structural realism, was explained by the fact that there were no major changes in the world system in the post-Cold War period, and that the structural changes inside the system hardly warranted a dismissal of structural realism. Despite the end of bipolarity, so the argument went, world politics continued to be defined by great-power interactions, even in their multipolar formations. Katzenstein’s (2005) study of global regions in the aftermath of World

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War II, and the way in which they are linked to the United States, highlighted the significance of regions and the local regional fabric in mutually constituting American foreign policies in various parts of the world. Katzenstein argued that American power, i.e. an “American imperium,” was grounded in its connections with various regions that differed among themselves in institutional form, type of identity, and internal structure. And while these regions were “porous,” in the context of globalization, their interaction with the American imperium helped to support democracy and to provide a modicum of political order and a loose sense of shared purpose. Similarly, Lemke (2002) introduced the concept of local hierarchies. While this approach was important for delineating the regional dimensions of post-World War II world politics, it, like Katzenstein’s study, failed to account for the imperial legacies in Eurasia. Lemke argued that in the world system, the onset of war in a given region is more likely if the local power parity is disturbed and a power emerges that is dissatisfied with the status quo. This approach at least recognized differences at the regional level, such as economic and political development, but also argued that there are enough shared attributes across regions to accommodate regional theories of power competition between states. The next theoretical approach from international relations with applications for Eurasian security studies and relevance to the imperial lens framework discussed here is hierarchy. The field of international relations is frequently criticized for its overemphasis on anarchical relations between states, and the associated assumption of state sovereignty in world politics (Lake 2009a; Cooley 2005). The dominance of theories stressing anarchy as foundational for the international system historically sidelined any adequate consideration of the imperial dimension in world politics. While not all dyads of hierarchical relations in world politics are imperial legacies, many of them are. The scholarship connecting empires and hierarchy has been minimal, with most such studies focusing on assessing empires as the ultimate hierarchical systems of authority. There remains a dearth of theories to explain the contemporary hierarchical nature of international relations as a legacy of formal empires. Simpson (2004) defines hierarchy in international politics as a way to compare states on the basis of their relative capacities. Lake (2009a) defines hierarchy as a condition in which one actor exercises varied levels of authority over another. In this definition, the level of hierarchy is measured by the number of contexts in which the dominant state can exert control



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over another state. The most hierarchical relations are found in empires, according to Lake. Particularly relevant for this work is the distinction between formal and informal empires (Lake 2009a; Lake 2009b), with formal empires exhibiting higher levels of economic and security dependencies than informal empires. The imperial lens, however, tests some of the assumptions of the hierarchy concept of world politics as defined by Lake. Rightfully recognizing the regional dimension of global security, Lake specifies that hierarchies in world politics tend to cluster in regional formations. He provides three reasons for this regional clustering: the positive externalities generated for the region by the hierarchic dominance of a particular state; the economies of scale achieved in producing a regional social order by the hierarchic/hegemonic power; and international legitimacy. Expanding on the first reason, Lake (2009b) argues that the social order provided by the hegemonic power often extends beyond the boundaries of any single subordinate state, becoming a public good for the neighboring states in the region as well. Economies of scale are a second mechanism that creates regional incentives for the hierarchic/hegemonic power. Lake explains that once a dominant power has invested in the technology and military infrastructure of one subordinate state, it is in its best interests to add a second or more states to its hierarchic structure in the region at what would be a lower incremental cost. The presence of Russian military bases in Armenia, for instance, was therefore perhaps viewed as insufficient by the Kremlin. After the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, initiated by Turkish-backed Azerbaijan, Russia succeeded in deploying its peacekeeping troops into Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan proper. This deepened Russia’s presence in the South Caucasus and constituted a return to its historical backyard after the short hiatus when it pulled out of Azerbaijan and Georgia after the Soviet collapse. The third mechanism explaining the regional expansion of hierarchies involves legitimacy: having multiple subordinates in a region provides the necessary legitimacy to the dominant state, enabling effective authority and monitoring of noncompliance by that state. Although it was initially caught off guard by the Turkish-backed Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus, Russia now enjoys a deeper strategic presence in the region, with Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Nagorno-Karabakh more dependent than before on the Kremlin as a security provider. As I have argued elsewhere (Ohanyan 2018b), contemporary Russia has utilized the strategy of driving regional fracture in Eastern Europe, the

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South Caucasus, and the Middle East precisely in order to reestablish its dominance and hegemonic presence in these regions. Preexisting regional divisions, often predating contemporary state systems, become useful cleavages for external powers to leverage for reentry and the consolidation of hierarchy in such regions. Lake’s scholarship on the variable nature of hierarchy is useful in conceptualizing the constantly changing relations between great powers and their satellites. However, only when the historical continuities of hierarchic relations are considered, and their imperial roots factored in, do we have a fuller picture of hierarchy as a cause and/or an effect in regional politics. Such a framework, situating hierarchy in the context of dynamic imperial relations, shows the continuities (as well as ruptures) in relations between dominant and subordinate powers. This book argues that the imperial legacies in the context of Eurasian security studies are intermediated by the fractured or resilient nature of the institutional connectivity of contemporary political regions. It posits that contemporary political regions, whether fractured or resilient, emerged from their historic avatars as imperial borderlands. In this respect, it echoes studies of imperial borderlands and shatter zones. Rieber (2014), for example, defines such imperial borderlands as geocultural systems, noting that these spaces “were carved out of the shifting frontiers and incorporated into the imperial systems as separate administrative units, sometimes with autonomous institutions, reflecting their distinctive political and cultural features” (59). While of course limited by the politics of space and territoriality, these frontiers were also created by struggles over ethno-national organizations and cultural identities. The core-periphery relations, according to Rieber, were highly variable, ranging from accommodation to resistance by the imperial frontiers. Rieber’s geocultural approach highlights the multilevel nature of politics in these borderlands, which, he argues, were shaped both by domestic struggles within these highly multinational spaces, in other words their relations with the core, and by external geopolitical competition between empires. The theory of regional fracture and resilience developed in this work also recognizes the historically transcended interaction between domestic politics and external geopolitical rivalries. However, in probing the relationship between the two, it also elevates the institutional fabric of these borderlands and political regions, partly because it is the institutional conditions that determine the possible levels of participatory politics and representation—key



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factors for the peaceful resolution of intercommunal tensions and conflicts, then and now. In conclusion, the imperial dimension of contemporary Eurasian security studies needs to recognize the hierarchical, as opposed to anarchical, nature of politics on the continent. Alliance formation, while seemingly driven by the politics of anarchy, often emerges from the hierarchy of imperial politics and its legacies on contemporary armed conflicts. The way the regions come together, stay together, and fracture carries important imperial imprints. And the practice of security and conflict management requires direct engagement with the imperial legacies of region-building and regional fracture, as the latter continues to bedevil many parts of the Eurasian continent.

Armed Conflict and Its Imperial Roots This section reviews some of the existing scholarship on imperial legacies to contemporary armed conflicts, the area that has had the most direct engagement with the security studies literature. There has been significant scholarship probing the impact of formal imperial collapse and the armed conflict in its aftermath in postcolonial periods, particularly on the African continent in the mid-twentieth century. The historical legacies of colonialism have been examined in terms of their effect on economic development and growth (Acemoglu and Robinson 2013), with armed conflict as a consequence. The institutional and political weakness of the new states (Migdal 2004; Oskanian 2013; Kaufman 2001), their internal societal fragmentation, and their levels of economic development and availability of resources for waging conflicts are some of the factors presented as imperial legacies to contemporary conflicts. In terms of the economic performance of states in the developing world, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) have argued that, for example, Europeans deployed different colonization policies in different regions, each having distinct institutional attributes. Those authors argue that the climates that favored European settlement resulted in the transplantation of European institutions of private property protection and rule of law. More physically inhospitable regions, with high mortality rates, meanwhile, were associated with a European imperial governance organized through local intermediaries and divide-and-conquer policies. These, in turn, resulted in extractive institutions, where “the main purpose of the extractive state

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was to transfer as much of the resources of the colony [as possible] to the colonizer” (1370). Setting up institutions to restrict government power and enforce property rights in the colonies was costly (Acemoglu and Verdier 1998). But if successful, such conditions yielded stronger post-independence economic performance. In contrast, the argument goes, in colonies where extractive institutions were the norm, decolonization failed to produce the needed checks on the state or protections of property rights, and extractive institutions and the associated forms of governing persisted, with ruinous effects on subsequent economic performance. State weakness and conflict onset usually followed. Migdal (2004) has identified the broader international environment of the new postcolonial states as a key factor in determining whether imperial collapse and the rise of new states ends up being a peaceful or a conflictridden process. International support for border stability is one key factor Migdal points to as determining whether the transition from formal colonialism to the rise of nation-states ends up being peaceful or not. A related variable is the domestic institutional resiliency of new states: the extent to which they are able to mobilize their societies to defend the borders of the new states, and whether they create internal societal cleavages between the dominant, core population and emergent minorities. If they do create such societal cleavages, the institutionalization of social boundaries inside the new state then becomes a political cleavage, which makes the state, and the region where it is situated, vulnerable to internal armed conflict and/ or geopolitical rivalry (Ohanyan 2018b; Ohanyan 2021; Ohanyan 2022). Forced or voluntary population migrations within imperial borderlands (Rieber 2014; Broers 2019) and the resultant social cleavages inside new states are a broadly recognized imperial legacy that can lead to armed conflict within and between the new states. A key question relates to the conditions under which such imperial legacies of population movements do or do not become violent. In the context of the Soviet collapse in the 1990s, Migdal points to new states that emerged in Central Asia and the Baltic region with large Russian minority populations. Laitin (1998) has analyzed the identity politics of the Russian minorities in post-Soviet Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, raising questions about the conditions under which such cleavages did or did not lead to violence and armed conflict. The imperial patterns and structures of connectivity are consequential for the management of such societal cleavages in new states in the post-Cold War period.



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Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 5, in the Ottoman empire colonial policies included strategies of “demographic engineering,” ranging from forced population transfers to ethnic cleansing and genocide, deployed in order to alter the demographic balance of the empire (Göçek 2014; Reynolds 2011). For example, at the outset of the twentieth century, large-scale forced population transfers of Muslim refugees from the Balkan wars into Anatolian provinces with predominantly Armenian and Kurdish populations were the explicit imperial policy (Bloxham 2005; Kurt and Sarafian 2020; Kieser, Öktem, and Reinkowski 2015). Analogous imperially driven population transfers, and the violence against indigenous communities that they precipitated, have been widely studied in other contexts, such as the cases of white settlements in the colonial territories of Angola, Bolivia, Canada, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, and Zimbabwe (Lange and Dawson 2009). The imposition of arbitrary borders, another mechanism of armed conflict and civil violence, was particularly prevalent in European colonies in Africa and the Middle East (Pedersen 2015). Such cartographic divisions institutionalized ineffective states, particularly on the African continent, where the political rationale for an administrative state, spanning a geographically inhospitable terrain, has been questioned by many. Extensive scholarship exists on the effects of colonialism on contemporary armed conflict in the context of the British and French empires on the African continent, a setting that has witnessed significant armed conflict in the postcolonial period. Horowitz’s (2000) work on ethnic stratification has proven foundational in this context. That work demonstrated how ethnic cleavages coincide with social cleavages and together produce ethnic mobilization and conflict. It is a framework that has been useful in examining the link between a region’s experience with colonial rule and its contemporary conflict. In particular, one comparative study of British and French colonial practices (Blanton, Mason, and Athow 2001) highlights the varied institutional conditions in the colonies, some of which created specific incentives for ethnic mobilization during the decolonization period. In this work, a history of British colonialism was found to be associated with higher levels of conflict; the study explains it as a consequence of the “unranked” system of interethnic cohabitation that British colonizers created during their rule. What is meant by an unranked system is that the British kept the local traditional institutions and ethnic structures intact and often deployed divide-and-conquer strategies in their governance. As a result, no single ethnic group was able to emerge as dominant. Instead, built into the

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system was a rivalry among ethnic groups that persisted in the struggle for control of the state after the British colonizers left. In such an unranked arrangement, the divide-and-conquer policies created a cultural division of labor: attempts at social mobilization required joining and supporting one of the ethnic groups, thereby elevating ethnicity as a social cleavage. The British strategy stands in contrast to the French preference for administrative centralization, in which all ethnic groups were expected to integrate into the French imperial identity. In this arrangement, social and ethnic cleavages cut across each other, rather than coinciding. However, various ethnic groups had different levels of success in assimilating into this French imperial identity. With their ethnic institutions weakened under the French system, states in the immediate postcolonial era found themselves with attenuated mechanisms and structures of ethnic mobilization and stratification. This is very different from the aftermath of British colonization, which left the structures of ethnic mobilization intact and indeed exploited them, thereby leaving institutional incentives for interethnic competition in its wake. Blanton, Mason, and Athow (2001) argue that such colonial legacies are fundamental in explaining the higher levels of conflict seen in the former British territories, compared to former French colonies. Upheavals in the former French colonies, however, tended to be of a more revolutionary nature, with groups vying to control the whole state, given that there were few institutions of incremental change and bargaining with the state. Also significant in probing imperial legacies to contemporary conflict is the emphasis on communal violence. Lange and Dawson (2009) affirm that communal violence is a common legacy of colonialism, particularly in the case of British colonialism, but note that the effects may be indirect and subtle. Among the many colonial policies that survived in the contexts of postcolonial armed conflict is the construction of oppositional identities by the colonial powers during their rule, most commonly known as divide-andconquer (Berman 1998; King 1999; Mamdani 2018). In this vein, the case of colonial Malaysia is instructive, where ethnic Malays, while politically privileged, were largely restricted from access to the economic opportunities that were open to Chinese Malays. This division of labor along ethnic lines was challenged in the 1969 elections that brought ethnic Chinese into the political arena, prompting violence during this period (Lange and Dawson 2009; Collin 2004). Also significant was the hardening of previously fluid and situational identity divisions into “ethnic groups,” mostly as a result of



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the bureaucratization of tribal identities, as explored by Lemarchand (2009) in the context of Rwanda (a former Belgian colony). Relevant to this debate on the institutional effects of colonial strategies is the question of the institutional capacity of the new postcolonial states. There is a broad consensus in the literature that new states are more prone to ethnic conflict than older ones (Ray 2016). Fearon and Laitin (2003) have shown that the risk of civil war onset is many times higher in the first two years of independence than it is for older states. In addition, a civil war that begins within the first few years of the formation of a new state is more likely to become protracted, while later-onset conflict, driven by lower levels of interethnic fragmentation, tends to be more limited in scope (Ray 2016). Barkey (1997) describes ethnicity and nationalism as inevitable incentives to mass mobilization in new states emerging from imperial peripheries. But she makes a distinction between states that emerge from the imperial core and those that emerge from the imperial peripheries, with the former having better chances of peaceful state-building and the latter being more prone to ethnic conflict and nationalism. Barkey explains that “nationalizing states of the periphery do not necessarily end up with a strong state apparatus or a set of well-defined institutions as their imperial legacy” (104). Imperial institutions on the peripheries are generally weak, she argues. As a result, ethnic nationalism becomes an instrument for unification and solidarity in postimperial state-building processes. In contrast, a state emerging from an imperial core enjoys a better-developed state apparatus and institutions and is less prone to ethnic violence. The structural attributes of empires are a significant legacy for postcolonial states, but this explanation in isolation ignores the institutional diversity in governance across peripheries within a single empire, or at the frontiers of different empires. Institutions and administrative structures are important for peaceful political contestation in new states, but so are the levels of societal connectedness and social trust existing between the different ethnic communities that are present on the peripheries. The ways in which states can arise peacefully from multiethnic imperial peripheries and from imperial centers remain underexplored. Against this backdrop, Ray’s (2016) work on the timing of ethnic conflict onset after independence, for 177 ethnic groups in 33 ex-British colonies, is instructive. In his identification of determinants of early-onset post-independence conflict, Ray is skeptical of economic factors, elite-level variables, and ethnic mobilization strategies as explanations for war onset. Instead, he demonstrates that subjective factors

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and perceptions at a group level can be more predictive in explaining the onset of war in new states: My analysis reveals that the main group-level triggers of early conflict onset are perceptions of backwardness, exclusion from political power on the eve of independence, downgrading of political status in the immediate aftermath of independence, and being regionally based. More generally, I find that shorter durations of post-independence peace are better explained by subjective evaluations of group worth than by rational assessments of the costs and benefits of mobilization. (811)

Such sociological explanations indicate the need to study the social fabric of communities prior to independence. The level of social ties and social trust existing between ethnic communities on imperial peripheries is a significant contextual factor that can either heighten or inhibit any elite-driven attempts at mobilization. In addition, in the context of the African continent, Wig (2016) has shown the power of traditional subnational, precolonial institutions of governance on many parts of the continent. Wig illustrates how centralized institutions of political organization in precolonial Africa contributed to such groups avoiding armed conflicts and civil wars with the governments of new, postcolonial states. Rieber (2014) has argued that imperial borderlands across Eurasia were “complex frontiers,” shaped by the imperial centers’ struggles to subordinate these regions, whether by force or accommodation. Rieber claims that the imperial borderlands across Eurasia, defined as geocultural spaces, defied centralizing measures in the late nineteenth century, thereby setting the stage for imperial collapse at the beginning of the twentieth century. As noted by some of Reiber’s critics, his vast and comprehensive study of the imperial borderlands of Eurasia shies away from explaining how these borderlands shaped and impacted patterns of conflict between empires at the time, in addition to their legacies for contemporary armed conflicts. It is such unanswered questions that motivate the present work.

The Pre-Soviet Roots of Post-Soviet Wars I now turn to focus on the imperial roots of armed conflict in the postCommunist context. Here, any imperial lens on the conflicts has largely been limited to construing Soviet collapse as an imperial dissolution. Any deeper dive into interethnic relations in conflict regions has been carried



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out within constructivist frameworks, giving analytical supremacy to “myth complexes” and constructed identities and images of the “other,” instrumentalized by ethnic elites (Kaufman 2001; Toal 2017; Broers 2019). Cheterian’s (2008) work on the ethnic conflicts in the post-Soviet space is crucial, and is the most direct in highlighting the imperial and institutional dimension of Soviet collapse. That work points out that the Soviet collapse, while comparable to colonial independence processes in African and Asian states, was much more complex “since it simultaneously marked the end of an imperial setting and a profound change in the socio-economic structure” (7). Applied to wars in the post-Communist space, the imperial lens has also produced rich institutional-constructivist scholarship on the outbreak of ethnic conflict as an outcome of Soviet ethnofederalism (Suny 1993a; Martin 2001). A deeper historical dive, seeking to excavate the imperial roots of contemporary conflict, beyond the Soviet formation, has traced the sources of contemporary conflicts to the first few decades of the twentieth century (Saparov 2018; Saparov 2020; Welt 2014). The application of the “enduring rivalry” framework (Goertz and Diehl 1993; Vasquez 1993; Thompson 2001; Uzonyi 2018) to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict (Broers 2019) is particularly important as a theoretical contribution to the imperial dimension of the conflict. Laitin’s (1998) work on Russian minorities within the new post-Soviet states has also contributed greatly to this discourse. However, there remains too little in the way of a systemic comparative analysis of the pre-Soviet imperial roots of contemporary armed conflict in the post-Communist space. The rise of nationalist movements and mass-scale political mobilization in the mid- and late-1980s, in the wake of the Gorbachev-initiated glasnost and perestroika reforms, caught many off guard. And Gorbachev and his government were often criticized for vacillating between the coercion and co-optation of national and ethnic elites in their attempt to dampen those movements and prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Decades later, all of the conflicts that erupted in that period in the Soviet Union remain substantially unresolved, with the exception of the Tajik civil war. The wars in the aftermath of the Balkan independence movements in the post-Communist space were ended only with major Western intervention, leading to an uneasy peace. The eruption of armed conflicts in the twilight years of the Soviet Union exposed the weaknesses of Soviet ethnofederalism in managing the perennial “nationalities question,” underscoring the issue of agency: how much

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power did the local actors in conflict regions possess relative to the Soviet government? With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the issue of local versus great-power agency resurfaced in all conflict regions. The question of the supremacy of great-power-centered geopolitics versus locally embedded nationalist movements thus emerged as a defining theme within the scholarship on post-Soviet wars. The imperial-regional lens on the study of armed conflict developed here reveals the role of great powers in conflicts, but its multilevel historical approach highlights the codependence of great-power politics with regionally wired local group and state relations. The historical perspective in this work complements the existing scholarship on post-Soviet wars, opening new pathways for examining complex historical legacies, of which Soviet ethnofederalism is only one. Kaufman’s (2001) work is particularly attuned to the historical legacies of armed conflict in the post-Cold War period. Kaufman has argued that “pre-existing mass hatred” and “myth complexes of symbolic politics” have conspired to create fertile ground for “ethnic entrepreneurs” to agitate the masses. While explicitly rejecting the “ancient hatreds” argument, Kaufman points to the role of manipulative leaders, economic rivalries, and security dilemmas between ethnic groups, manifesting in preexisting conditions of “symbolic politics” and myth complexes. Such preexisting myth complexes are then, according to this argument, “modernized” by political elites and weak institutions. The critical geopolitics approach developed by Toal (2017) is similar in its historicism. Toal explains how “geopolitical cultures” have been central in driving the conflicts in Ukraine and Georgia, with geopolitics understood as a cultural rather than a political practice. From this cultural perspective, geopolitics refers to the sets of organizing myths and narratives developed over long periods within different cultures to frame policies and local practices in conflict regions. This nuanced approach resists the geographic determinism prevalent in many scholarly analyses and highlights the role that power structures, such as states and markets, have in shaping and constructing public perceptions and understandings of territories, landscapes, spaces, and places. Constructivist in nature, these approaches emphasize the historical selfperceptions of conflict actors from the Balkans to Ukraine and the Caucasus. They are useful in highlighting local agency, and they add nuance to the more dominant geopolitical, great-power-focused analyses of post-Soviet violence (Toal 2017; Broers 2019; Shesterinina 2021). By offering a granular



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contextual approach to these conflicts, they recognize the variance in outcomes in emergent interethnic security dilemmas. Indeed, not all cases of interethnic hostility during the collapse of the Soviet Union ended up spiraling into war and armed conflict. This scholarship has been valuable in probing the historical roots of contemporary conflicts and local agency: elite and mass discourses and myth-symbolic complexes appear as dueling and dyadic narratives that have been modernized and repackaged. However, in shining the spotlight on local actors, such approaches seem to attenuate the role of imperial powers and imperial governance as causal and institutional factors in contemporary wars. Such approaches ascribe analytical primacy to the historically inherited and constructed discourses and narratives of local actors in current conflicts, rarely probing the institutional sources of these narratives. Where did these narratives come from? Why are they compelling? What were the institutional channels of their reproduction throughout the twentieth century? This has been particularly limiting for the study of the South Caucasus conflict cluster, a perpetual imperial backyard for Russia and Turkey. A case in point is the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict at the center of the Armenian and Azerbaijani relationships. Within a dyadic, narrative-driven constructivist approach, the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire remains unrecognized as a regional driver of insecurity in Russia’s Transcaucasia. From this angle, in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire emerges chiefly in the ideological realm—as a narrative, a trope, a symbolic myth complex, or a discourse used by Armenian elites to link Azerbaijanis to Turkey, modern Azerbaijan’s strategic ally in the region. The framing of the genocide by political elites as a “myth-symbolic complex” becomes a strategy to mobilize the masses towards ethnic conflict, so the argument goes. Such scholarship views the genocide as a narrative and a discursive resource being deployed in the contemporary conflict. In contrast, the approach developed in the present work highlights the genocide as an imperial-regional factor, an institutional obliteration of communal ties that has crippled indigenous conflict management capacities in Eastern Anatolia as well as Transcaucasia, with historical legacies to current conflict dynamics. The 44-day second Nagorno-Karabakh war in the fall of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, began as a Turkey-backed Azerbaijani offensive against the Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh and the line of contact between the Armenian and Azerbaijani forces. Initially and implausibly denied, Turkey’s role in this war was expressed in the provision of

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drones and other military technology, mercenaries from Syria who fought on the Azerbaijani side, and logistical and political support extended both prior to and during the war. Turkey’s active role1 in the conflict, and President Erdogan’s subsequent boasting during the military victory parade in Azerbaijan and other venues, belied the initial denials of Turkey’s agency in this war. In his speech, President Erdogan tied the war to the century-old Turkish military offensives in the Caucasus during World War I as well as to the Young Turk leaders who orchestrated the Armenian genocide.2 The genocide denial by Turkey (as well as by Azerbaijan), significant in its imperial-institutional dimension, has also been driven by a specific discourse of silencing the victim communities, a tactic that usually requires suppressing civil society actors that challenge the state narrative of denial. The institutional effects of such discourses, insufficiently understood in the relevant literature, are of critical political value for understanding contemporary conflicts. The authoritarian resurgence in Turkey is, in part, a symptom of a suppressed civil society, of which denialism is an important element. This resurgence of authoritarianism in Turkey, expressed in the suppression of civil society institutions inside the country, combined with Turkey’s unrepentant stance on the genocide, has remained an existential threat for Armenia, deepened by Erdogan’s increasingly revanchist, expansionist, and neo-imperial policies since 2016 (Cagaptay 2020). These factors have worked to heighten fear and uncertainty among Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. Within the contemporary scholarship on armed conflict in the South Caucasus, the treatment of the Armenian genocide as a source of victim narratives dilutes the understanding of the broader regional-systemic impact of the genocide in shaping the imperial roots of conflicts in the South Caucasus. In probing the historical legacies in this case, it is useful to look at the NagornoKarabakh conflict from the framework of an “enduring rivalry” and geopolitical cultures in a dyadic conflict over time (Goertz and Diehl 1993; Broers 2019). While useful in extending our historical perspective on this conflict, this dyadic and geo-cultural analysis elevates local agency, sometimes at the expense of the regional-systemic and institutional impact of the genocide on the conflict cluster in this backyard of two empires. In the Armenian case, the confounding variable, which spans the Ottoman and Soviet empires, is the institutional obliteration of the Armenian communities and institutions in the Ottoman empire during the genocide. This destruction was central to the execution of the genocidal policies and was organized regionally, traversing



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the imperial borderlands between the Ottomans and the Russians. The extinction of these community institutions crippled the preexistent capacities of ethnic groups and nationalities across Anatolia and Transcaucasia to manage interethnic tension and rivalry at the community level. It has given structure to the contemporary dynamics of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, introducing militarization as a legitimate and feasible solution to armed conflicts in the region: the previously fragile peace processes are now undermined. An apt analogy, in terms of grassroots institutional factors, is to the postcolonial African conflicts, where the linkage and causation between pre-imperial institutions and the modern susceptibility to violence is well-established (Wig 2016). Indeed, some of the theoretical frameworks developed in the context of the conflicts on the African continent can offer a more robust frame of analysis for the post-Soviet wars, despite the divergence in their economic transition pathways, discussed earlier. Another approach to the analysis of post-Soviet conflicts is that of Zürcher (2007). Key tenets of this framework for explaining armed conflict in the post-Soviet space are the particularity of Soviet ethnofederalism and the weakness of the Soviet state in the 1980s. Zürcher argues that “the conjunction of a specific ethnic demography and ethno-federalism institutionalized by the Soviet Union and the weakness of the central state account for the high risk of conflict in the Caucasus” (7). He goes on to explain that the nation and the state are central to understanding contemporary collective actions. In this theory, statehood matters in terms of the purported weakness and late formation of states among the conflicting parties. The argument surmises that nascent states are institutionally weak and rife with security dilemmas within and among them. Statehood also becomes important in this theory when the institutional weakness of the disintegrating Soviet system is considered. Zürcher joins many others in noting that throughout the history of the Soviet Union, ethnicities in the Russian empire were co-opted by Soviet forces (Martin 2001; Suny 1993a). Ethnic representation, hierarchically organized between titular nations and smaller ethnic groups with distinctly different privileges, institutionalized the divide-and-conquer principles of imperial Soviet rule. This culminated in a political system of control based on Moscow administering a vast multiethnic Soviet entity. In this framework, it is the unique institutional weakness of the Soviet state, materializing during the attempted reforms of the Gorbachev era, that laid bare the tensions and conflicts inherent in the multiethnic mosaic of that imperfect “Union.”

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The theory of conflict that emerges from this narrative is uniquely “Soviet.” The Soviet Union’s hierarchically structured ethnofederalism proved to be highly calamitous and unable to tame or contain interethnic tensions at a time of institutional weakness at the center. The “quasi-sovereignization” of the titular union republics clashed with the ethnic claims of the myriad autonomous republics and regions located at lower levels of the ethnofederal Soviet hierarchy. In this theory of conflict, the particular Soviet signature of ethnofederalism was the dominant factor underlying the string of armed conflicts that emerged in the twilight of the Soviet empire. Zürcher’s argument, institutionalist at its core, somewhat overestimates Soviet ethnofederalism as a key explanatory factor for post-Soviet wars. While it was a strategic necessity for the formation and consolidation of Soviet power, ethnofederalism was largely top-down and elite-driven. The limitations of ethnofederalist theories become clear when we consider that ethnic communities experienced extensive periods of social peace and coexistence that were interrupted relatively rarely by significant intercommunity tensions. The theory’s state-centric focus is also problematic, as it glosses over forms of political organization and self-governance within ethno-national communities that predate the Soviet Union. The most commonly voiced argument against ethnofederalism as a causal factor in post-Soviet wars relates to the fact that in the majority of cases, interethnic political systems within the post-Soviet space emerged peacefully from the Soviet collapse. The dynamics of the conflicts in Transnistria and Donbas also defy the ethnofederalist logic, and the latter case is examined in greater detail in this book, pointing to the power of institutional legacies and mechanisms of imperial rule beyond Soviet ethnofederalism. In brief, Moscow’s imposition of an armed conflict on anti-Kyiv protests in eastern Ukraine illustrates the role of great-power rivalry in fueling “smaller” wars. Geopolitical frames have also been prevalent in explaining contemporary conflicts in Eurasia in general and the post-Soviet space in particular. Such analyses involve familiar explanations of great-power rivalries in the post-Cold War period, particularly when analyzing the management of post-Soviet wars after their outbreaks. The important factor of local agency in enabling and facilitating such great-power rivalries is gaining overdue recognition. This more recent scholarship has described the way in which the unresolved armed conflicts in Eurasia, from Donbas in Ukraine to Damascus in Syria, have been instrumentalized in great-power confrontations. For example, Russia’s deliberate use of armed conflicts, often of its own making



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and used as leverage to exert itself as a “security provider,” is noteworthy (Ohanyan 2018b). Drawing from the contexts of Ukraine, the Balkans, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East, some scholars have shown how Russia, in its crusade against perceived intervention by Western actors, works to breed conditions of regional fracture (Samokhvalov 2018; Katz 2018; Broers 2018; Bechev 2018; Lewis 2018). The geopolitical rivalry between Russia and the West in the context of armed conflicts has also been addressed by Hampson and Troitskiy (2017). They have shown that for the past two decades, at least, conflicts in the post-Communist space have become securitized and pulled into the geopolitical competition between Russia and the West. And the implications for domestic politics in these “in-between lands” and fractured regions have been further assessed by Orenstein (2019). In this work I argue for the primacy of institutions, expressed in terms of their connectivity in the imperial peripheries. Regionally wired, whether resilient or fractured, such institutions shape the imperial peripheries as political regions. In doing so, they fuel and nourish the narratives and myths that, researchers have shown, make a difference in the onset of contemporary conflicts and their severity. In sum, an understanding of the neighborhood effect on imperial peripheries is overdue in the interest of advancing conflict theories in the context of Eurasian politics. Connectivity matters, in both its fractured and resilient forms. It is consequential in its institutional, imperial, and regional dimensions. The present work suggests that the nature of regional connectivity on the imperial peripheries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been a key cause of contemporary armed conflicts and has shaped their modern dynamics. The nature of connectivity in institutional terms—the neighborhood effect—has been varied, in terms both of intensity and of structure. As discussed in chapter 2, the regional connectivity in imperial settings has ranged from institutionally dense and balanced, with bridging social capital, to institutionally shallow and sparsely clustered, with low levels of bonding social capital. The former has given rise to more resilient regions, while the latter has produced a “predatory periphery,” generating fractured regions. In the case of the Soviet Union, these signature patterns of regional connectivity, rooted in pre-Soviet empires, were perpetuated in the Soviet framework through its ethnofederalist structures. As such, the Soviet system, inheriting the patterns of the Russian empire, consolidated and instrumentalized the cleavages and connections that predated its formation (Laitin 1998).

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The direct, causal value of Soviet ethnofederalism can be recalibrated to factor in the imperial, pre-Soviet patterns of connectivity on the imperial peripheries. The profiles of the erstwhile imperial peripheries are therefore directly consequential for analyzing the intensity of the armed conflicts that (re-) erupted after the Cold War, as well as the timing and rapidity of their onset.

Regional Fracture, Imperial Decline, and Propensity for Conflict This study of the neighborhood effect on the imperial borderlands of the early twentieth century concludes that the quality of regional connectivity was highly variable in ways not explicable by simple geography, location, or culture; that regional institutions matter; that the internal institutional system of imperial governance can shape its regional peripheries, producing varied outcomes ranging from resilience to regional fracture; and that these imperial roots affect state strength, armed conflict, and peacebuilding regimes in contemporary Eurasia. The implications of this study of the neighborhood effect on the contemporary politics of Eurasian security, bringing to light the imperial and regionally located roots of contemporary armed conflict, are manifold. It raises the question of how we should think about regional fracture and resilience in a contemporary Eurasian politics of connectivity. The continent today is divided by competing regional projects, including the European Union, the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, and China’s Belt and Road initiative. If the organization of politics in such large-scale political units remains a dominant trend in Eurasia through the twenty-first century, how will this structure compare to the earlier periods of formal imperial governance? Is the path from regional fracture to regional resilience evolutionary or monotonic? How should we foster deep and participatory connectivity between contiguous states while taming the dragons of great-power rivalry? I will explore three sub-themes here pertaining to the neighborhood effect that can help to probe some of these questions: (1) transcending geography, (2) transcending alliance politics, and (3) transcending armed conflict through greater regional resiliency.

Transcending geography: the historical comparative study of imperial peripheries, covered in the following three empirical chapters of this book,



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reveals that one can, indeed, cheat geography. The neighborhood effect, as defined in this work, is broadly determined by the quality of regional connections. We focus on these connections both on the peripheries of the empires succeeded by the modern Eurasian states in the twentieth century, and in the successor states themselves. The neighborhood effect varies, on a continuum from regional resilience to regional fracture, with balanced connectivity being a key element of resilient regions. Fractured regions are politically constructed and institutionally distinct. As such, they differ from the concepts of “shatter zones” or “borderlands” in empires, both of which are geographically deterministic, affording little agency to local actors or subnational traditional institutions. The concept of regional fracture encompasses the institutional structure of the region in terms of its connectivity. It offers a framework through which it is possible to explore the co-constitutive nature of the local/regional fabric with external/hegemonic power in such regions. Regional fracture analysis calls for a disaggregation of an imperial periphery from its imperial cores, to a certain extent, in order to allow a comparison of peripheries across empires and over time. Indeed, the concept of the shatter zone, while geographically deterministic to a certain extent, also reflects a constructivist approach. Bartov and Weitz (2013) point out that imperial borderlands, which they describe as shatter zones, are places of interaction; they are in-between regions and spaces, “where identities are often malleable and control of the territory and the population is subject to dispute. . . . Borderlands are therefore also constructs of the political imaginary and products of ideological fantasies” (1). Importantly, Bartov and Weitz emphasize that these shatter zones have undergone alternating periods of multiethnic coexistence and violence and devastation. Like many scholars, they, too, locate the sources of violence, to a certain extent, in nationalistic imperial metropoles that try to cleanse their peripheries for the sake of establishing a clearly delineated national region. But Bartov and Weitz point out that the inhabitants of the borderlands can also become perpetrators of violence, largely motivated by “the new rhetoric of separation and exclusion” (8). The theory of regional fracture, with its conception of armed conflict, violence, and insecurity, advances the quality of the regional fabric as a key factor in either facilitating, moderating, or dampening external or local pressures toward violence in a given region. The strength of the regional ties can mediate between the pressures toward violence stemming from the imperial center and external hegemonic

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players, on the one hand, and the local capacities for ethnic mobilization and violence, on the other. Transcending alliance politics: the multilevel theoretical framework around the neighborhood effect also matters for how we think about alliances and great-power leverage over fractured regions throughout history; understanding the mechanisms of the impact of great powers on the regional fabric is particularly important in that regard. In the context of formal imperial politics before World War I, great-power rivalries between empires have been broadly recognized for bringing about devastating war and, ultimately, the outright collapse of the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires. Importantly, those rivalries also reconfigured alliance politics on the world stage. The reconstitution of the Russian empire as the Soviet Union perpetuated the previous hierarchical political system of the Russian empire while introducing a more formalized process of alliance formation between the imperial core and its satellites. Regional fracture as an imperial process has made some empires inherently unstable, but has consolidated others. Still, many scholars have posited that empires are inherently vulnerable to disintegration, arguing that imperial multinationalism elevates ethnicity and nationalism to a terminally destabilizing factor. Others point to external rivalries and great-power politics as key drivers of imperial collapse and insecurity in early-twentiethcentury Eurasia. Reynolds (2011) rightfully argues for the importance of the interaction between the “high politics” of imperial rivalry between the pre-World War I Ottoman and Russian empires, on the one hand, and the “low politics” of ethnic nationalism among minorities in the two empires, on the other. Specifically, he notes that: Nationalism in these borderlands at this time is better seen as a byproduct of interstate competition than as the stimulus of that competition. Scholars accordingly must be wary of the pitfalls of adopting nationalism teleology retrospectively to classify, analyze, and explain behavior and of ascribing neat, programmatic ideological motives to political actors. (18)

Reynolds proceeds to clarify that, in the study of Ottoman and Russian borderlands, states and sub-state actors need to be placed in the foreground, but he also assigns the power rivalry between the two empires a causal role in driving the imperial collapse. In this accounting of Russian-Ottoman



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history, these empires were vulnerable to disintegration because of their differentiated populations, with ethnic groups having their own institutions and structures that often bypassed or competed with those of the imperial state. Furthermore, the conditions of interstate competition and territorial contiguity at the frontiers of these empires resulted in mixed populations that crossed borders regularly and detrimentally destabilized both empires. Each empire, Reynolds (2011) explains, exploited these populations in the neighboring rival empire, setting off an explosive interaction between the “high politics” of great-power competition between the Russians and Ottomans and the “low politics” of aggravating the internal ethnic divisions in the other. The “low politics” were used as a way to execute the “high politics.” The regional fracture theory presented in this work accommodates such institutional explanations of imperial decline and ensuing conflict. Concurring with Motyl (1997), the regional fracture framework also reveals that not all empires were created equal, so to speak, largely because of their internal institutional differences. There was great variance among empires, whether contiguous or maritime, in terms of their institutional capacities and political willingness to accommodate their minorities. While external interventions and meddling by competing empires into each other’s domestic affairs was a factor, as highlighted by Reynolds (2011, see above), it is unclear why certain communities responded to such meddling and others did not. External interventions hardly occur in a vacuum, and in both their historical and contemporary formations, such interventions are often exploited in cases of preexisting divisions and conflict cleavages. An empire’s domestic governance mattered in facilitating or causing conflict and imperial collapse. The nature of institutional connectivity on the imperial peripheries either ameliorated or exacerbated the impact of the external power rivalry exercised in such regions. In contemporary politics, resilient regions with deeper internal connectivity have shown stronger capacities to withstand great-power meddling: regional connectivity has given the region’s constituent states more freedom to negotiate extra-regional alliance formations. While Reynolds (2011) considers existing ethnic and subnational institutions as potentially destabilizing for empires, many others highlight these institutional factors as a pacifying and stabilizing force in imperial politics (Göçek 2014; Der Matossian 2014). As discussed earlier, Wig’s (2016) work is particularly important in explaining the imperial roots of contemporary armed conflict. Largely considering the African context, Wig shows that the existence of centralized institutions at a subnational

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level, in a precolonial era, is associated with a higher likelihood of avoiding civil war in a corresponding postcolonial period. Wig has argued that the existence of centralized institutions allows these subnational groups to rely on such institutions to bargain more credibly with the postcolonial state. The institutional dimension of regional connectivity explored in this work shows that regional and peripheral connectivity can be a buffer against sources of violence from both above (i.e. the imperial core or a neighboring hegemonic power) and below (i.e. community leaders and elites, beneficiaries of ethnic mobilization). In short, alliance politics and great-power rivalries can be tempered and managed by smaller political powers in regions that have deep and balanced connectivity. Transcending armed conflict: a comparative study of the neighborhood effect helps in understanding the effects of imperial legacies on contemporary armed conflict, making it possible to delineate peacebuilding approaches that are more responsive to those legacies. In this framework of regional fracture theory, tenuous connectivity on the imperial peripheries enables and empowers the imperial elites in their efforts at constructing oppositional identities. On imperial peripheries that are characterized by regional fracture, ethno-political communities are poorly organized. This institutional sparsity makes these communities more prone to ethnic violence because it deprives them of specific mechanisms and tools with which to bargain with the imperial center and one another. In contrast, greater regional resiliency, characterized by a diverse and dense ecosystem of ethno-political groups and institutions, represents a valuable mechanism for averting or managing conflict in the postcolonial context. In probing the imperial roots of contemporary armed conflict, regional fracture theory recognizes the institutional weakness and the nascence of statehood in the immediate aftermath of imperial collapse. Arguments centered on this weakness and nascence of new states and their institutions are widely established in the literature and are prevalent in the post-Soviet context as well. The present work on the neighborhood effect adds to the discourse by offering a historical comparative method with which to study the regional fabric on imperial peripheries and by helping to elucidate the ways in which regional postimperial contexts affect later state formation. The study of such mechanisms can then be used to explore the ways in which new states can trigger old conflicts. As such, this work shows how regional connectivity predates and shapes the contemporary state system.



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The onset and severity of contemporary conflicts is an extension of the regional dynamics on imperial peripheries. This work contends that empires affect the institutional foundations of their successor states. Imperial legacies are fundamental to the relationships between and among such new states. Imperial connectivity is the core institutional resource that shapes the regional conditions of interface and diplomatic engagement in specific geographic, and previously imperial, spaces in contemporary world politics. Regional fracture theory views the regional dimension as primary in assessing the imperial roots of armed conflict and sees the state capacity (either weak or strong) as an extension of that regional fabric: resilient regions are better positioned for strong statehood upon their political independence from empires. Postimperial successor states that emerge from pre-independence imperial peripheries must nearly universally contend with ethnic and national tensions inherited from the empire. Those states that emerge from peripheral imperial regions that were more connected and held a higher density of community-based institutions are better able to cope with these conflicts. Stronger and better-connected peripheral imperial regions, then, make for stronger and more peaceful states upon imperial collapse. The regionsbefore-states approach that follows from this work contrasts with the statesbefore-regions framework that currently dominates the theory and practice of regional security management and the liberal peacebuilding paradigm.

Conclusion The scholarship on international relations and comparative politics generally treats the contemporary Eurasian continent as a postimperial system. In the post-Cold War period, the security discourse has been dominated by structural questions pertaining to the world system. Questions about the integration of Russia into the Euro-Atlantic security structures (Sakwa 2017), China’s rise (Calder 2019), and the consequences of American retreat from global structures that it helped to create (Ikenberry 2019; Cooley and Nexon 2020) have been central. A shared theme in the seemingly divergent perspectives is the anarchical analytical framework they have used. These approaches recognize the great political and economic inequalities between states that are loosely structured into alliance systems of different sizes and organizational and political complexities. They tend to view the Eurasian supercontinent as up for grabs. It emerges from these research directions that multipolarity in the context of a weakening rules-based world order

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threatens to devolve into pre-Westphalian, neo-feudal rivalry among regional powers. By elevating the hierarchical understanding of the alliance system within the continent, this approach poses questions about historical legacies and the institutional continuities between Eurasia’s imperial past and its contemporary state-centric regional formations. The regional dimension, central to this historical continuity, points to regional fracture as a historically recurrent mechanism of colonial rule. This approach demonstrates that the imperial cores or contemporary great powers practiced this strategy to maintain dominance in their imperial domains and contemporary world politics, respectively. The study of contemporary alliance structures, for instance, should be viewed within its immediate regional and historical context in order to understand and appreciate the changing agency of small states and the way they negotiate with their stubbornly imperial contemporary patrons. Importantly, regional fracture theory offers additional nuance to the question of how colonialism contributed to armed conflict in the twentieth century; it points to the regional fabric as an under-studied variable in this scholarship. It argues that regional fabric, both in its fractured and in its resilient forms, is an intermediating variable in the way imperialism shapes the propensity for conflict on former imperial peripheries. This regional framework also makes it necessary to distinguish between social peace, at the level of communities, and a political peace that is maintained from the top down by political elites within a nation-state system. The two dimensions are usually conflated in the relevant scholarship, to the detriment of a more complete understanding of the conditions of peace and conflict and the policy implications that follow from it. In this approach, and in the context of multipolarity, political regions emerge as key battlegrounds for the future contours of regional governance and world order. The prospects for a Eurasian future and for its connectivity are largely contingent on the local struggles, at a regional level, between states and their communities. This study argues that Eurasia has become a neo-imperial continent, and that its future as a postimperial one is contingent on how the regional fault lines of Eurasian security are negotiated in the years to come.

4 The Habsburg Empire and the Bosnian Province

The multilevel approach advocated in regional fracture theory allows new thinking about the long-debated contradiction that defined the Habsburg empire. On the one hand, as was also the case for other contemporaneous empires, this empire had an explicit nationalities problem (Roshwald 2001). This was manifest in greater identification with ethnic groups and national collectivities than with the empire, and a greater awareness of national consciousness within many parts of the society. This often translated into centrifugal tendencies within the empire. On the other hand, this empire also boasted economic integration and significant connectivity in transportation links within its territory. The rise of ethno-national movements and growing economic integration throughout the empire during the nineteenth century challenge the historiography of the Hapsburg state, particularly regarding explanations of its decline and disintegration after World War I (Bruckmüller and Sandgruber 2003). This contradiction between the empire’s nationalities problem and its growing integration at the same time has had a profound influence on the regional fabric on the imperial peripheries. Both forces were consequential in making and remaking the regional fabric on the imperial peripheries, which is the focus of this chapter. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Habsburg empire covered much of central-eastern Europe, which, in addition to current Austria and Hungary, included the territories of contemporary Slovenia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, parts of Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, and Poland. Until 1908, Bosnia and Herzegovina was legally part of the

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Ottoman empire, but was de facto administered by the Habsburg empire. This arrangement of a shared sovereignty of sorts between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires was sustained until the 1908 revolution in the Ottoman empire provided a political opening for the Habsburgs to push ahead with formally annexing the province. The annexation also marked a new period in the imperial governance of the province by finally establishing a constitution for it, along with introducing public spaces and representative institutions, the Bosnian Diet being central among them. The outbreak of World War I was fatal to the Habsburg empire. However, as with other cases of imperial collapse, the state’s own imperial features remained a key causal factor (Wank 1997) driving its collapse. An additional factor was the failure of its political elites to engineer timely reform and legitimacy to offset the nationalities problems (Taylor 1976). Sked (2001), on the other hand, has argued that the empire rebounded from the 1848 revolutions by stabilizing and reforming, with the nationalities problem having largely abated by the eve of World War I. External geopolitical rivalries associated with World War I have also been identified as a causal factor for imperial collapse. Although their political institutions shared some features, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires differed in terms of the levels of autonomy they allowed at their peripheries; the depth and scope of their representative institutions throughout their territory; and the ways in which they managed the simultaneous modernizing pressures towards both centralization and decentralization. Prior to World War I, a bird’s-eye view of the Habsburg empire in its twilight years would have revealed a story of interethnic tensions and nationalist movements in many parts of the empire, often laced with secessionist pressures. However, if we zoom in to a more granular focus, a different narrative begins to emerge, somewhat paradoxically: a story about the strength of participatory politics and representative institutions in the imperial provinces. This chapter starts with a discussion of the neighborhood effect on the political peripheries of the Habsburg empire, focusing largely on the imperial institutions and their colonial governance style on the peripheries. It then focuses on the stressors of imperial governance, applied to the regional connectivity on the peripheries. As with the two subsequent empirical chapters, this chapter focuses on a single political periphery, in this case the Bosnian province. This chapter is a study of regional connectivity, expressed in terms of the existing bridging/bonding social capital and the density of



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civic institutions. This discussion is continued in chapter 7, covering the onset and severity of the Bosnian war in the post-Cold War period.

The Neighborhood Effect on the Habsburg Peripheries A key governance challenge shared by all empires is to formalize and centralize relations with the peripheries. Maintaining the imperial monopoly over coercive power, primarily the military, has also been a tall order in many cases. These goals have usually pitted the imperial centers and imperial institutions against tribal powers, autonomous kingdoms, and traditional informal institutions. In the Habsburg territory, this process of administrative reform started quite early, during the modernization efforts commenced by the empress Maria Theresa in the mid-1770s. Representatives of the imperial state worked with diets and regional parliaments as they tried to institutionalize tax collection and exert greater administrative control over the Habsburg territories. The regional analytical focus developed in this work clearly illustrates how the centralizing institutions of imperial regimes negotiated and interfaced with the tribal and traditional institutions on their peripheries. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was consequential in rewiring the regional fabric on the imperial peripheries. This arrangement established the Dual Monarchy, with separate but similar constitutions for the Western (“Austrian”) and Eastern (“Hungarian”) halves of the monarchy—a constitutional rule that lasted until World War I (Howe 2010). The arrangement ended the absolutist rule over Hungary, with both Austria and Hungary retaining their roles as mediators between the state and political society (Judson 2016). The compromise resulted from the emperor Franz Joseph’s failure to consolidate his bureaucratic centralism. It also opened the door to pressures for federalism, granting greater autonomy over regional governance and party politics to regional aristocracies. And not only did the formation of the Dual Monarchy rewire the nature of regional connectivity on the peripheries, it also altered their relationship with the imperial core. This period also legitimized and empowered nationalist movements, which Judson (2016) describes as having been a largely top-down phenomenon. But Judson also argues that much of the imperial politics in the second half of the nineteenth century remained deeply deliberative, local, and associative in nature, in both the Austrian and the Hungarian parts of the empire. Indeed, in this period, the associational fabric on the peripheries

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was quite rich, with deepening social capital, both bonding and bridging, that enhanced balanced connectivity within the civil and political society of the empire. Various types of economic actors, such as trade groups, farmers’ associations, rural banks (Albrecht 2004), village reading rooms, and cooperatives (Lorenz 2007), constituted the vibrant social capital and associational life of the imperial provinces. In addition, the macro-level data on trade integration within the empire has demonstrated the steady decline of transportation costs, another key factor in increased connectivity within the empire (Schulze and Wolf 2007). Increased physical connectivity, enabled by transportation infrastructures, facilitated intra-empire trade. Along with the introduction of public schooling and the constitutional revival of 1861, mass-scale political mobilization in imperial governance has been rightfully credited as being a force that stabilized the empire in its twilight years. The constitutional revival, whether intentionally or not, greatly increased popular political participation, in terms both of the levels of coherence in various associations and of their density. These developments applied within the formal structures of the political system—the parliaments and diets—as well as within the civil society, in both halves of the empire. The stronger political institutions emerged as arenas of bonding social capital—a proxy indicator of a more balanced connectivity within the empire, relative to its contemporaries. The AustroHungarian Compromise created new hopes for the political autonomy of historical crownland units, such as Hungary (which was recognized in the 1861 compromise deal), Galicia, and Bohemia. Polish nationalists hoped for greater autonomy in the short term and the restoration of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth in the long term. After the compromise, the two entities had different constitutions, administrative and judicial systems, and qualifications for citizenship (Judson 2016). And while the other crownlands failed to negotiate federal concessions, they still managed to secure significant levels of cultural and administrative autonomy, which enabled a richer associational fabric on the peripheries than had previously been possible. Judson highlights the use of local languages, the local civil service, and control over education and welfare policy in the peripheral crownlands, all of which rested on and required a resilient civil society fabric in those territories. Reflecting on the dense associative fabric on imperial peripheries in the Dual Monarchy, Judson (2016) notes:



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No longer merely bystanders and onlookers, Austrians and Hungarians claimed an explicit stake in their empire. If these were the empire’s twilight years, or even its last, long Indian Summer, as the years before the First World War have sometimes been characterized, most of its citizens apparently did not know it. (333)

The claiming of their empire, through their daily and deeply local engagement with the administrative state, altered the regional fabric for the imperial citizens in multiple ways. The increased connectivity on the imperial peripheries was physical as well as institutional. Mass mobilization and the close engagement with the imperial state were crucial transformations in the empire, rapidly rewiring the regional fabric on the peripheries. This political mobilization was possible partly because of the increased social and physical connectivity—key markers of the modernization processes sweeping the empire. At the turn to the twentieth century, it took Galicians only fourteen hours to get from their capital in the city of Lemberg/Lwów/ Lviv to Vienna by train—a five-hundred-mile trip that takes much longer today (Judson 2016). The revolutions in transportation and communication and the growing literacy and schooling in the empire unfolded along with equally transformative changes in the imperial administrative state. These developments helped to create a more integrated social fabric on the peripheries, with a range of mechanisms for creating bridging social capital across communities. Combined with deeper and denser institutional connectivity, the administrative structures of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg empire on the peripheries were stronger, and its governance there more highly developed, than was the case for the peripheries of the Ottoman and Russian empires of that time. Facing the same pressures from national movements and geopolitical rivalries as did the Ottoman and Russian empires, the Habsburg empire made advances with its administrative reforms, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. The new public entitlements and service provisions, from public education to welfare policies, resulted in new layers of bureaucracy, which were needed to implement and monitor the new policies. In their associational impact, these developments revived and transformed parliaments, crownland diets, town halls, professional associations and trade unions in the postal and telegraph sectors, and agriculture (Judson 2016). All of these civic and political institutions added to the bridging and balanced connectivity

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among various communities, making governance more responsive and participatory than would have otherwise been the case. The associational life of that time was highly diverse but also organizationally strong and coherent. Judson (2016) puts it well: The expansion of governmental functions also spurred citizens to identify and organize politically around particular occupational interests and seek effective representation in public institutions, such as town councils, school boards, or chambers of commerce. This in turn produced all kinds of specialized interest groups—from sugar-beet farmers to telegraph operators to rural insurance salesmen to state bureaucrats themselves—all of whom lobbied local and state governments for particular concessions. (337)

While the expansion of the administrative state in the empire was hardly a new development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its deeply local and regional manifestations were rather novel. These would prove to be consequential for regional politics and the nation-state system that would emerge later in the twentieth century. In the era of the Dual Monarchy, during the late-nineteenth-century expansion, it was the margins and imperial peripheries that drove much of this change, unlike in the earlier periods of state growth such as the 1780s under Joseph II and the neo-absolutist regime of the 1850s (Judson 2016). This deeply deliberative and regional fabric of state expansion rested on self-organization in local communities, which has long been considered a staple of democratic development. “Both the state-appointed and the local ‘autonomous’ bureaucracies in the communes stretched to fill mounting responsibilities to a growing clientele,” Judson points out (336). As already noted, the expansion of the administrative state in the Habsburg empire rewired and reconnected the imperial peripheries. It created political spaces at the local levels of government where region-wide and highly diverse associations and organizations could coalesce to push for politically significant action. Nationalist groups and political parties were very much a part of the political landscape in the empire. But, in contrast to the Ottoman and Russian empires, which are discussed later, in the Habsburg empire their political activities were significantly modified and moderated through institutional channels and the emergent regional institutions of participation. Nationalities were one of many categories (class, religion,



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region, and profession) through which individuals started organizing and making claims on the society. The deepening intra-communal, bonding social capital was supplemented by connections and bridging in the political spaces created by the imperial center’s political and administrative reforms. The modernization coming from the peripheries was a significant, and perhaps singular, development in the Habsburg empire, relative to the other cases of imperial governance examined in this work. And the other crownlands did not receive the same level of autonomy from the imperial core as did the Hungarians. However, the expansion of the administrative state and modernization reforms advanced the imperial peripheries as regional systems of their own, resulting in dense and diverse associations and in forms of political and civic participation that cut across ethnicities. And this expansion of political mobilization and civil society at a regional level helped to strengthen the empire in public imaginations. The density and diversity, as well as the high levels of organizational coherence, of regional associations on the imperial peripheries are only some of the dimensions of regional resilience and balanced connectivity expressed on the Habsburg peripheries. Additional measures of resilience included the terms of coordination and engagement among various organizations and associations. The historiography of the Habsburg empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has firmly established the practice of negotiation and compromise between various social and political groups on the imperial peripheries, among the various imperial peripheries, and between the peripheries and the imperial core. With the foundation of the Dual Monarchy, the governance became significantly decentralized: while the central-level institutions retained important powers in foreign policymaking, it was to the regional capitals in Austria and Hungary, and to the imperial institutions in both entities, that the loci of power moved. In addition to the micro-bargains made at community levels throughout the empire, sweeping constitutional changes in the second half of the nineteenth century reflected the range of concessions made by the imperial institutions to accommodate the ethno-cultural and linguistic diversity of the empire. Cohen (2013) notes that the 1867 constitutional provisions recognized citizens’ individual rights to their national language and cultures and the group rights of each people to its nationality. With little corresponding legislation from the Austrian parliament to support the implementation of such concessions to nationalist political parties, over the years a “series of court decisions acknowledged the rights of associations and communal

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governments to bring claims on behalf of national interests for the protection of individual national rights” (104). In this spirit of compromise, the Bohemian Diet passed a law to provide for separate local Czech and German school boards in areas with mixed populations. In a similar vein of balanced connectivity, the communal legislation of 1862 gave local property owners the right to shape the development of their communities via their elected municipal councils (Judson 2016, 342). Such monarchy-wide institutions, which were deeply local and regional in nature, created incentives for cooperation and durable common bonds among people across central-eastern Europe. These connections outweighed differences of language, religion, and region. The incentives for regional development and greater societal connectivity across ethnic and national divisions often enabled bargains and compromises between various nationalities. An important example involves the renegotiations by the Croatian groups of their political space in the Hungarian parliament. In the newly created Hungarian cabinet, after the 1867 settlement, the newly elected prime minister, Andrássy, negotiated the 1868 agreement that recognized Croatia’s historic position as an independent kingdom allied with Hungary. This agreement gave Croatia limited cultural and administrative autonomy. Importantly, Croatians also received the right to independent representation in the Hungarian parliament. Moreover, as Judson documents, the Croatians had the right to speak Croatian in parliamentary debates, and Croatia retained 45 percent of the taxes it collected, for its own purposes. Against the backdrop of strong imperial loyalty among the public in Austria, the parallel trend toward interethnic and interlinguistic bargains, driven by bridging social capital, seems to have accelerated after the 1890s (Cohen 2013). Agreements and compromises between nationalist politicians and state officials took place in Moravia in 1905, Bukhovina in 1910, and Galicia in 1914. The significance of these agreements was in the legal recognition of the nationalities as political entities in elections and in the representative bodies in those territories (Cohen 2013; King 2002). These strengthening mechanisms of imperial citizenship, unfolding along with the marked rise of nationalities in imperial politics, could have led to the progressive and rapid transformation of the empire into a multiethnic state. They could have, but they did not. World War I was a central factor that interrupted that process. And yet, despite the disintegration of the Habsburg empire in 1918, as World War I was winding down, the rewiring and remaking of its imperial peripheries and the regional fabric connecting



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them was a dramatic development, one that has been under-studied and underappreciated, particularly in the context of state theory and comparative regionalism scholarship. Another example of balanced connectivity and bridging social capital can be discerned in the context of electoral politics. Challenging the narrative of the dominance of nationalities in the politics of imperial Austria, Howe (2010) has shown cross-ethnic patterns of voting and “inter-ethnic bargaining and compromise” in electoral and parliamentary politics, as well as in representative political institutions in ethnically divided communities (308). The practice of transethnic voting in imperial Austria adds to the more recent historiography that has sketched the Austrian parliament as a space for compromise between various nationalist political parties (Boyer 1981; 1995; Kelly 2006). A key finding from Howe’s (2010) work on transethnic voting is the evidence of interethnic bargaining and compromise. Howe further clarifies that the evidence of transethnic voting shows that the more conflictual ethnic group politics was a strategy chosen by political elites, albeit with limited success, more than it was a reflection of popular sentiment. The multilevel analysis of the regional fabric on the imperial peripheries shows that the density, the depth, and the distribution of social connections and social capital have all been significant. The duality of the politics on the regional peripheries reflects how the bridging social capital was facilitated by the steadily consolidating mechanisms of imperial citizenship and direct engagement between the individual and the imperial state. This took place parallel to the establishment of bonding social capital, which many argue was imported and cultivated by nationalist elites. This study of the neighborhood effect on the imperial peripheries helps to delineate both forces, bridging and bonding, and to illuminate their mutually constitutive nature. Despite overall regional resilience on the peripheries, however, there were specific fault lines that weakened the level of connectivity within the empire. Uneven levels of economic development and integration between the western territories and the rest are one example of this. These economic factors also interacted with the continuous cultivation of linguistic differences by nationalist parties, attempting to instrumentalize the existing regional cleavages on the peripheries. The overall institutional resiliency on the Habsburg peripheries significantly moderated the economic and political pressures on the regional fabric. Still, both policy areas were significant as stressors for regional resilience on the imperial peripheries.

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Stressors for Regional Resilience on the Peripheries Judson (2013) has effectively shown that linguistic politics was the only instrument at the disposal of nationalist parties and nationalist elites for demarcating the boundaries between their respective ethnic groups. In imperial Austria, nations lacked any legally sanctioned existence as national groups or official recognition of their territory as administrative units specific to ethnic groups. In this context, using language policies to demarcate interethnic boundaries was a key instrument for nationalist parties. Despite the overall intermingling and bridging of social capital, such policies did end up weakening interethnic connections. Starting with the decennial census of 1880, respondents in Austria were asked to list their “language of daily use” (Judson 2013). Failing to document the numerous cases of bilingual and multilingual language practice, the census created a unique opening for nationalists to mark interethnic boundaries by the ethnic language practice of the respondents. And although the Austrian constitution did not recognize the existence of specific nations, it did recognize individual Austrians’ right to an education in their own language, as well as their right to communicate with the civil service in their own language (123). The receptivity of Austrian imperial institutions to linguistic diversity, along with the drive by the nationalist parties to cultivate interethnic differences based on language, enabled ethnic-based associations, such as school associations. These are mechanisms that divided the communal fabric, by promoting bonding as opposed to bridging social capital and civic institutions. In those districts where only a small number of school-aged minority children lived, such associations engaged in fundraising to build “minority language schools,” to entitle the children to a public school in their own language. Nationalist groups also utilized the imperial structures to promote other types of ethnic-based associations, such as nationalist defense organizations, libraries, community centers, museums of local history, welfare programs, and economic improvement schemes (Judson 2013). Efforts to advance local tourism, whose marketing ran largely along ethnic lines, were also significant. The attempts by the nationalist groups to demarcate the otherwise multiethnic public space put stress on the regional connectivity on the peripheries. Judson argues that such activities created “linguistic borderlands” in the context of otherwise highly pluralistic and multiethnic imperial peripheries. But the linguistic differences between various subjects were still not significant enough to create perceptions of distinct cultures among the local



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inhabitants. While rural Austria had its share of social conflicts, they did not result from any sense of national belonging. And there is no evidence that local linguistic differences evolved into larger hostilities between communities. But in terms of their impact on the regional fabric, the activities of nationalist parties and elites, via their linguistic policies, weakened the more pluralistic and regionally coherent connectivity in the crownlands of imperial Austria. Another factor that weakened the regional resiliency on the imperial peripheries relates to the uneven rates of economic modernization and economic integration. Some scholars have pointed out that the growing economic integration in the second half of the nineteenth century had steadily acquired a nationalist character, and that the nationalities problem slowed and ruptured the developmental potential of economic integration (Sked 2001; Schulze and Wolf 2007). They have shown asymmetries in market integration and concluded that intensifying intra-empire nationality conflicts led to asymmetric patterns of market integration. The conclusion that emerges from this scholarship is that economic nationalism mattered. Theirs is a story of bonding social capital, in which the ethno-nationalist flavor created “structural holes” and gaps in the social fabric, thereby undermining the economic efficiency and performance of the Habsburg empire. Good (1986) has detailed the uneven economic integration and development in the empire in the nineteenth century, albeit mostly in spatial terms. This work relies on the “region” as opposed to the “nation” as the unit of analysis. It argues that weak market links between some regions and the national market partly explained the persistent economic sluggishness in the empire’s eastern hinterland. Institutional rigidities slowed the spread of development from the empire’s western regions to its south and southeast. The slower decay of the institution of serfdom was also part of the sluggish diffusion of growth into the empire’s largely agricultural eastern provinces. In the Habsburg empire, the western regions were economically more advanced than the eastern and southeastern regions. This is expressed in terms of levels of income and industrialization, which in the Alpine and Bohemian lands, in the nineteenth century, were one and a half times those of the southern lands, and twice those of the Carpathian regions (Good 1986). Interestingly, the economic disparities in development and integration had been much smaller in the late eighteenth century. The mercantilist Habsburg economic policies encouraged regional specialization between the industrial west and the agrarian east. Good also argues that such disparities

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intensified in the nineteenth century, in the post-Napoleonic decades; these inequalities were the backdrop to the empire’s overall sustained growth, and they signaled the structural transformation of the economy. The Alpine and Bohemian lands experienced much of the rapid growth and technological change in such industries as textiles and sugar refining. Excess capital and railroad connectivity spread only slowly to the southern and eastern regions, and many analysts connect this lag and its associated economic disparities to the development of nationalist ideologies in the regions. A key takeaway from Good’s (1986) research is that economically laggard regions in the empire were those that were poorly integrated into the national economy.

The Bosnian Province in the Habsburg Empire I would now like to focus on the regional fabric of connectivity within the Bosnian province, as I prepare the groundwork for the conflict analysis of the Bosnian war that is carried out in chapter 7. Indeed, the administrative reach of the Habsburg state on this periphery was much different than in the rest of the empire. This province stood out within the empire as an institutional outlier in many respects. Bosnia was made into a distinct political periphery due to its geographical location and political history. It had been a part of the Ottoman empire for centuries, viewed as a borderland and the Ottoman empire’s western gate to Europe. Some have argued that its geographic ambiguity stems from its location in Europe but with cultural, historical, and economic roots stretching to Asia (Todorova 2005; 2009; Hajdarpasic 2015). Its current political boundaries were already formed in the mid-nineteenth century. Ottoman rule in Bosnia ended because of the peasant uprisings and associated international conflicts of 1875 to 1878, which forced Istanbul to cede control of Bosnia to the Habsburg monarchy. A peasant revolt among the Christian communities in 1875 was directed largely against the tax collectors. The unrest in one community quickly spread throughout Bosnia, which led to repressive measures from the Ottoman governor in Bosnia as well as from local landowners and their irregular troops. Neighboring Serbia, along with Montenegro, sympathizing with their conationals inside Bosnia, declared war on the Ottoman empire in 1876. This Serbo-Turkish war ended in 1878, having also pulled in Russia against the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman reprisals resulted in massacres in Bulgaria, and a humanitarian crisis in the form of refugee flows quickly followed. These conditions created political pressure against the Ottoman rule in the Balkans. In the



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1878 Congress of Berlin, the European powers sought to limit Russia’s influence in the Balkans by transferring the administration of the province to Austria-Hungary. And although it was not until 1908 that the Habsburgs formally annexed the province from the Ottoman empire, Austria-Hungary administered the province from 1878 until the outbreak of World War I, the spark for which was lit with the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Despite its centuries-old patterns of communal coexistence as a periphery of the Ottoman empire, the province also had recurrent internal cleavages. Partly as a legacy of the Ottoman rule, it was the religious divisions in the society, rather than the linguistic ones, that were the primary category of difference. Much of the civic fabric on this periphery was expressed through bonding social capital, manifested in the rise of confessional groups as autonomous political constituencies (Hajdarpasic 2015). Unlike in the rest of the Habsburg empire, here language would have been less effective as a marker or as an instrument of imperial administration, because most of the population spoke some variation of the same south Slavic dialect. Instead, it was the confessional differences between Muslims, Catholic Christians (Croats), and Orthodox Christians (Serbs) that not only divided the society into social groupings and their associated political organizations but also shaped and co-constituted its relations with Serbia and Croatia outside of the province. As discussed in chapter 2, the bonding social capital and clustered connectivity made this periphery vulnerable to extra-regional influences. In some respects, the Bosnian province is archetypal for the significance of the regional fabric of politics in its imperial and contemporary manifestations. It is an example of how the nature of regional “wiring,” its clustered or balanced connectivity, can shape the governance capacities of the political peripheries of empires, with lasting legacies for the succeeding nation-states when the empires formally dissolve. Due to the shared linguistic use of Serbo-Croatian in the province and historically extensive patterns of communal coexistence, Bosnia was envisioned by many south Slavic figures as a space where common Serbo-Croatian national narratives could converge and bridging social capital could emerge (Hajdarpasic 2015). As such, it held great potential for deep connectivity and regional engagement throughout the Balkans, which could have enabled progressive political forms of administration and coexistence. But concurrently, the pressures on that fabric of connectivity were also unrelenting, stemming from competing nationalist

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claims from neighboring countries and provinces, as well as from the imperial confrontations between the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires. These forces strained the regional fabric in the communities inside Bosnia, challenging the connections that cut across cultures and their sustainability. In short, “high” geopolitics regularly stressed the modicum of cross-communal coexistence that had existed in this multi-confessional entity. Regarding the specific attributes of the neighborhood effect in the Bosnian province under the Habsburg empire, the following patterns can be observed. The Habsburg era in Bosnia before the outbreak of World War I can be divided into two periods, with 1908 as a watershed in terms of its institutional development. After formally annexing the province from the Ottoman empire that year, the Habsburg empire moved to strengthen parliamentarism and constitutionalism in its continued efforts to modernize the province. The implications for regional connectivity in both periods are discussed in the rest of this chapter. On units, regional connectivity, and associational life. Under both Ottoman and Habsburg rule, the confessional divisions within the society, in the context of the institutional weakness in its administration and governance, were recurrent. They made the province vulnerable to nationalist projects, as well as to competing imperial endeavors in making and remaking the province. Hajdarpasic (2015) has shown how the arrival of the Habsburg empire and the attempts at imperial governance in Bosnia evolved in parallel with the nationalist movements in neighboring Serbia and Croatia. The province’s Muslim population, which had been privileged under Ottoman rule, was now viewed by the Habsburg imperial administrators as a key group to assist with state-building efforts in the province. Considering the Serbian opposition to Habsburg rule, the alliance with the Muslims was viewed as essential for the imperial center in consolidating Bosnia as a distinct political unit. Governance through the religious authorities in Bosnia’s three confessional communities was a major legacy of Ottoman rule, one that reflected and reinforced the bonding social capital and clustered connectivity on that periphery. Under the Habsburg administration of Bosnia, the Muslim community remained tied, via its religious authorities, to the Ottoman empire. The Christian Orthodox and Catholic communities in Bosnia also continued to enjoy significant political power. As such, in the early years of Habsburg rule, the religious authorities were one of the few types of organizations that were organized and active in their administration of their respective communities.



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As the Habsburg empire sought to deepen its political and administrative footprint in Bosnia, it engaged in the Austro-Turkish Convention of April 1870, which settled the terms of the empire’s mandate in the province. In particular, the convention recognized the sultan’s “rights of sovereignty,” albeit symbolically. His name was to be mentioned in Friday mosque services, and, significantly, the Muslim community was assured liberty in its relations with its spiritual leaders in the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman practice of parsing out power along confessional lines also had economic consequences for intercommunal relations in Bosnia. The economically privileged position of the Muslim landowners in Bosnian society continued under the Habsburg monarchy, thus intertwining the religious issue with socioeconomic ones. Also significant in terms of organizational density and coherence was that the monarchy announced its efforts at confessional equality, which it saw as critical for “civilizing” the Bosnian province and modernizing it in terms of the Western norms of rule of law. But the claim of equality proved rather optimistic. It underestimated the reshuffling of political and economic power among the three ethno-religious groups that this would entail. The agrarian question emerged as central in this context: Muslim landowners had traditionally employed the Christian peasants. The latter held the position of kmet, which required them to turn over a fixed percentage of their annual produce to their landlord, in addition to the state taxes that had to be paid. The intentions of the monarchy to promote confessional equality, if advanced as announced, would have had to undo this relationship in very drastic ways. The central authorities, while realizing that a delay in land reform could cost the empire the support of the Christian population, were nevertheless unable to move any faster than they did. “The central government in 1878–79 envisaged its ‘civilizing mission’ in Bosnia in the unhurried, dispassionate terms of any European colonial administration of the time” (Okey 2007, 31). In terms of the province’s organizational fabric, the religious authorities in Bosnia were not only important loci of political power but also drivers of the educational infrastructure: they formed the crux of the educational sector in all three confessional communities. These conditions indicate that much of the social capital and connectivity was bonding, rather than bridging. The lack of Bosnian-wide institutions that cut across the different communities made the society vulnerable to extra-provincial influences, whether from the Ottoman empire, Serbia, or Croatia, a neighboring province in the

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Habsburg empire. In parallel, the Habsburg empire’s “civilizing mission” was largely top-down, doing little to alleviate the rather clustered social connectivity in the province (chapter 2). This contrasts with the situation in the rest of the empire, where multinationalism was strengthened through parliamentarism. The more institutionalized and balanced connectivity in the rest of the empire manifested in political bargaining between different ethnic groups. It also created an interface between the political society and the dense fabric of civil society organizations in the empire. In Bosnia, the top-down pattern of imperial governance and the power of the external confessional forces driving domestic politics were significant in the first few decades of imperial governance, before the annexation and formal integration of the province by the Habsburg monarchy. Area scholars of this period have established that two broad goals animated the AustroHungarian empire in the Bosnian province: first, spreading the “civilizing” mission in Bosnia; and second, demonstrating the Habsburg model of multinationality and its ability to curtail ethno-religious nationalism. In Bosnia, unlike in the rest of the empire, both of these goals were largely top-down projects of social engineering and centralized modernization. They were introduced into a province that had long been lacking in province-wide institutions. Particularly in the first two decades of imperial rule, these initiatives did little to cultivate Bosnian institutions of governance, even though provincial-level governance was already in full swing in the other parts of the empire, both in Austria and in Hungary. According to the historian Robin Okey (2007), There is irony here, for the very backwardness of isolation, by preventing Bosnians from developing their own institutions, had deepened their dependence on extra-Bosnian factors, enmeshing them in a web of relationships outside direct control of the newly occupying power. . . . If Austrian administrators were less perturbed by this treacherous terrain than modern counterparts would be, a key factor was the inherently elitist nature of nineteenth-century notions of civil society; officials were accustomed to disregard much of the rumblings of subalterns and to give police and censorship a freer rein. And, above all, occupied Bosnia was a subaltern society in a hierarchical age. (28)

The subaltern status of Bosnia was manifest in the top-down nature of these modernization efforts, at the expense of grassroots processes of institutional



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development. While Bosnia enjoyed a significant density of cultural and civic associations, most of them were organized within confessional communities, largely through bonding social capital and clustered connectivity, with few points of interface among the communities or between them and the provincial governments. The first few decades of imperial governance, under Benjamin von Kállay, highlighted the connectivity problems that plagued Bosnia under Habsburg rule. Benjamin von Kállay’s rule. Widely viewed by historians and his contemporaries as the most important imperial official in the Bosnian administration, Benjamin von Kállay sought to remedy the internal cleavages of regional fracture in the province, inherited from the Ottoman empire. He sought to model the benefits of Western modernization for the Bosnians, while integrating the province (culturally, politically, and economically) into the Austro-Hungarian empire. But he ended up perpetuating the same cleavages of regional fracture and low/clustered connectivity that he had inherited. Benjamin von Kállay governed till his death in office, in 1903, and his rule was defined by its imprint on regional connectivity in the province. As elsewhere in the Ottoman empire, in Bosnia the religious organizations were essential public spaces of civic political activity. Religious authorities in the Ottomans’ millet system were used as mechanisms of imperial governance, a practice that left its stamp on the Bosnian province in the Habsburg monarchy. In his efforts to modernize the province, Kállay signaled the religious tolerance and multinational fabric of the Bosnian province within the Habsburg empire. Civic modernity and civic institutions, in his vision, were to be supplied from the imperial state, while the confessional groups would be tolerated by the empire. His ultimate hope was to create civic equality for everyone in the province, with the distinct confessional communities eventually transforming into a political community. With this as his long-term objective, Kállay proceeded to forge civic institutions from the top down, leaving little room for the ethnoreligious groups to organize, bargain, or negotiate their relationships with each other and the center. The imperial toleration of the three confessional groups manifested in co-opting and containing their national ambitious. The organizational diversity among the three groups was significant, but Kállay’s efforts to build civic modernity from the top down translated into divide-and-conquer strategies, characteristic of many multiethnic imperial administrations of the time. Okey (2007) has argued that Kállay sought to support Bosnian identity,

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acknowledging its historical roots as a way of offsetting Serbian and Croat claims to the province. This was a way to minimize narrower nationalist claims from the two confessional groups. As discussed above, strengthening Bosnian entity was also a strategy to weaken and dilute the co-religious influences from beyond Bosnia’s borders. Integrating the province into Austria-Hungary was the goal. Indeed, Kállay viewed the Muslim landowners as important for sustaining Bosnian statehood, seeing this group as the most vested in, and most capable of working towards, Bosnian statehood within the empire (Okey 2007). This strategy meant that land reform and agrarian policies, which pitted the Muslim beks against the Christian peasants, remained a persistent source of intercommunal tension. With little progress in this sphere, the political cleavage within the society remained, inviting and perpetuating influences from Christian coreligionists from beyond Bosnia—a key marker of regional fracture, in which the Bosnian entity has remained stuck to this day (Bechev 2018). The Croat community in Bosnia was viewed as the Austrophile section of the society. But the size of the Catholic Croat community was rather small, and poverty in this community was significant. These factors made it difficult for the empire to rely on this community for a deeper imprint in the province. The Hapsburg monarchy also had to balance the need to fulfill its obligations to the Vatican, without inviting the criticism that it was picking favorites and breaking its promise of inter-confessional equality in the province. With the Kállay administration’s multinational “management” often described as an absolutist rule, and with the Balkan region deeply fractured, the Bosnian Serbs were critical of Kállay. They perceived discrimination and a denial of the Serbian nature of the Bosnian entity. As the urban Serbian community saw it, Kállay’s notion of the Bosnian nation was a way to limit and constrain Serbian nationalism and its civic attachments to the Bosnian entity. Meanwhile, neighboring Serbia’s growing orientation towards the Russian empire was also making Kállay anxious about Russian influences and expansion into Bosnia. He therefore sought to emancipate the Bosnians from allegiance to Belgrade, Zagreb, or Constantinople, seeing the regional connections mostly as a threat rather than an opportunity. Managing and curtailing south Slav connections in the Balkan region and isolating Bosnia from these influences remained an objective for successive administrations in the province, largely dictated from Vienna. In terms of organizational density and the diversity and coherence of the



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regional connectivity (chapter 2), Kállay’s self-described project of modernizing and civilizing the Bosnian province was hardly conducive to regional resilience. He sought to bring the province closer to the Habsburg empire and, in his truly imperial fashion, did little for institution-building within the province. Prioritizing economic development over political reforms, this period saw the local self-governing institutions limited to village headmen, and only Sarajevo and Mostar were given some municipal autonomy (in 1884), though the British consul at the time described even this autonomy as illusory (Okey 2007). While seeking to maintain control over the political governance processes in the province, Kállay allowed the continued functioning of cultural-confessional associations in all communities, as well as publishing houses and newspapers. Hajdarpasic (2015) argues that the empire, and the Kállay regime in particular, sought to influence and shape the national discourse in the province. This administration financed specific newspapers, ones that leaned towards the imperial institutions and supported the Bosnian identity of the province. In terms of the geopolitical embeddedness and systemic coherence of regional flows (chapter 2), Kállay enjoyed relative stability. This allowed him to manage the cultural and political influences from the larger Balkans. Hegemonic influences outside of Bosnia and the Habsburg empire, and external overlay from geopolitical competitors in this province, were also managed. Russia’s rivalry in this region was contained by the AustroRussian agreement of May 1897, which reaffirmed Austro-Hungarian rights to Bosnia. That agreement also contained neighboring Serbia’s anti-Austrian policies, although the domestic Serbian population in Bosnia remained suspicious and resentful of the administration in Vienna. Serbia’s anti-Habsburg energies were also contained by the fact that Serbia had been insolvent and a loan from a Viennese bank, arranged through the good offices of Kállay himself, had partially remedied the situation (Okey 2007, 123). The implications of these developments for regional connectivity, in terms of fracture and resilience, are specific to the Kállay period. There was significant cultural-confessional organizational density, with certain connections and ties even across cultures and confessions. However, the Habsburgs’ divide-and-conquer tactics of relying on the Muslims to contain the Serbs and Croats furthered the societal cleavages that the Habsburgs had inherited from the Ottomans. The cultural-traditional institutions and accompanying associations, often supported by their coreligionists beyond Bosnia, resulted in clustered connectivity in the province. True, cross-confessional bargaining

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and engagement were quite common in Bosnia during this period. Even the Christian-Muslim divide was hardly as polarizing as it had been under Ottoman rule. Muslims in Bosnia were viewed by the Christians as “(br)others,” unlike the Turks, as Hajdarpasic (2015) observes. And such cross-confessional connections later were transferred to parliamentary politics. However, the familiar divide-and-conquer policies practiced by the provisional pre-1908 Habsburg government resulted in cross-confessional cleavages later becoming fault lines between political parties formed along ethno-religious lines. The imperial habit of engagement in the province via religious hierarchies created the institutional foundations for the rise of ethno-religious political parties when the opportunity presented itself, during the post-1908 constitutional period in the Bosnian province. Clustered connectivity was reinforced through bonding social capital, with few institutions to generate bridging civic institutions across social groups. In this period of Kállay’s regime, the province can best be described as “latently fractured.” The provisional government consistently worked to isolate the province from the broader south Slav communities in the Balkan region. The institutional weakness in the province made it nearly impossible for inter-confessional and cross-national bargaining to take place and consensus to be formed within the province. By engaging with the Bosnian society via its religious hierarchies, the provisional government further enabled inter-confessional divisions, while minimizing any interface between ethno-religious communities in the informal sphere of politics. The lack of institutions of governance not only delayed representative politics in the province but also undermined the capacities for conflict management between the communities. But the constitutional period, which was introduced in parallel with the annexation of the province from the Ottoman empire, offered an opportunity for redress. The constitutional period. Kállay’s passing in 1903 brought in István Burián de Rajeczi (1851–1922), whose rule of the province lasted till 1912. Burián is also considered the architect of the annexation of the province, which he framed as a necessity for its fuller integration and modernization as part of the empire’s governance institutions. While building on Kállay’s efforts at a cultural and civilizing mission, Burián’s rule was also different in two important respects, and was highly significant in rewiring the regional fabric of the Balkans. First, Burián, while continuing the cultural mission of the empire, delegated that task and instead focused on building institutions of governance



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and representation. He worked towards introducing the Bosnian constitution and the Bosnian Diet. He increased the number of groups and associations in all three confessions, also supporting those that were in opposition to the empire. Overall, his rule is associated with the rise of the representative assembly and the institutionalization of political life in the province. As Okey (2007) observes: Burián’s confidential memoranda to the Monarchy’s inner circle confirm the historiographical consensus that the post-Kállay era saw a shift from politics by proxy, through the cultural autonomy movements, to politics in its own right. Patriarchal leaderships, based on alliances of local notables, faced the challenge of establishing a mass political base. As nationalists looked to extend their influence over an increasingly mutinous peasantry and a nascent working-class movement, a contest was on between them and the administration over the framework within which a post-absolutist Bosnia would operate. (148–49)

Highly diverse and politically functional associational life in various entities is central to building regional resilience, as identified in the theoretical chapters of this work. In this context, Burián’s willingness and political ability to push in this direction were pivotal in shaping the prospects of genuine multinationalism in the empire, with Bosnia as an important test case. Whether the road from empires to contemporary regional blocs was destined to go through nation-states will have to remain unanswered, but this moment in the history of the province and its relations to the imperial governance highlighted the possibilities and choices in managing ethnoreligious diversity in a rapidly modernizing world. Second, Burián also parted with Kállay in terms of his strategy in engaging with the Serbian community. Kállay had been perceived as being discriminatory against this politically active and organized community, largely relying instead on the Muslim landowners to build the Bosnian entity as a political unit. Burián moderated Kállay’s authoritarianism and hoped that the rise of a constitutional order and representative institutions would allow deeper engagement with the Serbian community. By extension, he hoped that this would make any discourse and action promoting autonomy and separation from the province unattractive to the community. Strong representative institutions were viewed as necessary for dampening ambitions from neighboring Serbia.

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The associational life in Bosnia under Burián’s rule remained divided along ethno-religious lines, creating a rather clustered fabric of social capital (chapter 2) in the province. However, this period saw a dramatic increase in the number of civic organizations and groups, which later became the basis for the rise of political parties, also organized along ethno-religious divisions. In 1905, the province had 266 clubs and societies, a number that grew to 604, with a membership of 79,000, by 1908 (Okey 2007, 144). Napredak, Prosvjeta, and Gajret, the main confessional organizations, grew beyond their original missions as humanitarian associations to become “representative bodies of the culturally aware.” The print media also experienced a qualitative and quantitative increase in all three confessions: Serbian Word; Croatian Daily; and the first oppositionist Muslim paper, Musavat, were all introduced during this time (Okey 2007). These developments reflected an unprecedented rise in mass politics, which had been building up in the cultural and traditional spheres of society. The demand for formal political institutions in the province was enormous, largely mirroring the revolutionary spirit elsewhere in the empire and its neighborhood. One could argue that the regional fabric, increasing in organizational diversity, though still clustered, was moving towards greater regional resilience. The subsequent introduction of the Bosnian Diet and the constitutional order created the political spaces where the clustered social fabric of the community could be bridged and integrated, as discussed in chapter 2. Unfortunately, even in Burián’s more liberal framework of imperial governance, the state was to maintain its ultimate control over the province’s associational life. The drive toward centralized imperial governance and monarchical conservatism never went away, and this worked in opposition to the greater connectivity and participation that was already underway in the Bosnian province. In terms of the relationships between regional units in the province, and of its geopolitical embeddedness, the situation was rapidly shifting during Burián’s rule. The regional connections between the three ethno-religious groups in Bosnia and their coreligionists beyond Bosnia were becoming more politicized, increasingly vulnerable as geopolitical tensions deepened. The dualism that had been consolidated in the Habsburg monarchy during Kállay’s rule in Bosnia was now fraying. In the first few years of Burián’s administration in Bosnia, liberal coalitions in the parliament were weakening within the larger empire, particularly in Hungary. The independence coalition took control of the government in Budapest and a Croato-Serb



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coalition took control in Zagreb. The change of dynasty in neighboring Serbia brought an anti-Austrian government to power. The stable international order in the region came under stress. This created pressures on Bosnia’s internal politics via its already well-established confessional divisions. And the growing external instability, particularly with regard to the uncertainty of Russia’s position in the Balkans, only accelerated the political pressure on the Habsburg empire. Against this backdrop, Burián advocated for the annexation of the province from the Ottoman empire, as a way to control the hegemonic influences from external powers large and small. As previously discussed, the annexation was carried out in parallel with the introduction of representative institutions, the formalization of politics, and attempts at establishing constitutional order in the province. After the annexation, Bosnia’s modernization was made conditional on its full integration into the empire, and the constitutional order was viewed as necessary for that process. However, the representative institutions that were established, especially the Diet, had limited political power. The Diet’s legislative powers were contingent on imperial approval of any legislation it might pass, in addition to the necessary stamp of approval from the Austrian and Hungarian governments. These limited legislative powers contrasted with those of the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments, which had significant say over defense, foreign policy, and customs in their territories. Importantly, as a legislative institution, the Diet was subject to the executive power in the province, the empire’s provincial government. Still, despite its limited political power, the Diet formalized Bosnian politics and created a space for inter-confessional connections and bargaining. As such, it offered a mechanism for state-building of sorts, against the backdrop of growing extra-provincial hegemonic pressures from Hungary and Serbia. Regardless of the imperial incentives for introducing constitutionalism, it altered the regional fabric in Bosnia most directly. These new capacities for provincial self-governance, while limited, offered a way to build cross-confessional connections over shared concerns, such as education and economic development. The persistent need for agrarian reform, and the challenge that this created for the Muslim landowners, could now be addressed via bargaining and coalition-building among the three groups. Indeed, cross-confessional coalitions were taking place within the Diet, and the culture of compromise and parliamentary bargaining was taking hold. Issues of agrarian laws and the institution of kmetstvo (serfdom), language differences and signage issues in the railroad system, and

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educational policies and persistently high levels of illiteracy in the province were among a longer list tackled by the Diet. The Diet was also a practical response to accommodating the Serbian community and integrating the political energies and mobilization taking place in that community. Most importantly, it was also used by all three ethno-religious groups to challenge the imperial governance, highlighting the protracted nature of the colonial structures in the province. This period of constitutionalism was short-lived, exposing the limited political appetite, among the imperial institutions, for genuinely empowering the province and its people. Burián, the main proponent of constitutionalism, was removed from power. The Austrian military used the opportunity to push for a stronger governor general in Sarajevo, who would supersede the empire’s civilian aide (Zivil-Adlatus) in the province. General Potiorek became the civil-military head, and the civilian aide became his deputy. Potiorek, viewed as a military technocrat, continued with Bosnia’s constitutional moment, even shielding it from an empire-wide turn toward abolishing representative institutions under the building pressures of World War I. It was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, that dealt the final blow to Bosnia’s constitutional order and its parliamentary promise.

Conclusion The political history of the Bosnian province in the Habsburg empire, from the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I, is often told in terms of two conflicting narratives. Bosnia has been rightfully portrayed as a province that was perpetually fractured by the competing imperial projects of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. The Habsburg imperial drive toward centralization and modernization pulled it apart. It was affected by the attempts to integrate it fully into the empire, usually via greater centralization, but in parallel, it was also driven by bottom-up societal pressures toward greater political participation via decentralized institutions of governance. The tension between the traditional institutions of communal governance and the slow development of formal political institutions was significant in the making of Bosnia’s regional fabric. Another narrative of Bosnia’s political history is that of cultural coexistence between the three main confessional communities in the province. Cultural coexistence across confessional lines was commonplace in the province, despite the perpetual wedge issue of agrarian reforms. The introduction



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of the Diet and the constitution formalized cross-confessional bargaining and coalition-building. While the Bosnian province was still managed and feared by the imperial center, the constitutional period of provincial governance moved it towards greater regional connectivity and resilience. And although it was short-lived and shallow, that constitutional period revealed the constructive connectivity between the confessional groups and their external coreligionists, largely muting and diluting the national movements that were sweeping the region at the time. The study of the province through the prism of regional fracture/resiliency reveals that both narratives are true. This multilevel framework has shown that the province became more regionally resilient when cross-confessional coexistence and bargaining were institutionalized through parliamentarism. This framework also shows a gap between the imperial centralization and top-down administrative reforms (often advanced through intercommunal wedge issues), on the one hand, and the societal fabric of the province, on the other. Intercommunal bargaining and coalition-building had little time and political space to mature unencumbered by the imperial center. The severing of formal and representative domestic politics in Bosnia only worked to embolden and empower region-wide nationalist movements, which tore at the societal fabric of the Bosnian state. In conclusion, the Hapsburg empire stands out in terms of the deep connectivity of its peripheries, particularly relative to the Ottoman and Russian empires at the time. However, that type of regional connectivity was denied to the Bosnian province, where imperial governance, no matter how benign and “modernizing,” prevented the growth and institutionalization of bridging and balanced connectivity. While some of the imperial administrators, particularly Burián, recognized the political significance of domestic reform in the service of taming external geopolitical forces, such perspectives failed to gain systemic policy dimensions. It emerges from this chapter that the Habsburg empire inherited from the Ottoman empire, and then consolidated, the low and clustered connectivity in the province, cementing the fractured state of the province within its broader neighborhood. The top-down modernization reforms under Kállay did not remedy the clustered and purely bonding civic connectivity in the province. The clustered and low levels of connectivity, particularly under Kállay, resulted in a predatory governance, in terms of failing to formalize imperial administration in the Bosnian province through participatory and institutionalized levers of politics. The developmental needs of the Muslims,

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the Croats, and the Serbs remained largely unaddressed, while the empire continued its practice of playing one group against the other. The regional fabric of the province moved towards resilience under Burián, as formalized parliamentary institutions were introduced, creating spaces for various ethno-religious communal organizations to form bridging connections and institutions. This opening up of participatory politics and constitutionalism was short-lived, however and Burián was soon swept away in favor of Potiorek, the military technocrat. The short-lived opening toward regional resilience did little to change the overall trajectory of regional fracture in this province. As I will argue in chapter 7, this legacy of fracture reverberated through the devastating war of the 1990s.

5 The Ottoman Empire and Eastern Anatolia

The Janus Empire In ancient Roman mythology, Janus was the two-faced god of duality, transitions, passages, and endings, his gaze directed at once to the past and to the future. When it comes to the Ottoman empire—the “Janus empire”—this duality was expressed in the opposition between traditional institutions of informal, networked, transactional governance and the attempts of various imperial elites to centralize, modernize, and institutionalize imperial governance. Barkey (2008) has argued that it was the imperial inability to manage this duality that led to the empire’s violent and genocidal end after World War I. The traditional institutions of the past clashed with the efforts to create the institutions of the future—the representative, liberal, and institutionalized administrative state. But this Janus-like duality is also expressed in Ottoman historiography. At one end of the spectrum, Ottoman historiography highlights the extreme violence and long conflict cycles on the empire’s peripheries since the eighteenth century (Göçek 2014; Morris and Ze’evi 2019; Barkey 2008; Üngör 2015). But there has been a simultaneous and opposite theme of relative confessional coexistence—social peace—under the Muslim hegemony (Barkey 2008; Makdisi 2019; Campos 2010), a problematic approach that romanticizes this period. This perspective has highlighted the limited social contract among the multiple confessions, their elites, and the imperial center. This social contract, the argument goes, recognized Muslim dominance and social hegemony in return for relative self-governance and autonomy

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for the different confessional groups. Negotiated between the imperial elite and its multiple confessional and ethnic communities, this was the great bargain that sustained the empire for centuries, until the mid-nineteenth century, when it started to unravel (Barkey 2008). Its collapse culminated in genocidal violence against the empire’s Armenian subjects and sustained ethnic cleansing of its Greek and Assyrian subjects (Kévorkian 2011; Göçek 2014; Bloxham 2005; Akçam 2013; Rogan 2016; Suny, Göçek, and Naimark 2012; Balakian 2004; Kieser, Öktem, and Reinkowski 2015). This duality in imperial governance also manifested spatially, over the empire’s vast territories. The interethnic fabric and the social peace were able to hold against the geopolitical and imperial pressures on some peripheries, but not on others (Üngör 2015; Keiser 2014), a phenomenon that has been ascribed to the uniquely local fabric of the power relations in the various peripheral communities. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Eastern Anatolia steadily evolved into a violent vortex within the empire, while the empire’s Arab provinces, the Mashriq, have been described as an ecumenical experiment, interrupted by European colonization of the region after World War I (Makdisi 2019). The theoretical framework of regional connectivity both reveals and reconciles the inherent duality of and tension between these dominant narratives of Ottoman imperial governance. The historiography of Ottoman confessional tolerance and the Tanzimat reforms has enriched empire studies and our understanding of the rise of constitutionalism and modernization around the world (Quataert 2005; Finkel 2005). But it has also shown that the roots of the structural (Galtung 2010) and physical violence of the late Ottoman empire in the period under study were enmeshed in its beginnings as an informal but deeply networked empire. In short, as Barkey argues (2008), the Ottoman experience offered an alternative path to managing interethnic diversity and the multi-confessional fabric, which was challenging for all contemporaneous empires. At the same time, the Ottoman model of transactional coexistence under Muslim hegemony later proved to be a liability. The regional level of analysis of the imperial peripheries is an important conceptual key to these historiographical tensions. This chapter starts out with a background discussion of the millet system of imperial governance in the Ottoman empire, explaining how the system was both a lever and a liability for imperial longevity. A particular emphasis is placed on the opportunities and limitations of center-periphery relations and their management. This entails discussing the regional implications of



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the millet system and the nature of regional connectivity and/or fracture in which it manifested. The chapter focuses on taxation as an issue of imperial governance with the most direct regional implications. The chapter then follows the same template as I do elsewhere for the Habsburg and Russian empires: it zooms in on one of the political peripheries of the empire, Eastern Anatolia, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. This periphery emerges as one with low and clustered connectivity in its regional fabric, partly resulting from and reflecting the predatory governance of the imperial center throughout much of the period under study. In trying to draw a line from the imperial governance of Eastern Anatolia and contemporary conflict in and around that region, chapter 7 will look at the Kurdish conflict, whose more recent stages were expressed in the early 1980s. While the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire in the period under study constituted a dire expression of preexisting regional fracture, the elimination of the Armenians removed this community as a factor in imperial governance then, and as a conflict component at the end of the twentieth century.1 This partly explains the focus on the Kurdish conflict in the research design (chapter 7). Chapter 7 does, however, also discuss the implications of this imperial fracture for the contemporary conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, where Turkey emerged as a secondary party during the 44-Day war in the region in the fall of 2020.

The Millet System as a Lever This study focuses on the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, with the mid-1870s being an especially important juncture for the Ottoman state. The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of mass mobilization for greater rights, expressed through nationalist movements and class struggles in Europe and beyond. Constitutionalism and the pressure for political accountability and representation challenged the inherently conservative and authoritarian nature of the imperial powers. In the case of the Ottoman empire, the 1870s capped successive cycles of reform attempts, referred to as the Tanzimat (1839–1878), which were geared towards crossconfessional and interethnic equality in the multinational empire (Whitehorn 2015; Finkel 2005; Quataert 2005). Bloxham (2005) identifies the years 1875 to 1878 as an important historical juncture because they ushered in the rule of Abdülhamid II and created the “Eastern crisis”: the 1878 treaties of San Stefano and Berlin ended the

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third Russo-Turkish war of the century and resulted in the secession of Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and part of Bulgaria from the Ottoman empire, as well as the de facto transfer of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Hapsburg empire. These were in addition to territorial losses to Russia on the Ottoman-Caucasus border. These military defeats and territorial losses created domestic pressure and led to the end of the hopeful and progressive constitutional processes that had been unfolding in the empire at the time. But while these structural factors of the international context challenged the domestic reform process, they can hardly absolve Abdülhamid II from responsibility for the authoritarian and violent turn he took in the empire’s political transition to constitutional governance. The end of the Tanzimat reforms proved particularly polarizing, violent, and regressive for the Ottoman empire, only accelerating the imperial collapse that Abdülhamid II was so keen to prevent. The Ottoman empire, like most of its contemporary imperial states, was expansionist, territorially vast, multiethnic, and coercive in its imperial governance. And like the European empires, the Ottoman empire was rather “rimless,” organized via often indirect and intermediated center-periphery relations (Nexon and Wright 2007; Cooley 2005). This hub-and-spoke model of governance within the Ottoman empire, combined with the transactional and network-based nature of its organizational politics, prevented the formation of an “imperial society” that could safeguard its own social and political interests (Barkey 2008). In this quintessential imperial form of power organization (Padgett and Ansell 1993; Barkey 1996; 2008), peripheries stood mostly in vertical relations to the center, and their contact with other peripheries was intermediated through the center (Göçek 2014). This intermediated hub-and-spoke model built and consolidated the regional fracture of its peripheries into the core of imperial Ottoman governance. Consequently, regional connectivity on the imperial peripheries remained sparse. Much of the existing social capital was bonding, not bridging, with an almost complete lack of institutionalized mechanisms and forums that cut across ethno-religious divisions. This trend was reinforced after the 1870s, when the empire went through its next round of authoritarian rule, which abruptly suspended a nascent period of constitutional promise and representative governance in the empire. Despite its vertical power organization and poor connectivity on its peripheries, the Ottoman empire is often lauded, in retrospect, for its cultural plurality. The millet system was the institutional core of this multiethnic



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coexistence. It reflected the tacit bargain between the institutional center of the empire, built around Islam, and the rest of the confessions and ethnic groups. The Muslims, especially the Ottoman Turks, were the socially and politically dominant group in the empire (Göçek 2014). The three nonMuslim confessional communities were organized into three millets: the Greek Orthodox (also known as “Rum”), the Armenians, and the Jews. The non-Muslim communities were largely self-governing, with autonomy over cultural and internal community matters. They were protected by the state in return for paying a special tax, agreeing not to bear arms, and wearing special clothing to differentiate them from the Muslims. Göçek notes that since the non-Muslim communities were not allowed to serve in the military, they concentrated on trade and commerce. The Muslims specialized in administration (mülkiye), legal and religious affairs (ilmiye), and the military (seyfiye). Within the framework of this work, the millet system emerges as one of bonding social capital and clustered connectivity, with ethno-religious boundaries reinforcing socioeconomic divisions and stratification in power relations within the empire. Recognizing the millet system as an instrument for managing the empire’s ethno-religious plurality (Klein 2019) should not obscure the political hierarchy and institutional segregation that it created between various groups. Whitehorn (2015), for example, notes that Armenian Christians were considered an inferior religious minority, and were therefore treated as subordinate within the empire. Such institutional divisions became political fault lines in the nineteenth century, when the territorial decline of the empire led to scapegoating and targeted mass killings of this and other minority Christian communities. The Armenian genocide during World War I was a culmination of these imperial practices. Parallel to the millet system, the legal extraterritoriality and capitulation system (Kayaoğlu 2010; Göçek 2014) imposed by the Western powers inside the Ottoman empire provided exclusive jurisdiction of those powers over their own citizens, as well as over some Ottoman Christians engaged in trade relations with European companies, within the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman economy had been opened to European economic interests in various ways, including through the Anglo-Ottoman Treaty of 1838. The domestic millet system and the system of extraterritoriality worked together to deepen ethno-religious divisions within the empire. While the extraterritoriality system advanced certain Christian communities economically, the political stratification of the millet system served to make these economic

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gains visible in such a way as to render these minority groups vulnerable to communal violence. Barkey (2008) has argued that the millet system was built on traditions from the Roman and Byzantine empires. The loose and fluid strategies of control that it offered were attractive to the Ottoman elite in maintaining its imperial control of a territorially vast multinational entity. Building on the Muslim dominance in the state, the system helped to delineate and defend the differences between the ethno-religious groups, while relying on the community leaders for imperial administration. Barkey (2008) notes that administratively, the millet system served to ensure the loyalty of a growing Christian community with important economic skills, to increase legibility and order, and to enable the administration to run smoothly and taxes to flow to the center while also reinforcing the wedge between the Orthodox and Catholic worlds of Europe. (131)

As an administrative system of governance, the millet system was quintessentially imperial: it was based on the imperial center governing its multiethnic polity via ethno-religious elites. Such intermediated imperial governance, with little direct and formalized bridging connectivity between the various groups, created opportunities for “differential contracting” (Nexon and Wright 2007). In such arrangements, various ethno-religious groups and localities had differentiated contractual arrangements with the imperial center. Divide-and-conquer mechanisms of imperial control were typical in imperial governance, and the millet system created numerous opportunities for such mechanisms to emerge and flourish. Der Matossian (2014) discusses the example of the Armenian millet, which was organized around the Armenian patriarch and his complete jurisdiction over the millet’s spiritual administration, charitable organizations, and religious institutions. Importantly, though rather informally, the patriarch enjoyed the economic support of influential Armenian magnates in Istanbul. Due to their strong ties to the Ottoman ruling elite (Carmont 2012; Der Matossian 2014), these economic players, called Amiras, acted as intermediaries between the imperial elite and the Armenian millet. Der Matossian (2014) points out that this arrangement was somewhat similar to the informal power exerted by the Arab notables (ayan), large landowner families, in Syria and Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth century.



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Though the millet system had resulted in imperial longevity for the Ottomans, it began to become a liability for the empire’s survival starting in the late nineteenth century. The system has been celebrated for its ability to produce imperial adaptability and longevity in the face of the ethnoreligious complexity of the empire—its mosaic quality. Barkey (2008) has argued that the millet system helped to cultivate tolerance as a form of imperial governance within the Ottoman empire throughout its early centuries of existence. She describes this tolerance as a political project, which maintained peace between religious and ethnic communities, particularly in periods when the potential for interethnic violence was rather high. But she argues as well that the boundaries between these communities, carved out and protected by the empire, were also defended by the communities themselves because of the societal peace and stability that the arrangement provided. The informality of the millet system allowed for ad hoc negotiations and the management of relations between the imperial center and various social forces. The millet system produced clustered connectivity on the peripheries, with the limited bonding social capital between ethnoreligious communities reinforced and overseen by the imperial center, as well as by the members of these communities. Toleration is neither equality nor a modern form of “multiculturalism” in the imperial setting. Rather, it is a means of rule, of extending, consolidating, and enforcing state power. Toleration is therefore one among many policies of incorporation such as persecution, assimilation, conversion, or expulsion. I define toleration as more or less the absence of persecution of a people but not their acceptance into society as full and welcomed members of communities. Toleration . . . is the outcome of networked, negotiated, and pragmatic forms of rule. (Barkey 2008, 110)

It can be inferred from Barkey’s account that tolerance as a form of imperial governance—networked, negotiated, and pragmatic—was an organizational innovation of sorts, especially when compared to contemporary European powers, where, until the mid-nineteenth century, there were recurrent pressures toward homogenization and persecution by the monarchies. However, the pressures of modernization and centralization in the European empires led to the gradual but steady transformation of political power in the monarchies towards representative institutions. In the Ottoman empire, this

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networked and negotiated system of tolerance steadily devolved into ethnoreligious polarization and state-sponsored violence directed at minorities. Its networked and informal nature, which had been a lever of imperial governance, became a liability when efforts at modernization commenced. The lack of bridging social capital and institutions cutting across ethno-religious lines created the foundations for deeply fractured peripheries, making them subsequently vulnerable to predatory imperial governance.

The Millet System as a Liability: “Mirrored Modernity”2 The relative dearth, created by the millet system, of central political representation for the three confessions had a devastating effect in the provinces, particularly in Eastern Anatolia. The weakening institutional power of the imperial state in the early eighteenth century was felt in the chiefly rural provinces, where, to quell dissent, the imperial state started to rely extensively on irregular forces. This approach to establishing stability exploited interethnic divisions and prevented the possibility of sustainable interethnic engagement. The clustered connectivity on the peripheries, expressed in bonding capital, became weaponized by the imperial government. Indeed, the fractured state of the provinces, with bonding (as opposed to bridging) connectivity between ethno-religious groups (chapter 2), made the imperial strategies of establishing control over the provinces more predatory and violent. The unchecked power of the irregular forces resulted in insecurity in the provinces, making them more vulnerable to external interventions by other powers. Russia’s rhetoric and expansionist ambitions in Eastern Anatolia (Bloxham 2005) are one example of this. It appears that the social structure of the Ottoman millet system, with its veneer of imperial tolerance, functioned as long as the state and communal leaders monitored and redressed the persistent tensions and ensuing injustice (Göçek 2015). And, as Göçek (2015) observes, such accountability and legal redress declined across time and space, as one moved away from the imperial capital to the provinces, and as the Ottoman state had fewer and fewer resources with which to intervene and guarantee justice. (81)

The political interdependence between the imperial center and the provinces was pronounced in the context of the Tanzimat reforms attempted throughout the nineteenth century. The failure of the Ottoman state to value the provinces as political regions, essential for effective reform implementation,



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significantly derailed the successive reform efforts. The case of the Mithat Pasha (1822–84), an Ottoman reformist statesman, is indicative of this dynamic. During his tenure as governor of the Danube and Syrian provinces, Mithat consistently stressed building economic infrastructure, and even created local police forces. Importantly, he established administrative channels at the provincial level to provide the population with legal recourse around the clock (Göçek 2015). By emphasizing and creating representative channels at the provincial level, the pasha succeeded in establishing local control over the economy (Göçek 2015). The increased tax yields were ordered to be sent to the capital rather than reinvested in the province. Ironically, and tragically, the pasha was executed by the sultan for insubordination, which was all too typical of the predatory nature of the Ottoman state at the time. Throughout the nineteenth century, a series of Tanzimat reforms addressed the institutional gaps in political representation created by the millet system (Whitehorn 2015; Quataert 2005; Finkel 2005). Initiated at three historical moments—1839, 1856, and 1876—the reforms were accompanied by little, if any, institutional changes in imperial governance, in terms of building truly representative institutions. Their top-down centralizing nature at the expense of regional governance perpetuated the regional fault lines and wedges within the provinces, often with devastating consequences for ethno-religious minorities in the empire. Göçek (2015) offers several explanations for the failure of the Tanzimat reforms to save the empire from its internal violence and eventual collapse. She notes that in all three of the Tanzimat reform cycles, the reforms were responses to external crises of war and geopolitical competition. As such, they were driven by military necessity rather than being the result of grassroots campaigns fueled by greater representation and mass politics—they were ad hoc and reactive, lacking any institutional basis for their effective implementation. She describes the Tanzimat reforms as “mirrored modernity”: They attempted to replicate the consequences of Western European modernity, with the expectation that these would eventually enable them to withstand Western expansion. Such mirrored adoption copied the visible consequences of modernity in form, without adequately taking into account the content that had generated the form in the first place. (82)

Significantly, during the three reform periods that took place between 1839

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and 1878, the reformers and the reform initiatives intended to foster equality between the ethno-religious groups faced a significant backlash from traditional, conservative groups within the imperial elite. The reforms were carried out with little administrative structure at the regional level, and this exacerbated the fear and insecurity among the Muslims about the loss of their political privilege within the empire. Specifically, in 1839, the right to life, property, and honor for all Ottoman subjects was introduced, along with the promise to collect taxes according to income (rather than ethnoreligious origin). The 1856 reforms, again, promised equality in education, government appointments, and the administration of justice to all subjects regardless of creed. Göçek notes that both reforms (those of 1839 and of 1856) resulted from the weakened military state of the empire, which led to its giving in to European pressures to reform and protect the Christian communities from systemic violence (Bloxham 2005). These dynamics replicated themselves in the 1876 Reform Edict, promulgated to prevent further Russian complaints about the integration of non-Muslims into Ottoman governance. In all three cases, Göçek argues, the reforms were dictated by military concerns and geopolitical considerations, with very little bottomup, grassroots pressure. The reforms failed to strengthen the institutional foundations of the state. Instead, they ended up fueling polarization between ethno-religious groups (Astourian 1992), largely due to the administrative weakness in the provinces. Overall, no push emerged for greater equality between the various confessional communities in the empire, nor did any strengthening of the provincial governance and regional administration materialize. In addition to being driven by military necessity, the Tanzimat reforms were also aimed at gaining the loyalty of the non-Muslim communities while nationalist movements were gaining steam in much of Europe (Der Matossian 2014). The reforms sought to create inter-confessional equality, which was understood as the elimination of the millet system and the cultural autonomy it had assured. The zero-sum nature of the conflict between centralization efforts and regional levels of government diluted the intended modernizing effect of the Tanzimat reforms. Still, despite the administrative, institutional, and political failures of the Tanzimat reforms, that period introduced the notion of Ottoman citizenship (Der Matossian 2014), which captured the imaginations of all confessional groups and ethno-religious minorities during the two constitutional periods of the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman empire is a useful case study for contemporary scholarship



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on authoritarianism and regime stability, and its rich historiography can help generate new theories and hypotheses to help explain authoritarian survival strategies. In the imperial context, the process of authoritarian survival is perhaps more complicated and multilayered than in contemporary nationstates. Still, the Ottoman empire and its reform period in the nineteenth century are indicative of the need for local agency and regional institutions in making centralization efforts stick. And the periods of Ottoman reform were also characterized by cycles of heightened expectations among the non-Muslim confessional communities and the “abyss of disillusionment and disenchantment” that followed them (Der Matossian 2014). Failing to produce a qualitative shift in representative institutions at the central and provincial levels, the reforms not only fueled anxiety among the Muslim communities about the loss of their privileged political power, but also led to growing insecurity among the non-Muslim communities. The impact of the reforms, in terms of changed governance, remained limited to the elites (Göçek 2015) in the empire’s central and coastal cities (Der Matossian 2014), leaving much of the rural population on the peripheries insulated from these political changes. In the rural regions, for instance, there were tensions between the traditional Armenian forces, represented by the clergy and Armenian notables (who benefited from the state), and the Armenian constitutional movement, which wanted to bring change, under the influence of the Tanzimat. The nineteenth-century Tanzimat reform era (1839–78) and the two constitutional periods (1873–76 and 1908–18) created cycles of incremental reform and retrenchment, with the institutional basis of their implementation lagging behind. While the millet system may have played a role in ensuring the relative stability of the empire, it also helped to sustain authoritarianism. Importantly, it was also challenged by the major socioeconomic transformations that were taking place at the time. But what follows from the regional connectivity approach of this work is that regions matter for successful reform initiatives in the imperial center. This internal factor of regional fracture as a mechanism of imperial collapse adds an important corrective to the debates on imperial longevity.

Taxation without Representation: Failures of Imperial Regionalism I now turn to the regional dimension of imperial governance, specifically the socioeconomic impact of the millet system. Here I focus on tax collection

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within the empire, which is a key dimension of state governance in general, be it imperial or pertaining to modern forms of administrative statehood. Indeed, within the Ottoman empire, the institutions that supported tax collection were deeply regional, which makes taxation central to any examination of the nature of the regional fabric of the Ottoman empire. Whether the patterns of regional connectivity were balanced or clustered, bonding or bridging, partly reflected the imperial practice of tax farming, discussed in this section. Tax farming was a fiscal instrument used by the imperial elites in the eighteenth century and beyond that gave private groups, subcontracted by the state, the right to raise taxes. An individual wishing to purchase a state lease to engage in tax farming had to pay the state a sum of money, as well as external annual payments. This practice has existed since antiquity, having been widely practiced in Egypt and the Greco-Roman world (Barkey 2008) as well as in classical Middle Eastern societies and other Muslim empires (Levy 1967; Badian 1972; Macmullen 1988; Levy 1988). In Barkey’s analysis, tax farming rewired the center-periphery relationship by creating regional/provincial power bases, thereby establishing an infrastructure of decentralization in the empire. The rise of provincial power bases enhanced and restructured social networks between the provinces and the center, adding to the connectivity of the empire. It led to the political empowerment of regional actors, Barkey argues, bringing those regional actors—notables and landowners—into direct contact with the imperial elites. Negotiations through these informal networks were an important mechanism of imperial adaptability. Along with commercialization, tax farming facilitated greater horizontal connectivity within the regions, in addition to making regional notables into political actors who were vertically integrated with the imperial center. Barkey maintains that tax farming created “regional governance regimes,” which she describes as networks of large patriarchal families who established themselves around one or two leaders; developed their resources and influence through multiple state and nonstate activities and positions; extended their networks to incorporate clients, whether lesser notables or peasants; and both in their local rule and in their understanding of their legitimacy mimicked the ruling household of the sultan. (242)

This relative regional empowerment lasted until the pressures of centralization



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resurfaced. Mahmud II came to power in the early nineteenth century with the intention of eliminating the regional centers of governance, while embarking on reforms to formalize tax collection and centralize imperial governance. Indeed, the eighteenth century had witnessed an uneasy coexistence between networked, negotiated, regionalized imperial governance and new attempts by elites in the center to recapture and consolidate regional power, in hopes of catching up to European modernization reforms. The pressures of sustained warfare and the militarization of the empire were important factors in the need to modernize the empire. These regional governance regimes generated much connectivity and engagement on the peripheries and contributed to imperial adaptation and flexibility (Barkey 2008). Even purely as an imperial adaptation mechanism, the regional layer of imperial governance should have produced sufficient institutionalization to feed into the subsequent attempts at centralization and state reforms. But instead, regional governance in this case was associated with decentralization, a hallmark of contemporary efficient state governance, but one that was viewed as a vulnerability by the imperial center. From 1808 on, Ottoman reformers thought of centralization and decentralization as a zero-sum game. The strengthening of centralizing reforms was viewed as possible only if regional levels of governance were weakened. One explanation for the limited institutional impact of these regional governance regimes on the imperial state relates to their network-based structure. The regional governance regimes revived and empowered new voices and communities within the empire, but they were still unfolding within the highly stratified, unranked system of Muslim dominance, with much of the social capital organized through bonding rather than bridging networks. Social networks are often viewed as empowering, innovative, and democratic, but they can also be highly hierarchical in their internal organization. In the context of the Ottoman empire, the networked governance prior to 1808 under the conditions of Muslim hegemony created much-needed regional empowerment and a more effective interface with the imperial center. But these “regional governance regimes,” as Barkey calls them, while networked and relatively open at the time, were also vulnerable to interethnic wedging and fracture. Primarily because of their informal, ad hoc, network-based, and corporatist nature, these regional networks reproduced the empire’s hierarchical forms of governance on the peripheries. They strengthened the elites in various ethno-religious communities, who were already well-connected to the imperial center (Göçek 2015). And

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importantly, particularly in the political context of Muslim hegemony, networks were not effective as instruments of interest aggregation and public representation—the very political challenges that were stressing imperial forms of governance around the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In short, the institutional impact of regional empowerment and networked governance on state strength was limited, partly because it had unfolded within the traditional millet system. The rise of the regional power centers produced overall connectivity, but the millet system as a background for imperial “regionalism” maintained the interethnic divisions and worked to offset any gains from cross-confessional connectivity within the empire’s “regional” period. In the Ottoman provinces, even when regional loci of power flourished in the eighteenth century, these organizations evolved along confessional, ethno-religious lines and around bonding social capital, which the millet system of imperial tolerance had fostered. Therefore, the rise of provincial notables as sources of regional power centers failed to produce organized and coherent political regions on which centralizing reforms could have been built. Instead, the networked and negotiated regional governance ended up perpetuating regional fractures. It did little to add to the regional fabric in the provinces. The result was clustered, rather than balanced, connectivity on the peripheries. In addition to the millet system diluting the potential of networked regional governance, the private nature of tax farming dramatically weakened the progressive promise of the Ottoman state at the time. With shallow political institutions in the provinces, tax farming through regional networks only corroded state power. It turned the empire into a rentier state, in which tax collection was disentangled from accountability and representation. Tax farming was prevalent in the societies on the peripheries, but very few in these societies had any access to effective political power on either the provincial or central levels. The regional governance regimes (Barkey 2008) proved incapable in that regard. Not only did the state struggle to move the peripheries to execute its interests, but it also enabled predatory taxation and predatory governance in the provinces. The fact that representative institutions failed to emerge from the regional governance regimes under the conditions of the millet system proved to be symptomatic of the imperial decline that would follow. The approach developed in this work reveals that the “regional governance regimes” on the Ottoman peripheries—networked, transactional,



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and rooted in the confessional divisions of the millet system as they were— ended up producing patrimonial rather than participatory provincial regimes. And these patrimonial regimes failed to consolidate any gains in broader participation achieved in this period. This became evident when the regimes were tested by the centralization reforms that began in 1808. The patrimonial regions were still fractured, lacking the deep participatory capacities and bridging social capital often found in resilient regions. The relative empowerment of the provinces, whether viewed as adaptation or flexibility (as Barkey argues), simply consolidated the quintessential imperial habits of ruling through intermediaries and the elites of the minority communities. The institutional value derived from this period was rather limited, undermining imperial governance in the nineteenth century and becoming a serious liability for the imperial state’s attempts at centralization and modernization.

Eastern Anatolia as the Predatory Periphery This section focuses on the nature of regional connectivity, the neighborhood effect, on one of the political peripheries of the Ottoman empire in the period under study—Eastern Anatolia. This is a useful case study for highlighting the geographically deterministic accounts of imperial borderland regions. In the context of both the Habsburg and Russian empires, borderlands have been examined in terms of their positions as shatter zones and points of friction between imperial and geopolitical rivals, an approach that tends to privilege geopolitics over domestic factors. Similarly, from a domestic perspective, others have described the perpetual challenge, for imperial centers, of “reining in” and “civilizing” the periphery (Klein 2011). The multilevel regional approach developed in this work (chapter 2) recognizes the mutually reinforcing nature of geopolitical factors and local power structures on the peripheries. Importantly, though, it privileges the regional fabric of the periphery, the nature of its connectivity (whether clustered or balanced), which can shape the region’s response to external meddling from geopolitical rivals. That regional fabric can also influence the nature of “reform” initiatives from the imperial center at home. As I argue in this work, imperial political peripheries that are more regionally resilient (rather than fractured) are better able to withstand political and economic stressors in their communities, no matter how strong. Eastern Anatolia is a quintessential part of such debates. It has been portrayed as a shatter zone between the Ottoman and Russian empires

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(Klein 2011; Reynolds 2011), a geographic space where Ottoman and Russian forces clashed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been discussed as a target of the Ottoman empire’s civilizing projects and a site of its internal colonialism (Klein 2011), directed against the Kurdish tribes in its waning years. It has also been discussed as a neglected front line of World War I (Rogan 2016; Tusan 2017; Whitehorn 2015) and the space of a “total war” carried out by the Ottoman empire, fought in its exterior and interior (Kieser 2015). Despite the features it shares with a number of other imperial borderlands, Eastern Anatolia has the tragic distinction of having been the center of the ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored genocidal violence unleashed on the Ottoman Armenians and other Christian communities by the Ottoman empire in its twilight years. A harbinger of the genocidal violence in Eastern Anatolia, the Adana massacres took place on April 14th through 17th of 1909, spiking again a few days later, on April 25th through 27th. Der Matossian (2011) has argued that the Adana massacres of the Armenian community reflected the rise of the “weak public square” after the 1908 revolution, expressed in the explosion of associations, groups, newspapers, and assemblies, to name a few of the entities that resulted, all of which celebrated the 1908 revolution in the Ottoman empire and the promise of inclusion and reform that it brought. Der Matossian’s work also shows the inability of the public sphere, developing as it did against the backdrop of unstable and fragile political institutions, to manage interethnic tensions in the empire. The “public square” that emerged after the 1908 revolution was structured through bonding social capital, with few mechanisms of bridging across social groups. In parallel, the economic modernization and the introduction of technology into the cotton industry in this province led to a loss of employment among the predominantly Muslim workers and laborers in the cotton industry. The continuing Armenian presence in trade, in contrast, only heightened the “accumulated envy” (Aktar 2010) against Armenians, making the existing socioeconomic stratification into a mechanism of communal violence. The lack of bridging social capital and the rise of public spaces of political contestation combined to move this deeply fractured province further down the road toward genocidal violence in the empire’s twilight years.

The Vortex of Violence in the Ottoman State Despite structural problems with their implementation over the nineteenth century, the Tanzimat reforms culminated in the first constitutional period



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in 1876, which saw the empire acquire its first constitution and parliament, with both Muslim and non-Muslim delegates. This period constituted a great step towards more representative government in the large multinational state, but it ended abruptly in 1878, when Sultan Abdülhamid adjourned the parliament and suspended the constitution. This began a three-decadelong despotic rule that only ended with the second constitutional period, of 1908–18. In both reform periods, constitutionalism was viewed as in instrument for making the empire more inclusive and representative. It was perceived as a path to saving the empire from collapse. Importantly, both periods were followed by an authoritarian resurgence and systemic violence, which for a variety of reasons were particularly devastating for the largely agricultural provinces of Eastern Anatolia. These waves of reform and repression reconfigured the regional fabric in Eastern Anatolia, elevating violence as a tactical tool of regional governance by the imperial center. While there is of course a need for a multilevel analysis of the nineteenthcentury situation, there is always the danger of determinism. Arguments that assign disproportional weight to external factors have often, in essence, absolved the ruling regime of state-sponsored violence, particularly of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Such narratives are dangerous because they usually end in accounts of the inevitability of particular historical outcomes, dismissing the alternate scenarios that could have developed. Importantly, giving such disproportionate weight to external factors removes the agency of the Ottoman actors (Kieser and Anderson 2019), particularly within the leadership structures both in the center and in the provincial governments. In doing so, these narratives reproduce Euro-centric analyses (treating the Ottoman empire as a passive recipient of geopolitical rivalry emanating from Europe) and obscure the centrality of political peripheries in producing global outcomes (Ohanyan 2021). Against this backdrop, the rest of this chapter identifies the structural and tactical/strategic drivers of regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia in the twilight decades of the empire. Structural factors can be described as regional fracture by default, because they capture those issues of political economy and imperial competition over which imperial governments did not exercise direct control. In such cases, the impact of these structural factors on the regional fabric of the peripheries was mediated by the broader forces of institutions and markets. Tactical/strategic factors constitute regional fracture by design, because they refer to the direct and unmediated impact of the imperial government. This refers to the way in which the regional fabric of

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the peripheries was specifically used and instrumentalized to advance the narrow goals of the imperial government. Regional fracture by default: structural factors. There were many structural factors driving regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia in the period under study. Changing patterns of trade integration between the empire and the European economies was one among them. It heightened the existing ethnoreligious cleavages by connecting various confessional groups to different stakeholders in and outside of the empire. Another factor contributing to regional fracture was the institutional decay in imperial governance that had been underway throughout much of the nineteenth century. Inefficiencies in imperial governance and the empire’s perpetual war-making contributed to the push for the Tanzimat reforms, but those reforms did little to ameliorate the regional cleavages in the provinces. In a way that was similar to the British “unranked” system of colonial rule in parts of the African continent (reviewed in chapter 3), competitive and socially stratified interethnic relations resulting from the millet system heightened the polarizing impact of the modernization reforms and changing patterns of global trade relations. The bonding social capital of the millet system translated into clustered connectivity, offering little in the way of institutionalized levers of conflict management in violent times. Lastly, the great powers and the politics of their reform agenda, in the context of domestic imperial decay on the peripheries, emerged as a constant irritant and stressor on the already polarized peripheries. Inter-imperial conflicts and rivalries became particularly destructive against the background of these factors. The highly segregated millet system produced British-style “unranked” and economically stratified labor divisions within society along ethnoreligious lines. As discussed earlier, with the rise of industrialization and the rapid deepening of the European and world economy in the nineteenth century, the Christian communities’ concentration within the trade networks made their differences from the Muslim community much starker (Göçek 2015). The Christian communities benefited from the changing economic structures and from the empire’s greater integration with the world market (Kieser, Öktem, and Reinkowski 2015). But this integration of the Ottoman economy into the world market via its Christian communities, and the existence of a growing Armenian bourgeoisie, particularly in the urban areas of Eastern Anatolia (Göçek 2015), continued to stress relationships with the Kurdish communities. The agrarian question, along with the inflow of refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, were



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additional factors adding to the stress on relationships with the Kurdish communities. Göçek (2015) points out that the economic dominance of the nonMuslims continued well into the early twentieth century, and that their lack of integration into Ottoman society on equal terms made them more dependent on their engagement with western European countries. Furthermore, these economic interactions took place in the context of the lack of representative institutions in the Ottoman empire, where divergent interests between communities might have been able to be aired out and negotiated, or cross-confessional connections, particularly among the peasants of all confessions, been able to develop. This process frayed the societal connectivity in Eastern Anatolia, created conflict cleavages between the Christian and Muslim (Turkic and Kurdish) communities, with devastating impacts during the genocidal years. Thus, the periphery found itself in a condition of clustered regional connectivity, a consequence of regional fracture by default. Lacking any shared political spaces for inter-confessional engagement, the power structure was altered to the detriment of the Kurdish communities in the mid-nineteenth century. In a process of imperial centralization, Kurdish emirates were destroyed, with no alternative institutions available to fill the governance vacuum. Over time, this increased the power of Kurdish tribes, which were much smaller and institutionally simpler units, raising them to the same level of governance previously enjoyed by the emirates (Kieser, Öktem, and Reinkowski 2015; Klein 2011). In terms of regional connectivity, this wave of institutional erosion created a larger number of organizational units—tribes—each of which, due to their smaller sizes, wielded less political power than their predecessors. This development resulted in a deterioration in security for both the Kurdish and the Christian communities. The changing power structures within Kurdish society, along with enhancing the economic power of some members of the Christian community, produced a clustered connectivity in Eastern Anatolia. The more centralized organization of the Kurdish community gave way to greater decentralization, with weakened institutional ties. This further complicated the prospects of bridging and connecting with the Christian communities in the provinces, since the Kurds could not credibly commit to any bargains or negotiations. Studies of interethnic conflict and the role of traditional societies have shown the effectiveness of centralized traditional institutions in conflict management and interethnic bargaining (Wig 2016). The rewiring of the

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political power bases in the Kurdish community undermined the regional connectivity of Eastern Anatolia as a whole. Economic changes related to trade integration and industrialization in Europe further elevated the Christian communities, making cleavages more visible and thus creating firm conflict structures. These divisions were leveraged and amplified by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) party members upon their arrival in power and their subsequent radicalization. The modernization efforts, which were intended to create equality between the ethno-religious groups and strengthen individual rights, produced a significant backlash from both Muslim and non-Muslim religious leaders (Bloxham 2005). Ayans (the powerful provincial Muslim leaders), tribal leaders, landowners, and urban notables from the Muslim community saw the reforms as ending their political privilege in the empire. The non-Muslim communities in some regions also objected to the reforms, mostly because of the political uncertainty that would ensue if they gave up the millet arrangement that had provided them with significant autonomy (Bloxham 2005; Göçek 2015; Davison 1963). The Tanzimat reforms in Eastern Anatolia were often obstructed by provincial officials under the control of the Muslim notables, who were interested in maintaining the status quo. And, as Bloxham (2005) points out, the reforms also eroded the conditions of the peasant communities. They failed to provide for the security of property, an essential precondition for economic development and modernization. Indeed, in Eastern Anatolia, most rural Armenians, with no right to bear arms in the millet system, were dependent on the “protection” of landlords and Muslim tribal leaders. As discussed in chapter 2, hegemonic influences from neighboring empires and an overlay of geopolitical embeddedness on the peripheries are important dimensions of regional fracture: the higher the level of geopolitical overlay and geopolitical rivalry over the given political region, the more fractured the regional periphery. And the great-power reform agenda directed at the Christian communities in Eastern Anatolia was a form of hegemonic embeddedness and geopolitical rivalry, a structural condition contributing to regional fracture. The pressure for reform, and its specific focus on the Armenian question, were a familiar mix of humanitarian concerns and naked realpolitik (Suny, Göçek, and Naimark 2012). Not unlike the contemporary humanitarian interventions by the great powers, usually driven by their political interests in the target country, reform politics dominated regional relations on the Ottoman peripheries. The Armenian



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question was a recurrent political theme within reform politics, both externally and within the Ottoman empire. In his overview of the politics surrounding the Armenian question, Der Matossian (2014) points to the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which sought to modify the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano. The Armenian question, internationalized as the plight of the Armenian community, emerged on the international agenda and became entangled with external pressures, both geopolitical and humanitarian. But it also became a litmus test for the political changes of modernization that the empire sought to advance. Der Matossian explains that massive demographic changes in Anatolia resulted in the deportation and refugee flows of Muslim communities from the Balkans and the Caucasus in the Russian empire (Kivelson and Suny 2017). Tsarist Russia’s deportations and massacres of the Circassian community in the Northwest Caucasus (Catis 2015) is one example of a broader demographic engineering that was taking place in the Russian empire, in parallel to those in the Ottoman empire. Indeed, during the Russo-Turkish war, many of the refugees in Anatolia were fleeing the interethnic tensions and clashes in the Balkans. Between 1862 and 1882, the Muslim population of Anatolia increased by 40 percent. Most of the migrants and refugees moved to rural Eastern Anatolian provinces (or were directed there by the imperial regime), thereby creating friction with the indigenous Armenian peasants. These movements made the land a contested resource, and so the politics of the agrarian reforms became debilitating for the Armenian communities. Der Matossian (2014) goes on to emphasize that the Armenian revolutionary movement in the provinces emerged only after the failure of the diplomatic channels tried by community leaders. However, it is critical to point out that the rapid demographic shifts and resulting interethnic tensions were taking place in the context of the institutional decay of regional and imperial governance; the lack of representative institutions and parliamentary systems of any sort made it nearly impossible for peaceful conflict resolution mechanisms to emerge in these regions. Two main factors drove the internationalization of the Armenian question in the late nineteenth century: the inability of the Ottoman empire (due to institutional weakness) to accommodate the rising friction, and the mobilization of conflicting interests. The instrumentalization of the Armenian question by the rivals of the Ottoman empire was rather swift. Suny (2015) has argued that the interest of the great powers in the Ottoman empire, often expressed in their reform

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politics, was driven by their desire to control the Turkish Straits, which connected the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. This made the Ottoman empire into a space where western European powers could balance and contain Russian interests. The reform politics usually involved Great Britain, Russia, France, and Austria, with Germany professing an official neutrality or indifference towards the Armenians, as they were eager to cultivate an alliance with the Ottoman state (Suny 2015). Russia’s centuries-old efforts to support the Christian communities in its neighboring empires, both Habsburg and Ottoman, reached from the Balkans to the Caucasus. With regard to the Caucasus, Bloxham argues that Russian ambitions for Ottoman reforms that would favor Christians can be dated to the early nineteenth century. Seeking to influence the Ottoman empire without destroying it (not unlike the current Russian policy in eastern Ukraine), Russia declared itself the protector of the Christian communities after vanquishing the Ottomans on the battlefield. In the Caucasus, Bloxham dates the Russian overtures to protect the Christians in the Ottoman provinces to the 1833 Unkiar Iskelesi treaty of “alliance and mutual defense” (Bloxham 2005; Jelavich and Jelavich 1993). Early in the century, Russia emerged as a power in a position to protect the Ottoman Muslim Kurds; its claims to protect the Ottoman Christian Armenians followed in the late nineteenth century. The reform agenda of the outside powers had distinct implications for the regional connectivity on the Ottoman peripheries. These reforms heightened expectations and created false hope among the Christian communities, which then suffered disproportionately as multiconfessional mechanisms of tolerance continued to erode and Muslim hegemony in imperial governance deepened. This growing communal insecurity in the provinces made external overtures of reform politically effective for the great powers. From the perspective of a multilevel analysis, it is apparent that the internal decay in imperial governance and the collective violence directed against Christian communities that it produced were mutually reinforcing. They were further exacerbated by the geopolitical calculations and machinations of external powers. Reynolds (2011) has argued that great-power competition between the Ottoman and Russian empires, particularly in their borderlands, is key to understanding the course of Eurasian history. This geopolitical rivalry, of which the reform initiative was one mechanism, was an important driver of imperial collapse. In the 1908–18 period, Reynolds notes,



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Ottoman and Russian imperial rivalry and insecurities interacted in a particularly complex form in Eastern Anatolia, which constituted a double borderland where the two empires blurred into each other in a zone distinct from the centers of both. The dynamics of global interstate competition spurred the two centers to extend their power into the region. In order to stave off great power—especially Russian—encroachment, the Unionists were determined to assert central control over and extract revenue and resources from the region. (46)

This geopolitical narrative, while capturing an important dimension of the regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia, obscures the significance of local/ regional/national governance failures. This includes predatory resource extraction in Eastern Anatolia, which made external meddling a winning geopolitical strategy for great powers, often to the detriment of the communities they claimed to help. Bulutgil (2017) has challenged these geopolitical narratives, pointing out that they tend to assume that state leadership is ideologically uniform, always directed towards the territorial expansion of the imperial state. In a comparative analysis of contested borderlands in the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires, she shows that the ideological and institutional structure of state leadership were important variables in explaining the different outcomes of minority treatment in contested borderlands during wartime. In short, in Bulutgil’s (2017) analysis, ethnic cleansing and genocide do not emerge as inevitable historical outcomes explained by imperial strategic necessity, driven by geopolitical competition, as some characterize them. Instead, she discusses “the politics of alternatives” and the conditions under which they are either silenced or enabled. She develops a comparative analysis that includes the Austro-Hungarian empire’s Italian minority, the Armenians of the Ottoman empire, and the Russian empire’s Muslims in the South Caucasus. During World War I, these groups were subject to temporary and limited relocation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and localized massacres and unrealized plans for deportations, respectively. The structure of state leadership in each empire at the time, the prevalence of nonethnic cleavages, and the opposition voices in the government are key explanatory factors for the varied outcomes for minority treatment during wartime. As Bulutgil points out, the genocidal outcome in the Ottoman empire was not a result of geopolitical necessity. Rather, the persistent deterioration in Ottoman imperial governance, expressed in the suppression of opposition

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and liberal alternatives for foreign policy choices, was the problem. The institutional deterioration that had crippled the empire since the end of the first constitutional period further polarized interethnic communal relations and, importantly, destroyed representative institutions of political contestation. Balanced connectivity, expressed in dense and bridging social capital, would have been a grassroots firewall against the illiberalism that emerged within the imperial leadership. The multilevel framework of regional connectivity, the neighborhood effect, helps to analyze the ways in which great-power rivalries interacted with domestic cleavages and the failures of internal regional governance in Eastern Anatolia. Specifically, Bloxham (2005) explains that the German position on the Armenian question was driven by its ambitions of economic influence, for which it needed the approval of the Ottoman government— an imperial center. In contrast, Russia’s aim in 1913–14 was the extension of its own informal political control into Ottoman territory, an objective for which it needed influence over the Ottoman subject people rather than the imperial government (Bloxham 2005). Consequently, Russia’s reform politics targeted the province of Eastern Anatolia, rather than the imperial center. The preexisting ethno-religious fault lines and divisive, bonding, social connectivity within the province elevated the impact of geopolitical rivalry by deepening the center-periphery tensions in Eastern Anatolia. Only a multilevel approach that recognizes the interaction between societal and geopolitical factors can produce the needed nuance on the question of reform politics and ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eastern Anatolia. Regional fracture by design: tactical and strategic factors. The tactical and strategic mechanisms of regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia were also numerous. Some of the tactical drivers of regional fracture included divideand-conquer policies. They were applied between the Kurdish and Armenian communities in Eastern Anatolia by successive imperial governments at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such tactics were carried out through agrarian reforms during which land ownership was instrumentalized for political purposes, buying loyalty from some groups and deliberately depriving others. Tied to the agrarian policies were efforts at demographic engineering and the use of refugee crises from various conflict areas in and around the empire. These policy areas reflected the privatization of the use of force and the irregular military in Eastern Anatolia. Bonding social capital and clustered connectivity on this periphery were weaponized by the imperial government, which deployed one ethno-religious group against



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the other. The ruling elites’ nationalist and chauvinist ideologies regarding the Christian communities in Eastern Anatolia usually manifested in the context of these policy domains. The cumulative effect of these measures was the emergence of violence as a political strategy of imperial governance in the peripheries. This was a crucial reflection of the predatory governance in Eastern Anatolia. Throughout the nineteenth century, Eastern Anatolia, as a regional system, witnessed a surge of associations and political organizing, a process that was rooted in the millet system of confessional tolerance under Muslim hegemony and the Tanzimat reforms. These developments added to the organizational complexity, diversity, and depth of the regional fabric in Eastern Anatolia and on other peripheries. A growing historiography has documented the political revival and cultural renaissance within various confessional and ethno-religious communities of the empire in the midnineteenth century (Der Matossian 2014; Campos 2010; Makdisi 2019; Berberian 2019). Much of the increase in the density of civic institutions was organized around bonding social capital and clustered connectivity. As such, the potential of new civic depth for more balanced connectivity in the province remained limited. The Tanzimat reforms, despite their limited success in advancing constitutionalism and parliamentary politics in the empire, contributed to the proliferation of ethno-religious civil societies in all millets of the empire. The mobilization of interest groups, political parties, trade associations, and religious institutions, to name a few, added to the organizational diversity and coherence in the empire’s provinces. However, the short-lived first constitutional period and the parliament that it enjoyed created a destabilizing vacuum in the form of the political absence of participatory governance, in the context of already-mobilized ethno-religious associations. Very soon, the empire and its provinces found themselves in the dangerous position of having parties without parliaments and experiencing a mass mobilization of the public without the institutional structures to channel that discontent. Combined with the deteriorating security situation in Eastern Anatolia, this caused the relative regional resiliency and regional connectivity observed earlier to give way to regional fracture. As the empire elevated and securitized the preexisting divide-and-conquer mechanisms of imperial governance, collective and systemic violence against the Christian communities grew steadily. Meanwhile, the rapid polarization of interethnic relations worked to radicalize some of the political parties, exposing the explosive nature of

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political mobilization without the institutional support to accommodate it. The Janus-like nature of the empire began to exact a serious toll on the security of the minorities, as the long-hoped-for Ottoman constitutionalism and survival of the multiethnic empire turned into a mirage (Der Matossian 2014). The regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia evolved in the wake of this associational vibrancy. But this was a vibrancy that had grown out of bonding social capital and clustered connectivity on the periphery. As such, it lacked the mechanisms for unit coordination and bargaining between the ethnoreligious groups. And this lack of unit coordination and bargaining between units—associations and political parties—proved deeply destabilizing, particularly in two interconnected areas where they were needed the most: the agrarian question, and security provisions, which were carried out by the imperial center via irregular militia. These two areas, deeply intertwined with each other, represent the most elemental aspects of the social contracts that typically underpin the relationship between the government and the governed in any organized polity. The handling of the agrarian question in Eastern Anatolia, combined with the formation and deployment in the 1890s by Sultan Abdülhamid II of an irregular tribal militia drawn from the Kurdish community, turned Eastern Anatolia into a deeply fractured region. This process of disruption and fracture of connectivity enabled the governmental policy of genocidal violence against an indigenous community in the empire. The deadly combination would later incentivize some segments within the Kurdish community, particularly the irregular militia forces, to carry out the genocidal program of the government in 1914 and 1915. Specifically, the agrarian question in Eastern Anatolia refers to the grabbing of land, by state agents, the Muslim population, Kurdish tribal leaders, and local notables, from both Armenian and Kurdish peasants (Polatel 2015). It was hardly a new problem in Eastern Anatolia, but it became securitized and politically contested during the second constitutional period. Klein (2011) argues that the “agrarian question” was a euphemism for the usurpation of Armenian lands in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, mostly by Kurdish tribal chiefs. The agrarian reforms and the deterioration of security for the predominantly Armenian peasants in Eastern Anatolia were linked, and driven by a variety of factors. Göçek (2015) and Klein (2011) point to the rise of agricultural capitalism in Europe, which reverberated in these provinces with the growing value of land. Additionally, the empire’s recurrent attempts to gain greater control over the provinces and the largely



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nomadic Kurdish tribes led to efforts to settle the Kurdish tribes. Some of the strategies used by the imperial government to co-opt the Kurdish tribal leaders, which had regional ramifications, included special privileges, appointments, special lease-holding (tapu) rights, and land-for-settlement deals. A further effort to co-opt the Kurdish communities, which went hand in hand with the land-grabbing practices, was the formation of irregular militia forces drawn from the Kurdish communities: the Hamidiye cavalry units, named after the sultan himself. Klein (1890) writes: Just as the process of land-grabbing had been closely associated with the Hamidiye and the license accorded to its members by its patrons, so would the “agrarian question” remain intimately linked with the question of the Hamidiye and its role under the new regime. Moreover, by extension the “agrarian question” necessarily became connected to the larger matter of the state’s relationship with the Kurdish aghas who had grown so powerful during the Hamidian period. (153)

The political support provided to the Kurdish groups in their usurpation of lands from Armenian peasants helped to secure the loyalty of the Kurdish community, who, along with the Armenians, were a regular target of Russian overtures of protection during this period. In addition, in seeking to empower the Kurdish tribes, the empire was applying the familiar tactic of divide-and-conquer: the sultan translated his political support for Kurdishled seizures of land from Armenian communities into an instrument of demographic engineering, seeking to push out the Armenian population from the eastern provinces in order to consolidate the Muslim presence. The Muslim Kurdish tribes were viewed as less of a threat to the sultan than were his Christian subjects. Indeed, Polatel (2015) explains that while Kurdish peasants also suffered at the hands of the Kurdish tribal leaders emboldened by the sultan, the Armenian cases of dispossession were interwoven with massive violence, expressed in the series of massacres in the å1890s. The establishment of the Hamidiye cavalry by the sultan reflects the external dimension of regional fracture. It was a reaction to Russian efforts to co-opt the Kurdish community and create instability inside the borderlands of the Ottoman empire. This empowerment of one community, and through extra-legal and informal channels, caused the fragile regional societal balance between the Armenian and Kurdish communities to fray and undermined the clustered pockets of social peace and coexistence. With no

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institutional spaces of interethnic bargaining in the region, the deployment of the Hamidiye cavalry units was a case of destructive use of bonding social capital within the Kurdish communities. Klein (2011) explains that the sultan’s primary rationale for establishing the Hamidiye cavalry units was the fear of external aggression from Russia. But many other contemporaneous observers and historians also pointed to the motivation of suppressing any activity by revolutionary groups from the Armenian communities and quelling their calls for land reform. Largely driven by a desire to bring the Kurdish communities under the administrative reach of the empire, the sultan ended up making the community less governable. He did so by ceding the most elemental form of state power, monopoly over the use of force, to an unaccountable irregular unit. Politically unaccountable violence by the Hamidiye cavalry units, in communities already divided by problems of land grabbing and demographic engineering, became the ultimate manifestation of predatory governance. These mechanisms of regional fracture, applied tactically and deliberately by the imperial center in this borderland, illustrate the politically constructed nature of these peripheries. They reveal fractured regions to in fact be political systems, in contrast to the characterization they have received as mere geographically determined shatter zones, doomed to be beyond imperial reach and vulnerable to external aggression. Referencing Balta (2007), Klein (2011) points out that the way in which states and local actors respond to political geography is more important than the inherent characteristics of that geographic terrain. The mechanisms of regional fracture discussed here explain the political responses from the imperial center to its borderland with neighboring Russia. They expose the agency of the imperial government and its culpability in producing deep fracture and predatory governance in Eastern Anatolia. The regional implications of this convergence of the agrarian issue and (in)security entered a qualitatively new state during the second constitutional period, in which the short window of participatory governance galvanized hopes for agrarian reform within the Armenian community. The participation of Armenian political committees in bringing about the Young Turk Revolution during the second constitutional period has been widely documented. The critical role played by political groups from the Armenian community raised hopes in the community that the emergent constitutional government would finally enhance their positions in the empire, putting them on an equal footing with Muslim Ottomans in educational, military,



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political, and social matters (Klein 2011). The agrarian issue was a litmus test for the promise of constitutionalism and Ottoman citizenship, which much of the Armenian community supported (Kaligian 2017). In the first few years after the 1908 revolution, in the prevailing atmosphere of enthusiasm and excitement among the minorities of the empire, negotiations took place between the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). The Armenian Revolutionary Federation was a key player in the 1908 revolution (Berberian 2019; Der Matossian 2014), and along with many other minority political groups, supported the CUP in its efforts to reinstate constitutional order in the empire. In this process, the new regime introduced an arbitration procedure to start the restitution of land to the Armenian community, while offering compensation to the usurpers. Attempts to establish a committee to implement these reforms went nowhere, however, partly due to resistance from the deputies from the eastern provinces in the cabinet (Polatel 2015). As in other instances, reform initiatives were followed by a wave of communal violence. In this case, the Adana massacres in April of 1909 were partly in response to these reform initiatives (Der Matossian 2014). Another attempt to implement the reforms was the August 7, 1909 order creating an arbitration route through local commissions; some properties were in fact returned to Armenians during this period. Most notably, a meeting took place between the Armenian leaders and the Kurdish chiefs in Van (Polatel 2015), with the support of the government and promises that it would offer restitution to the Kurdish population as they returned the Armenian properties. Polatel (2015) and Klein (2011), however, show that the compensation offer from the government failed to satisfy many Kurdish individuals and groups. The negotiations were diluted by the government, which was trying simultaneously to placate the Kurdish notables who had started leaving the empire for Iran, and to respond to Russian overtures. The last institutional attempt at land reform by the CUP was the cabinet decision to create a reform commission for the eastern provinces, with the focus on land reforms. But the Balkan wars delayed the commission, which was finally never implemented and, according to Polatel (2015), appeared to have only been a tactic by the CUP to buy time. The growing dissatisfaction of the Armenian community was expressed through the newly available institutional channels, with persistent insecurity and failed land reform as central themes in their advocacy efforts. These efforts to press the central institutions for reform on security and land

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tenure were hampered at the regional level, however, as the Muslim notables and provincial leaders often blocked and sabotaged the attempts at reform implementation. This division would later deepen, with the growing Turkish nationalism and CUP radicalization at the imperial center (Bulutgil 2017). Whether due to lack of capacity or lack of will, the failure of the land reform was rooted in the regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia. The patterns of predatory governance already established by the sultan with the creation of the Hamidiye cavalry continued to fuel interethnic polarization. Any attempts at Armenian-Kurdish engagement and negotiations were diluted by the efforts by the imperial center to keep the loyalty of the Kurdish landowners and tribal leaders. The privatization of force within the Kurdish community made the institutional route to reform nearly impossible to carry out. Externally, the delay and obstruction of reform initiatives by officials in the imperial center as well as in the provinces worked to undermine the expectations for the newly established constitutional regime among the Armenian community. In this context, the internationalization of the land reform initiative was driven in part by the Armenian community, which sought to pull in the European and Russian powers more closely in order to keep the reform initiatives on the agenda of the Ottoman government. Independently of these efforts, land reform was used as a wedge issue by both the Ottoman government and Russia. Russia’s reform initiatives in Eastern Anatolia, and its rhetoric for the Armenian community, were not new, of course. In this most recent round of supporting Armenian land reform advocacy, Russia was also working with Kurdish tribal leaders opposed to the reform. These textbook divide-and-conquer interventions by Russia helped it to maintain influence over these communities while adding to the simmering instability and insecurity in the provinces. Given its concern that a full-blown imperial collapse would create a power vacuum and invite a German presence on its borders (Polatel 2015), this slowly burning fire in Eastern Anatolia was the best outcome for the Russian empire at the time. In parallel, the Ottoman government was also pursuing a similar strategy: delaying and obstructing its reform rhetoric while appeasing the Kurdish tribal leaders. Lacking the regional administrative presence to accommodate and negotiate the competing interests of the Armenian and Kurdish/ Muslim communities, the CUP leadership reverted to coercive strategies of governance under the sultan, suppressing Kurdish unrest, fueling a growing



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Kurdish nationalism, and moving to genocidal policies against the Armenian and other Christian communities in Eastern Anatolia. The centralization of the empire was threatening to the Kurdish tribal leaders, the aghas, as they would be losing economic and political privileges they had enjoyed under the sultan. With land reform attempts and taxation, the fear of losing the material privileges they had enjoyed for decades was quite real (Klein 2011). Such material considerations prompted Kurdish tribal leaders to push for autonomy and engage Russian and Iranian powers. These moves raised the stakes of their engagement with the Ottoman empire. Keeping the Kurdish tribal leaders loyal became a political preference for the imperial government. The land-grabbing of the previous several decades and the violence associated with it, in addition to the human suffering in the provinces, eroded and destroyed the institutional fabric of interethnic coexistence. It prevented the rise of any truly deliberative and representative regional administration. These deep regional fissures, both internal and external, allowed for an easy transition into the genocidal policy and its execution by the CUP, with Kurdish irregulars as active participants in the process. In sum, the Tocqueville paradox of authoritarian reform efforts (i.e. that reforms produce greater public unrest, ultimately bringing down the authoritarian regime) was turned on its head in the empire’s eastern provinces. The CUP, at the helm of the government, faced increased expectations for agrarian reform from the Armenian community, but it lacked the institutional capacity to carry it out. In addition, the CUP moved towards coercive policies in the eastern provinces, a development driven partly by its creeping authoritarianism and nationalist radicalization as it sustained military defeats in the Balkan wars. The short-lived reform agenda that the CUP introduced shifted towards a strategy of collective violence to remap the provinces, making them more homogenous and more “governable.” The genocide of Armenians and other Christians in Eastern Anatolia emerged as a tragic, overdetermined, and avoidable outcome for the CUP.

Conclusion In conclusion, the network-based, informal, and transactional ethno-corporatist style of imperial governance was unique to the Ottoman empire (Barkey 2008). As such, it produced a particular type of connectivity at the empire’s peripheries, before attempts were made at modernization and

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centralization. Bonding social capital and clustered connectivity within the millet system stabilized the empire for centuries. However, this clustered connectivity, against the backdrop of recurrent authoritarianism and the failure of constitutional reforms, eventually became a liability for the empire, particularly in the period covered in this study. The paucity, on the edges of the Ottoman empire, of the kind of forums and mechanisms for bridging social capital and balanced connectivity that were present on the liberalizing peripheries of the Habsburg empire, created the preconditions for geopolitical meddling from neighboring Russia. The imperial government ended up weaponizing the clustered connectivity, as discussed above, in the areas of agricultural reform and security provision. The privatization of violence through irregular Kurdish groups, deployed against the Armenian communities, was the most vivid manifestation of the predatory imperial governance in Eastern Anatolia. Indeed, this case study reveals that clustered connectivity and bonding social capital in multiethnic empires can have a stabilizing effect. In this case, for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, networked and informal methods of governance, via community leaders of varied confessional groups, were central to the imperial governance of the peripheries. Bonding social capital was used in the service of the empire’s networked and informal mode of ethno-corporatist governance. However, this clustered connectivity became problematic when successive centralization and modernization reform efforts were introduced in the nineteenth century. The zero-sum approach to centralization and regionalism on the peripheries proved devastating to the imperial fabric of the Ottoman state. It was fatal to the empire’s ethno-religious minorities, and, specifically, resulted in the genocide of its Armenian and other Christian subjects. In terms of an approach to the study of the Ottoman empire, this chapter has taken specific theoretical pathways: it is regional in its application, using the perspective of one of the Ottoman peripheries, namely Eastern Anatolia; it is comparative, contrasting the region in questions with other peripheries in other empires; it focuses on the regionally wired connectivity within the periphery; and it examines the co-constitution of the periphery and the imperial center. This approach, in this empirical context, illustrates the interconnectedness of the seemingly conflicting narratives of multiconfessional coexistence, on the one hand, and genocidal violence, on the other. The multilevel regional level of the analysis of the peripheries in this case is central to understanding the drastic transformations of imperial politics



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throughout the nineteenth century. There is extensive scholarship arguing for the role of external geopolitical competition among the European empires in causing or facilitating the imperial violence against the minorities inside the Ottoman state, from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Described as “the provocation thesis” (Bloxham 2005), it argues that the Ottoman empire was regularly subject to disintegration in its Balkan territories, partly driven by European ambitions to partition the empire, with the Russian empire’s most aggressive expansionism a regular stressor for the Ottomans. The regional approach applied here, on the other hand, highlights the point that it was the weakness of the social fabric on the peripheries that made them vulnerable to external pressures. The internal sources of regional fracture that had been perpetuated since the fifteenth century heightened the Muslim-Christian polarization and elevated external humanitarian reform pressures into a successful strategy for the external hegemonic powers of the day. Viewed at the regional level, it emerges that the “provocation thesis” ignores the centuries-old institutional degradation of the Ottoman empire, in which regional fracture was both a cause and an effect. The regional approach developed here shows the deep interactivity between the domestic and imperial sources of regional fracture, with recurrent external “provocations” from outside the empire. This comparative regional approach to the study of the peripheries of the Ottoman empire, relative to other empires and their peripheries, engages the question of the inevitability of violent collapse and illustrates the singularity of the genocidal violence in Eastern Anatolia. By investigating the mechanisms of regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia (relative to other peripheries in the Hapsburg and Russian empires), this chapter makes a structural, institutional argument that the regional fracture on this periphery over the past century polarized the inter-confessional fabric and produced a largely predatory governance, carried out by the imperial center. This political region was characterized by low and clustered connectivity, and by overt fracture, throughout much of the period under study in this work. It is in this context of regional fracture and predatory governance that the genocide against the Armenian community was carried out at a mass level, requiring the orchestration of the imperial government (both central and provincial) and the participation of paramilitary units. The regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia also reflected external factors (recurrent European and Russian intervention as well as the Ottoman empire’s territorial losses in

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the Balkans and Libya), which facilitated (but did not cause) the predatory governance in Eastern Anatolia and built the violent vortex in this region during World War I. The contemporary manifestations of this imperially rooted regional fracture are examined, in the context of the Kurdish conflict inside Turkey, in chapter 7.

6 The Russian Empire and Transcaucasia

The “Russian bear” is a commonly used symbol for contemporary Russia and its prior imperial avatars. However, the “Russian octopus” would be more apt, as a way to capture the political significance of the peripheries of the tsarist empire as well as the contemporary political regions around Russia’s vast post-Soviet vicinities. Indeed, contemporary Russia is conspicuous for the sheer size of its territory—an imperial legacy it inherited from tsarist Russia. In terms of both size and longevity, it is far ahead of the British, Mongol, Roman, and Sassanid empires (Taagapera 1988; Suny 1993a). This territorial vastness has been significant in shaping the political geography of the Eurasian continent. Also very important, though perhaps less recognized, is the co-constitution of Russia and its vast peripheries, which has driven regional and world politics for centuries. The view from the perspective of the provinces and political peripheries of the Russian empire brings into focus the complex history of its interwoven national identities, cutting across social relations and overlapping forms of difference (Suny 1993a; 1993b; Mogilner 2013; Werth 2000; Semyonov 2009; Plokhy 2017). The co-constitution of the center and peripheries of the Russian empire evolved over centuries (Kappeler 2001; Burbank 2006), and with some important exceptions (Mogilner 2013; Plokhy 2017), the influence of this historical legacy on contemporary politics is insufficiently understood. Understanding the patterns of regional connectivity on the peripheries of the Russian empire is another effort to decenter Russian historiography (Mogilner 2013) and elevate the role of non-state actors and the patterns of their connectivity in shaping the

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political context of post-Cold War Eurasian security. Moreover, the range of current problems and specificities surrounding Russian foreign policies in the South Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia can only be fully appreciated by integrating the imperial and regional analytical perspectives. The “octopus” view of the Russian empire, from the vantage point of its provinces, reveals two specific challenges in imperial governance. The first one is territorial expansion versus institutional consolidation, which refers to the challenge of building functional institutions of imperial governance over vast imperial territories. Whether governing directly through its various officials and viceroys, or indirectly through the elites and administrative structures of the lands it had conquered (Plokhy 2017), the vastness of its territory remained a liability in the Russian empire, undermining any prospects for effective, developmental governance. This was a distinctive aspect of the Russian empire; territorial expansion was a signature instrument of its governance and imperial statecraft. Territorial conquest was a way to provide state security, reflecting an inability to produce such security domestically. This territorial expansion helped to create buffer zones between Russia and its external imperial competitors, such as the western and central European great powers, the Ottomans and Persians to the south, and the Qing and Japanese to the east. This tension manifested in recurrent indigenous opposition, across ethno-religious and class cleavages. Werth (2000) notes how “the imperial power was nonetheless being fractured by the struggles of subordinates, and that it often involved a considerable effort even provisionally to bind back together the fissures that had been opened up in the process” (29). And this politics of recurrent resistance also expressed the tension between outward territorial expansion and the internal challenges of inclusive governance (Haynes and Prakash 1991; Stoler and Cooper 1996). Given the contiguous nature of the Russian empire, this tension between territorial expansion and internal institutional consolidation defies the familiar dynamics of colonial rule by one culturally distinct population over another, indigenous population (Werth 2000). Instead, the conventionally understood “colonial” domination coexisted with administrative forms and practices that authorities applied somewhat equally to Russians and nonRussians alike. This “unevenness of the empire” (Werth 2000) complicated recurrent efforts at centralization and modernization, creating struggles that were characteristic of contiguous empires in the Eurasian continent at the time. This challenge to disentangle the colony from the periphery adds to



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the rationale for understanding the regional connectivity patterns on the peripheries of imperial Russia. Also critical for the regional framework as a way to understand imperial Russia is the vacillation between reformism and reactionism, in the imperial center, when it came to “managing” the restless peripheries. For example, Riegg (2018) highlights the tenure of Viceroy Vorontsov-Dashkov in the Caucasus from 1905 to 1915. He explains that Vorontsov-Dashkov’s reformist stance was expressed through engagement in and the revitalization of indigenous institutions, as a way to create “workable governance in the imperial peripheries during the general crisis of instability” (116–17). This case study reflects a broader struggle within the imperial center, with respect to long-term strategies of engaging with indigenous communities, fearing that such legitimation might destabilize the empire. Centralization without participation was the second challenge of imperial governance in Russia, in pursuit of the “octopus” view of this imperial state. As was true for other contemporaneous empires, here too the monarchy came under growing pressures toward modernization and administrative reform. Centralization, a familiar imperial modernization strategy, meant standardizing the relations with various peripheries and ethno-national groups. Traditionally, for centuries, the Russian tsars had tolerated a broad autonomy for their newly acquired territories (Plokhy 2017), such as the Baltics and the Hetmanate. Yet there were also periods in which the imperial center did not tolerate any special status of self-governance, and tried to integrate and standardize the newly acquired lands into imperial governance. Catherine II, for instance, did not allow any special status to the newly annexed Polish lands, creating the “Polish question,” which would stress the empire in more ways than one (Plokhy 2017), and for centuries to come. In cases where the empire tried to standardize and centralize the governance of its vast peripheries, the imperial government had to relinquish differential contracting with its varied imperial subjects. The preference for centralization without participation, as was the case in the neighboring Ottoman empire, proved to be destabilizing.1 Understanding the shifting patterns of regional connectivity on its peripheries, against the backdrop of centralization efforts, is critical for assessing the impact of imperial legacies on the conflict beltway of contemporary Russia, from Donbas to Damascus (Ohanyan 2018b). This chapter begins by discussing the ways in which the Russian empire navigated the two dilemmas mentioned above, as it crystallized as a political

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entity over centuries. In the process, we will review various peripheries of the empire, largely within the analytical framework of regional connectivity, the neighborhood effect, developed in this work. The chapter then moves on to emphasize Ukraine, describing its history as a political region of imperial Russia. This section prepares the groundwork for the discussion of the armed conflicts in eastern Ukraine in chapter 7. As with the empirical chapters on the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, this chapter also introduces a case study of a single political region, in this case Russian Transcaucasia. A key theme introduced here is a reflection on regional hybridity, manifested in this region through parallel processes of regional fracture and regional resilience. The analysis of the regional fabric of this region is then connected to the armed conflicts in the South Caucasus (chapter 7), which, in their modern forms, erupted and built up in the twilight years of the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War.

Territory versus Institutions This section examines the trade-off between territorial expansion and institutional governance that the Russian empire faced throughout its political history as an imperial entity. This question is examined within the framework of regional connectivity, the neighborhood effect; that examination is followed by the case study of Russian Transcaucasia. By the sixteenth century, with the “gathering of the lands of the Golden Horde” (Kappeler 2001), the imperial terrain was already vast. In the Russian empire, as in its contemporaries in the premodern era, territorial expansion often emerged out of political insecurity. Each territorial conquest created a new borderland, further from the imperial center and again vulnerable to invasion. From the perspective of the imperial center, protecting the new borderland required yet more conquests (MacKenzie 1988; Nalbandov 2016). But without the institutional foundations to govern the new borderlands, territorial expansion became not only a political and security necessity but also a perpetual liability. Territorial expansion without at least some internal institutional consolidation, however, would have been hard to sustain. And it is Peter the Great who is credited with turning the empire into a great power, capable of rivaling and competing with European contemporaries. He continued the empire’s territorial expansion but simultaneously laid the institutional foundations of imperial governance. For example, he defeated Sweden and, with the Treaty of Nystad (1721), gained control of most of Sweden’s



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Baltic provinces: Estonia, Livonia, and part of Finland (Kumar 2017). In institutional terms, Peter the Great is credited with initiating Westernizing reforms and institutional changes, including the formalization of the ranks of nobles into a single estate, later known as dvorianstvo. With continued territorial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the tension between territory and institutions become more explicit. The nature of connectivity in provinces and gubernias (or province systems) also varied, and rather widely, as discussed in the next section. Catherine the Great continued her predecessors’ strategic designs on Crimea, with its valuable access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. When it acquired Crimea in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74, the imperial leadership moved closer to the Ottoman empire. Territorial expansions in the eighteenth century also included the acquisition of parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. With these new conquests, the Russian empire, having already incorporated the greater part of Ukraine in 1667, was now firmly established on these western frontiers (Kumar 2017). The “western provinces” refer to the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian lands annexed by Catherine the Great (Plokhy 2017). The institutional foundations established in the western provinces were significant, and in terms of regional connectivity, the administrative apparatus of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is particularly noteworthy. These western provinces stood out for their strong layer of administrative structures, but they also contained marked divisions along ethno-religious lines. The Polish nobility ruled over mostly Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants. Such social fractures, expressed in bonding social capital, weakened and clustered the societal connectivity in the region, a breakdown that could also be observed in other parts of the Russian empire. For example, in the Baltics, the German nobility controlled Estonian and Latvian peasants. And these divisions became openings that the Russian imperial center utilized as wedges in its imperial rule. On the western borderlands, with the Polish nobility always mobilized, and resisting co-optation, the Russian imperial government supported Russian nationalist parties that cultivated connections between the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants, rallying them against the non-Russian landed nobility, particularly the Poles (Plokhy 2017). The empire’s southward expansion led it into the mountainous terrain of the Caucasus, bringing it into contact with more than fifty ethno-national communal groups, including Chechens, Circassians, Kabardinians, Ingushetians, Ossetians, and Abkhazians (Kumar 2017). The empire’s territorial

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gains forced it to contend with a growing institutional diversity in forms of governance. Between the institutionally centralized administrative structures on the western frontiers and the more tribal and horizontal governance modes in the Caucasus, the empire was becoming multinational, territorially vast, but also multilayered in its governance. Much of the organizational fabric in these new territorial conquests was expressed through bonding social capital, with clustered connectivity as a key regional marker in these terrains. The entry into the Caucasus mountains further entrenched the empire along the southeastern frontiers of the Ottoman empire and also brought it closer to the Iranian empire. The entry to Transcaucasia was established in 1783, with a protectorate over Georgia, which was formally annexed in 1801. The Russo-Iranian war of 1804–13 ended with victory for the Russian empire, which brought in the Turkic-speaking Muslims from Iran’s northern provinces. Subsequent expansion into the Iranian empire took place in 1828, which resulted in the incorporation of the Armenian khanates from the Iranian empire into the Russian fold. The institutional dimension of this territorial push into the Iranian provinces only added to the preexisting diversity of administrative forms of governance in the empire’s provinces. As Kappeler points out, traditions of statehood in this region predated the formation of the Russian empire. Having been integrated, during various periods, into the Persian, Greek, and Roman worlds, Armenians and Georgians had adopted Christianity and established national alphabets early in the fourth century. The Armenians, who also enjoyed periods of self-governance and independent statehood, experienced their “final flowering in the tenth and eleventh centuries” (Kappeler 2001, 172) before their conquest by the Byzantine empire and the Seljuk Turks. The medieval kingdom of Georgia experienced its political and cultural peak in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, a “flowering” that was soon ended by the Mongol conquest (Kappeler 2001). The Muslims in the region, whose presence was due to the medieval Turkic migrations into the Caucasus region, maintained cultural links and religious allegiance to the Shiite form of Islam in the Iranian empire, while being continually Turkicized over the years. De Waal (2019) writes that until modern times, “Azerbaijan” was more often applied to the northern Turkicpopulated part of Iran than to the modern-day state of Azerbaijan. Before the twentieth century, outsiders tended to refer to Azerbaijanis as “Shirvanis” (from around Baku and Shemakha), “Caucasian Tatars,” “Turks,” or just



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“Muslims.” Referencing Shaffer (2002), de Waal also argues that Azerbaijanis could describe themselves as either Turks or Iranians. However, any historical continuity was complicated by three changes in the alphabet used by Azerbaijanis since the third decade of the twentieth century, shifting first from the Arabic to the Roman alphabet in the 1920s, then to the Cyrillic alphabet in the 1930s, and finally back to the Roman alphabet in the 1990s. Broers explains that the shift in terminology from “Azerbaijani Turks” to “Azerbaijanis” was sudden, taking place in 1937 as a result of the Soviet politics of ethno-linguistics and ethnofederalism. The change came after the dissolution of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, which was a bureaucratic structure that had contained Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia until then. Importantly, the change also coincided with the Great Terror, when accusations of pan-Turkism caused many to die in Azerbaijan, and Baku, as an important center of Turkology, was left without its experienced Turkologist historians (Yilmaz 2013, cited in Broers 2019). Never a stable or homogenous ethnic group until the twentieth century, the Turkic-speaking Muslim groups of Transcaucasia started to self-identify as Azerbaijanis, a homogenous group, in the 1930s, when the ethnonym emerged in common use within Soviet historiography (Broers 2019; de Waal 2019; Suny 1993a). Burbank (2006) notes that Russian imperial law was built on legal pluralism, as it accommodated particular social institutions extant in the population. She argues that imperial law did not homogenize diverse indigenous cultural-legal practices but, instead, selectively legalized them within the whole opus of imperial legislation. While acknowledging and incorporating this diversity, then, imperial law maintained its own claim to be the ultimate power and source of justice (Burbank 2006). The legal pluralism of imperial governance appears to have emerged as a coping mechanism to manage the tension between territorial expansion and institutional consolidation. While perhaps useful for imperial durability at the time, this legal pluralism created the cleavages and fractured connectivity on the peripheries that have become liabilities in the patterns of conflict and possibilities of peacebuilding in the post-Cold War period. Indeed, regional fracture was integral to Russia’s strategy in Transcaucasia. The territorial expansion toward its southwestern frontiers resulted from the empire’s rivalry with two great powers at the time, the Ottoman and Iranian empires. Territorial acquisition, in addition to the perceived security enhancement it could provide, was also a way to weaken the empire’s rivals (Kappeler 2001). This exemplifies the ways in which strategic

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calculations at the level of great-power rivalries are deeply interwoven into the local societal fabric in each region—a multitiered politics that is central to the regional connectivity framework of this research. With its territorial expansion, the Russian empire developed the rationalizing narrative that it was saving Christian minorities from Islamic rule, which was associated with interethnic polarization in these regions; its integration of Muslim communities, meanwhile, was (self-)justified by its “civilizing” mission in such communities (Kappeler 2001). A similar dynamic of regional fracture emerged with the empire’s expansion into Central Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was also a case driven by great-power competitions and rivalries, interwoven into the region’s societal fabric at the local level. The territorial expansion into Central Asia brought the Russian empire into competition with China and Great Britain, which controlled India. As with Siberia (and the North Caucasus in the late eighteenth century), the expansion was carried out using the Cossacks as first colonists, but Russian and Ukrainian farmers were also encouraged to settle in these lands (Kumar 2017). The societal fabric in the conquered regions started shifting, as did the patterns of connectivity within the region. This form of colonization diluted the power of indigenous institutions, such as the Kazakh khanate, as it forced the nomadic Kazakhs into drier and less hospitable areas to the south (Kumar 2017; Donnelly 1988). The dilution of the power of indigenous institutions translated into low and bonding connectivity between various communities, shaping the regional fabric here for centuries to follow. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the expansion impacted Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Turkmen. The conquest of these groups and their lands was relatively easy and achieved fewer casualties and engendered more limited resistance (Kumar 2017; MacKenzie 1988) than conquests elsewhere in this empire. In short, in all cases of territorial conquest, the empire met with varied types of local institutions and administrative practice, often with built-in cleavages for regional fracture as an instrument of imperial governance.

Centralization without Participation The Russian “octopus” model of imperial governance presented a second trade-off for imperial governance—attempting top-down bureaucratic centralization while suppressing political participation from the bottom up. While traditionally allowing for local self-governance, the various tsars vacillated between attempting to advance homogeneity in imperial governance,



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by integrating all provinces uniformly into the Russian empire, and particularism, expressed in allowing varied levels of self-governance between different provinces. For example, the 1832 Organic Statute took away freedoms that the Kingdom of Poland had enjoyed under the rule of Alexander I. Alexander I had allowed for limited participation and self-governance, establishing a degree of constitutionalism in this province, denied to Russians in the core lands. With the 1832 Organic Statute, following the November 1830 uprising by the Poles, the office of tsar of Poland was gone and the Diet and the Polish army abolished (Plokhy 2017). Plokhy explains how a committee on the western provinces was created in 1831 and charged with identifying various pathways for the full integration of annexed territories. The policy of Russification, first formulated by Catherine II, was now being applied to the Polish lands as well as to the western lands in general. Still, this overall trend should not obscure the sporadic but recurrent efforts by the imperial bureaucracy to forge situational partnerships with non-Russian intellectuals, religious elites, and nationalists who sought parallel political aims (Riegg 2018). Indeed, such situational partnerships were a recurrent theme in imperial Russian history (Riegg 2018; Hillis 2012; Weeks 2001; Crews 2009). The waves of nationalism, industrialization, and modernization sweeping European empires in the nineteenth century were particularly challenging for the Russian empire. Military defeat by an alliance of western European powers and the Ottoman empire in the Crimean war of 1853–56 only accentuated the problems of an unreformed economy and fragmented political governance on the Russian empire’s vast peripheries. It also exposed the challenges of military engagement using unfree conscripts and an economy based on serf labor (Kivelson and Suny 2017). But even before the Crimean war, the tide in Europe had been turning against slavery, with the momentous revolutions of 1848. In Russia, these waves started jeopardizing the dynastic legitimation of the multiethnic empire, forcefully impacting its estate-based and prenational political units (Kappeler 2001). Officially endorsed Russian nationalism emerged as a vehicle for promoting integration. The linkage of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism, advocated by Count Uvarov during the reign of Nicholas I, allowed the government to create a wedge between the landed Polish Catholic nobility and their Ukrainian and Belarusian subjects. This officially endorsed Russian nationalism worked against balanced connectivity and participatory politics in these lands. At the same time, it

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facilitated connectivity, albeit a contested one, between Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian peasants, until Ukrainian nationalism started challenging the Russian version in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Plokhy (2017) maintains that the tripartite Russian nationalism based on the recognition of culturally distinct Slavic groups within the Russian nationality was articulated as a way to push back against Polish nationalism while accommodating the growing Ukrainian national movement. As with the Ottomans, the Russian imperial government also started the familiar search for longevity, attempting to centralize governance while holding on to the power of differential contracting (Burbank 2006). The imperial elite prioritized administrative centralization but continued to sustain and enforce differential contracting, ruling through fragmentation and clustered connectivity among various social groups in imperial peripheries. The differentiated legal regime, legal pluralism, was one manifestation of this approach to governance (Burbank 2006). Administrative and institutional centralization dictated uniformity, predictability, and public participation in governance (Scott 1999). Such values of enhanced administration promised gains and efficiencies in the imperial economy. At the same time, if implemented, they would have eroded the preferential, layered, tiered, uneven, and differential bargaining with various ethno-religious groups, classes, and territories. That kind of enhanced and centralized administration would have deprived the imperial government of immediate control over its peripheries while also curtailing its bargaining power with various elites and social groups in the empire.2 The ad hoc and case-by-case approach to imperial governance allowed the empire to selectively practice flexible pragmatism for a period, for some groups and territories (Kappeler 2001; Kivelson and Suny 2017; Burbank 2006; Riegg 2018; Plokhy 2017). The cooperation of the elites and their ability to stabilize their respective regions on the ethno-religiously diverse peripheries was a major factor in shaping imperial policies, and the center did not want to give up this edge. This differential contracting led the center to engage in full-scale violent suppression and ethnic cleansing of several Muslim communities in the highlands of Caucasus in the mid-nineteenth century (Kivelson and Suny 2017), to social accommodation and elite bargaining in Transcaucasia, and to tacit acceptance of institutional diversity and autonomy in parts of the western and northern provinces. Still, clustered connectivity, as opposed to balanced connectivity, remained a preference for the imperial elites on all of the empire’s political peripheries.



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Such a differentiated institutional presence in the imperial territories created unique opportunities for varied forms of regional fracture and manipulation of the regional fabric. The goal was imperial longevity and survival. These mechanisms of regional fracturing were as varied as Russia’s northern, western, and southern provinces. While regional fracturing helped to stabilize the southern provinces in Transcaucasia in the second half of the nineteenth century, it heightened unrest and crises in the western provinces under Polish influence. Ironically, in the northern Baltic provinces, it had the unintended consequence of strengthening the regional connectivity between the Latvians and Estonians. Indeed, Werth (2000, 35) notes that even the policies of “Russification” ended up with the result “not of denationalizing Estonian intellectuals but of liberating them from the prevailing Baltic German cultural influence.” In many regions beyond the core Russian provinces, three, four, or more ethnic and confessional groups occupied various levels of social dominance in proximity to one another (Werth 2000). And these polygonic sets of imperial relations (Werth 2000) determined the patterns of fractured connectivity on Russia’s imperial peripheries, with resilient connectivity in some cases emerging as an unintended result of the (mis)governance by the imperial center. After gaining Finland from Sweden in 1809, the empire allowed the Finnish Grand Duchy to maintain its laws and its own custom dues. The Finns were neither enserfed nor recruited into the Russian army, and even enjoyed dual citizenship. This pattern of relative political autonomy, leaving an imperial territory’s own political institutions mostly intact, was later also applied to the Polish territories, which Russia had acquired through the three partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795. Poland enjoyed its own constitution, parliamentary representation based on relatively broad electoral participation, and the rights of freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and habeas corpus (Kivelson and Suny 2017). This added up to dense social capital, as it created stronger ground for balanced political connectivity, cutting across interethnic cleavages. At the same time, Polish aristocrats were perhaps the most vocal and assertive opponents of Russian imperialism within the Romanov system. The forcefully subdued Polish rebellions of 1830–31 and 1863 only served to crystallize the political cleavage with the Russian empire, despite significant opportunities for regional connectivity and political participation. These two cases, constituting more than mere toleration of ethnoreligious difference, were exceptional; these regions, with the advanced

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institutional infrastructure of their governance and constitutionalism, were more progressive than the imperial center itself. Importantly, they were each also multiethnic in their own right. This arrangement created a layered imperialism, with ethno-religious stratification at its core. The resultant power imbalances created internal openings and political cleavages for the Russian imperial government to exploit, which it did. Deeper pockets of constitutionalism and connectivity had put these regions onto the path of balanced regional connectivity, but that would be undermined by the imperial center later on. The liberal practices of governance in these newly acquired territories were not extended to other peripheries. In the Caucasus, after the initial decades of autonomy under the local vassals (which varied in duration from case to case), the centralizing instincts of the empire kicked in. With the 1801 annexation manifesto, the imperial government promised the Georgian nobility the same status as that enjoyed by the Russian nobility (Jones 1987; Kivelson and Suny 2017). By 1850, the hereditary rights of the Georgian nobility were recognized and accommodated within the empire’s estate system. By 1846, the hereditary landowning rights of the Muslim beks and Armenian meliks were also recognized, and they, too, were drawn into the regional administration. In Transcaucasia, individual and pragmatic cooperation with the elites emerged as a critical mechanism of imperial governance in the region. This translated into the integration of this region into the imperial administration, with limited reliance on grassroots institutions. Gradually, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian gubernia had been fully introduced in this region. Regional fracture remained central to imperial governance even after the introduction of the gubernia system and the greater standardization that followed. The Caucasus viceroyalty was established in 1844, only to be diluted and replaced by the position of the High Commission, which enabled more direct control over the region (Riegg 2020). Despite greater centralization, there were various recurrent forms of elite co-optation in institutional and political terms. While working with the Georgian community through its landed nobility, the empire engaged the merchants and ecclesiastical actors within the Armenian community (Riegg 2020), utilizing bonding (as opposed to bridging) social capital and reinforcing clustered connectivity. This form of regional fracture in Transcaucasia crystallized into deeper political and socioeconomic divisions, forming the basis of the regional fracture in the contemporary armed conflicts in the South Caucasus (chapter 7).



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Commenting on the return to centralized governance in the Caucasus in 1882–1905, Viceroy Vorontsov-Dashkov expressed concerns that it would lead to the same crises in governance with which the empire regularly grappled in Transcaucasia. Riegg (2018) notes that the viceroy was worried that the “Caucasus administration’s bureaucratic dependence upon the imperial ministers would delay or disrupt the region’s fragile sociopolitical and economic progress” (135). Regional fracture manifested differently in the constitutional regimes of the western peripheries: it was expressed in a layered imperialism between the nobility and privileged classes in Poland and Germany, on the one hand, and in the peasantry among the Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians, and Estonians, on the other. Initially, the multiethnic western and northern provinces had greater autonomy from the imperial center. Against this backdrop, the enduring practice of promoting regional fracture was expressed here in the clustered connectivity and bonding intra-ethnic social capital that the imperial center utilized to manage the constant pressures from various ethnic groups for autonomy and self-governance. The regional connectivity of the peripheries was also significantly affected by the elimination of serfdom in the empire. Alexander II issued the emancipation decree in 1861, and reforms in landholding, law and justice, military conscription, education, health, local governance, and the economy followed soon thereafter (Kivelson and Suny 2017). Serfdom, which the decree abolished, had connected peasants to the landlord, a connection that, by extension, made the landlords dependent on and loyal to the tsar. The elimination of the institution slowly reshuffled the sources of loyalty and allegiance, identity, and participation. In particular, the institution of the soslovie (estate) was replaced with forms of political participation to accommodate the newly freed serfs. A network of administrative units called volosti was established, which was run by representatives elected by the peasants. At the provincial level, the zemstvo (plural zemstva), a system of elected local assemblies, was created, designed to integrate emergent “citizens” into public administration (Kivelson and Suny 2017). This newly established layer of public administration was endowed with powers to facilitate such things as local policing, the building and maintaining of infrastructure, and primary education. Although they were participatory and more inclusive, these organizations remained at the local and district/provincial levels. Public participation at the national level was firmly rejected by the empire. Reflecting the imperial spirit of governing through difference, the

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institution of zemstvo remained limited to the core European Russian lands. As a result, preexisting channels and mechanisms of regional fracture remained largely undisturbed on the political peripheries, and clustered and ethnically based connectivity emerged as political fault lines on Russia’s peripheries. The creation of zemstva in the three Baltic provinces was vetoed in 1887 on the grounds that it would establish channels of self-government susceptible to capture by the German nobility. Similarly, the nine western provinces constituted from the holdings of Poland-Lithuania were left outside of the zemstva on the ground that the Polish nobles would capture these emergent institutions. The idea was also a nonstarter for the Caucasus and Central Asia (Kivelson and Suny 2017). Transcaucasia in particular was increasingly managed by centralized rule in which the unofficial, and largely patrimonial, groups of governance, such as the merchant class and ecclesiastical authorities in the Armenian community, were emerging as the loci of power (Riegg 2020). Moreover, in the early twentieth century, Viceroy Vorontsov-Dashkov unsuccessfully campaigned within the imperial bureaucracy to extend the civic benefits of these reforms from other parts of the empire into the Caucasus, a region he was working hard to stabilize, develop, and pacify (Riegg 2018). The Council of Ministers and the Duma actually obstructed efforts to introduce zemstvo into the Caucasus, as noted by Riegg. The imperial government also opposed the viceroy’s efforts to extend the agrarian reforms into the Caucasus and pushed back against calls to include local representatives of local municipalities on his advisory committee (Riegg 2018). Still, the viceroy succeeded, and in 1912 the Duma abolished the peasants’ financial and legal dependence on beks and provided the Caucasus administration with 10 million rubles to reimburse the beks (Riegg 2018). I now turn to examine the nature of regional connectivity and forms of fracture in the Baltic and Western provinces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Russian empire was grudgingly and, perhaps, too slowly moving towards greater participation and centralization.

Reform for Some, Rupture for Others The empire’s fear of ethno-religious mobilization on the peripheries partly explains why the modest reforms of the mid-nineteenth century were limited to the core Russian lands. In those core Russian lands, after the emancipation decree of 1861, the empire moved in the opposite direction from the rest of its provinces. These Russification policies reflected the overall direction of



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the empire throughout the nineteenth century with respect to its western, northern, southern, and southeastern provinces. In the case of the western provinces, the Polish question emerged as a consistent and systemic irritant for the empire. Largely in reaction to the November uprising of 1830 in the partitioned Russian half of Poland, the empire proceeded, over the subsequent decades, to crush and eliminate many institutions of participatory governance, exacerbating a major rupture in the capacities for self-governance in the western provinces. After suppressing the uprising, Nicholas I proceeded to confiscate estates from the Polish nobility, transferring them to Russians. Most of the concessions that had been made to the Kingdom of Poland under Alexander I were also revoked, and the constitution of 1815 was suspended. The Polish parliament, or Sejm, and the Polish army were abolished. The Russian viceroy in Poland, I. F. Paskevich, and other top Russian bureaucrats proceeded to rule through emergency powers. Still, Kappeler (2001) explains that despite these changes, the Polish nobility remained the dominant force not only in Russian Poland but also in large parts of the western provinces after 1831. Significant, in terms of societal connectivity in the western provinces that were previously under Polish influence, was the growing suppression of and discrimination against the Catholic church. This was not only an effort at cultural Russification, but also an instrument to weaken the Polish influence in these provinces. The suppression, in 1839, of the Uniate church, viewed as a tool of influence, resulted in the incorporation into the Orthodox church of Belarusians and Ukrainians who had previously been in communion with the Catholic church. The imperial propaganda in the late eighteenth century was designed to make the Belarusian population both Russian and Orthodox. This policy, according to Turonek and Słomczynska (2001), provoked hostility, leading to a permanent split, between the Orthodox and the Catholic segments of Belarusian society. But despite these attempts, the social position of the Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians did not change dramatically within the empire, because they remained in their position of serfdom, dependent on the Polish nobility and creating a social cleavage of clustered connectivity and bonding social capital that would subsequently be exploited on a regional basis. Russification in the domain of religion was also attempted in the Baltic provinces, and with the similar consequence of regional fracture. Kappeler (2001) explains that between 1845 and 1847, about a hundred thousand Latvian and Estonian peasants converted to Orthodoxy in hopes of improving

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their socioeconomic status. The Russian language and Russian education were also being promoted in the Baltic provinces, albeit on a smaller scale. The promotion and subsequent advancement of the Orthodox church in the Baltics was directed against the German nobility. But it also reflected the growing insecurity of the imperial center, which began to rely on its conservative Orthodox religious authorities to stabilize the empire against waves of European nationalist movements. The change from the imperial policy of working through the national elites, or the elite classes within ethno-national subgroups, impacted regional connectivity. Kappeler (2001) notes that Russia “departed from the welltried estate-based principle of cooperation with foreign elites, and for the first time tried to play off the peasant lower classes against the aristocracy in a systematic manner” (254). In this period, a multilayer Russification was undertaken in the western provinces, in a push to achieve linguistic, cultural, and administrative integration of the western provinces with the imperial administrative structures (Thaden 2016). Much of this drive played out in regional terms. The elimination of serfdom in these provinces was not primarily driven by efforts at administrative modernization, as it was in “inner Russia.” The creation and exploitation of fractures and fissures, often orchestrated by the imperial government, were by far the greatest incentives, as such reforms made it possible, at least in the short term, to advance clustered regional connectivity via bonding social capital. The elimination of serfdom strengthened the Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian peasants relative to the Polish nobility and the Catholic church, but zemstva were not introduced in these provinces (Rieber 2014; Thaden 2016). Additionally, Poles and Catholics were prevented from purchasing land, which was another way of reducing the political and economic power of the Polish nobility in the provinces but without empowering the previously marginalized nationalities in the process. In short, these policies of cultural, linguistic, and administrative Russification ended up weakening Polish influence, driven by efforts to capitalize on the economic divisions and stratification between the landed Polish nobility, on the one hand, and the Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian peasants, on the other. The absence of constitutional orders and representative institutions curtailed the prospects of building bonding social capital within ethno-religious groups. It also undermined the chances for bonding social capital to slowly evolve into bridging connectivity, which would have been possible if there had been forums and institutional spaces of interethnic bargaining.



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The imperial leadership, fearing secessionist movements in Finland, Poland, and Ukraine, turned the economic inequalities and class lines between various ethno-religious groups into political wedges. After 1863, the minister of internal affairs, Petr Valuev, proposed working with the loyal elites, such as Polish nobles and Jewish merchants, for the purpose of using class divisions to weaken nationalist movements and national loyalties. An approach of working only with the “Russians,” East Slavs of Orthodox faith, was also considered, with the intention of confiscating properties from rebel Poles to transfer them to loyal Slavs (Kivelson and Suny 2017). In the Baltic provinces, the German estates had become an established political preference for the imperial government (Rieber 2014; Thaden 2016). Unlike the Poles in the western provinces, the German nobility was considered loyal and dependable. There were pressures toward Russification and integration of the provinces in some corners of the empire, but the government pushed back, continuing its support of the German nobility’s rule of Estonians and Latvians. Maintaining political support for the German nobility, however, did not stave off the mounting pressures for greater participation coming from the marginalized Latvians and Estonians (Kappeler 2001; Thaden 2016; Rieber 2014). The imperial government tried to play both sides, thereby maintaining the existing regional fracture in the Baltics. While supporting the German nobility, it also supported the calls from Estonians and Latvians for a greater voice against their German landlords. In contrast to the western provinces, here there was a political will among the economically marginalized groups to work with the government of the Russian empire against their regional landlords, the Germans. The Russification policies in the Baltics took the form of regional fracture. The Russian language was mandated as an official language for state institutions, largely to dilute the German influence in the provinces. Importantly, new municipal self-government bodies were introduced (Thaden 2016; Rieber 2014), which brought Estonians, Latvians, and Russians into governance in greater numbers than before. Although it did not introduce the zemstva, this move added to the participatory politics and institutional deepening of governance in these provinces. It reflected the Latvian and Estonian aspirations to weaken the Baltic German upper class and to enhance the institutional channels of politics inside these provinces. Still, from 1880 to 1890, the pressures toward Russification curtailed the special status of the Baltic provinces (Kappeler 2001; Thaden 2016), although this region avoided the deeper standardization and centralization policies of

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the imperial government. Linguistic and religious pressures on the provinces continued, but the region ended up with more representative institutions, while the imperial center retained the German nobility as a regional pivot. As in the western provinces, socioeconomic and ethno-national fractures overlapped in the Baltics, deepening bonding capital and clustering connectivity, both of which resulted in divisive fault lines within the province. In the mid-nineteenth century, Latvians and Estonians were largely peasants with little political power, governed as they were by imperial layers of German nobility. And yet, while the German bourgeoisie and the nobility dominated the local institutions of governance (Suny 1993a; Thaden 2016), Estonians and Latvians started moving into the urban areas, forming a small middle class and generating greater political mobilization towards the end of the nineteenth century (Thaden 2016). Much of this growing political activity was directed towards St. Petersburg. Kappeler explains how tens of thousands of peasants signed petitions demanding the introduction of reforms, in addition to the abolition of the German privileges in the Baltics. Partitioning the estates of the Baltic Germans was a part of their political demands. Some reforms were introduced, which alleviated the Estonians’ and Latvians’ political marginalization. In parallel, linguistic Russification also gained speed, resulting in the closure of Estonian and Latvian primary schools. Pressure on the Lutheran church and ecclesiastical institutions also affected connectivity, eroding the organizational coherence and interactions between them. As subregional and marginalized nationalities, the Estonians and Latvians stood out, with more uniform political relations with the imperial government. Regional connectivity there, while still clustered, was organizationally simpler, lacking the multilayer divisions typical of the western provinces. Estonians gravitated towards nationalist movements, while Latvians veered towards Bolshevism (Suny 1993a), and yet their institutional conditions of participatory politics and incentives for working with the Russian imperial government in the first two decades of the twentieth century were somewhat similar. In contrast to the western provinces, the external dimension of regional fracture was rather muted here. Ukrainian activism, which had been crushed in Russia, reorganized in the neighboring Habsburg empire. Estonian and Latvian nationalism and cultural resistance, in contrast, was regionally contained. The Baltic region succeeded in gaining more and deeper representative institutions at the end of the nineteenth century—a key contributing factor for balanced connectivity within regions to emerge.



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This deepening of representative institutions also enabled a greater uniformity of relations between the Estonians and Latvians and the imperial center. These factors created favorable conditions for regional resiliency in the Baltics, which allowed the Baltic republics to keep their relations intact during the Soviet collapse. The external dimension as an influence on regional connectivity in the Baltics began to emerge in the early twentieth century. The German factor was already present regionally in the form of German control of the administrative and political institutions. This external dimension—the German factor—is particularly noteworthy in that it produced a type of regional fracture similar to the case of the Ottoman empire in Transcaucasia. The revolutionary period in the twilight years of the Russian empire accelerated this, particularly after the mass political and social unrest of 1905. The western provinces, as well as the Baltic region, had already developed an institutional layer of politics, including assemblies, political parties, and parliaments. The political parties themselves were diverse in terms of their political agendas and party platforms on issues of statehood and independence from the Russian empire. It is in this context that the external German factor played a decisive role in the regional connectivity of the western and Baltic regions. Suny (1993a) explains that in this revolutionary period, Lithuanians were divided on the prospects of independence, with more support for greater self-administration inside “democratic Russia.” Yet it was under German supervision and support that, in September of 1917, the creation of the Lithuanian National Council, the Taryba, and a declaration of independence became possible. Pushing for Lithuanian independence, despite the weakness of political support among political parties in Lithuania, antagonized the local Poles: this independence precluded the formation of a union or a federation with an independent Poland (Suny 1993a). In the Baltics (as well as in Transcaucasia with German support for Georgian independence) Germany’s support for the national independence of subregional nationalities was largely motivated by its drive to weaken the Russian empire. German advocacy and support for independence in Latvia and Estonia was a key determinant in their declaration of independence from the Russian empire in February of 1918.

Ukraine as a Political Periphery I now want to focus on the patterns of regional connectivity and geopolitical embeddedness within Ukrainian lands in the Russian empire. This will

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then be connected to the conflicts in eastern Ukraine, discussed in chapter 7. Aside from the contemporary armed conflicts in Ukraine, this assessment of the imperial legacies to Ukraine’s contemporary regional connectivity is also justified by its geographic location between Russia and the West. At this moment of multipolarity and a weakened liberal rules-based world order, Ukraine has become a battleground between Western and Russian narratives as to how geopolitical rivalries within a multipolar world order should be handled, managed, and prevented. In much of this discourse, Ukraine is viewed as a passive target and a subject of rivalries between Russia and the West. The multitiered approach developed here paints a messier picture (Plokhy 2017). The dynamics of imperial regional fracture were particularly pronounced in the Ukrainian context, with inter-imperial geopolitical rivalry as a dominant background factor. Since the sixteenth century, the territories of contemporary Ukraine had changed hands multiple times as a result of partitions and annexations, involving the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was formed in 1569, large parts of the Ukrainian lands were annexed by Poland from Lithuania. The regional fracture of Ukraine was expressed through the economic and political dominance of the Ukrainians by the Polish throughout the seventeenth century, lasting until the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the westward encroachment of the Russian empire. This geopolitical embeddedness and these rivalries were intertwined with communal polarization between Ukrainian farmers and the Polish aristocracy. Societal connectivity suffered as a result, with bonding, as opposed to bridging, social capital taking root. Throughout this period, partly driven by communal polarization and Ukrainian revolts against the Polish aristocracy, for example in 1648–49, Ukrainian Cossacks looked to the Russian tsar for support and tried to pull in the Russian empire, which was hesitant at the time, to provide protection against the Poles. Russia avoided a conflict with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time, but the cleavage of intercommunal polarization and clustered connectivity was already present, and Russia, as an external geopolitical player, would start to make use of it very soon thereafter. Large parts of Ukraine came under Russian rule in the middle of the seventeenth century (Kappeler 2001; Thaden 2016). However, Ukraine’s geopolitical embeddedness and the great-power rivalry over the area did not settle until the gradual disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth



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and its absorption by the Habsburg and Russian empires, a process that was not completed until the third partition of the Commonwealth in 1795. The geopolitical embeddedness and rivalry of the imperial powers within Ukraine was significantly stabilized when the Habsburg empire annexed Galicia, where Polish governance over Ukrainians had been the most direct and administratively extensive. The geopolitical rivalry between the Habsburg and Russian empires played out over the Dniepr River: with the first partition of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, in 1772, the Habsburg empire absorbed the right bank of the Dniepr River (western Ukraine). This ended the Polish rule over Ukraine in terms of administration, but not necessarily in economic or political terms. With the second partition of the Commonwealth, in 1793, the Russian empire took over the right bank of the Dniepr River (eastern Ukraine), along with eastern Volhynia, with the full absorption of Volhynia completed later, in 1795. Russia’s control over Ukrainian lands was not contested geopolitically, and geopolitical tensions in this region did not start to build until closer to World War I. Even while ethnically Ukrainian regions were split between the Habsburg and Russian empires, as of the late eighteenth century, the region stabilized in geopolitical terms, and its geopolitical embeddedness eased somewhat. It was then the region’s internal patterns and structures of connectivity that emerged as important: civic traditions and institutions started diverging on either side of the Dniepr River, with lasting legacies for the prospects of democratization and conflict in contemporary Ukraine and its neighborhood. Samokhvalov (2018) cautions against the prevalent discourse about Ukraine being stuck in a “geopolitical conundrum,” defined as Ukraine’s inability to make a Huntingtonian choice between Western democratic civilization and its Soviet past and Eastern authoritarianism. Samokhvalov recognizes that the western part of Ukraine, the historical region of Galicia, long part of the Habsburg empire, does have a deeper parliamentary tradition and stronger civic roots of participatory politics. Against this backdrop, it is significant that the Soviet dissolution did not result in clashes and conflicts between Ukraine and Poland, despite the historical tensions and communal violence between Poles and Ukrainians within both the Habsburg and the Russian empires. This nonevent is important when analyzed in parallel with the outbreak of the conflict in the Donbas region, discussed in greater detail in chapter 7.

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The “Habsburg thesis” holds that the portions of Ukraine and Poland that previously comprised historical Galicia resonate to this day with a shared cultural past that is distinct from that of the rest of Ukraine and Poland. Specifically, this thesis holds that Galicians, whether in Ukraine or Poland, are more civically minded than their compatriots, showing higher levels of political efficacy, expressed in higher levels of voting and voting against leftist parties in the post-Soviet period (Drummond and Lubecki 2010; Birch 1995; 2000; Rupnik 1997; O’Loughlin and Bell 1999; Roper and Fesnic 2003). Rupnik (1997) explains that countries with deeper experiences with Habsburg liberalism exhibited civic primacy and were in a position to consolidate their democratic transitions in the long term. The civic traditions in the Habsburg and Russian empires were consequential for the nature of regional connectivity in these areas. As discussed in chapter 2, regional resiliency emerges from dense, diverse, and coherent civic organizations, which are able to coordinate and bargain with one another towards establishing regional security arrangements. It emerges from the scholarship reported above that civic traditions shaped political history in the Ukrainian context, with lasting legacies for connectivity patterns in contemporary Ukraine. The relevant scholarship demonstrates that this civic primacy, expressed in norms, values, and civic institutions, was facilitated by the Catholic church. Prior membership and involvement in the Catholic church correlates with more liberal habits and values in contemporary politics. These states and regions were thus positioned for more open and participatory political systems, capable of building accommodative capacities inside their states—a key condition for the prevention and management of ethnic conflict in the twentieth century (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Wucherpfennig 2017). The approach developed in this work indicates that the “Habsburg thesis,” a cultural theory, needs to be augmented to account for institutional factors—societal connectivity on this imperial periphery. To this end, Drummond and Lubecki (2010) note that the socioeconomic profile of the region was one of smallholder peasants, the backbone of the agricultural sector, coexisting with zones of industrialization, thereby generating a “stable, highly integrated population” (1318), bolstered by imperial institutions of participatory governance, as discussed in the previous chapter. In short, on the right bank of the Dniepr River, there are deep civic traditions of bridging social capital, with organizational ties that cut across and connect the agricultural and industrial sectors.



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The left bank of the Dniepr River, eastern Ukraine, experienced different patterns of social connectivity. Kivelson and Suny (2017) note that the January 1863 Polish insurrection for restored autonomy intensified the contest of identities between various nationalities, reviving “Russianness” as both a cultural and a political project. The 1863 uprising escalated the Russian empire’s fears of the growing national sentiments and secessionist movements among the Poles and the Ukrainians. The empire’s repressive response to the Polish uprising extended to include the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian language was labeled a mere “dialect” by imperial officials, and the Ukrainians were considered to have been corrupted by the Poles. Ukrainians were viewed as “Little Russians,” which, as Kivelson and Suny explain, was both used to promote unity and a common identity between Ukrainians and Russians or the Russian empire and also deployed against Poles and Jews. This amounted to ruling through diversity (Kivelson and Suny 2017), driven by efforts to foster clustered connectivity through limiting the bridging social capital across ethno-religious groups. This had immediate consequences for the nature of social connectivity, civic institutions, and social capital. The imperial government debated whether to co-opt and reward the national elites, including the Ukrainians, Polish nobles, and Jewish merchants, through city councils and estate-based zemstva, still in the early stages of planning. Others within the imperial government advocated working only with the “Russians” on the western peripheries, which meant the East Slavs of the Orthodox faith. Kivelson and Suny (2017) argue that such a path would have led to confiscating property from the Poles, undercutting economic development, and weakening the merchant class in these regions. The imperial government settled on a middle path. The zemstva were not extended to the Polish and the Ukrainians, but nor was local culture fully repressed. The government did issue the Ems Decree, in 1876, which prohibited all publications and theatrical performances in Ukrainian. Limiting the use of Ukrainian in print was a blow to political organizing among Ukrainians, and many activists then crossed the border to neighboring Austria to revive their civic organizations. The project of advancing Ukrainian identity and consciousness within Austria, however, also became directed against the Poles and the Jews (Kivelson and Suny 2017). Within the Russian empire, the economic cleavages were already pitting Ukrainians against the Polish nobility and Jewish merchants and industrialists. The Jewish community was prominent in the profitable sugar beet industry and, more

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generally, in Kyiv’s3 industrial development (Kivelson and Suny 2017). The economic rise of the Jewish community in Kyiv fueled social resentment among Ukrainians against the “foreigners.” In addition, the promotion of the “Little Russian” project within the Ukrainian community also activated political divisions and created a wedge between Ukrainians, on the one hand, and Poles and Jews, on the other. The eroded capacities of bridging social capital and connectivity between all these nationalities emerged from this pattern of governance within the Russian empire on its western frontiers. The net result of these developments for the patterns of social connectivity on Russia’s western frontiers was markedly different from those in the neighboring Habsburg empire. Within the Ukrainian and Polish communities, civic organizations and social capital were repressed. Governing through the elites, while crushing the formal institutions of participatory politics, also undermined the budding bonding capital within the Ukrainian community, but it gave civic groups the impetus to cross over to Galicia, within the Habsburg empire. Governing through the elites, without formalized political and civic institutions, also precluded the development of bridging social capital between Ukrainians and Poles, Jews, and Russians. The prospects for bargaining and coordination among these groups suffered as a result. The overall trend in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian imperial governance on its western frontiers was to suppress institutions of governance and civic connectivity. The Russification process, limited to cultural and linguistic forms (Riegg 2020; Kappeler 2001), lacked strategic consistency and uniformity throughout the nineteenth century (Kivelson and Suny 2017; Kappeler 2001). Russification policies mostly ruptured and corroded the institutions of societal connectivity and participatory politics. These policies undermined the organizational coherence of communal groups, and the emergent institutional weakness challenged the foundations of public politics that cut across ethnicities (Tilly 2005). But by suppressing the institutions of societal connectivity and participatory politics, Russification policies enabled complex but clustered connectivity in the multiethnic and socially stratified fabric of the western provinces, as the suppression led to groups hunkering down within their communities. The crushing of Ukrainian activists, pushing their activities across the border into the region of Galicia in the Habsburg empire, created extra-regional influences on the western provinces. Inside the western provinces, the multilayer power relations and the continued economic dominance of Poles and Jews also



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gave rise to anti-Semitic attitudes and social resentment, fueling interethnic tensions and creating communal polarization in these regions.

Transcaucasia: A Globalized Region in an Imperial World In this section, I move to examine the regional fabric of connectivity within Russian Transcaucasia, preparing the groundwork for an imperial narrative of the contemporary armed conflicts in the South Caucasus. The focus on this region is also critical because this is where the two contemporary, increasingly revanchist and perhaps revisionist, powers, Russia and Turkey, collide and coexist at the same time. Transcaucasia has been a theater of major imperial rivalries throughout its history, and geopolitical narratives have dominated the study of this region from the imperial period to the present. As an imperial frontier location, it was subjected to frequent rivalries between the Ottoman, Russian, and Iranian empires from the early nineteenth century on. However, the theory of regional connectivity, when applied in this case, reveals that the region possessed significant agency of its own in the early twentieth century. Its regionally organized political parties and associations reflected Transcaucasia’s relatively resilient regional fabric, despite the concurrent intercommunal violence in the region. Transcaucasia can be described as “unranked” (chapter 3), in that its economic divisions were built around ethno-religious boundaries. This explains the nature of its fracture as an imperial periphery. In comparison with its western and Baltic provinces, Russian imperial governance in this region was more direct, unlayered, and unmediated by any separate privileged group (such as the German nobility, for instance, in the Baltics). Here regional fracture formed a different pattern. In the Baltics, the empire relied on the Latvian and Estonian peasantry to keep the German nobility in check and to stabilize its rule on that periphery. This pattern of regional fracture was not as devastating for the intercommunal relations between Estonians and Latvians. But in the unmediated and unranked imperialism of Transcaucasia, Russian imperialism polarized its main ethnic groups and nationalities through socioeconomic cleavages that quickly became politicized and securitized. The intercommunal clashes were most significant between the Armenians and the Caucasian Muslims or Azerbaijanis (Suny 1993a; Broers 2019). In terms of socioeconomic divisions, Suny explains that Armenians were

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the most urbanized, and Azerbaijanis the least; Georgians and Azerbaijanis were also the most regionally compact, while Armenians were the most dispersed. Clerics dominated Azerbaijani society, while the old national nobility was influential among the Georgians. And in the Armenian communities, though a large segment was made up of the peasantry, some working for Muslim landowners, it was the merchant middle class and the ecclesiastical institutions that were politically dominant (Suny 1993a; Riegg 2020). The territorial and political boundaries of the contemporary South Caucasus, while contested, belie the mixed and mingled fabric of Transcaucasia in imperial Russia. Georgian nobles and peasants with shared ethnic values and rural, precapitalist traditions coexisted with the Armenian entrepreneurial and urban middle class, which dominated Georgia’s historic capital of Tiflis (Tbilisi)4 both politically and economically (Suny 1993a). To the east, in the oil-rich city of Baku, this social stratification repeated itself. In and around Baku, the peasantry was mostly Azerbaijani, and urban society was divided between Armenian and Russian workers, in the more skilled professions, and the European industrialists and capitalists who dominated the oil industry. Muslims were concentrated in the ranks of unskilled labor and were generally limited to the bottom rungs of the economic hierarchy. While the Russification policies placed intense pressure on the Armenian community in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Riegg 2020), the Muslim community experienced discrimination from the Russian imperial governance over a longer period of time. Baku, one of the oil capitals of the world at the turn to the twentieth century, hosted a multinational working class, with 72.6% being from elsewhere, according to Suny (1972). By 1917, there were around 110,000 workers in and around Baku, with Azerbaijanis making up 36.9% of that total, Russians 23%, Armenians 21.4%, Daghestanis 11.3 %, and Volga Tatars 3.6% (Suny 1972). As the region’s global and industrialized city, Baku was also a site of frequent labor strikes, notably in 1903, 1904, 1913, and 1914. With the economic cleavages reinforced by ethnic stratification, such social instabilities and strikes at times turned into national animosities and manifested in interethnic clashes. The economic visibility of the Armenian merchant class frequently made them a target, much like the Armenian community in the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century and the Jewish communities in Russia’s western provinces (Kivelson and Suny 2017). In Baku, a site of revolutionary mobilization since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Armenian-Azerbaijani clashes in 1905 and the “March Days”



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of 1918 were particularly consequential in eroding intercommunal trust in the region. In the absence of region-wide representative and participatory institutions of governance, the largely bonding social capital had few pathways to transform into bridging social capital and balanced connectivity in this region. Intercommunal links were ad hoc and functioned outside of the formal imperial governance. Tragically, the imperial governance offered little to ameliorate the explosive cleavages and interethnic tensions when they erupted (Ohanyan 2018c).5 Instead, administrative Russification was applied to the region in order to standardize and centralize the imperial governance. This manifested in so-called “perverse regionalism,” with the imperial center seeking to stabilize restive regions and regularly engaging in the gerrymandering of administrative barriers. Such administrative engineering was applied during various periods of imperial rule in Russian Transcaucasia. Largely top-down and coercive, it did little to build capacities for interethnic coexistence and dialogue. Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in another round of cultural and administrative Russification, indigenous institutions were wiped out and grassroots civic spaces of interethnic engagement eliminated. Richard Hovannisian (1969) notes: Influential civic and religious leaders were neutralized or required to leave Transcaucasia. Tsarist policy for the Caucasus was now aimed at replacing the diversities in administration with a system uniform throughout most of the empire. Often, separatist tendencies in particular regions were discouraged by combining contrasting geographic entities into new provinces with unnatural boundaries and heterogenous populations. (10)

With the Russo-Japanese war and the 1905 “Bloody Sunday” massacre preoccupying the imperial government, these communal clashes may have been perceived as “minor” and taking place in a distant land, which could have been why they failed to generate a more assertive response from the imperial center.6 The tsar did, however, restore the viceroyalty, which had been suspended since 1882, and sent the liberal viceroy, Vorontsov-Dashkov, mentioned above, to pacify the region (Riegg 2018; Sargent 2010). Still, the imperial center indirectly added to the conflict by refusing to extend zemstva, as a layer of representative institutions, into Transcaucasia. Combined with the region’s bonding social capital and unranked and

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stratified socioeconomic fabric, this latter factor kept the region divided along its unevenly mobilized social and political units of organization (religious, political parties, and associations), with little connectivity among them. Regional fracture also manifested in Transcaucasia in its external dimensions, with the extra-regional and hegemonic embeddedness of outside powers, and with refugee movements across the border—Christians moving to the Russian empire and Muslims moving to the Ottoman empire. In addition, the violent vortex of the Ottoman state’s genocidal violence in Eastern Anatolia in 1915 (chapter 5) radiated to Transcaucasia, reverberating there in subsequent years in the already polarized fabric between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The recurrent geopolitical aspirations of the Ottoman empire to reclaim its territorial losses from the Russian empire and to connect with the North Caucasus and Central Asia also remained a significant stressor for the prospects of regional resilience in Transcaucasia.

The Progressive Periphery in a Declining Empire Regional Connectivity in Transcaucasia and the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic This section turns to the organizational fabric of this region, focusing on the short-lived, politically consequential, and under-studied Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) and the broader organizational ecosystem in the region that shaped its formation. This early effort at a regionally integrated political entity unfolded against the backdrop of intensifying Russification policies and a parallel rise in revolutionary activities in the region, some of which were influenced by Russia’s own anti-tsarist revolutionary movements. Russification, while partly a pragmatic attempt aimed at imperial survival, resulted in institutional obliteration among the regional nationalities. The temporary confiscation of Armenian church properties and of the church’s network of schools in the region is one example (Riegg 2020). This period of strong coercion coincided with a time when the region was becoming increasingly urbanized, industrialized, physically connected, and riveted by the revolutionary ideas of constitutionalism and representation (Berberian 2019). Socioeconomic inequalities were expressed, at times, through ethnic cleavages, but they also fostered an institutionally thick layer of political parties and revolutionary groups. This turned the region into a bastion of anti-socialism directed against Petrograd and Moscow. These



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socioeconomically expressed nationalist movements coexisted with socialist political parties, such as the Georgian Menshevik movement (Jones 2014). As the empire failed to reform, the formation of the TDFR, which lasted a little over a month (April 22 to May 28, 1918), became a way for nonRussian provinces to separate from the Russian empire, where the Bolshevik forces were gaining ground. From a Transcaucasian point of view, “All Power to the Soviets” was merely a Bolshevik slogan dictating a top-down political agenda, often involving the obliteration of the preexisting civic and political depth and development of the region. The TDFR, while short-lived, brought Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians together. Some scholars, however, because of the fact that the TDFR announced its independence from the Russian empire largely under pressure from the Ottoman empire, have dismissed it as an insignificant endeavor of regional cooperation resulting from geopolitical necessity and happenstance, rather than an expression of genuine regional cooperation between the national elites (Brisku and Blauvelt 2020). Considering the regional politics on this periphery from the perspective of the regional fracture/resilience framework, the question of periodization becomes essential. The regional level of connectivity and engagement may appear insignificant when the formal duration of the independent TDFR is considered, with its short life span of little over a month. However, a closer look reveals that the geopolitical factor of external hegemonic influences was deeply shaped and mediated by the internal regional connectivity between the main nationalities and other, class-based political parties. The TDFR did not emerge in a vacuum, and it did not appear overnight. Instead, this period of bottom-up regionalism in Transcaucasia was a result of civic depth and institutional connectivity between highly coherent and organizationally diverse political units (political parties, associations, ecclesiastical groups, schools, etc.). Much of this institutional connectivity and civic depth had evolved in opposition to Russification policies from the imperial center, in the context of growing mass mobilization and greater physical connectivity in the region. Therefore, the argument that the period of regional engagement consisted of well under two months in the spring of 1918 is rather misleading. Specifically, Berberian (2019) has shown how the revolutionary movement in the region produced highly organized and diverse groups and political parties that circulated ideas, tactics, and strategies cutting across three different empires. She points to the political work that was done in the

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decades of the 1880s and 1890s, which subsequently formed the basis for revolutions in the three empires in the years 1904 through 1911. This civic depth, which culminated in the short-lived TDFR, has been under-studied and obscured in political science. The analytical framework developed in the present work offers an alternative way to study this region. As evidenced in Berberian’s work on “roving revolutionaries,” political mobilization, in the case of Armenian political parties, was institutionally dense and globally deployed. Perpetually crisscrossing rivalrous imperial spaces, these groups spread revolutionary ideas and challenged autocratic imperial governance. Importantly, they also transcended nationalist divisions in multiple ways, revealing the regional politics of the Transcaucasia as simultaneously (and paradoxically) engulfed in communal conflict and exhibiting coexistence, a space of both division and integration. The regional connectivity approach applied in this case is a way to conceptualize and study the duality that was characteristic of the neighborhood effect in this region. Despite the fact that the imperial center denied zemstva, as a muchneeded layer of representative politics, to Transcaucasia, the political units and the institutional infrastructure for such a politics continued to develop. Both the imperial regime in Russia and its revolutionary parties recognized the revolutionary bases in Transcasusia, in Baku and Tbilisi in particular. Baku’s industrialization and oil sector had drawn diverse groups of people, giving rise to various forms of connectivity. Baku attracted many intellectuals and workers from all corners of the Caucasus at a time when many of their activities could not be carried out legally. It is in these revolutionary environs and this revolutionary period that the regional fabric of Transcaucasia unfolded (Berberian 2019). Particularly noteworthy is the cooperation among the Azerbaijani Social Democratic Himmat (Endeavor) party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, and the Armenian Social Democratic Hunchakian Party (Chaqueri 2001; Yazdani 2013). Berberian and others credit this collaboration with galvanizing Iranian migrant workers in Baku and establishing the Iranian Social Democratic Party at the time. Gocheleishvili (2013) also highlights the role that the collaboration of Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and Armenians in Iran played in supporting the revolutionary movement in that empire (see also Berberian 2019) The regional discourse among the revolutionaries on notions of federalism was consequential to the formation of the TDFR. On the Armenian side, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), established in the late 1890s in Tbilisi and active in the Ottoman and Russian empires, produced



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three books, in addition to numerous articles and public lectures in both empires, advocating for federative solutions to minority protections. Working closely with other anti-imperialist revolutionaries in both empires, the ARF advocated for this path for minority self-governance in legislative, administrative, and taxation policy areas, each realized by directly elected citizens. Echoing similar sentiments among their Macedonian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Russian, and Ottoman Muslim counterparts, these ideas were viewed at the time as the best way forward towards building multiethnic and multireligious pluralist political systems, such as in the Russian and Ottoman empires and on the Balkan Peninsula (Berberian 2019; Watts 1998; Chase 2013). Political parties such as the ARF and its counterparts in the Georgian and Azerbaijani communities were deeply embedded in global conversations and anti-imperial constitutional movements in Europe. Also noteworthy is that these groups successfully connected with parties in the Balkans. In this regional discourse in Transcaucasia, the federal political models of the United States and Switzerland captivated the imaginations of revolutionaries in the region (Berberian 2019). Berberian explains that the revolutionaries saw federalism as a way to balance diversity and political unity. Decentralization, enabled by federalism, was attractive to the revolutionaries for the better governance that it promised as well as the self-organization of their community within a larger and more diverse political system. According to Berberian, these notions of federalism, examples of a much broader discourse among revolutionaries in Transcaucasia, formed the foundation for the practice and potential of regional governance in a federative form. Indeed, the ARF joined many other voices in the region speaking out against separatism, whether in the Ottoman or the Russian empire. In both cases, the revolutionaries sought reform of the imperial systems towards greater representation and administrative decentralization. Separatism was considered unrealizable and undesirable. Indeed, these revolutionary groups, and the ARF in particular, worked closely with the Young Turks in the Ottoman empire to bring about the revolution and reinstate the constitution in 1908. In the Russian empire, these groups worked with their counterparts among the Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and Russians as they waited and hoped that the Russian empire would move towards reform after its first revolution in 1917. Seeing that Bolshevism was taking over, the region moved towards the TDFR, referred to as “bourgeois” by the Bolsheviks in the region (Hovannisian 1969). The vibrant kaleidoscope of varied political parties in the

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region was nested in globally organized movements and broader political parties. The ability to localize and adjust broad political party platforms to the unique conditions in Transcaucasia, and to their respective ethnonational communities, drove cooperation among these parties and fueled their progress. The civic depth in the region was significant; viewed through the prism of the current conflicts and divisions, this seems like a fleeting utopia buried deep in the region’s past. In parallel with its intercommunal clashes, this region stands out for its extensive reserves of bridging social capital, which, if supported by broader participatory political systems of governance, might well have translated the existing clustered connectivity into a balanced one.

The Organizational Politics of the TDFR The TDRF is often described as having been a historical aberration, contingent on the specific geopolitical logic of its time (Reynolds 2011). It is highlighted as the one and only case of independent Transcaucasian union and shared political space in the South Caucasus (Jones 2005; de Waal 2019). It is often described as a brief political experiment that resulted from a geopolitical power vacuum in the region (Zürcher 2007). In an introductory article to the special issue on the TDFR published by Caucasus Survey, Brisku and Blauvelt (2020) note that the scholarship on the TDFR is limited, pointing out that it is usually packaged with larger imperial narratives. Within the respective national historiographies of the three states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, there has also been a tendency to view the TDFR as a transition from empires to nation-states. In more contemporary discourse, the national independence resulting from the formal dissolution of the TDFR is lauded in victorious terms. The regional roots of this independence are rarely examined, however. Ironically, relative to the current levels of patrimonial authoritarianism in Azerbaijan, the political developments in the TDFR, as well as the independent republics that replaced it, were more democratic and deliberative in many respects, complete with elections and a diverse group of political party representations in the three parliaments of the new republics at the time. The region-wide mobilization of varied political parties and the close engagement among them (pointing to balanced connectivity and bridging social capital), in parallel with the highly polarized ethno-religious fissures in the region (reflecting bonding social capital and clustered connectivity), were concomitant with the empire’s policies of centralization



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and Russification. The TDFR was in many ways a culmination of and a response to the coercive governance inside imperial Russia, as much as it was a product of geopolitical necessity. It resulted as much from domestic institutional factors as from external geopolitical ones. And the unit coordination across ethno-national groupings in Transcaucasia, expressed as bridging social capital, was also evident, and best exemplified, in the very formation of the TDFR. In the midst of Russian imperial collapse and of World War I, raging at its doorstep, Transcaucasia was drawn together regionally by its political elite. Significantly, the TDFR emerged as an attempt at a collective security alliance. While short-lived and politically much weaker, it predated NATO’s contemporary initiatives in the South Caucasus as a more local and deeply regional initiative to address regional security challenges. The TDFR was weakened by hegemonic influences in the region and their geopolitical embeddedness. As I will detail below, World War I alliance politics, along with the more immediate regional aspirations of the Ottoman empire and the emerging Soviet empire, all played a role in sabotaging this early flowering of regional governance outside of the industrialized and democratic West. Viewing these developments in the multilevel framework of analysis presented in this work helps to delineate the way in which domestic institutional factors interacted with geopolitical forces and the extent to which each factor was consequential for the rise and fall of this early initiative in regionalism. The civic depth in the region is exemplified by the various political platforms among the parties in the Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian communities. Overall, the Bolsheviks commanded little influence in the region, but their presence was strongest in the region’s industrial capital, Baku. Still, while the Bolshevik party members in the region declared loyalty to the party’s central committee in Russia, others expressed excitement about the promise of greater representation and democratic governance that the fall of the royal dynasty brought with it. Nationalism and separatist movements were dismissed by most parties across the national divides. Most political parties hoped for a reformed empire led by the provisional government. Lenin, in the meantime, continued to reject calls for coalition-building, lending his support to the Petrograd Soviet, which was operating in parallel to the provisional government. In the spring of 1917, the ideological split between the provisional government and the Bolsheviks reverberated to Transcaucasia, but the Bolsheviks, largely due to their small numbers and

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limited leverage in the region, continued to work with the Mensheviks and other parties (Hovannisian 1969; Jones 2014). In organizational terms, the provisional government created the Osobyi Zakavkazski Komitet (“Special Transcaucasian Committee”), also known as Ozakom. Created on March 22, 1917, it was charged with the civil administration of Transcaucasia, including the Ottoman territories that were occupied at the time. The parallel structure to Ozakom in the region was the Tiflis Duma, which expressed skepticism about Ozakom’s legitimacy and support in the region. Importantly, one of Ozakom’s objectives upon its arrival in Transcaucasia was the introduction of zemstvo, which had long been denied by the Romanov government before its fall. Throughout 1917, Transcaucasia was blanketed with deeply deliberative and diverse spaces of political activity. These deliberations took place within the national communities, communities that were also internally divided between political parties with diverse agendas. Overall, the dominant trend in the Transcaucasus was towards self-governance, representation, and democracy within a reformed and multinational Russian state. With the Bolsheviks’ growing strength in Petrograd and their ultimate takeover of power in the fall of 1917, the rift between Transcaucasia and the now Bolshevik Russian government became wider. This would not be the first time that an imperial province was politically more progressive than the center. Hovannisian explains that Transcaucasia was nearly unanimous in opposing the Bolshevik government, hoping, instead, for a peaceful settlement of the developing civil war in Russia and the All-Russian Constituent Assembly to provide political leadership. Only the Baku Soviet recognized the Russian Sovnarkom on November 15th, and that only after most of its members had withdrawn in protest against the Bolshevik slogan “All Power to the Soviets.” Transcaucasia’s regional resiliency was manifest as the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The seat of political power in the region consolidated in Tbilisi, where an emergency conference on November 24, 1917 brought together nearly four hundred representatives of the regional soviets, the Tiflis Duma and Executive Committee, the Ozakom and the Public Safety Committee regional professional unions, and military agents of France, England, and the American Council (Hovannisian 1969). This forum acknowledged that Transcaucasia was now severed from the Russian center, as hopes for a constituent assembly to renegotiate a democratic Russia all but disappeared. A resolution was proposed and unanimously confirmed



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after the Bolshevik delegates described the forum as counterrevolutionary and walked out. Still hopeful for a constituent assembly in Russia, the resolution established an interim administrative body, the Commissariat, which was multinational and composed of members from diverse political parties in the region. The Commissariat unveiled an ambitious program of economic development and democratic reform, including the introduction of zemstvo, the reorganization of the judicial system, and attention to the nationalities question. It also recognized its own temporary status, until the All-Russian Constituent Assembly could be convened. As such forums of bridging social capital emerged, they began to transform the region’s clustered societal connectivity into a balanced one. In an unprecedented occurrence for the region, elections for the AllRussian Constituent Assembly were organized throughout November of 1917; Hovannisian (1969) describes the event as incomplete and poorly administered but “the most representative and unhindered election in Transcaucasian history” (108). The elected members represented the Social Democracy (Menshevik) party, the Musavat party, Dashnaktsutiun, the Muslim Socialist Bloc, the Muslims of Russia party, and the Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) party, among others. The delegates were still en route to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, which had been convened for January 18th, 1918, when the Social Revolutionary-oriented Constituent Assembly was forcibly dispersed by the Bolshevik Sovnarkom. With the political rift between Transcaucasia and Bolshevik Russia now complete, the members elected to the Constituent Assembly were now tasked with forming a regional administrative body for Transcaucasia. They gathered in Tbilisi in February of 1918 and did just that, creating the Transcaucasian Seim, its regional parliament. Although the TDFR did not declare independence until April 22, 1918, its work prior to that date was significant in many respects. First, as a deliberative body, it became a forum for diverse and engaged political parties. As with any regional forum, it had to manage conflicting positions and forge a consensus in its work. The Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian groups had varied levels of enthusiasm for this regional grouping, partly driven by their security considerations, which will be discussed below. Suffice it to say that as a deliberative body, the Seim succeeded in keeping groups with often divergent positions relatively united, even before the geopolitical incentives for joint action against the Ottoman expansion emerged. Second, this regional body was formed despite intercommunal clashes,

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particularly between the Armenian and Azeri communities: the so-called Armeno-Tatar war of 1905, stretching from Baku to Nakhichevan and claiming as many as ten thousand lives; and the March Days of 1918 (March 31st to April 2nd, 1918), followed by massacres that September (Broers 2019). The relevant historiography reveals that these intercommunal clashes were viewed by the political elites in the Sejm as problems to be addressed, rather than intractable divisions necessitating the collapse of the body. In short, in sharp contrast to the contemporary politics in the South Caucasus, with its intractable armed conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, the collaboration of the regional deliberative bodies and the regional diplomacy in Transcaucasia in 1918 were unprecedented and unsurpassed. Indeed, on at least two occasions, documented by Hovannisian (1969), the Armenian and Azerbaijani members, either directly or indirectly via other mixed commissions, organized mediations between communal groups and prevented the spread of violence into new areas. Such cases of grassroots mediation efforts also stand in stark contrast to contemporary mediation systems in the South Caucasus, in which it was third-party mediators, not the conflict parties themselves, that drove the process. These cases of direct mediation are also indicative of the security orders that were forming within the region, which, if given the time, might perhaps have matured into much stronger systems of security management and peacebuilding in the region. In Transcaucasia, fracture was produced chiefly by hegemonic influences and geopolitical embeddedness. The added value of the regional fracture/ resilience framework is its ability to capture the interactivity between the external geopolitical forces of imperial encroachment during World War I and the domestic institutional and organizational drivers for the formation of the federative system. This approach poses a new question: did the TDFR collapse because the imperial powers were too strong and overpowering, or because the institutions of regional governance were too young and organizationally weak? Much of the evidence points to the former, with the latter remaining underexplored. In terms of geopolitical embeddedness, the Ottoman empire was pushing for the formation of the TDFR, viewing it as a tool to detach Transcaucasia from the temporarily weakened Russian empire. Many have argued that, following the loss of its Balkan provinces, the Ottoman empire was driven by the desire to establish territorial connections with the Turkic and Muslim communities beyond its domain, eyeing territories in the Russian empire. Pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism have been described as key incentives behind



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the empire’s position in Transcaucasia (Akçam 2006; Demirağ 1995; Landau 1995; Roy 2000; Zürcher 2004). Others have argued that the Ottoman empire was more pragmatic in its calculations in the region and that it was driven primarily by considerations for the welfare of the Muslim communities in the Russian empire. In addition, by pushing for the formation of a federative unit in Transcaucasia, the Ottoman empire could constrain and dilute the Armenian presence in the region (Taglia 2020; Zolyan 2020), as some have shown. By establishing a federative unit with a demographically dominant Muslim community, the Ottomans would be able to rely on that community to exert leverage and influence over that federative state. The high geopolitical embeddedness of this region was also expressed in the politics surrounding the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire. Having ethnically cleansed and physically eliminated its Armenian community in its territory, the Ottoman empire, fortified by the Russian territorial concessions in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, proceeded to advance into Transcaucasia while concurrently ”negotiating” with the political forces from the region. This “sword and quill” strategy of the Ottoman empire rested on pushing for territorial concessions from the Transcaucasian delegation, which included the sanjaks of Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, as a precondition for continuing negotiations with them (Hovannisian 1969). Those concessions, however, particularly the loss of Batum, would have jeopardized the self-sufficiency and independence of the TDFR as a political entity, which the Ottoman government claimed to support. The imperial powers used the regional institutions in Transcaucasia for specific purposes, and the interaction between institutional and geopolitical factors here is important to examine. For the Ottoman empire, the regional institutions provided a diplomatic cover for Ottoman military advancements. Somewhat constrained by its German allies and the British and French, the Ottoman empire cloaked its territorial advances into Transcaucasia in direct diplomacy with the political forces from Transcaucasia. This “sword and quill” strategy helped the empire to buy political capital in Europe, but it also brought the short-lived TDFR to its knees. The Georgian Menshevik parties, which had been instrumental in forming the TDFR, also ended up being the ones pushing for its dissolution by declaring the independence of the Georgian state. This step was enabled by the German government, which provided the Georgian leadership with the bilateral political support needed for their independence, quite similar to German policies in the Baltics.

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Examining Transcaucasia in this period through a regional lens reveals the fact that the Russian and Ottoman empires were targeting the region both by institutional, diplomatic means and by military means, at the same time. This approach also makes clear the interaction between the two factors. The Muslim Musavat party, while working with Georgian and Armenian political parties and civic groups in regional contexts, was also hesitant to support regional military cooperation against the Ottoman empire. In sharp contrast, the Armenian political parties felt directly threatened by the Ottoman empire in the immediate aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Despite the preceding suppression of the Armenian community by the Romanovs (Riegg 2020), the Ottoman factor was a determinant for the Russian tilt of the Armenian parties. While key Armenian and Azerbaijani-Muslim parties continued to work in regional institutional frameworks, that cooperation was diluted by external pressures from the imperial powers. In sum, Transcaucasia, with its political hybridity (Berberian 2019), supports the existing research and the relevant historiography that the deterioration of imperial rule at the center stood in contrast to the relative political coherence and regional resilience on this periphery. Regarding the twilight years of the Russian empire and its rule in the Transcaucasus, Riegg (2018) notes that  disproportionate focus on crises can distort the story toward a fateful perception of the “inevitability” of structural collapse. Such tendencies bury the political and social transformations achieved or pursued during the decade-long tenure of the tsar’s last reforms in the Caucasus. To be sure, during the denouement of the Romanov empire, the notorious Caucasus demonstrated the viability of imperial rule. (136)

Conclusion In the early twentieth century, the regional profile of Transcaucasia in terms of its neighborhood effect was one of high but clustered connectivity. At the same time, mechanisms for that clustered connectivity to transform into balanced connectivity through emerging bridging social capital were also observed. Region-wide and inter-imperial revolutionary groups worked in tandem with regional institutions of the imperial administration. Dense and diverse political groups and civic associations blanketed the region, but their institutional consolidation had scant time to mature, especially



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with the imperial clashes of World War I in the background. The regional resilience in Transcaucasia was undermined by external hegemonic forces, including the Ottoman empire, Bolshevik Russia, Germany, and Britain— the most directly involved actors in the region. The hybridity of this region was manifest in the regional resilience of diverse and deeply connected civic and political groups, despite the intense intercommunal clashes and interimperial rivalry ravaging the region. Indeed, Transcaucasia is the quintessential case of the region-before-states paradigm championed in this work.

7 Paired Peripheries and (C)old Conflicts

The end of the Cold War at the conclusion of the twentieth century brought about a temporary thaw in great-power rivalry and bipolarity over Eurasia. This was a historical juncture for the continent. At a global level, it was a period of broad concordance among Russia, the West, and the rest (Sakwa 2017). Locally and regionally, these were traumatic times of armed conflict and communal violence in new, post-Soviet, states and middle powers on the continent. To date, this hybridity in post-Cold War Eurasia, expressed in these two tiers of politics—the geopolitical “cold” peace and a string of local “small wars”—has defied joint theorization. Instead, whether in academia or in policy circles, these developments have been analyzed through bifurcated theories, often resulting in divergent policy implications for the global capitals that mattered at the time. In addition to this bifurcated approach to the study of Eurasian security, the underdeveloped nature of the historical sociology of “regionness” within the Eurasian imperial peripheries has prevented the study of regional contexts as a cause of, and possible solution to, ongoing armed conflicts on parts of this continent. As a result, historical legacies, expressed at a regional level, have remained under-studied. The most vivid juxtaposition here is the archetypal peaceful reemergence of the independent Baltic region from the Cold War, while national independence movements and new states in the South Caucasus emerged in fractured regions, with four conflicts burning and simmering at the same time (Zürcher 2007; Jones 2014). This chapter offers a conflict theory to transcend the bifurcated and dyadic narratives of Eurasian security studies. It is multitiered and regional



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in its scope, grounded in the comparative historical case studies of select imperial peripheries offered in chapters 4–6. Having examined the quality of imperial governance on the selected peripheries in the three empires, this chapter moves to assess the onset and severity of armed conflicts in these regions in the aftermath of the Cold War. It builds on the empirical analysis of the quality of regional governance on the imperial peripheries. It then probes the ways in which these imperial legacies affected the contemporary onset and severity of armed conflict, against the backdrop of receding geopolitical rivalries in the post-Cold War period. While the dynamics of these conflicts are grounded in the post-Cold War period, their roots are deeply imperial and predate the immediate Soviet experience. All the conflicts covered in this work are “old,” meaning that they reach deep into the imperial pasts of the continent. And perhaps they were made “cold” during the Cold War. However, the temptation to interpret them as “ancient hatreds” or the like fundamentally obscures their essence and their contemporary consequences (Jones 2014). Indeed, even when the deep historical roots of these contemporary conflicts have been analyzed, no theoretical framework has been offered to problematize these historical legacies for contemporary conflict outcomes. This chapter attempts to address that gap. It emerges from this work that the imperial peripheries that were endowed with more balanced connectivity, expressed in bridging social capital, were also the areas with a more developmental imperial governance and civic traditions of representative politics. To reiterate from previous chapters, balanced connectivity was expressed in civic networks, in many different forms including political parties, nationalist movements working together, and professional associations, that cut across ethnicities. Public and political spaces of bargaining and negotiations between such groups were markers of balanced connectivity and bridging social capital. As I argue in this chapter, regions with such legacies of balanced connectivity and bridging social capital have been more able to effectively withstand geopolitical rivalry and were more likely to emerge peacefully under the relative geopolitically stable conditions of the post-Cold War. Such regions were, then, both more resilient in their imperial pasts and better positioned to avoid armed conflict in their post-Cold War present. Even if conflicts erupted in such regional contexts in the post-Cold War period, they did so after a significant post-Cold War lag, and with much lower levels of severity. The case of the conflicts in Ukraine is one such example of balanced connectivity on an

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imperial periphery and a delay in conflict eruption after the Cold War, lacking the deep communal fracture that has been characteristic of the conflicts in the South Caucasus. The Kremlin’s imposition of an armed conflict on anti-Kyiv protest activity in Donbas only strengthens this argument. And the peaceful reemergence of central Europe and the Balkans are also cases of balanced connectivity in their respective expressions as imperial peripheries. In contrast, imperial peripheries with low levels of connectivity and mostly bonding social capital have created clustered connectivity. Such patterns of connectivity translated into semi-developmental and predatory governance at the time. The Bosnian province in the Habsburg empire and Eastern Anatolia in the Ottoman empire are examples of such imperial conditions. This has made such regions more vulnerable to external greatpower rivalry. The vicious cycle of imperial predatory governance on the periphery, along with recurrent geopolitical meddling, made such regions more vulnerable to post-Cold War armed conflict of high severity, shortly after the bipolar stability of the Cold War came to an end. The war in Bosnia and the Kurdish conflict in Eastern Turkey are contemporary cases of such armed conflict, resulting from predatory imperial governance in the twilight years of imperial collapse. This chapter begins with an overview of the contemporary conflict cases that are surveyed in this work, with a focus on their severity and timing of onset in the post-Cold War period. The background on each conflict, within the framework of conflict analysis developed here, is designed to provide a basic overview for readers before analyzing the sources of these conflicts within the theory of connectivity and regional fracture/resilience developed in this work. The second part of the chapter focuses on the imperial legacies in the conflict regions, representing imperial peripheries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The analysis of imperial legacies covered in this second part includes such factors as civic institutions, patterns of regional connectivity (whether bonding or bridging social capital), and the prevalence of external geopolitical rivalries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The cases covered in the second part of the chapter are grouped using a matched and paired methodology of comparison (see chapter 2): first, cases of an imperial periphery contested by multiple empires—i.e. with extensive external overlay and significant meddling by neighboring powers; and second, cases that were relatively less contested imperial peripheries and that experienced relative geopolitical stability



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and lower levels of external geopolitical meddling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Conflict Cases: From Bosnia to Basra The conflict cases included in this study all have deep historical and imperial roots, but the conflicts vary both in terms of their post-Cold War severity and in their onset, the timing of their reemergence in the aftermath of the Cold War. The cases I will cover here are the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict, the South Ossetian-Georgian conflict, the Nagorno-Karabakh and associated Armenia-Azerbaijan conflicts, the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars (most notably the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo), and the conflicts in the eastern Ukrainian regions and Crimea. The Kurdish conflict in Turkey is also included, together with its reverberations in the Middle East in the wake of US intervention in Iraq and the myriad civil wars in the region that followed the Arab Spring. Each of these conflicts spanned the twentieth century and reaches back even earlier, erupting at various times and with various intensities over those decades. Each represents a duality. On the one hand, these conflicts manifested in areas that were distinct geographical-administrative spaces and political regions on imperial peripheries. As such, they were geographically specific in terms of being frontiers where various empires interfaced. This was expressed in terms of cross-border refugee flows, external influences, trans-boundary rebel movements, and trade disruptions. Yet these regions were also political constructs, institutionally cultivated by their imperial centers as well as being subject to more organic bottom-up forces, such as social movements, organized communities, and professional associations. As political peripheries, these regions varied across a continuum of imperial governance, from predatory to semi-developmental to developmental. It was the nature of that governance that determined the ability of each region to withstand the geopolitical rivalries that often came crashing down on them, in their position as shatter zones between empires. Predatory peripheries, expressed in low levels and clustered structures of connectivity, were more vulnerable to high levels of geopolitical embeddedness and inter-imperial stressors. Such peripheries were the least equipped to manage such geopolitical rivalries at the regional level. As emerges from this study, such legacies reverberate in contemporary armed conflicts. The imperial-regional framework I use to analyze these Eurasian conflicts offers a fresh outlook with which to explain their causes and contemporary

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consequences. In modern analyses, the post-Soviet/post-Communist frame has been the most frequently used approach to classifying these conflicts, while the Kurdish conflict in Turkey has usually been treated as being in a different category. I argue that the linking of Soviet and Yugoslav ethnofederalism to contemporary armed conflicts is rife with spurious associations. The imperial-regional frame helps to broaden this framework and justifies the treatment of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey in this context. To begin with, let me provide a basic overview of each conflict covered in this work, with a specific focus on their post-Cold War severity and temporal onset. This descriptive section is then followed by the historical comparative analysis, in which I examine the relationship between the nature of connectivity on the imperial peripheries and the quality of imperial governance that that connectivity reflected and enabled, on the one hand, and the severity and temporal onset of the contemporary conflicts in the post-Cold War period, on the other. The cases are organized into two groups based on whether their level of geopolitical embeddedness and inter-imperial rivalry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is high or low. Within each group, experimental and control cases are compared, pursuant to the research design developed in chapter 2.

The South Caucasus Unraveling, Again Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh In terms of the timing of the onset of this post-Cold War conflict, Nagorno-Karabakh was among the first ethno-political conflicts to erupt in the twilight years of the Soviet Union (de Waal 2019; Zürcher 2007), if the smaller-scale mobilization of Crimean Tatars and the Almaty riots in 1986 are not counted.1 The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict spanned the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, surviving the Soviet dissolution, but the rivalry between Armenians and Azerbaijanis was intense and devastating even before the formation of the Soviet Union (Broers 2019), and it reverberated throughout the Soviet years. For decades, Nagorno-Karabakh had been an established Soviet Autonomous Oblast within the Soviet Azerbaijani republic, with defined borders, administrative structures, and an ethnic Armenian majority. In the winter of 1988, the territory’s local governing Soviet council formally voted for the transfer of the region to Armenian jurisdiction, citing anti-Armenian discrimination and maltreatment under Azerbaijani rule from Baku.



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These developments tested the newly ascendant policies of glasnost and perestroika. The local Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh were the first to puncture a series of Soviet taboos, as extensive public rallies and strikes in Armenia in support of the local Nagorno-Karabakh initiative effectively added up to a public vote of no confidence in Moscow. In the Soviet Union’s twilight years, the Soviet authorities rejected Nagorno-Karabakh’s requests to be transferred to Armenia, on the grounds that such a move would undermine interethnic relations between the working peoples of Soviet Azerbaijan and Armenia. The popular protests of early 1988 in both Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenian republic continued unabated and grew in scope—crowds of hundreds of thousands were a regular occurrence—but remarkably, the movement remained within the bounds of the largely pro-reform framework of glasnost and perestroika, and eschewed becoming explicitly anti-Soviet (de Waal 2019). Nevertheless, the institutional and political levers of the Soviet hierarchy in Moscow proved inadequate for peacefully addressing the conflict. This was tragically exposed when anti-Armenian pogroms erupted in Azerbaijan in late February of 1988. The anti-Armenian violence was far removed from the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, occurring in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and environs, centered on the industrial suburb of the city of Sumgait, with its large Armenian minority. The mob violence raged unabated for two days, and local law enforcement was indifferent or even encouraging. By the time central Soviet security forces arrived in Azerbaijan, at least twenty-six Armenians and six Azerbaijanis had lost their lives, according to official accounts (Zürcher 2007), and the local Armenian minority had been put to flight. The Sumgait pogroms reverberated across conflict lines and further polarized societies in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. Lending credence to the Armenian fears in Nagorno-Karabakh, the anti-Armenian pogroms presaged communal clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis that became frequent and increasingly violent throughout the summer of 1988. Large-scale rural population movements across conflict lines became prevalent, as tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis started fleeing Azerbaijani villages in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia and Armenians fled Azerbaijan in the other direction. By the end of 1988, large-scale protests had broken out throughout Azerbaijan as well. Thousands of demonstrators across Baku, Kirovabad, and Nakhichevan demanded the restoration of full dominion over NagornoKarabakh and its Armenian population. In January of 1990, nationalist

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demonstrations in Baku again degenerated into a pogrom against the remaining Armenian community in the city, leaving hundreds of Armenians dead or injured (Zürcher 2007). Amidst the decimation, the entire population of nearly two hundred thousand Baku Armenians took flight to Armenia or Russia, perhaps most prominent among them the young Armenian-Jewish chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who would later become a vocal human rights activist in Russia. Almost overnight, the centuries-long Armenian presence in Baku was extinguished. As in Sumgait, it was some days before Soviet security forces intervened in the January 1990 pogrom. By the time they did, the Armenians were already gone, and the Soviet army instead turned its attention to suppressing the rapidly growing independence-minded opposition forces of the Azerbaijani Popular Front. Zürcher highlights those hundreds of activists who were arrested by Soviet forces in the aftermath of the Armenian pogroms. The political mobilization in Azerbaijan was also increasingly directed against the Communist leadership. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would emerge as a central feature of anti-Soviet political mobilization and state-building in both Armenia and Azerbaijan (Broers 2019). Away from the urban centers, in Karabakh itself, the conflict deepened into a local low-intensity war in which, demographically, the Azerbaijanis were disadvantaged. The severity of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh was expressed in the deeply communal nature of the violence between the two sides, with military organization still lacking in the region. The withdrawing Soviet army transferred significant military technology to paramilitary groups on both sides. Political mobilization in Karabakh and Azerbaijan proper hardened the conflict into a full-blown war, one that became internationalized upon the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Armenia and Azerbaijan. By the time a cease-fire agreement was reached in 1994, the conflict had seen more than twenty thousand killed and more than a million displaced, if we include the prewar forced migration flows. Armenian forces established de facto control over Nagorno-Karabakh, along with seven Azerbaijani districts around it as a security zone, a situation that remained largely unchanged in subsequent decades until the 2020 Turkey-backed Azerbaijani offensive. In the latest 44-day war, Azerbaijan, with Turkish military and logistical support, recovered the seven districts that had been under Armenian control, in addition to the southern regions of Nagorno-Karabakh. A Russia-brokered cease-fire agreement crystallized these military gains, but also introduced the Russian forces as peacekeepers in the conflict (Ohanyan 2020a).



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Since 1994, the unresolved conflict has been a main factor in deepening Azerbaijan’s petro-fueled authoritarianism, which has seen an unbroken hereditary transfer of power within the Aliyev family since 1993. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and its security implications for Armenia also enabled Armenia’s soft form of competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way 2010), at least until the Velvet Revolution of 2018, which brought a democratic breakthrough (Broers and Ohanyan 2020). The 1994 cease-fire in Karabakh was fragile (Broers 2019), with significant breaches occurring in the ensuing years, but falling short of a resumption of all-out war until 2020. Today, Karabakh, truncated after the war, remains an unrecognized de facto state (Caspersen 2011). Armenia’s Velvet Revolution, meanwhile, while strengthening an emergent democratic pole in the South Caucasus comprising Armenia and Georgia, has so far failed to translate into broader cooperative region-wide security arrangements in the South Caucasus. Until the 44-day war of 2020, Russian influence remained a stabilizing factor in the region, restraining the Turkish appetite for involvement in the conflict. But the Russian presence was also an obstacle to the emergence of longerterm regionally based security structures in the South Caucasus within which the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict could have been resolved (Ohanyan 2015; Ohanyan 2018b). The 2020 conflict began as an Azerbaijan-Turkey offensive, which caught Russia off guard. By the time this war erupted, Russia was already accustomed to competing, clashing, but also cooperating with Turkey in other conflict regions, from Libya and Syria to the Mediterranean. In this case, Russia accommodated Turkey’s presence in Azerbaijan, but succeeded in preventing Turkey from gaining the co-chairmanship of the Minsk Group that it so coveted. Even if Russia had opened a political pathway for Turkey within this only formal forum of conflict management around the conflict, Armenia would most likely have blocked it. Still, Russia was successful in squeezing Turkey out of a postwar security system, maintaining its own role as the central actor in conflict management in this case. Some have argued that maintaining its monopoly over conflict management processes and blocking out other “honest brokers” remains a signature of Russian foreign policy in the post-Cold War period (Spetschinsky and Bolgova 2014). In the end, Russia succeeded in brokering a cease-fire agreement with Armenia and Azerbaijan that left Turkey out of any significant role, with the exception of a small cease-fire monitoring center inside Azerbaijan, which to date has played only a symbolic role.

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The agreement had two features that are particularly significant for the future trajectory of this conflict and its prospects for a sustainable settlement. First, the agreement lacked any mention of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, which the Russian authorities, along with all parties in the Minsk Group process, continue to maintain will be resolved later. Second, the agreement called for opening borders and freeing transportation routes between the Azerbaijani territory of Nakhichevan, to Armenia’s west, and Azerbaijan proper. Reviving this transportation route has the potential to improve Azerbaijan’s connectivity with its Nakhichevan exclave, while offering Russia and Turkey better access and connectivity to new markets. Armenia’s connectivity with Russia and Iran and, hopefully, Azerbaijan will also develop. In terms of the neighborhood effect discussed in this work, the agreement, at least on paper, promises better and deeper connectivity in the region. This is a line that Azerbaijani authorities, and President Aliyev himself, have highlighted to international audiences. Speaking to his domestic and regional audiences, however, Aliyev uses language that betrays aggression and threats of renewed militarization, with expansionist claims on Armenia’s territories.2 This comes in addition to Aliyev’s claims that the NagornoKarabakh conflict has been resolved, and that Nagorno-Karabakh will not receive any special administrative status inside Azerbaijan other than cultural autonomy. If the promise of greater connectivity is realized, the economic dividends for the region would be favorable for a democratic consolidation in Armenia and Georgia. Unfortunately, Aliyev’s messaging seems to indicate a preference for imposing a single corridor, an access between Nakhichevan and Azerbaijan via Armenia’s sovereign territory, but no region-wide unblocking of all borders in the region. By advocating for such a coercive connectivity between Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan, Aliyev seems to be working to prevent more inclusive formats of regional connectivity in the South Caucasus. In continuing with its militarized rhetoric, the Azerbaijani leadership ends up reinforcing the insecurity of Armenians in their southern regions as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh. This insecurity, in turn, ends up strengthening the perceived rationale for a Russian presence in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. The current agreement applies for five years only, after which either Armenia or Azerbaijan can request the Russian peacekeepers to leave. But continuing aggression from Azerbaijan could create a dangerous rationale for Russian peacekeepers to stay beyond the five-year limit expressed in the agreement. The stronger and deeper Turkish presence in Azerbaijan in general,



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and in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in particular, connects the Kurdish conflict as a cluster to the one in Nagorno-Karabakh. Erdogan’s persistent persecution of the Kurdish communities and their oases of self-governance in Syria and Iraq is set to be reproduced in Nagorno-Karabakh. In Nagorno-Karabakh, President Aliyev appears to be mimicking and mirroring Erdogan’s policies in securitizing the Kurdish conflict. President Erdogan often slaps the label of “terrorist” on Kurdish political party members inside Turkey and on organizations of self-governance in Syria and Iraq. At the time of this writing, Azerbaijan was holding more than two hundred Armenian hostages,3 who had been supposed to be released after the Russia-brokered cease-fire agreement.4 In addition, after the November 9, 2020 cease-fire, Azerbaijani soldiers advanced into Armenia’s territory under the pretext of border delimitation.5 Using coercive tactics, including rhetoric by Aliyev about territorial claims on Armenia, and regular firing on Armenia’s borders, killing three soldiers and injuring the mayor of a border town in the summer of 2021, Baku is pressuring Armenia to renounce any support for the Armenian community in Nagorno-Karabakh and to give up its push for a political status for the entity.6

Conflicts in Georgia The post-Cold War onset of conflicts in Georgia coincided broadly with the Georgian independence movement and the Soviet dissolution, with a first round of armed conflict persisting from 1989 to 1993. These conflicts involved ethnic and minority-based interests as well as politically motivated clashes between varied political groups, resulting in civil war in Georgia. The conflicts were related to state weakness and the uncertainty and security dilemmas created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, for the Georgians as well as the ethnic minorities in the country (Jones 2014). In the cases of ethnic conflicts, the history of Soviet ethnofederalism also played a role in perpetuating fears among the ethnic minorities of losing the privileges that they had enjoyed under the Soviet system (Zürcher 2007). Sabanadze (2014) explains that “from the outset many minorities opposed Georgia’s bid for independence, fearing for their status, security and well-being in the nationalizing Georgian state” (119). The ethnocentric political rhetoric that dominated the liberation movement in Georgia during the independence movement of the 1980s and 1990s encountered national mobilization among some minority communities that stood in opposition to Georgian independence from the Soviet Union. Jones (2014), however, notes that the

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dimensions and forms of the nationalist movements led by various Georgian elites fluctuated over time, and that they defy neat labels or sweeping categorizations. The nascent independent Georgian state had little time to adjust and to provide broader, civic bases of citizenship in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Consequently, the onset of ethnic conflict was nearly concurrent with the declaration of Georgian independence. Indeed, the levels of post-independence nationalism of the majority ethnic groups in Georgia between 1989 and 1991 have been compared to those of post-Yugoslav Serbia in their intensity (de Waal 2019). In Georgia, the conflict over the breakaway region of South Ossetia began in 1989 and persisted into early 1991, with a significant subsequent exacerbation during the Georgia-Russia war of 2008. The hostilities of the first stage of the conflict ended in June 1992 with a cease-fire agreement negotiated between Georgian and Russian leaders at the Black Sea resort of Dagomys. De Waal (2019) points out that the agreement was a short-term fix aimed at ending the combat, and failed to address the deeper political issues underpinning the conflict. The cease-fire introduced peacekeeping forces, including Russian, Ossetian, and Georgian soldiers, into South Ossetia. Another round of talks in 1997 and 1998 between the leadership of South Ossetia and Georgia produced an agreement giving South Ossetia an autonomous status with the Georgian state. That agreement, however, was never implemented, a failure attributed at least in part to the entrenched economic interests of various groups that benefited from operating under the status quo of South Ossetia’s institutional weakness. The change of leadership in Russia, with the rise of Putin, further internationalized this conflict and deepened its geopolitical dimension, as Russia became more deeply embedded in both conflicts. The conflict in Abkhazia erupted in 1992, two weeks after Georgia was admitted to membership in the United Nations (de Waal 2019). Among the factors often cited to explain this conflicts are early state weakness, nationalism among Georgia’s governing elites, and unaddressed security dilemmas between the local Georgian and Abkhaz communities. There was also a notable absence of any overt or militarized Russian factor in the early stages of the Abkhaz conflict, although Russia’s early involvement on the side of the breakaway regions steadily increased as the conflict wore on (Filippov 2009), with the 2008 Georgia-Russia war marking the main turning point in terms of Russia’s role in the conflicts in Georgia. Nevertheless, the shared history among the Abkhaz, Georgians, and Russia, dating from



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before the Soviet Union, figured prominently in the origins of the conflict. Abkhazia’s pro-Russian and pro-Soviet orientation during Georgia’s First Republic of 1918–21 under the Georgian Menshevik leadership reemerged as a divisive factor during the Gorbachev reform era, with those pre-Soviet divisions reverberating in the Abkhaz ambitions to stay within the Soviet Union and oppose Georgian independence (Zürcher 2007). A key event that deepened the Russian and Soviet dimensions of the conflict was the violent crackdown, on April 9th, 1989, on demonstrators in Tbilisi demonstrating in response to pro-Soviet demonstrations in Abkhazia. The heavy-handed Soviet response was not only the last straw in delegitimizing Soviet authority among Georgians, but it also furthered the narrative of the Abkhazians’ pro-Russian orientation and hostility to Georgian aspirations of independence (Cheterian 2008). The Tbilisi crackdown by the Soviet authorities, which resulted in nineteen dead, validated the more radical nationalist leaders and groups campaigning against Soviet rule and sidelined the more civically minded nationalist groups in the process. Still, despite a hardening of political goals against the backdrop of retreating Soviet power, de Waal (2019) maintains that “there was enough common ground for the two sides to do a power-sharing deal for the formation of a new parliament for Abkhazia in August 1991 along ethnic lines” (156). But with the fall of the Soviet Union and of the immediate post-independence Gamsakhurdia government, this tenuous power-sharing agreement also faltered. The continued institutional weakness of the new Georgian state and the absence of institutions cutting across ethnic lines deepened the security dilemma dividing the two sides. Overt hostilities and war in Abkhazia commenced in August of 1992. The Georgian National Guard moved on Abkhazia under the pretext of rescuing Georgian officials allegedly being held hostage by loyalists of the toppled president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. The Georgian force proceeded on to Abkhazia’s capital, Sukhumi (Cheterian 2008), seizing government buildings and committing what were alleged to be ethnically based crimes. After the initial fall of Sukhumi, the commander of the Georgian forces, Tengiz Kitovani, announced in a televised address that he had dissolved the Abkhaz parliament and dismissed the leader of the region. De Waal explains that it remains unclear whether this operation was orchestrated by Shevardnadze, the Georgian president in Tbilisi, or whether it was undertaken by Kitovani as a rogue player, Shevardnadze and Kitovani having become deathly rivals by this time.

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The institutional weakness of the Georgian state at the time was a factor in its inability to consider an accommodation of Abkhaz interests and fears short of armed intervention (Jones 2014). Shevardnadze pushed for accommodation and inclusive civic nationalism in the Georgian state, but he was too weak to control the nationalist groups (Jones 2014). Another countervailing factor against a peaceful resolution was the increasingly ready availability of freelance military support for Abkhaz resistance as the Soviet armed forces disintegrated, which lowered the barrier to armed confrontation, particularly for the Abkhaz side (de Waal 2019). Most important for the purposes of this work is the role of volunteer mercenaries from the North Caucasus, primarily Chechens and Cherkess, who joined the Abkhaz in the summer of 1992 (Kvakhadze 2021). De Waal explains that these groups, led by Chechnya’s most notorious warrior, Shamil Basayev, were inspired by the idea of a “confederation of mountain peoples” to support the minority peoples of the North Caucasus in achieving independence, which was an echo of the regional politics of 1918–19. This ostensible alliance among North Caucasian groups evoked similar attempts at integration and regional cooperation, dating to pre-Soviet times, by these “mountainous republics” that had remained largely marginalized within the short-lived early-twentieth-century Transcaucasian Federation, comprising Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia (chapter 6). In the war in Abkhazia, unlike in the South Ossetian conflict, the intercommunal connections and frequent familial and marriage links between communities did little to temper the levels of violence. Reports and allegations of war crimes, including torture, mutilations, and rape, distinguished the Abkhazian conflict from those of South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh (de Waal 2019). The presence of large numbers of fighters and mercenaries from outside of Georgia and Abkhazia, often lacking the restraint exhibited by local fighters, and incentivized by the tolerance of looting and pillaging, has been cited as one factor explaining the heightened levels of violence in this conflict. Thus, the severity of the conflict in Abkhazia was much more pronounced than that of the conflict in South Ossetia. Nearly thirteen thousand lives were lost during the Abkhaz-Georgian wars, in addition to the ethnic cleansing and forced removal of more than two hundred thousand civilians, primarily ethnic Georgians, from Abkhazia. The carnage in Abkhazia stood in stark contrast to the toll in South Ossetia, where not quite a thousand were killed out of a prewar population of a hundred thousand (de Waal



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2019). The South Ossetian conflict was characterized by limited goals from the outset, and was also a region with deeply intertwined and intermixed intercommunal relations; even after the 1991–1992 war, most ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia remained untouched, in sharp contrast to the case in Abkhazia. But Gamsakhurdia’s nationalist rhetoric in the early stages of Georgian state-building, and the security dilemma that it created for the South Ossetians, has been highlighted by many as a central reason for the failure to contain this crisis in its early, more manageable, stages. Together with the changes in Russian foreign policy overseen by Vladimir Putin, the South Ossetian conflict evolved, albeit gradually, into an intractable one. In Abkhazia, hostilities largely ceased upon the defeat and expulsion of the Georgian forces in 1993 (Zürcher 2007). However, as with the ceasefire that ended the South Ossetian conflict, the end of fighting ultimately entrenched Russia in Abkhazia. With the conclusion of the Georgian civil war in the wake of the coup d’état against Zviad Gamsakhurdia in Tbilisi, the paramilitary influences were managed and defeated and state structures slowly gained strength. But it was not until the peaceful Rose revolution of 2003, through which Georgia experienced something of a democratic breakthrough, that a qualitative jump in its state-building took place. The de facto loss of Abkhazia and South Ossetia had the paradoxical consequence of affording Georgia greater strategic flexibility and distance from Russia, enabling it to deepen its democratic state-building after the Rose revolution. The Russo-Georgia war of 2008 further crystallized Georgia’s de facto independent regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as emerging geopolitical battlegrounds between the West and Russia (Broers 2019). The conflicts remain unresolved, and Russia remains fully entrenched in both territories, having recognized both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.

The Kurdish Conflict in Turkey: Between Ballots and Bullets Like the conflicts in the post-Soviet Caucasus, the modern Kurdish conflict has a much older history; in this case, the conflict predates the founding of modern Turkey, tracing its roots to at least the late Ottoman period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More than thirty million Kurds inhabit the Middle East today, spread across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Before World War I, much of this terrain was part of the Ottoman empire. The rise of the modern nation-state system in the Middle East and the attendant delineation of borders cutting across the former peripheries of the

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Ottoman empire have rendered the Kurds the world’s largest stateless nation. In modern Turkey, the Kurdish community constitutes nearly one-fifth of a total population of approximately 79 million.7 The post-Cold War onset and severity of this conflict differ from those of the other cases considered in this work. Despite the deeply historical roots and rather active status of the conflict throughout the twentieth century, much of the scholarship analyzes the Kurdish conflict in Turkey by dating its modern origins to the mid-1980s. Its severity is usually assessed in terms of casualties between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkish state security forces. The Council on Foreign Relations places the number of deaths so far at forty thousand, focusing on the insurgency stage of the conflict between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkish state security forces.8 This toll does not include the related conflicts involving Kurdish communities in Iraq and Syria. The 1980–88 Iran-Iraq war, the 1990–91 Gulf war, the 2003 US intervention in Iraq, and the subsequent rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria have all led to heightened attacks on Kurdish minorities and their institutions in the recent past. They have also created opportunities for self-governance and political mobilization, most recently realized in northern Iraq and Syria. Although the Kurdish conflict in Turkey by far predates the end of the Cold War, its dynamics were deeply affected by the end of that bipolar rivalry in world politics. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program9 dates the establishment of the PKK Kurdistan Workers Party to 1974 and marks that year as the beginning of a “stated goal of incompatibility,” with the PKK originally promoting Kurdish independence from Turkey. It was not until 1983 that the first use of armed force was observed, with attacks on Turkish military personnel. The Kurdish-led insurgency and the response of successive Turkish governments have been devastating for the Kurdish population. More than two thousand villages and hamlets were reportedly destroyed by Turkish security forces (and some by the PKK) in the 1980s alone, resulting in two million Kurdish internal refugees displaced in the 1990s (Barkey and Fuller 1997). This conflict is one of the world’s longest-running civil wars. The level of intercommunal civilian violence between Turkish and Kurdish inhabitants is very low, however (O’Connor and Baser 2018), with most of the casualties occurring within the ranks of the PKK and of the Turkish armed forces and its affiliated paramilitary groups (Tezcur 2015). The ideological polarity that characterized the conflict in the 1970s, nourished by left-wing parties and groups inside Turkey and by the PKK,



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diminished with the end of the Cold War. The immediate post-Cold War political vacuum in the Middle East allowed the PKK to form alliances with other Kurdish groups in Iran, Iraq, and later Syria, and the PKK insurgency within Turkey has been central in shaping the Kurdish conflict beyond Turkey’s borders. As the group increasingly succeeded in transcending regional and tribal divisions within the Kurdish community in Turkey, it also created political space for more moderate groups representing Kurdish groups to emerge (Barkey and Fuller 1997). As I argue in this work (see chapter 5), the severity of this conflict in its modern form has been largely determined by the deep fractures that characterized the polyethnic region of Eastern Anatolia in the twilight years of the Ottoman empire. The regional spillover of the conflict beyond Turkey’s borders (Robins 1993) emerged from those regional fracture fault lines, which were consolidated within the state system in the Middle East (Katz 2018). In Turkey, the breaking with the multiethnic nature of the Ottoman empire in favor of an exclusive Turkish nationalism, a process that had started in the twilight years of the empire’s collapse, was the fundamental factor that deteriorated social connectivity in Turkey’s Kurdish-inhabited provinces. The purely Turkish nationalist ideology built around Kemalism, developed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, identified secularism, statism, and nationalism as organizing principles of the Turkish political system (Cagaptay 2020). While seeking a break with the Ottoman empire, the Kemalist ideology continued the imperial efforts to co-opt and suppress the Kurdish community. Denying the cultural and political rights of the Kurds was elemental for the new Turkish Republic. The new elite viewed recognition of Kurdish rights as a prelude to an eventual Kurdish autonomy that might challenge the primacy of the state. Assimilation of the Kurdish community and the outlawing of Kurdish identity became core principles of the Kemalist ideology of Turkish nationalism. During the Cold War, the legacies of the imperial fractures were carried over into the Turkish republic by Kemalist secular nationalism, politically subsidized and enabled by the Western powers in Europe and the United States. The low and clustered connectivity of Eastern Anatolia was left intact in the new Turkish republic, perpetuated by authoritarianism and the top-down social engineering initiatives inspired by the nationalist and secular Kemalist ideology. Amid the bipolar rivalry of the Cold War, Turkey obtained strategic value in the eyes of Western foreign-policy elites: its perceived ability to balance the Soviet Union in Eurasia was its main political

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asset in the Western capitals. The pattern of regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia continued undisturbed and proceeded to catalyze the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and regionalize it into the Middle East. In terms of the onset and severity of the conflict, the period between the declaration of the Turkish republic in 1923 and the founding of the PKK in the 1970s was marked by numerous Kurdish uprisings in Anatolia. These Kurdish rebellions were forcefully suppressed each time, emboldening the military of the new Turkish state and undermining the already fragile political institutions of the republic. The 1925 Sheikh Said rebellion saw irregular Kurdish forces occupy nearly one-third of Kurdish Anatolia before the Turkish gendarmerie reestablished control. The aftermath of that 1925 rebellion set the stage for the systematic policies of forced assimilation pursued by Turkey in the subsequent decades. The use of coercion in Turkish policy on the Kurdish conflict emerged as a consistent policy response by the state (Robins 1993). Additional cycles of rebellion and repression followed in the 1930s. The political transition to multiparty rule in Turkey in the 1950s liberalized certain parts of the economy and nominally eased some of the cultural restrictions in the east, often alleviating the most oppressive practices of the state in rural Kurdish areas (Barkey and Fuller 1997). This political opening moved many Kurds to electorally support a variety of newly formed or revamped political parties, and a modicum of political space for Kurdish civil society groups emerged in this period. Still, the dominant Turkish political parties reverted to their more familiar coercive tactics in dealing with the Kurdish question. Most political groupings became increasingly intolerant of social or political dissent in their twilight years before the 1960 military coup d’état (Barkey and Fuller 1997). In the 1970s, a broad disillusionment with the faltering liberalization processes gave rise to left-wing movements across the country, with many in the Kurdish community tying their lot to such groups. The left-wing PKK party, with its leftist insurgency tactics, emerged from this period of radicalizing politics inside Turkey. Indeed, the Kurdish question was a key factor in the military takeover of the government in 1980. The repressive policies of the 1960s and 70s had largely eroded any liberal middle ground in Kurdish political consciousness and had set the stage for a destructive choice between the brutally assimilationist policies of the Kemalist state and the violent resistance and insurgency advanced by the PKK. An institutional vacuum in addressing the Kurdish question was palpable and polarizing for the state at large.



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Myriad cease-fire and peace processes in the 1990s proved unable to end the armed conflict with the PKK. Those developments prefigured the failure of peace processes relying on greater democratic participation by the Kurdish community, which had seemed possible in the first years of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, in the early 2000s (Köse 2017). Turkey’s authoritarian resurgence under Erdogan in the early twentyfirst century, particularly since the failed coup attempt in 2016, has been the major factor derailing any contemporary prospects for a democratic resolution of the Kurdish question and the success of an institutionalized conflict-resolution process. Erdogan’s authoritarian turn was emboldened by the contemporary regional fracture in the Middle East, which enabled the Turkish repression of Kurdish aspirations to extend militarily beyond its borders. Kurdish initiatives at self-governance involved not only Turkey itself but a large swath of adjacent states, from Syria to Iraq. In the twilight years of the Ottoman empire, the imperial fractures in Eastern Anatolia shaped the basic structures of the Kurdish conflict in the young Turkish republic. But the intractability and deepening of the Kurdish conflict were driven by broader regional fractures in the Middle East, expressed most acutely in the post-Cold War period. This regional dimension of the conflict in the Middle East has been reflected in the coordination of Kurdish groups between Turkey and Iraq, prompting cooperation between the two governments. Iraqi Kurds in post-Saddam Iraq, having more cultural freedom than did the Kurds in Turkey, started to present a threatening model for Turkey with respect to its own Kurdish population. The coercive policies and institutional obliteration of civic institutions in the Kurdish community inside Turkey throughout much of the twentieth century presented a sharp contrast to the growing civil society and communal connectivity in the Kurdish north in Iraq. Significant for the onset and severity of the conflict was the 1988 ceasefire that brought the brutal eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war to an end. This left Iraq freer to direct its attention to the power vacuum created in its northern Kurdish territories. Iraq’s military responses and suppressive policies, including the use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish population,10 led to more than a hundred thousand Iraqi Kurdish refugees crossing into Turkey. The cycle was repeated during the Gulf war of 1990, temporarily pushing an additional seven hundred thousand Kurdish refugees into Turkey. The creation of safe havens in northern Iraq by Gulf war coalition forces, aimed at preventing the flow of refugees into Turkey, also ended up strengthening

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Kurdish autonomy and self-governance in northern Iraq—the very outcome that Turkish governments have historically aimed to prevent (Robins 1993). Within Kurdish communities in the Middle East, associative capacities and connectivity—key dimensions of regional resilience, identified in the earlier, theoretical chapters of this book—have deepened in the post-Cold War environment. The Kurdish communities in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria remained disconnected and disjointed across state borders and boundaries, but they pushed ahead with initiatives toward enhanced organization and connectivity. The establishment of no-fly zones in northern Iraq in the aftermath of the 1990 Gulf war resulted in the formation of a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq in 1992. The grouping included an assembly in northern Iraq, an executive authority, and ultimately a parliament that voted for a federated Iraqi state. Robins (1993) points out that these measures created the embryo of a Kurdish state in Iraq. Indeed, these institutional units would form the foundation of the rapid political organization of the Kurds in northern Iraq after the US-led intervention in 2003. In the early 2000s, after the American intervention, the Turkish government chose to work with the newly mobilized Kurdish entity, the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, building economic and political links with the entity. This engagement bolstered the Erdogan government in Turkey, bringing it the electoral support of the Kurdish community inside Turkey. In this context, the American hegemonic overlay in the Middle East enabled a greater connectivity within the Kurdish community in northern Iraq and Turkey. This short-lived virtuous circle continued when Erdogan launched a domestic peace process with the PKK in 2009 (Barkey 2019). The formalization of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq had been made possible with the formation of a federal system in that country; the reverberations in Turkey included significant victories by the Kurdish-dominated People’s Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey’s March 2014 municipal elections. Those recent improvements in Kurdish political fortunes proved shortlived, however. In 2014, Erdogan abandoned negotiations with the PKK while initiating outright military conflict with Turkish and Syrian Kurds (Barkey 2019). These political and military moves coincided with increased cultural and local repression of Kurdish communities in Turkey. By the end of 2017, Kurdish-language institutions, publications, and private schools had been eliminated by the Erdogan government. Street signs and traffic signals using the Kurdish language were removed. At the time of this writing, the Erdogan government and the ruling AK party in the parliament are moving



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ahead, unopposed, in shutting down the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Still, as Barkey notes (2019), some Turkish universities have allowed students to study Kurdish, and a TV channel in the Kurdish language, controlled from Ankara, has also remained on the air. The withdrawal of American forces from Syria by the Trump administration debilitated the Kurdish paramilitary groups in Syria in their quest for greater autonomy from Damascus and left them vulnerable to continued Turkish pressure. The Erdogan government succeeded in militarily pushing against the Kurdish paramilitaries inside Syria while also suppressing Kurdish activism inside Turkey. Still, the strides made in social connectivity within the Kurdish community in Turkey, linking Kurdish civil society groups and their dominant political party with opposition forces in Turkey as well as across the border, remain as significant gains for greater regional resilience in the Middle East.

Conflict in Eastern Ukraine: The “Polite” War or a Rude Intrusion As with the conflicts in the South Caucasus and Kurdistan, the Ukraine crisis is one that is fundamentally imperially rooted; its regional-imperial dimensions were discussed in chapter 6. The contemporary conflict in Ukraine has revolved around the status of the regions of Crimea and Donbas; it erupted in 2013–14, after a significant post-Cold War lag. In terms of its severity, as of the summer of 2020, the estimated number of civilian casualties in the conflict stood at ten thousand, with 1.5 million internally displaced. Its onset is dated by most scholars to the 2013 Maidan protests in Kyiv, more than two decades into the post-Cold War period. These protests laid bare the divergent affiliations of different segments of Ukrainian society. The Maidan protests were a response by largely pro-European forces to the Ukrainian president Yanukovich’s decision, under Russian pressure, to abandon a significant trade agreement with the European Union (Toal 2017). The abruptness of Yanukovich’s retreat from the European partnership was not without precedent, as Armenia’s leadership under then-president Sargsyan had conducted a similar U-turn a few months earlier. In Ukraine’s case, mass protests challenged Yanukovich’s position, leading to the political armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and the Russian annexation of Crimea. The ensuing crackdown on protesters failed to quell popular outrage, and as their ranks swelled, oppositionists soon organized a “self-defense force.”11 As the government ultimately lost control and President Yanukovich fled to

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Russia, his remaining political supporters fled to the broadly pro-Russian regions of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. There, they would trigger a series of new conflicts in the spring of 2014 over the Donbas region, which includes the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine. The Ukraine crisis was and continues to be a quintessential case of regional fracture. Its causes and consequences defy mere domestic or geopolitical narratives. While Ukraine was clearly pulled into the geopolitical rivalry between the West and Russia, its local, internal patterns of connectivity enabled the political expediency of geopolitical meddling. The broad support in Kyiv for a European orientation was not shared by the more pro-Russian regions of eastern Ukraine. Indeed, after Yanukovich’s departure, pro-Russia protesters began organizing in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and the local resentments against the Kyiv government offered an opening for the Kremlin to “overlay” through political meddling—into the country. With central institutions in Kyiv in flux, pro-Russian separatist militias began to form and Kremlin support quickly followed. In March of 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, working with separatist groups after having hastily staged a referendum to legitimize the annexation. Later that spring, in the Donbas region, the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic were proclaimed, encompassing Ukraine’s largely industrial eastern regions. While the annexation of Crimea was largely bloodless, the conflicts in Donbas quickly devolved into a hybrid war designed to offer plausible deniability to Moscow. Rauta (2016) explains that the military strategies and the nature of local support varied significantly between the cases of the Crimea annexation and the separatist conflicts in eastern Ukraine. In Crimea, Russian military strategy appears to have been designed to produce “outward sovereign defection” in the form of a secession from an existing state. In eastern Ukraine, by contrast, the aim was one of generating “inward sovereign defection” by creating a political buffer zone between Ukraine and Russia in the incarnation of a “frozen” conflict. The latter goal was implemented by supporting pro-Russian secessionists through proxy forces on the ground and paramilitary groups crossing the border from Russia. The conflicts in both Crimea and Donbas quickly attracted academic study. The Crimean annexation was often analyzed as a Russian covert operation in collaboration with local pro-Russian militias (Karagiannis 2014; Galeotti 2015; Cimbala 2014). Much of the discourse focused on the changing patterns in Russian warfare (Thornton 2015; Rauta 2016), with



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the analysis of a hybrid warfare strategy at its center (Rauta 2016; Kofman and Rojansky 2015). While the Crimean annexation was a case of a covert military strategy, the armed struggle in eastern Ukraine followed a more complicated pattern. Rauta (2016), for example, pointed out that the separatist conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region was an armed struggle waged by the separatist rebels but externally supported by Russia (Sutyagin 2015). In contrast to the other conflicts reviewed in this study, the onset of the Crimea and Donbas conflicts in Ukraine came after a significant amount of time had elapsed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While devastating for the communities, with a high human toll, the conflict has not been as severe as the Kurdish or the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, reviewed in this study. Natalia Mirimanova, a scholar and practitioner of conflict resolution, explained in a phone interview in July of 2021 that this conflict lacks the broader social base that was characteristic of the Kurdish conflicts or the conflicts in the South Caucasus. Having evolved in largely multiethnic parts of Ukraine,12 the conflict followed the war (perhaps a hybrid war cultivated by the Kremlin) rather than the conflict leading to war, the more common trajectory of conflict onset in the post-Soviet space. The lagged eruption of the conflict in the post-Cold War period is usually attributed to Russian political weakness in the early years of the post-Soviet collapse. But this binary view is misleading and elevates Russia’s role in engineering these conflicts, making them into a crisis of geopolitics and the security challenge between Europe and Russia. Toal (2017) explains how Ukraine is viewed in Russian and Western policy discourses as a space that can “make or break” Russia as a neo-imperial and revanchist power. Framed as a civilizational choice (Toal 2017) or a geopolitical conundrum, the role of a hegemonic overlay, in this case of Russia, is overemphasized. Instead, the civic traditions and imperial legacies of regional connectivity have played their role in the relatively more moderate levels of communal violence in the conflict in the Donbas region. The nature of imperial governance in the western provinces of the Russian empire, in its twilight years, was one of suppressing formal institutions of governance and ruling informally through elites. The patterns of social connectivity in Ukraine reflect the specific social cleavages that were created by Russian imperial rule. Ukrainian social capital was one of bonding: the connectivity patterns and developing Ukrainian national consciousness were directed against the Polish and Jewish communities, which were economically dominant in the regions. The cultural argument of the “Habsburg thesis”—deeper civic

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traditions and institutions of participation within the Galicia region—may have played a part in preventing a rise of Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the post-Cold War period. In parallel, some layers within the Ukrainian community were co-opted by the imperial government of Russia, with the promotion of the “Little Russians” project and limited rewards to those who worked with the empire. This latter factor, in combination with the shared Slavic cultural roots, worked to dampen interethnic communal divisions between Ukrainians and the Russians in the country. Still, the patterns of connectivity and social capital in Ukraine in the post-Cold War period lacked the institutional legacies of participatory politics that the territories of the Habsburg empire enjoyed. The social legacies of largely bonding social capital, with some bridging connections between Ukrainians and Russians, played their role in preventing an immediate outbreak of the conflict in the Donbas region. And as mentioned earlier, the conflict lacked the broad social mobilization that has been characteristic of other post-Soviet wars. However, the failure of the successive Ukrainian governments to manage the country’s multiethnic and plural fabric through participatory institutions worked to chart the path of the country towards the political conflict in the Donbas region. These conditions enabled Putin’s assertive and militarized intrusion into Ukrainian politics. In a similar vein, Harzl (2015) has written about the “home-made institutional problems through which power structures, paternalistic networks, and hybrid behavioral patterns remained intact behind the façade of democratic elections, leading the country into an economic and political abyss since 1991” (219). According to Sakwa (2014), the institutional weakness of the Ukrainian state was further compounded by a clash between two visions for the state: monist and pluralist. The monist conception, partly a historic reaction to regional fracture on the western frontiers of the Russian empire, envisioned Ukraine as a unitary and culturally specific state, deliberately denying common historical pathways with Russia (Harzl 2015; Sakwa 2014). Sakwa argues that in the Maidan movement and its aftermath, it is this version that succeeded as a political project. This view stands in contrast to pluralist conceptions of the Ukrainian state that recognize its multicultural fabric and envision a consociational state and stable relations with all its neighbors. Such a vision would have organically translated into regional connections and deep regional connectivity, thereby making any hegemonic overlay inside Ukraine much more costly for external intruders, including Russia.



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In terms of its geopolitical embeddedness, this region enjoyed relative geopolitical stability from the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. As such, it lacked the extra-regional rivalries that have shown to divide the communal fabric in the South Caucasus, for instance. However, even as Ukraine emerged from the Soviet collapse as a separate state, Russia-Ukraine relations developed imperial undertones, albeit in a “modern” form of informal elite connections and personalized networks, developed against the backdrop of weak statehood (Samokhvalov 2018). Ukraine’s independent statehood did little for regional resilience with its immediate neighbors, which made the country vulnerable to extra-regional intrusion and geopolitical embeddedness from both Russia and the European powers. With the Soviet collapse, the Ukrainian state was born into a fractured region (Samokhvalov 2018), as were the states in the South Caucasus (Broers 2018) and Central Asia (Lewis 2018). This was perpetuated by the proliferation of organizationally weak and nominally regional institutions, such as the GUAM grouping (Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Moldova) and the Community of Democratic Choice group, which Ukraine joined. These organizations, in fact, possessed little capacity for true region-wide collective action and governance in eastern Europe. Instead, these groups functioned as a superficial cordon sanitaire, which geopoliticized Ukraine’s foreign policy relative to Russia without deepening its regional presence with its immediate neighbors. The inability of the Ukrainian governments to forge connections with minorities and across de facto states in the post-Soviet space further elevated Russia’s leverage in Ukraine, as well as in its broader neighborhood. The Western approach to Ukraine was largely Kremlin-centric; as such, it offered little support towards building regional resiliency or nourishing a greater and deeper connectivity of Ukraine’s civic fabric inside the country, with its minorities, or with its immediate neighboring states in the region. Studies of the conflict in Donbas differ in terms of the extent of primacy they ascribe to the Kremlin in driving the conflict. The Kremlin-centric narrative sees the conflict as purely a hybrid war, perpetuated by the Kremlin to keep Ukraine divided and safely outside of NATO. Sakwa (2014), on the other hand, recognizes that the Kremlin relies on its proxies in eastern Ukraine, but cautions that Russia is not the primary driver of this conflict. Instead, the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of 2014, he argues, interacted with the Donbas rebellion, and was then exacerbated by geopolitical tensions between the West and Russia.

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What emerges from this book is the analytical significance of the interaction between the cultural and institutional patterns of connectivity (the social fabric), on the one hand, and the geopolitical embeddedness of the conflict, on the other. More precisely, it is the lack of institutions of connectivity and participatory politics, combined with the fact of the regionally fractured neighborhood, that made Ukraine’s eastern regions vulnerable to Russian intrusion. The partial autonomy of the disputed regions, as reflected in the Minsk Agreement,13 is viewed by Kyiv and the Western powers as an access point for Russian involvement in Ukrainian politics. Putin’s push for constitutional change and federalism inside Ukraine is most likely due to such motives. At the same time, the Kremlin-centric lens prevents a full reckoning with the gaps in participatory institutions in Ukraine, an imperial legacy that the more pluralist conceptions of political reform advocated by Sakwa (2014) could have addressed. With Ukraine’s new leadership under Volodymyr Zelensky, who campaigned on a promise to end the war, the Steinmeier Formula of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia was revived. The Steinmeier Formula includes two agreements signed in Minsk in 2014 and 2015 by Ukraine and Russia, and is supported by France, Germany, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). This plan envisages a Ukrainian commitment to reintegrate the separatist eastern enclaves, but to endow them with a “special status.” The plan, however, leaves a particularly contentious aspect unaddressed: the Minsk agreements specify that Kyiv can resume control over its eastern border with Russia only after elections. Zelensky, while facing a domestic backlash for reviving the Steinmeier Formula, has remained adamant that only full control by Kyiv would make it possible to carry out the elections in the eastern regions.14 In the meantime, as of June 2020, the European Union extended its sanctions against Russia for another six months in response to the Kremlin’s failure to live up to its agreements in the peace process.15

The Balkan Wars: Between Failed Federalism and Peripheral Fracture The post-Cold War onset of the conflict cluster in the Balkans was immediate. And in terms of severity, the Balkan wars during and in the aftermath of the disintegration of Yugoslavia were the costliest in human lives of all the conflict cases considered here. The level of violence and the scale of loss of life were the most extensive in Europe since World War II (Dyrstad 2012).



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The region-wide conflict comprised three distinct wars that erupted across former Yugoslav territories. Formally, the War of Yugoslav Succession refers to the 1991–95 wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which concluded with the Dayton Peace Accords in Dayton, Ohio, in November of 1995 (Hoare 2010; Ohanyan 2015). The wars in Slovenia and Croatia were rooted in their declarations of independence, which created a security dilemma for their minorities. The scale of violence was lowest in Slovenia, where skirmishes were followed by a broader confrontation in Croatia in August of 1991. The conflict in Croatia pitted the Croatian army against a Serbian minority that wished to secede from newly independent Croatia and remain part of Yugoslavia. The Croatian Serb rebels, supported by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav national army (JNA), were not militarily defeated until 1995, after which most of the Serb minority fled the country (Paris 2004). Many thousands were killed on each side, with hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced from their homes. But the bloodiest conflict in the former Yugoslavia raged in Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 1992 to 1995, where ethnic Serbian forces and the JNA fought against ethnic Croat and Bosnian forces. An often-tentative Croat-Bosnian alliance during the war frequently frayed, resulting at times in parallel fighting between Croat and Bosnian groups as well (Dyrstad 2012). Together, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia resulted in nearly a quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons, myriad crimes against humanity, and the devastation of entire cities and regions (Kaufman 2001; Brunborg, Lyngstad, and Urdal 2003; Dyrstad 2012). Tragically, the war in Bosnia also included the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica (Mojzes 2011) in which 7,500 Bosniak men and boys were executed by the Bosnian Serb forces. The 1998–99 armed conflict waged within Serbia by Kosovo Albanian rebels was preceded by a decade of tension between the Serbs and the Kosovar minority (Dyrstad 2012). The Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian security forces had been engaged in low-level clashes and riots since the mid-1990s, and the larger-scale war that ensued at the end of the decade was largely concluded after the military campaign of NATO-led airstrikes against Serbia. By 1999, Kosovo had become a United Nations protectorate (Ohanyan 2008), and a formal Kosovar declaration of independence from Serbia followed in 2008. A variety of causal factors have been identified to explain the onset and severity of the various Yugoslav wars of secession. These include the

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specificities of Yugoslav federalism (Brubaker 1996; Bunce 1999; Leff 1998; Roeder 2007; Snyder 2000), conflicting security dilemmas, nationalist myths, a prevalence of “symbolic politics” among ethno-nationalist groups (Kaufman 2001), and economic rivalries and stagnation brought about by a dysfunctional Yugoslav federalism (Woodward 1995). Common to much of the scholarship is the well-known notion of “Balkanization,” originally described by the journalist Paul Scott Mowrer in 1921 as “the creation, in a region of hopelessly mixed races, of a medley of small states with more or less backward populations, economically and financially weak, covetous, intriguing, afraid, a continual prey to the machinations of the great powers, and to the violent promptings of their own passion” (Todorova 2009). This early construction and understanding of the region as one plagued by perpetual violence, instability, and a unique capacity to draw in geopolitical rivalries (Hansen 2000; Der Derian 1992) returned as a dominant narrative in the post-Cold War period as an explanation for the unprecedented scale of the Balkan wars in Europe (Hansen 2000). This Balkanization, as a conceptual undercurrent, framed the debates on the failures of Yugoslav federalism, the weakness of democratic institutions, and the rise of “ethnic entrepreneurs” who were capable of galvanizing preexisting divisions of symbolic politics. The frame of Balkanization, as a lens through which to view the region, has been costly in terms of theory and policy. In theoretical terms, it has obscured the regional hybridity, the concurrent expression of ethno-religious coexistence and conflict, that can also be observed in the case of the South Caucasus. While periods of intense and at times large-scale violence have divided the Balkan region in the past, particularly during the two world wars (Mojzes 2011), the region has also seen long periods of peaceful coexistence and integration at a societal level. Dyrstad (2012), for instance, has shown that prior to the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, nationalism in Croatia and especially Bosnia was rather marginal. Tito’s top-down federalism arguably enabled interethnic coexistence in Yugoslavia despite the cycles of violence between the ethnic groups during the twentieth century’s world wars. Many have observed that the suppression of interethnic rivalries during the Yugoslav years was a signature outcome of Tito’s policies. And soon after the federal institutions that were suppressing the rivalry weakened, in the 1980s, the conflict erupted, so the argument goes. Others have shown that interethnic coexistence was much deeper (for instance in multiethnic cities like Sarajevo), and particularly significant when we consider the World War II-era waves of violence: even in spite of the inter-group violence that



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had taken place during World War II, the groups came together to forge the Yugoslav state. Gagnon (2004) has argued against ethnicity as a conflict driver, contending that it is instead the political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb who created and manipulated the conflicts along ethnic lines as a way to thwart and prevent the large-scale political and economic change that was brewing in former Yugoslavia. The regional fracture framework adopted in this work is more useful in capturing such regional hybridity, expressed in the duality of interethnic coexistence and persistent polarization. This framework incorporates the dynamic aspects of societal connectivity that can vary, over time, in terms of its forms and depth in a society. Yugoslavia, whether in its early-twentieth-century incarnation after World War I or in its later socialist federal formation under Tito, has been a quintessentially political region (Hansen 2000). Its federal structure has been profound in shaping the vectors of its regional connectivity. The secession wars of the 1990s demonstrated that federalism can be limited in terms of engendering deep connectivity. The economic disparities between Yugoslavia’s north and south created economic cleavages that the federal institutions struggled to mediate. Indeed, the role of economic disparities has been a dominant narrative in explaining the outbreak of the wars of secession. However, this economic narrative does little to explain the persistence throughout the twentieth century of the interethnic cleavages that, when the opportunity presented itself, quickly engulfed the Yugoslav states. A more thorough understanding of the Balkan region requires an analysis of the construction of the region as a political periphery of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, the approach that is pursued here. Looking at Yugoslavia’s roots as a political region situated on the imperial peripheries, as discussed in chapter 4, is a way to theorize the regional hybridity and transcend the determinism of the prevalent Balkanization framework. In particular, the devastation and larger scale of the war in Bosnia are deeply rooted in the patterns of regional fracture that plagued the Bosnian province during the Habsburg era. The regional dimensions of the imperial institutions of governance in that province shaped the patterns of its regional connectivity in the subsequent century, rendering them clustered and uneven and therefore ineffectual as political tools of governance. Indeed, building upon Connor’s (1984) scholarship, McCarry (2018) has challenged the causal primacy of ethnofederalism in the breakup and subsequent ethno-nationalist conflicts of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union.

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Yugoslavia, as the archetype of a politically constructed region, exposed the limits of federalism when it comes to its ability to produce regional connectivity. The political construction of a region, and the nature of its connectivity, are much broader, as a process and a conceptual tool for supplying that regional fabric, than are federalism and federalist institutions. Federalism does not always yield deep connectivity, and the frequent critique of Yugoslav federalism as a “sham” (McCarry 2018) partly reflects this point. The nature of participatory politics at a regional level is perhaps more significant in managing interethnic strife than are top-down federal efforts at managing pluralism in a society. Federalism, that is “sham” federalism, without participatory politics, does little to translate societal connectivity across ethno-religious groups into robust political mechanisms of governance. The application of the theory of regional fracture and resilience to the Balkans promises to add great value in explaining the failure and limits of federalism in Yugoslavia, as well as elucidating the temporal dynamics of the hybridity of its regional fabric. Yugoslavia’s roots as a political region on the imperial peripheries emerges as a key factor in explaining the onset and severity of the wars of the 1990s, an analysis that I will advance further in the next section.

Paired Peripheries and Contemporary Armed Conflicts Now that all the conflict cases have been described in terms of their postCold War onset and severity, this chapter moves to probe their imperial antecedents. Specifically, it examines whether the regions that had conflicts with high levels of severity and early onsets—erupting in the twilight years of the Soviet collapse and early in the post-Cold War period—correlate with the former imperial peripheries that were fractured and predatory. By extension, it also seeks to establish whether the armed conflicts that erupted after a time lag, and with lower levels of severity, took place in former imperial regions with more balanced connectivity and semi-developmental governance. And lastly, it studies whether those contemporary regions that emerged peacefully in the post-Cold War period were former imperial regions that had enjoyed dense and balanced connectivity and developmental governance. The methodology of the case selection and the rationale for categorization were discussed in chapter 2. Just to reiterate: a paired case-control methodology has been applied in this chapter in order to study the contemporary conflicts while controlling for their imperial contexts. Cases are organized in such a way as to control for the level of geopolitical embeddedness on



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Post–Cold War Conflict Cases

Post–Cold War Conflict-Free Control Case

Imperially Contested

South Caucasus Kurdistan

Baltics

Imperially Uncontested

Bosnia Eastern Ukraine

Central Europe

FIGURE 7.1. Categorization of Cases and Controls in the Present Study. Source: Author Created

the imperial peripheries. In this respect, the cases are grouped into two sets. The first group includes regions that were, during their imperial periods, geopolitically contested by adjacent empires. This includes the South Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia, which were contested between the Russian and Ottoman empires, and the Baltics, contested between the Russian and German empires. The second group comprises regions that enjoyed relative geopolitical stability in their imperial era, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the outbreak of World War I. In this study, this second category includes central Europe and the Balkans under the Habsburg empire, and eastern Ukraine under the Russian empire. Within each of these two categories, cases of post-Cold War conflict are contrasted with control cases that are defined as those in which no significant post-Cold War conflict emerged. The resulting categorization is illustrated in Figure 7.1.

Contested 1. Imperially Contested but with a Peaceful Rebirth: Balanced Connectivity and Limited Resilience in the Baltics The Baltic region was contested by the Russian and German empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but emerged from the Cold War peacefully. It is a case of a relatively resilient regional periphery, with a low density of ties but bridging social capital between the imperial minorities in the region, as discussed in the chapter on the Russian empire. It was, during the imperial era, characterized by low but balanced connectivity within and between its various nationalities. The governance on this periphery can be described as semi-developmental, with limited levels of regional resilience (chapter 2). Russian imperialism had a specific signature in the Baltics, one that stands in contrast to that of the South Caucasus. Within the imperial

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Baltics, the subregional nationalities, Latvians and Estonians, were dominated by another, “foreign,” nationality, the German landed nobility. In contrast to the situation in the Russian empire’s western reaches, where the Polish factor was considered an irritant for the empire (Plokhy 2017), here this Baltic German nobility was more trusted by the Russian imperial center. But even though the German nobility was trusted, the Baltics were still subjected to Russification in order to weaken German influence overall. Still, in contrast to the populations of many other peripheral regions of the Russian empire, the Estonians and the Latvians, despite being marginalized and dominated by the Russians and the German nobility, managed to have relatively uniform relations with the imperial center, which helped to maintain stable relations between these groups themselves as well. The regional connectivity divided the Estonians and Latvians from the landed nobility, the Germans and Russians. As such, Russian imperial governance institutions in the Baltics, perhaps mediated by the German nobility, did not engender interethnic divisions between Estonians and Latvians. The Russian empire relied on the German nobility as a “pivot” nationality on the periphery, which allowed interethnic relations between the Estonians and Latvians, as imperial minorities, to develop more harmoniously than was the case in the South Caucasus or Eastern Anatolia. These groups succeeded in emerging from the Russian empire with their societal connections largely intact. This has been effectively researched in Laitin’s (1998) study of Russian minorities in the post-Soviet states. This type of balanced connectivity, albeit institutionally sparser than that in most regions of the Habsburg empire, allowed for regional resiliency in the Baltics following the end of the twentieth-century Cold War.

2. Imperially Contested and with a Turbulent Rebirth: Clustered Connectivity and Latent Regional Fracture in the South Caucasus The region of the South Caucasus within the Russian empire was highly contested among the Russian, Ottoman, and British empires. It had high connectivity but of a clustered nature: dense social ties were organized through bridging social capital. This was a case of latent fracture and semidevelopmental governance. This region emerged from the Cold War with several armed conflicts, discussed earlier in the chapter. Indeed, in contrast to the Baltic region, socioeconomic cleavages within the broader Transcaucasian region on the Russian imperial periphery had



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historically manifested in ethno-national divisions (Suny 1993a). Described in the literature as being an “unranked” system (chapter 3), economic divisions overlapped here with ethno-religious fault lines. This played out between marginalized groups and structured the relations between the minorities and the imperial center. Because the region lacked a mediating provincial hegemon, a “pivot” power like the German nobility in the Baltics, the Russian empire structured its relationships with the various groups in Transcaucasia quite differently: divide-and-conquer instruments of governance were prevalent, against a backdrop of periodic Russification policies, both of which worked to erode intercommunal ties between the imperial minorities. As discussed in chapter 6, Russian imperialism in Transcaucasia was unmediated and unranked, creating socioeconomic cleavages that became politicized and securitized locally. Russian imperial governance on this periphery was geared to standardize and centralize. It was top-down and coercive, heightening the interethnic divisions that it created via the socioeconomic cleavages between ethno-national groups and at the same time eradicating any indigenous institutions and grassroots spaces of interethnic engagement. This practice of eliminating grassroots institutions on multiethnic terrains was subsequently continued into the Soviet period, under Lenin’s “All Power to the Soviets” approach. This approach only furthered and accelerated local institutional conformity and imperial hegemony at the expense of regional civic depth at the grassroots level. The regional fabric in Transcaucasia features highly dense but clustered, uneven connectivity and bonding social capital, giving rise to vertical and unequal patterns of engagement with the imperial center across the subregional ethno-national groups. Ethnically organized political parties and associations, as discussed in the chapter on the Russian empire, reflected civic depth in this imperial periphery, but did not cut sufficiently across ethnic lines. Indeed, as discussed in the empirical chapters on the imperial peripheries, the civic connections bridging interethnic divides were significant but fragile, consistently vulnerable to broader imperial stressors from inside (the Russian center) and outside (the Ottoman, German, and British empires). These patterns of connectivity enabled semi-developmental governance, since the local civic institutions, necessary for community organization and administration, had been weakened by the imperial authorities. Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russification policies not only polarized interethnic relations on this imperial

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periphery but also triggered full-fledged, region-wide counter-imperial revolutionary movements that eventually spanned multiple ethnic affiliations (Berberian 2019). Indeed, amidst the intercommunal discord in Transcaucasia, these pan-ethnic civic and political movements culminated in the formation in 1918 of the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR), which politically joined the myriad ethnic groups prior to Sovietization, even if only fleetingly. The regionally centered movements that realized the political ambition of the TDFR in 1918 were quickly overwhelmed, however. The background interethnic violence and geopolitical stressors emanating both from the interventionist Russian empire and from the post-genocidal Ottoman empire rapidly crystallized into a latent regional fracture based on ethnicity, one that was subsequently institutionalized by Soviet ethnofederalism. A proliferation of ethnicity-based autonomous oblasts and gerrymandered territories in Transcaucasia epitomized this unstable fractured condition, which unraveled in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Indeed, the variety of regionally centered class-based and nationalist movements created a highly dense fabric of civic organizations. These connections, often cutting across ethnicities, developed in Transcaucasia despite the persistent imperial stressors that were placed on them at the time. This clustered and uneven connectivity developed throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the formation of the TDFR, short-lived as it was, was a clear culmination of these regional connectivity dynamics. This type of organizationally dense but clustered, uneven connectivity, resulting in latent fracture in the region in its pre-Soviet period, worked to constrain and mitigate the levels of violence when the political conflicts erupted in the South Caucasus in the post-Cold War period. The Cold War had produced a regional conflict formation in the South Caucasus, but one that held a range of opportunities for peaceful management in the early conflict cycles (de Waal 2019). Certain aspects of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are a case in point: in what is arguably a unique reality among modern conflicts, Azerbaijani and Armenian forces largely self-policed the line of contact along their various borders for more than two decades, up until 2020, with no external peacekeeping forces separating the militaries. Meanwhile, the hegemonic overlay and embeddedness of neo-imperial Russia and Turkey remain significant obstacles to sustainable peacebuilding and conflict resolution in the region. The 44-day war in 2020, a Turkey-backed Azerbaijani offensive against



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the Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh, revived the Turkey-Russia geopolitical rivalry, changing the structure of this conflict in multiple ways. With both Turkey and Russia more firmly wedged in Azerbaijan, NagornoKarabakh, and Armenia, the prospects for region-wide security orders in the South Caucasus remain weak. This is a case of great-power rivalry and offensive alliances between two authoritarian powers (Turkey and Azerbaijan). The war, along with the continuing coercion and militarization by Azerbaijan on Armenia’s borders, continues to damage the prospects for peaceful conflict settlement and undermine capacities for region-wide security formats to evolve. Moreover, this region was one of latent fracture, with highly dense but clustered and bonding connectivity. It was historically endowed with significant reserves of interethnic connectivity, giving it good prospects for peaceful settlement of all conflicts within regional frameworks (Ohanyan 2015). But the heightened geopolitical rivalry is now eroding those prospects. Even though Azerbaijan was victorious in the war, the rhetoric from the political elites in both Azerbaijan and Turkey remains aggressive, with an intense advocacy of coercive policies to “integrate” Armenia into regional cooperation formats. Georgia, historically the regional center of imperial Transcaucasia, remains rather weak, politically, for taking any lead on region-wide frameworks of cooperation and diplomacy among the three states.

3. Imperially Contested and with a Turbulent Rebirth: Clustered Connectivity and Predatory Fracture in Kurdistan In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Kurdistan region of Eastern Anatolia was similar to Transcaucasia in that the region was contested at various points between the Russian and Ottoman empires. However, regional fracture in Kurdistan differed from that of Transcaucasia in that Kurdistan was an imperial periphery characterized by a very low density of social and intercommunal ties, a condition compounded by the clustered and uneven nature of connectivity these ties engendered. The specific patterns of connectivity in Kurdish Eastern Anatolia, the predatory periphery (chapter 5), were driven by structural factors of the imperial governance, as well as more tactical choices made by the imperial government of the Ottoman state after the 1908 revolution. This was a case of overt regional fracture, baked into the Turkish Republic after World War I, with Kemalism as its foundational ideology.

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As in Russia, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Ottoman empire witnessed various reform efforts aimed at arresting the Ottomans’ decline. These programs comprised attempts, at various times, to reform, centralize, formalize, and equalize imperial governance. One consequence of these undertakings was a weakening of the fragile societal peace on the various imperial peripheries, including Eastern Anatolia. The Tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth century, under various sultans, heightened the societal fractures on the peripheries and, over time, fueled interethnic polarization and legitimated violence as a political strategy of the imperial state. Another similarity to the Russian imperial strategy was that the Ottomans’ divide-and-conquer policies were interwoven into their imperial governance. But what was specific to the Ottoman empire was that the informality and the network-based nature of Ottoman ethno-corporatism through the mid-nineteenth century served to temper regional sources of fracture, making the peripheries self-reliant to a certain extent and thus relatively resilient (Barkey 2008). In later years, the Ottoman imperial reforms, in attempting to centralize governance and institutionalize tax collection, undermined preexisting regional sources of governance and accelerated a process of unraveling of what regional fabric had developed on the imperial peripheries. The resulting processes of regional fracture, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, contributed tremendously to intercommunal tension and violence, at times initiated and at times aided by the imperial center. In predominantly Kurdish areas, the deployment of Kurdish irregular forces by Sultan Abdülhamid II in the late nineteenth century as an instrument to manage the empire’s eastern periphery served to institutionalize predatory governance, with the application of political violence being central to the process (chapter 5). This was in addition to the elimination of tribal centers of governance within the Kurdish community, which created a political vacuum and dangerously polarized the ethno-religious ties in Eastern Anatolia. The Ottoman annihilation of the non-Muslim (Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek) communities in Anatolia (Morris and Ze’evi 2019), foremost the Armenian genocide, structured the Kurdish conflict in the postimperial Turkish republic for decades. Although they fall outside the scope of this current work, those early-twentieth-century racial extermination campaigns and the demographic engineering attempted and/or carried out by the



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imperial governments, before and after the 1908 revolution, further eroded intercommunal connectivity between Kurdish and Christian communities. The genocidal obliteration of grassroots communal institutions in Eastern Anatolia deepened the pattern of sparse and uneven connectivity in which the Kurdish community found itself in the twilight years of the empire and the early years of the Turkish Republic. The most recent period of the Kurdish conflict, discussed earlier in this chapter, remains driven by the unchanged patterns of this clustered and uneven connectivity in Eastern Anatolia. While the Kurdish community is politically more organized and aware, fielding candidates in Turkish politics, its cultural and political organization remains in jeopardy in the increasingly authoritarian Turkey of the Erdogan era (Cagaptay 2020). Institutional obliteration persisted under Kemalist Turkey into the modern era, consolidating deep regional fracture in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish eastern regions. The regional fracture around the Kurdish conflict became increasingly nested in the broader Middle East and enmeshed with President Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions.16 Of the three post-Cold War regions explored in this work that emerged out of former imperially contested contexts—the Baltics, the South Caucasus, and Kurdistan—it is the Kurdish setting that has witnessed the most extensive and protracted conflict and violence. The Kurdish conflict in Turkey originated on a predatory periphery of the Ottoman empire (chapter 5) rooted in sparse and largely bonding social capital, and uneven civic connectivity in the region. While the post-Cold War South Caucasus remains similarly afflicted by a latent regional fracture rooted in the Russian imperial era and extending to the Soviet period, that region nevertheless has retained a distinctive pattern of regional connectivity that has created reserves of interethnic peace and coexistence. These reserves are usually (and often erroneously) ascribed to the Soviet system; in fact, they have their roots in the late imperial Russian era. The dense but clustered and uneven nature of the regional fabric in the Transcaucasus during the imperial era partly explains the relatively moderate levels of armed conflict in the contemporary South Caucasus when compared to Kurdistan, even when the 2020 44-day war in Nagorno-Karabakh is considered. In the Kurdish setting, such reserves of interethnic peace and coexistence are diminished, in part because the non-Muslim communities were wiped out or forced out during the twilight years of the Ottoman empire. This reduced the civic diversity of ties in the Ottoman empire, including

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the empire’s connectivity with the predominantly Kurdish community, a minority within the predominantly Turkish society that emerged from the Ottoman empire. And the Turkish secular nationalism of Kemalist ideology worked to further suppress Kurdish identity and communal organization throughout much of the twentieth century. Turkish-Kurdish connectivity suffered as a result. The pairing of the Kurdish case and the Baltic setting places this in yet starker relief. The Baltic “peaceful rebirth” from the Cold War was rooted in a highly dense and balanced regional fabric inherited from the Russian imperial era and, correspondingly, the region witnessed little explicit post-independence violence in the post-Cold War period.

Uncontested 1. Imperially Uncontested and with a Peaceful Rebirth: Balanced Connectivity and Regional Resilience in Central Europe The second group of matched cases involves settings of significantly less inter-empire contest and with much lower levels of geopolitical embeddedness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The post-Cold War outcomes in this grouping include the “peaceful rebirth” of central Europe, the Yugoslav wars, and the conflicts in eastern Ukraine. As introduced in the empirical chapters 4, 5, and 6, the pre-Soviet period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw relative inter-imperial geopolitical stability in these regions encompassing imperial Russia’s western and Austria-Hungary’s eastern frontiers.17 Much of the cross-border regional influences were limited to cultural influences and cross-border national activism, such as among Ukrainians, who would often regroup in Austria-Hungary’s Galicia region in response to Russification pressures on the other side of the border. In the matched-pair comparisons in this work, the “peaceful rebirth” of central European countries in the post-Cold War years sharply contrasts with the early onset and severity of the Yugoslav wars, with the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina being the most devastating. The conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted much later, and with explicit Russian intervention. The formerly imperial domains of these conflict spaces encompass the Habsburg and Russian empires, with Bosnia and Herzegovina having been de jure in the Ottoman empire and de facto in the Habsburg empire. The annexation and formal transfer of Bosnia to the Hapsburg empire was completed in 1908. The argument in this work is that the peaceful rebirth of the central



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European countries is rooted in their imperial legacies of civic participatory politics, as well as in an overall regional resiliency enabled by constitutional reforms in the 1860s in the Austro-Hungarian empire (chapter 4). These were imperial peripheries with dense social ties and bonding social capital, creating balanced connectivity, enabled by the institutional reforms and liberalization that took place in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the late nineteenth century. The continuous institutional deepening in the empire attenuated the regional cleavages that are universally characteristic of imperial governance. This “peaceful rebirth” outcome in central Europe differs from the experimental/conflict cases in this matched set. Despite comparable lower levels of geopolitical embeddedness, the immediate post-Cold War onset and high level of severity of the Yugoslav/Bosnian wars contrasts with the slower-burning hybrid warfare in eastern Ukraine. Importantly, the conflict in Eastern Europe also emerged more than two decades into the post-Cold War period. Why such variance in contemporary conflict outcomes, given the overall relative inter-imperial/geopolitical stability of the early-twentieth-century history in which all of these cases are rooted?

2. Imperially Uncontested and with a Turbulent Rebirth: Clustered Connectivity and Overt Fracture in Bosnia This work on the neighborhood effect maintains that differential forms of regional connectivity on various imperial peripheries have set these regions onto particular historical pathways, which continue to reverberate in contemporary conflicts. As noted in chapter 4, the Bosnian province in the Habsburg empire inherited cleavages of regional fracture from the Ottoman era; the subsequent Habsburg administration perpetuated these cleavages. Earlier in the nineteenth century, as part of the Ottoman empire, Bosnia had been included in the millet system of confessional governance, which entrenched a practice of informal and transactional governance by religious authorities. This system reinforced the existing economic cleavages, pitting Muslim landholders against Serbian peasants, for instance. In the early period under the Habsburg empire, the Bosnian province was subject to a top-down “modernization” effort coordinated from the imperial center. But these efforts did little to alter the traditional inter-confessional divisions, which were often aggravated by patrons of each confessional group from outside of Bosnia, both within and outside of the Habsburg empire. Seeking to consolidate the province into the empire, Vienna relied on the Bosnian Muslim population as a counter to the increasingly organized and

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politically vocal Serbs and their compatriots across the border. Inter-confessional cleavages morphed into economic ones as certain programs, such as agrarian reforms, fell victim to the rivalries that were provoked between the Serb and Muslim communities. Overall, the regional fabric in Bosnia under the Habsburg empire was one of dense but clustered and uneven regional connectivity and bonding social capital, with little institutionalized bridges between confessional communities. The change in the imperial governing elite in 1903 and the subsequent constitutional period in 1908 were critical in introducing and formalizing Bosnian institutions, which aimed to ameliorate the regional fractures that had plagued Bosnia. This included the introduction of representative institutions that were instrumental in that regard, and which ushered in a short period of representative politics in Bosnia, but that period was ended by World War I. In short, the ethno-religious divisions in Bosnia that resulted from imperial governance processes were never fully healed and were bequeathed to the successor Yugoslav state in the twentieth century. In Bosnia, consistently governed by top-down institutions, deep civic ties and participatory institutions had little chance to organically emerge and grow. This is an imperial legacy that continues to haunt contemporary Bosnian politics, where it preserves and deepens the ethno-religious cleavages. These regional fractures were significant in scaling up the latent political conflict in the post-Tito period into strategic violence and devastating warfare, all within the span of a decade, in the twilight years of the Cold War. Bosnia’s perpetual state of regional fracture (Bechev 2018) as an imperial legacy remains an understudied factor in that process.

3. Imperially Uncontested and with a Turbulent Rebirth: Clustered Connectivity and Latent Fracture in Ukraine The contemporary conflict in eastern Ukraine did not emerge until 2014, with many analysts depicting it as the flashpoint for a “new Cold War” between Russia and the West. The patterns of regional connectivity on Russia’s western frontiers throughout the twentieth century, discussed in chapter 6, were influential in shaping relations between Ukrainians and Russians. On those western peripheries, the position of Russian imperial rule in Ukraine was largely conditioned by fears of Polish independence, making the Poles the “pivot” nation for Russia’s imperial governance in this region. The divide-and-conquer policies applied



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in these areas by the Russian empire were directed first and foremost against the Polish nobility. The fracture in this region was in many senses a consequence of Moscow’s sporadic support of Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian peasants to undermine the Polish nobility. The Russification policies that were undertaken in parallel resulted in a complex but clustered connectivity within the socially and economically stratified fabric of the western provinces, where bonding social capital and dense social ties developed on this semidevelopmental periphery. Broader anti-Semitic attitudes and social resentments further fueled antipathy against Poles and Jews. Against this backdrop, Ukrainians were often also compelled away from Catholicism towards Orthodoxy by the Russian center, furthering their cleavage from the Catholic Polish communities and bringing them closer to Orthodox Russians. Over the years, as in the Baltics, the western provinces institutionalized their political activities through assemblies, parliaments, and political parties. This connectivity, while clustered and institutionally weak, helped to ease the political impact of the existing cleavages in mixed-ethnicity communities. Indeed, within the Lithuanian community, as discussed in chapter 6, there was little widespread support in the first decade of the twentieth century for independence from the Russian empire, with much of the impetus for independence originating from German aims to weaken Russia. In short, the Ukrainian-Russian cleavages of the late 1890s and early 1900s, despite pressures toward Russification, did not lead to the systematic erosion of intercommunal ties and institutional breakdown. The Russian empire regarded its Ukrainian communities at least in part as a counter to Polish influences in the western provinces. This dynamic maps onto the contemporary contours of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The conflict, while still rooted in ethno-political issues of Russian representation in Ukraine, has been driven primarily by external geopolitical forces and Kremlin support, rather than intercommunal clashes between Ukrainians and Russians.

Conclusion The imperial legacy of regional connectivity in contemporary conflict zones is a consequential factor that has been under-studied in Eurasian conflict scholarship. The promise and the peril of these imperially rooted neighborhood effects are playing out on former imperial peripheries across Eurasia today, and they have engendered contemporary regional cleavages and connections across many of today’s conflicts. The challenge of creating and

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re-creating regional institutions has proven daunting: many regions remain vulnerable to the “proxy politics” of rival hegemonic players meddling in and adding to conflict intractability (see chapter 8). The conflicts in the South Caucasus and the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and the broader Middle East are vivid examples, albeit to different degrees, of imperially inherited regional fractures where imperial legacies continually undermine prospects for regional empowerment and autonomy. The conflict analysis in this chapter reinforces the conclusions of the existing scholarship that imperial institutions matter in shaping contemporary conflict. But this work also finds that the inherited regional imprints of imperial governance are particularly important factors in understanding why certain regions are peaceful and others struggle to break out of their history of violence. The post-Cold War thaw yielded a peaceful and regionally resilient Baltic region, but plunged the South Caucasus into a series of regional conflicts and deepened and expanded the Kurdish conflict in Turkey into the broader Middle East. This multilevel approach to the study of imperial peripheries as politically constructed regions offers a more granular analysis. It encompasses local agency, a factor that is often marginalized in the scholarship on international relations, and explores how local actors interact with the more conventionally studied political elite in great powers and imperial centers. What this study did not do, however, was to engage in “process tracing” for each case, to connect contemporary conflict outcomes to relevant events, institutions, and processes throughout the twentieth century and all the way back to their roots in imperial governance. Carefully carried out single or comparative qualitative studies of a few cases could accomplish such a task. And such a research pathway would be transformative for conflict theories. It would be able to reveal the specific mechanisms by which inherited regional cleavages on the former imperial peripheries were baked into, say, Soviet ethnofederalism or Turkish Kemalism. It could identify the ways in which such divisions were consolidated or ameliorated throughout the twentieth century. It could focus on the independent impact of the two world wars on patterns of regional fracture and resilience over time. And, importantly, it could offer fresh insights into the assessment and reassessment of the legacies of the Soviet Union to its successor states beyond Russia. Deep and balanced connectivity, realized through dense social ties and bridging social capital, empowers representative politics and institutional capacities for better governance. This signature of regional connectivity,



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while vulnerable to geopolitical rivalries, remains important for managing and dampening the impact of those rivalries on the states and communities in such regions. The next chapter turns to exploring this key policy implication for contemporary conflict management in the context of the largely fractured Eurasian continent.

8 Peace by Proxy The Neighborhood Effect in Turbulent Times

Connectivity matters. This is the key takeaway from this work. The social fabric within communities, whether at imperial peripheries or within the contemporary state system, engenders levels of security and shapes the capacities of states and their people to withstand the recurrent pressures of instability, conflict, and violence. Democracy has been shown to be the political system most supportive of broad and deep connectivity within and between communities, particularly when contrasted with hybrid regimes and entrenched authoritarian states. The specific policy task in this chapter is to envision policies that will support connectivity as a security resource, even as the broader political system in which communities are embedded remains inhospitable to it. Put differently, this work on connectivity is another way of talking about participatory politics in settings that lack democratic content. The COVID-19 pandemic consuming the globe at the time of this writing is largely driven by global connectivity and hyper-globalization, spread by the globally mobile and the transnationally connected. In early 2020, as the scale of the pandemic became clear, border closures and disruptions to trade and transport were quick to follow. The long-term backlash against globalization, however, has yet to arrive. But between the binary of hyper-globalization on the one hand and dangerous parochialism and national retreat on the other, there is a “third way” that could shape postpandemic global politics: greater regional engagement among states. Some of these regional dynamics will recreate patterns of hegemonic as well as participatory forms of regionalism that were prevalent in the pre-pandemic



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world system. Yet, just as vaccine development entails using elements of the pathogen against itself, the same connectivity that spread the virus around the world will remain essential for dealing with its political and economic aftermath. With the world shutting down on itself, the rewiring of global connectivity may take on increasingly regional forms that pull states into regional groupings and more proximal regional markets. The erosion of trust in global connectivity may hinder this development, in the short term. However, as this work has shown, regional formations and connectivity in world politics predate broader globalization as we know it. The top-down, coercive territorial empires on the Eurasian continent prior to World War I were instances of significant regional connectivity (Burbank and Cooper 2011). Even though empires, serving as regional formations, were largely exploitative and oppressive, they did create large markets over vast territorial terrains (Hudson 2018). But as the empirical chapters on imperial peripheries have demonstrated, not all connectivity is progressive; the specific vectors and civic structure of regional connectivity matter, both then and now. Moving forward, the more regionally oriented futures are set to reproduce two developments already underway. First, geopolitical rivalry can revive the hegemonic regionalism of great powers, as they seek to reconstitute and reinforce their spheres of influence, often through and within regional groupings. Perhaps legitimized by regional organizations, this neo-medieval (Friedrichs 2001) and neo-imperial path to regional engagement will work to produce protectionism and nourish authoritarianism (Ohanyan 2018a). Russia in the Putin era has attenuated overt authoritarianism and naked geopolitical posturing by redirecting Russia’s hegemonic strategy toward regional organizations such as the Eurasian Economic Union, a more palatable form of domination in the twenty-first century. As a form of hegemonic regionalism, the Eurasian Economic Union has sought to rewire, reclaim, and reposition markets, trade routes, and energy infrastructure that had been lost in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse (Ohanyan 2018c). But the second path of participatory and developmental regionalism will also continue to evolve. Before the pandemic, regional trade agreements1 covered more than half of international trade, a trend that is poised to increase as distressed global supply chains are rethought and reengineered. Regional organizations remain the fastest growing structures of trade, commerce, and communication in the world. And regional interdependencies among states have been growing in political terms as well. Studies have

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shown that democratic transitions are more likely to succeed in regions in which democracies outnumber authoritarian states (McCallister 2016). An increase in GDP in one state affects the economic climate in its neighbor (Collier 2007) Most importantly, the unfettered globalization of the post-Cold War period has at times eroded (Ohanyan 2018a) the more immediate regional markets and neighborhood connections between and among proximal states. The quest and competition for distant markets and global capital has left regional neighborhoods fractured and unattended. Such trends have favored the minority of politically connected businesses that had the resources to go global. This in turn has undermined the economic promise of globalization and translated into broader political distrust in democracy (Ohanyan 2018a). Arguably, the rise in authoritarian populism has been the most visible manifestation of this discontent. But the COVID-19 pandemic has created a window of opportunity of sorts for smaller states to rebuild their regional markets. The previously underutilized regional statecraft of smaller states could possibly see its value increase (Ohanyan 2018c) amid the political ups and downs of the post-pandemic world order. The challenge for them will be to band together and weather the divide-and-conquer advances of neo-imperial regionalists, which are sure to come. Unresolved conflicts in some of these fractured regions will remain a deterrent to the emergence of participatory forms of regionalism in the post-pandemic multipolar world order.

The Regions-Before-States Paradigm in Policy Terms The quality of connectivity in and between our communities and the civic strength in our societies matter for building political regions that are resilient in turbulent times. Regional connectivity is consequential for the post-pandemic politics in Eurasia and its conflict beltway, from Bosnia to Basra. This comparative historical analysis has shown that the imperial legacy of regional connectivity influenced the onset and shaped the severity of armed conflicts erupting in the post-Cold War period. Imperial peripheries with a denser and more balanced regional fabric were better positioned to build reserves of regional resiliency within their communities while resisting extra-regional stressors, such as inter-imperial rivalries. These features of regional connectivity also moderated the severity of violence. Imperial peripheries with dense and balanced regional connectivity nourished civil societies and created bridging social capital, both of which strengthened



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the participatory politics on these peripheries. The multilevel framework developed in this work has also explained how social peace and coexistence within multinational and multi-confessional communities can be shattered by the politically engineered conflicts advanced by imperial rivalries and great-power plays in each region. I have argued that regional connectivity, albeit with varied institutional strength and different political vectors, preexisted on the imperial peripheries. By offering a theoretical toolkit with which to study such regions over time and space, this work reveals continuities and ruptures between imperial collapse and state formation at the beginning and then again at the end of the twentieth century, with the conclusion of the Cold War. Significantly, this regions-before-states paradigm offers specific policy implications, to which I now turn.

“Something There Is that Doesn’t Love a Wall”2 The underutilized regional statecraft in fractured regions (Ohanyan 2018c) is the broad policy problem this work addresses, with direct consequences for armed conflicts and peacebuilding. At first glance, it may seem superfluous to argue for the value of having good relations with one’s neighbors. In industrialized democracies, public policies incentivizing and promoting strong communities and bottom-up growth strategies are widespread. From community policing to urban design that is conducive to communal life, the value of strong neighborhoods is hardly debatable in the context of domestic politics in the industrialized world. In the context of world politics, however, the value of strong ties among neighboring states is less obvious, under-researched, and often in need of intense advocacy, in policy terms. In my earlier works (Ohanyan 2015; Ohanyan 2018b; Ohanyan 2018c) I have shown that regional fracture is driven by outside powers, but also has domestic stakeholders. Entrepreneurs of regional fracture are typically oligarchs, who benefit from closed borders and lack of competition, as well as political elites (often illegitimate) whose survival depends largely on external powers. The policy discourse produced and perpetuated by governments in fractured regions can be recognized as such, and the features of that discourse and the policy on which it rests can be observed in all fractured regions. This policy discourse, largely state-centric, includes developmental and security policies stemming from often-unrecognized conditions of regional fracture. I will refer to this discourse, which is grounded in beliefs and perceptions among policymakers that territorially defined states are politically

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and institutionally coherent, as fortress policies. These policies are deliberate about taking physically bound states as political units of analysis, and the policies are assumed to maximize development under conditions of regional fracture: they view the states as politically isolated and insulated from fracture in regional neighborhoods. These fortress policies attach little significance to spillovers of forces between geographically contiguous states, even though those spillovers often have direct developmental and security outcomes. In post-Cold War policy circles, particularly in politically divided conflict areas such as the western Balkans or the South Caucasus, fortress policies became so ubiquitous in political discourse that they colored the national zeitgeist. They were sustained by the false assumption that political division and separation from the neighboring state would have no effect on a country’s economic and political development. This kind of unsubstantiated trust in a given state’s physical and institutional borders with a neighboring state, and the invincibility of those borders in such regional isolation, has strengthened the vectors of global multilateralism, often at the expense of regional integration arrangements. The political drivers for multilateralism have done little to support regional political connections. Multilateralism and global governance infrastructures tend to treat regional governance as a mechanism to tolerate rather than as a strategy for integration and common purpose in achieving global goals. This is bound to change in the wake of the pandemic, however, as the pressures toward deglobalization and shorter supply chains gain momentum. The fortress policies practiced in fractured regions have involved placing inordinate trust in high fences and strong and often impenetrable borders. The economic policies practiced in such states usually discount the value of economic ties with immediate neighbors. Collier’s (2007) work is particularly relevant here, with respect to the sensitivity of national markets to the economic performance of neighboring states. Indeed, Collier specifically mentions the neighborhood effect, pointing out how the increase in GDP of one country trickles to its neighbor’s economy. The effect can be measured more strongly in the advanced, industrialized world than in developing countries, but it is still significant enough to warrant a deeper dive into this issue. The global free-trade agenda is another force that has bolstered fortress policies in fractured regions. The economic pull towards bigger markets and distant capitals has disadvantaged businesses that have a more limited



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geographic reach. Indeed, perceptions about regionalism and regionally wired trade policies have generated rather polarized debates. Some economists have perceived regional trade blocs as undermining the multilateral trading system; from this perspective, regional trade is seen as multilateralfree-trade-diverting (Bhagwati 1992). Others, however, have argued for the multilateral-free-trade-inducing promise of those same regional trade blocs (Preeg 1989; Tovias 1991). Despite the persistent economic lure of large and often distant markets for the countries in the developing world, regional approaches to development are gaining steam. As more developing countries consider regionalism as a developmental tool, researchers have called for an assessment of this approach (Schiff and Winters 2003), pointing out that economic regionalism has already altered the global economic environment to such an extent that even countries that decide to opt out of regional groupings will feel the effects of their opt-out policies. Söderbaum (2008) has argued that the developmental impact of economic policies can be best realized under conditions of regionally wired policies of economic growth, rather than a multilateral free trade regime. As discussed earlier, even the institutional integrity of a state, a frequently identified precondition for economic growth (Acemoglu and Robinson 2013), is sensitive to the domestic politics of its neighboring countries. The transfer and mobility of technology and ideas, also highlighted by economic theories as consequential for development, is more easily realized between regionally proximate states than between states that are farther away from each other. Geographic proximity remains significant in facilitating the developmental outcomes of economic policies associated with sustainable growth. Thus, one of the problems with economic theory is that it does not automatically lead to good public policy (Higgott 2002, 22). Indeed, new regionalism is being embraced because multilateralism no longer works (Mistry 2003, 136). Regionalism has become the best risk-management and coping strategy. . . . Regional Integration Arrangements provide an opportunity of the market access they [the states] always wished for but never really extracted from multilateral negotiations. (Söderbaum 2008, 630)

In short, fortress policies are deliberate and direct in their conceptualization

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in terms of prioritizing the global, the multilateral, and the distant sources of capital and power. Yet the historical examination of neighborhood connectivity in this work has made clear the value of regional fabric for states. The common refrain that some regions are “tough neighborhoods” can be found in the policy as well as in the academic discourse. Such statements, reflecting an implied determinism, assume that states are born into those particular “tough” neighborhoods, thereby absolving the various actors, both local and global, state and non-state, of their role in making it so. Such assumptions discount the agency of the states and the people in such regions in producing the fractured or resilient nature of the region.

Neo-Imperial Rivalry and Regional Disorder in Eurasia The multilevel frame of regional connectivity studied here has shown that the communal conflict and insecurity on the peripheries of world politics have been historically embedded in broader imperial systems. They remain vulnerable to inter-imperial rivalry. Despite the formal collapse of the empires, interstate rivalry and hierarchy have not disappeared. The world order, under the informal leadership of the great powers, has provided some stability to international relations, particularly during the Cold War and in its aftermath. In both periods, the world order was defined as a system of global governance “that institutionalizes cooperation and contains conflict sufficiently to allow all nations and their people to achieve greater peace” (Slaughter 2004, 15). With disproportional leverage over world politics, these powers also applied specific instruments and tools that affected the ways in which armed conflicts around the world were settled (Wallensteen 2015). Within the post-World War II rules-based hegemonic world order created by the West, liberal peacebuilding has been one of the most recognizable and contentious frameworks applied in conflict regions. It has guided international peacebuilding work both during and since the Cold War. Liberal democratic governing systems and market-oriented economic growth have been its key pillars (Paris 2010). Liberal peacebuilding was applied in state-building interventions in conflict regions (Ohanyan 2008; Ohanyan 2009) after World War II. It helped to promote a particular type of peace and, ultimately, resulted in states that were democratic, capitalist, and open to global markets. The Western dominance in the post-Cold War period provided political cover for democracy and capitalism, exercised within



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institutionally coherent states, as the best formula for peace and security in various hot spots around the world. Over the past decade, this model has been challenged on various grounds. Much of the criticism relates to the value of markets and the increased inequality that neoliberal economic policies have created in post-conflict states. Others have pointed to the problem of simultaneous political and economic liberalization without institutional support (Paris 2004). “Bringing the state back in” is the new front line in salvaging the liberal peacebuilding paradigm (Paris 2010). Rooted in broad principles of democratic peace theory and conflict settlement (Doyle and Sambanis 2000), liberal peacebuilding continues to enjoy the strongest and longest empirical support relative to the alternatives that favor military tools and victory consolidation (Goertz, Diehl, and Balas 2016; Wallensteen 2015). In the post-pandemic world, the contours of world order and power polarity will remain uncertain, but several pre-pandemic trends will persist. International support for democratic norms and practices will remain limited. Foreign aid allocations for the promotion of democracy promotion, vociferous challenges to autocratic rulers, and the political will to intervene in cases of severe man-made humanitarian crises were markers of the postCold War era support for democratization (Levitsky and Way 2010). These factors are set to decline in the emergent multipolarity of world politics, and a struggling democracy anywhere remains a challenge to peacebuilding everywhere. The implications for patterns of armed conflict and peacebuilding practices in this emerging order are straightforward. Studies have already documented that military approaches to conflict settlement have become increasingly unsuccessful. Yet peace agreements, particularly for interstate wars, have also had a checkered history during and since the Cold War. In this context, unresolved conflicts, de facto states, and suspended conflict outcomes with recurrent outbreaks are likely to become the new normal (Caspersen 2011). Conflicts in which great powers have been involved as direct or indirect parties are less likely to have been settled (Wallensteen 2015). An increasingly authoritarian turn in Eurasia, particularly when considering Turkey’s and Russia’s neo-imperial foreign policies, casts a long shadow over the prospects of conflict settlement for all the conflict cases covered in this study. A great-power rivalry in Eurasia is set to play an insidious role in the prospects for peaceful conflict resolution, perhaps except for the Bosnian conflict, which many analysts consider relatively settled.

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Still, some of the findings here reveal a clear political space for sustaining peaceful approaches to conflict resolution in the post-pandemic world order. Liberal peacebuilding remains an important path for conflict resolution and security provision. It is the deeply ingrained top-down approach to liberal peacebuilding policies in the post-Cold War period that will prove to be a liability. The regions-before-states policy paradigm advocated in this work points to grassroots sources and regional connectivity beyond the state to liberalize the polities in which peacebuilding practices take shape. The policy implications of this paradigm point to the strategic value of connectivity in conflict regions that is (1) regional; (2) institutionalized; and (3) balanced. Regional neighborhoods with these attributes are best prepared to weather the turbulence in a post-pandemic world order where great-power rivalries will likely be a historically recurrent stressor. With Western support for liberal peacebuilding practice in decline, the role of bottom-up and regional connectivity is gaining a renewed strategic significance in conflict-resolution processes in Eurasia. Wallensteen (2015) has pointed out that during the Cold War, “the chances of developing more independent, regional initiatives toward conflict resolution and peacebuilding were limited” (188). The strength of the major-power rivalries impeded regional ownership from emerging anywhere, particularly in areas covered under Soviet influence. The end of the Cold War created some potential for autonomous regional arrangements (Väyrynen 2003). But in Eurasia, the politics of regional fracture emerged instead (Ohanyan 2018c). Moving forward, the political space for peaceful conflict resolution and security management will continue to depend on the prospects of democratic systems. Investing in regionally reinforcing democratization rather than dyadic peacebuilding programs is a better bet for those concerned about Eurasia’s peaceful future. The regions-before-states paradigm offers a specific pathway for building regional resiliency in these turbulent times. The case of the Transcaucasian periphery in the Russian empire, and of the TDFR, vividly illustrates the role of grassroots capacities in conflict resolution, in a way that was possible on the relatively open and participatory peripheries of the Russian empire. And the contemporary scholarship on peacebuilding has already established the role of grassroots initiatives in building sustainable peace systems (Lederach 2010). It also has shown the need for a modicum of political openness in order for such grassroots voices to emerge and connect. Representative institutions on some imperial peripheries enabled balanced



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regional connectivity among various ethno-religious communities, putting such regions on the path to a peaceful rebirth after the political “thawing” of the Cold War. In the context of contemporary politics in Eurasia, with its neo-imperial powers, namely Turkey and Russia, authoritarianism is driving their neoimperialist foreign policies. This development only heightens the potential strategic role of grassroots forces and local civil society groups pushing towards democratization. A range of studies has already established the regional dimensions of democratization and the positive feedback loop such groups create for the peaceful resolution of armed conflicts. Despite Eurasia’s neo-imperial turn, the path towards liberal peacebuilding outcomes is regional and grassroots, with local capacities for peacebuilding a key goal. With the fraying of the US-centered rules-based order (Ikenberry 2014), the vacuum may be filled by regional, and mostly authoritarian, hegemons in conflict zones, such as Russia, Turkey, and China in Eurasia. Unless the agency of the local fabric in conflict zones is revisited (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall 2016; Mac Ginty 2015; Paffenholz 2015; Lederach 2010), the challenges of the neoliberal peace paradigm will be replaced and magnified by the “authoritarian peace” touted by dictators from Central Asia to China and Rwanda. If Turkish and Russian neo-imperial foreign policies continue to advance, propelled by their domestic authoritarianism, how shall balanced connectivity for the peaceful resolution of armed conflicts be cultivated in the region? Democracy and representative institutions remain central to the achievement of quality peace and peaceful modes of conflict resolution. What is the pathway to establishing those in an otherwise authoritarian neighborhood?

Beyond Eurasia: Growing Regional Resilience in Turbulent Times The first policy implication stemming from this work is that clusters of democratization should be supported as they emerge, which is best exemplified with the Armenia-Georgia democratic dyad in the South Caucasus. A regional approach to supporting such democracies is less polarizing, geopolitically, than support from the West would be, and can be carried out via technical channels (Ohanyan 2022). The Western rhetoric of supporting Georgia’s nascent democracy has polarized Georgian politics and emboldened Russia’s incursions in the region. But it is in Ukraine where the security implications of the polarizing impact of dyadic and top-down democratic support from

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the West have been particularly vivid. In eastern Ukraine, this dynamic has transformed relatively manageable cleavages into geopolitical fault lines. Moreover, recent scholarship has demonstrated the importance of regional contexts for democratic consolidation in conflict regions. Much of the quantitative research on democratic peace theory has been built around dyadic interactions, which often discount the regional contexts in which such dyads are embedded. Studies utilizing a multilevel approach to dyadic interactions have found that the relationship between peace and democracy is largely dependent on regional conditions, and that when the regional power balance favors democracies, it influences conflicts between dyads, including those between mixed pairs of autocratic and democratic conflict parties. It does so by increasing the costs of aggression by autocracies and establishing and bolstering regional norms of cooperation and compromise. In this approach, the democratic strength at a regional level has a pacifying effect. Indeed, existing research has demonstrated that in the absence of such a regional norm of cooperation and compromise, and with the dominance of nondemocratic norms in the region, mixed conflict dyads of autocracies and democracies tend to be the most conflictual. Only after democracies strengthen in the region does this political tango shift in favor of democratic states, as it supports the democratic norms of compromise and the peaceful resolution of armed conflict (McCallister 2016). The second policy recommendation stemming from the regional perspective taken in this work is that aspirant regional hegemons need to be vigorously confronted, which is best exemplified by Turkey’s regional ambitions in the Middle East, North Africa, the South Caucasus, and the Mediterranean. Thompson (1996) has shown that it is regional conflict and regional stability that explain regime type, rather than, as is more commonly understood, that democratic regime type has a pacifying impact on armed conflict. Only when regimes cease their efforts to dominate their respective regions are the states more likely to liberalize. This research suggests that it is the quest for regional supremacy that pushes such states to centralize their power internally, which then drives the countries towards authoritarianism and undercuts their chances of democratization. Contemporary Turkey, Russia, and Azerbaijan, in their quest for regional supremacy, have, similarly, fed their authoritarian resurgence and undercut domestic prospects of democratization inside their states and within their shared neighborhoods. Studies have also shown that the strengthening of autocracies in a region contributes to the centralization of power inside states and leads to



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war (McCallister 2016; Gleditsch and Hegre 1997; Thompson 1996). In contrast, the decentralization of political power in a region, best achieved by the presence of stronger democratic regional poles, drives greater liberalization, thereby increasing the costs of aggression in cases of unresolved conflict. It therefore follows that in addition to lending softer support to democratic clusters, Western powers should also respond more decisively to regional authoritarians in unstable neighborhoods. The security costs of growing authoritarianism in conflict regions are quite high. Calls to contain rather than confront such players disregard the fact that time is on the side of autocrats. One example is the softer approach that has been taken to authoritarianism in Turkey and Azerbaijan, partly driven by the fact that Azerbaijan’s oil resources have been heating European homes over the past two decades. The entrenchment of authoritarianism in Azerbaijan has only hardened its position on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which is now poised to become fully internationalized with Turkey’s demonstrated and growing military support for the Aliyev regime. With domestic challenges to the survival of the regime, the Aliyev government has only deepened its alliance with Turkey’s Erdogan. This dynamic mirrors Armenia’s dependence on Russia before its democratic breakthrough in 2018 (Ohanyan 2015; Broers and Ohanyan 2020; Ohanyan and Kopalyan 2022). This kind of authoritarian coordination between illiberal governments and their illiberal geopolitical patrons has inhibited the formation of direct and deep channels of diplomacy between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Turkey-backed Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh3 in the fall of 2020 was an expression and the direct culmination of this dynamic.4 The Aliyev regime, facing a stronger democratic pole in the South Caucasus with the emergence of the Armenia-Georgia democratic cluster, and against the backdrop of anti-government protests in Belarus, responded by pulling Turkey into the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The authoritarianism inside Azerbaijan has only deepened since the country’s victory in the 44-day war. This raises again the strategic value of regional support for democratization as a better long-term avenue toward processes of sustainable conflict resolution than dyadic peacebuilding initiatives. In the case of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the preference for the latter has only hardened and emboldened Aliyev’s autocratic rule, further polarizing the relationships between the sides in the conflict. The third policy implication is that regionally wired support should be provided for ongoing peacebuilding initiatives, in parallel to dyadic and state-centric

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interventions. There has been a growing scholarly consensus that regional neighborhoods matter in conflict outbreaks. Gibler and Braithwaite (2013) have argued that the spatial clustering of conflict is insufficiently researched. They further point out that the likelihood of conflict and observation of joint democracy between dyads around the world tend to cluster regionally. The authors explain that the pacifying effects of democracy are more likely to occur and are more pronounced in peaceful regions. Territorial disputes tend to recur, and are more likely than other issues to cause regimes to centralize, which is why unstable regions tend to be associated with border disputes and autocratic states. Absent territorial issues, however, regimes are not prone to the centralizing forces of external threats, and those states that are able to democratize do so. (877)

The key takeaway from the Gibler and Braithwaite study is that dyadic democracy reduces the likelihood of conflict only if the dyadic partners reside in peaceful neighborhoods. This supports Gleditsch’s (2002) finding that stronger regional democracy mitigates conflict in such regions and supports democratization at the state level. This research offers a model for identifying those dyads that are least likely to be involved in conflict, pointing to a virtuous cycle among democratic integration in a region, peace, and more democracy. The presence of democracies in the immediate neighborhood of autocratic states makes it harder for autocrats to defend their systems. The benefit of regional, as opposed to state-centric dyadic, support for peacebuilding initiatives is also supported by the empirical scholarship on territorial contiguity and armed conflict patterns. Buhaug and Gleditsch (2008) have been the most direct and lucid in explaining the neighborhood effect on patterns of armed conflict. They have found that civil wars cluster in space as well as time. Moreover, this clustered pattern is driven less by the similar domestic attributes of states caught up in civil wars than by the risk of contagion and degree of exposure to proximate conflicts. Our results strongly suggest that there is a genuine neighborhood effect of armed conflict, over and beyond what individual country characteristics can account for. . . . We find that conflict is more likely when there are ethnic ties to groups in a neighboring conflict and that contagion is primarily a feature of separatist conflicts. This suggests



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that transnational ethnic linkages constitute a central mechanism of conflict contagion. (215)

Buhaug and Gleditsch also reflect on the rich diversity of the literature focused on the drivers of civil strife, pointing out that much of that scholarship has “assumed that the prospect for domestic conflict is a function of the specific characteristics prevailing in individual countries, and disregards the potential influence of regional factors and the international context. This assumption is highly questionable” (215). The authors report on a rich array of studies showing that countries in proximity to states in conflict are more likely to experience a violent conflict of their own (Buhaug and Gleditsch 2008; Anselin and O’Loughlin 1992; Hill and Rothchild 1986; Most and Starr 1980; Sambanis 2001; Ward and Gleditsch 2002). Some of the examples include the Balkans, the conflicts around the African Great Lakes in the 1990s, and the eruption of civil war in DR Congo (then Zaire) in 1996. Regional factors were also significant in both the orchestration of the genocide in Rwanda by the Rwandan Hutu militias and their ultimate defeat by the Rwandan Patriotic Front forces (Buhaug and Gleditsch 2008). Regional conflict formation in the South Caucasus is another such case. Interestingly, the conflicts here are being addressed by separate peace processes, with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict being considered structurally different from the ones in Georgia. No regional approaches have yet been tried or presented in the South Caucasus (Ohanyan 2015). The fourth policy implication is that deeply regional alliances, built around regionally incentivized interests and institutions, should be supported and cultivated. Short of establishing democratic systems in fractured regions, Western support for regionally oriented alliances and subregional diplomatic fronts is a way to temper the polarizing effects of alliance politics on the continent. Indeed, alliance politics has been a signature marker of regional fracture in Eurasia throughout the twentieth century. And the regional fracture on the continent has reproduced itself through illegitimate governments and the chase for external patrons that they create. At the time of this writing, in August 2020, post-election protests in Belarus were challenging the autocratic rule of President Lukashenko. Quintessential processes of regional fracture in Belarus’s neighborhood were playing out as Lukashenko drew Russia in, asking for the Kremlin’s help with military support against fabricated security threats from NATO on Belarus’s borders.5 The invitation from Lukashenko was poised to set off a scenario like the one in Syria, in which

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Bashar al-Assad pulled Russia in when he faced similar protests against his rule during the Arab Spring. In the case of Belarus, at the time of this writing Putin had already invoked the Collective Security Treaty Organization to justify a possible military intervention in Belarus.6 Fortress policies, discussed earlier, and the chase for patrons are mutually reinforcing, often diluting the immediate economic and political ties between states in their respective regions. Governing elites that disregard their regional neighborhoods tend to rely on extra-regional patrons throughout their rule. This pursuit of external patrons is characterized by exaggerated trust in the security alliances offered by external powers. Without belittling the real security threats to small states in fractured regions, it is important to critically evaluate the actual security dividends for these states from such alliances. Of course, some state insecurities are in fact driven by their immediate neighbors. However, it is essential to understand the conditions under which this is the case and to delineate instances when external alliance formation with a great power erodes the regional fabric of a neighborhood without obvious security dividends. The existence of broad-based and civic-led regional forums could help to minimize the destabilizing effects of elite-led alliance politics, which work to fracture the state and the region, as is the case for the Belarus-Russia alliance in eastern Europe or the Azerbaijan-Turkey alliance in the South Caucasus. Georgia’s self-proclaimed European trajectory in its global strategic orientation has also done little to realize Georgia’s untapped potential as a broker and an advocate for regional diplomacy in the South Caucasus. Despite the dominance of the traditional balance-of-power framework in the scholarship on alliance politics (Sprecher 2006), new theoretical approaches and emerging data are pushing for a clearer delineation between military alliances and economic ones, calling for the further study of alliance polarization and wedging. They also probe the effects of alliance formation on democratization, war, and conflict termination. Alliance formation as a security guarantee is practiced with zeal, particularly by smaller states. Yet the evidence on the effectiveness of such alliances in procuring security in troubled situations is mixed at best. Studies dating back to Singer and Small (1966; 1972) and Levy (1981) have revealed that alliances are more likely to be followed by war than by peace (Gibler and Vasquez 1998). Gibler and Vasquez (1998) have also found that alliances increase the probability of war for the next three to five years, lending support to similar findings by others (Vasquez 1993; Ostrom and Hoole 1978; Levy 1981).



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The polarizing effects of alliances and their ability to create security dilemmas in fractured regions have important implications for the warproneness of alliances. The structure of alliances, such as distinctions between great-power and small-state alliances, also determines their security implications. In terms of their functionality, Gibler and Vasquez (1998) have also shown that those alliances that are formed by a balance-of-power logic (i.e. to balance an enemy or a target) are more likely to lead to war than alliances formed after the resolution of a territorial dispute and or those that seek to cement a new agreement. It emerges from Gibler and Vasquez’s analysis that alliance formation has limited security value if it is deployed for power-balancing purposes, and that it can also destabilize a particular neighborhood. In contrast, when an actual agreement on a divisive and often territorial issue has been achieved, alliance formation can help to prevent the resumption of war down the road. Against this backdrop, war-prone balance-of-power alliances are best understood in the context of the chase for external patrons in fractured regions. As foreign-policy mechanisms, they have been crucial instruments in driving and perpetuating regional fracture on previously imperial peripheries. If I may repurpose the adage, often attributed to the former American congressman Tip O’Neill, that “all politics is local”: all security diplomacy is local, and all world orders are regional. Gibler and Vasquez’s (1998) study, reported above, indicates that the resolution of territorial disputes in a given region is a necessary condition for peace to be established, and that alliance politics can be a tool with which to scale up a single agreement, around a territorial dispute, into a broader regional order in which subsequent disputes are more likely to be handled peacefully. In the regional hotspots examined in this work, the immediate post-Cold War period resulted in regional fracture. Nascent states with governments that enjoyed little domestic legitimacy ended up pulling external patrons into their respective regions. The Western powers thus had more leeway to expand their geopolitical blanket over new post-Communist states. The Russian regrouping and revanchism, particularly under Putin, only accelerated this dynamic. The “lands in between” (Orenstein 2019) found themselves caught up in this whirlpool of geopolitical competition, particularly as Putin consolidated his power on Russia’s previous imperial frontiers. The pattern of geopolitical competition is now shifting once again. This time, regional powers such as Turkey are driving balance-of-power alliance formation, which is set to destabilize conflict regions in the South

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Caucasus and the Middle East. Hard confrontation in response to emerging regional hegemonic aspirations in conflict areas is essential for regional connectivity and ownership to emerge. The balancing strategies of the alliance politics in the Middle East have been devastating for the region, nourishing authoritarianism and regional fracture throughout the twentieth century. The South Caucasus and eastern Europe, both under the Soviet umbrella during the Cold War, benefited from the geopolitical stability, albeit at a cost to their respective regional autonomy. Their shared imperial history in the Russian empire has also created deep reserves of regional cooperation. A hard confrontation of regional hegemonic aspirations, particularly from Turkey, is overdue. This will help to create and nourish a political space for regional ownership to emerge, which is essential for peaceful conflict management institutions and norms to mature in an otherwise authoritarian neighborhood.

How to Tame Your Dragon: Lessons for Smaller Powers The neighborhood effect—the regional fabric around small states and middle powers—is the wild card in world politics at this moment of emerging multipolarity in Eurasia. The empirical evidence that regional factors can have an independent influence on such varied issues as democratic consolidation, economic development, and armed conflict and resolution is undeniable. But they have so far remained marginal to how we teach and think about world politics and to the policies we prescribe in our public discourse. Instead, the dominance of the great-power prism has reduced the growing political complexity in global security to a few scenarios, all revolving around the capabilities and influence of the great powers. This discourse has been laser-focused on whether China’s rise will be peaceful and whether the United States can continue to project its power globally (Yetiv and Oskarsson 2018; Glaser 2011; Ikenberry 2008; Acharya 2014; Nye 2015; Norloff 2010). Outcomes that lie somewhere on the continuum between United States dominance and the emergent multipolarity of a few great powers remain under-studied. And the regional fabric, the nature of its connectivity, is a powerful factor in shaping small-state agency in greatpower politics. While unresolved conflicts, on their own, are far from insurmountable obstacles to regional resilience (Ohanyan 2015), the internal political cleavages they create inside their states remain formidable. A likely outcome on the Eurasian continent is growing great-power rivalry under multipolarity.



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In this context, the regional cleavages in conflict zones will only heighten these rivalries. Such cleavages create conditions conducive to proxy wars: clustered and low levels of regional connectivity elevate autocratic rulers and oligarchs and concentrate economic and political power. These factors create vested interests and stakeholders in regional fracture, which are sustained by extra-regional alliances that are economic, political, and, when necessary, military. Fractured regions weaken state capacities, heightening the impact of unresolved conflicts and making such states vulnerable to geopolitical overlay. Against this backdrop, peacebuilding initiatives remain critical to the maintenance of stability in conflict areas. But deeper support for democratization remains the ultimate remedy for regional resilience and institutionalized conflict management in fractured regions and smaller states. It follows from this work that the quality of regional connectivity will shape the capacity of smaller states to navigate the increasingly turbulent waters of Eurasian politics. Their political will and capacity for regional statecraft are necessary factors in the prevention and management of greatpower rivalries, a major conduit of proxy wars (Groh 2019). Great powers, whether imperial or modern, will perpetually seek to intervene and meddle, either covertly or overtly, in such regions. Regional connectivity that is dense and balanced, institutionalized and grassroots, participatory and representative, can offset the effects of weak statehood. It can constrain aggressive and often authoritarian governments that need external patrons for their domestic legitimacy. Dense and balanced regional connectivity offers the political space for building regional resiliency in the increasingly turbulent and rivalrous politics on the Eurasian continent. Despite serious challenges to liberal peacebuilding policies, the nature of connectivity and representation—bottom-up versus imported by international agencies or great powers—remains critical. Western support for creating the political space for smaller links and connections at the grassroots level, regionally applied, is a fruitful policy path in conflict regions on the Eurasian continent. More can be gleaned about the shifting contours in the polarity of world systems from the vantage point of small states and medium powers than through the conventional prism of great-power politics. In an October, 2019 program,7 BBC’s Hard Talk interviewer, using the program’s signature combative tone, repeatedly pressed Armenia’s then-minister of foreign affairs, Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, to “clarify” whether Armenia, in the aftermath of its democratic transition following its 2018 Velvet Revolution, was now in the European or the Russian camp. Mnatsakanyan, resisting the pressure

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to pick a side, insisted that Armenia was not “for” or “against” any other state. But the interviewer’s question betrays a geopolitical pressure that is consistently applied to smaller states. It reflects a deeper foreign policy strategy that is consistently applied both by Russia (Ohanyan 2018b) and by the West (Ohanyan 2022; Ohanyan and Kopalyan 2022). With a divideand-conquer policy as its subtext, the question reflects the policy of regional fracture that great powers tend to advance, deliberately or by default, in regions with weak states. As discussed above, the human costs of such policies, driven by greatpower alliance politics, have been astounding throughout history. But more relevant to this study are the assumptions, in the policy discourse, that there is an unavoidable bifurcation in world politics, and the false choice between geopolitical poles imposed on the smaller states in the “lands in between” (Orenstein 2019). The assumption of a bifurcated or polarized world politics remains dominant in the policy discourse, and it continues to legitimize alliance formation as the best strategy for small-state security and as a cornerstone of their statehood. The policy implications arising from the comparative historical analysis of regional connectivity challenge these assumptions. They add to the growing chorus of voices, at the very least inside the policy circles of fractured regions and global capitals vested in a rules-based liberal world order, that systemic power transitions in world politics do not have to be violent and destabilizing. There is a clear policy path to advance, a third way: regional resiliency.

Conclusion The opening lines of this book depict the Eurasian continent as holding the promise of greater connectivity. Eurasia, however, has also been a site of ruptured connectivity, both institutional and physical. It has been both ravaged and preserved by imperial players and great powers in contemporary politics. As elsewhere, great-power rivalries have generated instability and proxy wars in volatile regions (Paul 2018; Snyder 2013). Snyder’s (2013) analysis connects directly with the imperial roots of great-power overextension, a commonly noted problem in current affairs: Counterproductive aggressive policies are caused most directly by the idea that the state’s security can be safeguarded only through expansion. This idea, the central myth of empire, was the major force propelling



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every case of overexpansion by the industrialized great powers. In the more egregious cases, the belief in security through expansion persisted tenaciously despite overwhelming evidence that aggressive policies were actually undermining the state’s security. (1)

The myth of security through territorial expansion has made the “turbulent frontiers” and the “hinterlands” of the imperial peripheries into battlegrounds for such policies. This is best exemplified by the politics of Eastern Anatolia in the twilight years of the Ottoman empire. The great-power rivalry between the Russian and Ottoman empires deepened the preexisting regional fracture and created the violent vortex in Eastern Anatolia. This tragically fractured regional fabric is what enabled the genocidal violence against Armenians and other Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire. Similarly, next door, the same imperial powers were engaging in an outright attack on and institutional obliteration of the nascent regional structures of governance that had emerged in Transcaucasia, structures that constituted an unprecedented exercise in regional governance that emerged despite the persistent imperial-power rivalry in their immediate background. Regrettably, the scholarship on international relations continues to view great powers as actors for and guardians of world stability, the only capable architects of global structures of governance. This work has argued that the fractured regional connectivity in the “volatile regions” covered here played a part in enabling great-power rivalries and, in some cases, contributed to their devastating outcomes. This work supports Paul’s (2018) argument that the international community takes it for granted that great powers have an inherent responsibility and capacity to maintain the world order. My argument here, rejecting that widely shared assumption, points instead to regionally wired resilient connectivity—societal, grassroots, bridging, and institutionally dense—as a pathway to participatory, rather than predatory, structures of regional governance. This work has shown that resilience in the regional connectivity on the imperial peripheries mitigated communal violence and political conflict then, and that it can do so again. Moreover, the contours of regional connectivity have mapped onto contemporary armed conflicts, shaping their severity and responsiveness to shifting power polarity since the Cold War ended. While the great-power rivalry between Russia and Turkey, as well as that between Russia and the European Union, continues unabated, the rise of China raises new promises and perils for continental connectivity.

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Can China remake and pacify some of the fractured regions reviewed here? Calder (2019) has argued that Eurasia is destined for greater connectivity, partly by China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Indeed, some scholars have long argued that international systems always require a single stabilizer, a hegemon, or at least a balancing actor between two great powers (Gilpin 1981). Calder’s work on the increased connectivity in Eurasia sketches several new potential scenarios in an age of hegemonic retrenchment by the United States. Calder (2019) points to growing connectivity on the continent as a factor that could enable diverse stakeholders in a more “decentralized, region-centric pattern centered on Eurasia, given coherence not by abstract rules enforced by a hegemon but by the distribution of material benefits through a less centralized leadership system” (212). The strengthening relations and connectivity between China and Europe are central to the rise of Eurasia as a supercontinent in world politics. Calder’s point that growing connectivity across the continent will serve as an engine for China’s rise is heartening. This work concurs with Calder’s view of the strategic importance of connectivity in Eurasia in reshaping the world order moving forward. But I focus here specifically on the regional, or (in Calder’s terminology) subsystemic expressions and manifestations of connectivity. The neighborhood effect, developed in and applied to contemporary conflict regions, highlights the institutional and societal ties between states and communities and reveals regionally expressed social capital as essential to regional resiliency on the continent. The neighborhood effect discussed in this book is indeed, at its core, connectivity. But it is more than physical infrastructure and regional institutions. It is the capacity and political will among states to engage in their immediate neighborhoods, drivers that are often deeply local and grassroots. China can become the new patron pursued by smaller states. But it can also stimulate regional connectivity without hijacking the existing potential of regional engagement, as its imperial predecessors on the continent have done. These choices will determine the future of power transitions in world politics on the continent. Peaceful power transitions are contingent on the ability of smaller states to engage in their immediate neighborhoods in ways that are strategic, institutionalized, and deeply regional. By offering a comparative historical analysis of the regional fabric of states and communities, this work has probed fluctuations in connectivity between communities. It has investigated the ways in which such connectivity has been harnessed, sabotaged, or outright attacked by greater powers



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and more local stakeholders in regional fracture. It has concluded that whether in its imperial or Westphalian formations, regional connectivity that is institutionally dense and balanced offers the best chance for regional resiliency and the peaceful management of regional security. Along with roads and bridges, it is the regional fabric on the peripheries of empires, both old and new, that will make Eurasian connectivity peaceful, prosperous, and progressive. In sum, the neighborhood effect is a potentiality that is hidden in plain sight, yet can be effortlessly revealed through the eyes of a child. As my then-eight-year-old daughter, Helen Adourian, explained, the neighborhood effect is “when one person in one house is being kind to their neighbor. That neighbor is then kind to her neighbor. This then spreads to the whole town, and the whole city, and the country, and the whole world.” Helen’s clear, simple insight rests on the very human value of interdependency and the deeply local nature of connectivity and reciprocity, which is the note on which I will close this book.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1. Ohanyan, Anna, 2020, “Russia and the West Still Need Each Other in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 24. https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/11/24/russia-and-west-still-need-each-other-in-nagorno-karabakh-pub-83295. 2. I am grateful and deeply appreciative to one of the anonymous reviewers of this book for nudging me in this direction. 3. See the datasets documenting organized violence and peacemaking at the website of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program: https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/charts/.

Chapter 2 1. different version of this chapter was published as “Regional Fracture and Its Intractability in World Politics: The Case of the Late Ottoman Empire,” in Nationalities Papers, First View, September 21, 2021. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for allowing me to use a version of that article in this book. This trade was recently halted by Armenia, in the aftermath of the Turkish-backed Azerbaijani offensive against the Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. 2. For example, the Balkan periphery of the Habsburg empire can be compared with central European territories in the same empire, or the Baltic periphery of the Russian empire can be compared to the Transcaucasian periphery of the same empire. Since empires engaged in differential contracting with their peripheries, these peripheries then emerge as organizationally distinct, capable of their own agency relative to patterns of war and peace after the imperial collapse.

Chapter 3 1. Anna Ohanyan, 2020, “1973’s Yom Kippur War Holds the Key to Solving ArmeniaAzerbaijan Conflict,” The National Interest, October 6. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/

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buzz/1973%E2%80%99s-yom-kippur-war-holds-key-solving-armenia-azerbaijan-conflict-170232. 2. The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, 2020, “At Baku Victory Parade, Aliyev Calls Yerevan, Zangezur, Sevan Historical Azerbaijani Lands, Erdogan Praises Enver Pasha,” The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, December 11. https://mirrorspectator.com/2020/12/11/at-bakuvictory-parade-with-erdogan-aliyev-calls-yerevan-zangezur-sevan-historical-azerbaijani-landserdogan-praises-enver-pasha/.

Chapter 4 1. It was not until the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, in the fall of 2020, that the Turkish factor connected with the conflict cluster in the South Caucasus, in Russia’s backyard. I return to this discussion in chapter 7. 2. I borrow this formulation from Göçek 2015.

Chapter 5 1. Unlike the Ottoman empire, the Russian empire reinvented itself, with a new model of multiethnicity, albeit a pro forma one: the Soviet Union was the new avatar that allowed the Russian empire to have its cake and eat it, too, as it successfully centralized its power over a vast territory while containing bottom-up political participation along the way. 2. This is not to trivialize the differences in imperial governance styles between various tsars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, Nicholas I (1825–55) and Alexander III (1881–94) are generally viewed by historians as reactionary, conservative, and authoritarian, while Alexander I (1801–25) and Alexander II (1855–81) are seen as more open-minded and experimental in their nationalities policies and imperial strategies. I credit Stephen Riegg for this clarification. 3. I use the spelling “Kyiv,” which is closer to the Ukrainian spelling, rather than “Kiev.” Ukraine has been campaigning for the international community to use the spelling “Kyiv” since 1990. 4. Until 1936, the city was known as Tiflis, but I use “Tbilisi” throughout this manuscript and across various historical periods, to avoid confusion. I do use the name “Tiflis Duma” to indicate the political institution, however. 5. As I describe in my earlier work (Ohanyan 2018c), Hovhannes Tumanyan, an Armenian writer and peace activist in imperial Russia, was twice imprisoned by the tsarist government for his efforts to mediate interethnic clashes between Armenians and Georgians. 6. I credit Stephen Riegg for this clarification.

Chapter 6 1. I am thankful to Laurence Broers for this important clarification. 2. Joshua Kocera, 2021,“What’s the Future of Azerbaijan’s ‘Ancestral Lands’ in Armenia?” Eurasianet, July 16. https://eurasianet.org/whats-the-future-of-azerbaijans-ancestral-lands-in-armenia 3. Joshua Kucera, 2021, “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Post-War Report,” Eurasianet, April 23. https://eurasianet.org/prisoners-of-the-caucasus-post-war-report

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4. USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies, 2021, “Aliyev Exhanges Five More Armenians, May Still Hold Hundreds, USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies, February 9. https://armenian.usc.edu/aliyev-releases-five-more-armenians-may-still-hold-hundreds/ 5. Laurence Broers, 2021, “New Armenian-Azerbaijani Border Crisis Unfolds,” Chatham House, May 27. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/05/new-armenian-azerbaijani-border-crisis-unfolds 6. Joshua Kucera, 2021, “Cross-Border Shooting Escalates as Azerbaijan Seeks Formal Agreement with Armenia, Eurasianet, July 23. https://eurasianet.org/ cross-border-shooting-escalates-as-azerbaijan-seeks-formal-agreement-with-armenia 7. Council on Foreign Relations, Global Conflict Tracker, “Conflict between Turkey and Armed Kurdish Groups” (frequently updated). https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/ conflict/conflict-between-turkey-and-armed-kurdish-groups 8. Council on Foreign Relations, Global Conflict Tracker, “Conflict between Turkey and Armed Kurdish Groups” (frequently updated). https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/ conflict/conflict-between-turkey-and-armed-kurdish-groups 9. Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Country Page, Turkey. https://ucdp.uu.se/country/640 10. BBC News, 2013, “Iraqi Kurds Mark 25 years Since Halabja Gas Attack,” BBC News Middle East, March 16. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-21814734 11. Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Conflict Page, Ukraine. https://ucdp.uu.se/ conflict/13219 12. Natalia Mirimanova, 2018, “Donbas Businessmen: From Victims to Peace-Builders?” Carnegie Moscow Center, April 4th. https://carnegie.ru/commentary/75980 13. International Crisis Group, 2020, “Peace in Ukraine (II): A New Approach to Disengagement,” International Crisis Group, Report No. 260, August 3. https://www.crisisgroup.org/ europe-central-asia/eastern-europe/ukraine/260-peace-ukraine-ii-new-approach-disengagement 14. Katherine Quinn-Judge, 2020, “Peace in Ukraine: A Promise Yet to Be Kept,” International Crisis Group, April 17. https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/eastern-europe/ ukraine/peace-ukraine-promise-yet-be-kept 15. AP News, 2020, “EU Prolongs Sanctions against Russia over Ukraine Conflict,” AP News, JUNE 29. https://apnews.com/6ce503c1a1df7e5a2ca25d0cd5ca5db5 16. The Economist, 2020, “Turkey Is Wielding Influence All Over the Arab World,” The Economist Middle East & Africa, August 1st. https://www.economist.com/ middle-east-and-africa/2020/08/01/turkey-is-wielding-influence-all-over-the-arab-world 17. The Balkan wars prior to World War I were largely intra-imperial affairs for the Ottomans, driven by national independence movements rather than an inter-imperial clash.

Chapter 7 1. OECD, Better Policies for Better Lives, “Regional Trade Agreements Are Evolving— Why Does It Matter?” https://www.oecd.org/trade/topics/regional-trade-agreements/ 2. From the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall” (Frost 1914). 3. Anna Ohanyan, 2021, “Peace and Reform: Europe’s Role in the Post-Karabakh War Caucasus,” Carnegie Moscow Center, March 3. https://carnegie.ru/commentary/83987 4. Anna Ohanyan, 2020, “1973’s Yom Kippur War Holds the Key to Solving

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Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict,” The National Interest, October 6. https://nationalinterest. org/blog/buzz/1973%E2%80%99s-yom-kippur-war-holds-key-solving-armenia-azerbaijanconflict-170232 5. Anna Ohanyan, 2020, “Belarusians Can Learn a Lot from Armenia’s Velvet Revolution,” Aljazeera, August 21. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/8/21/ belarusians-can-learn-a-lot-from-armenias-velvet-revolution 6. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, 2020. “Putin Tells Lukashenka Russia Ready ‘to Provide Help’ Militarily If Needed,” RadioFreeEurope RadioLiberty, August 16. https://www. rferl.org/a/putin-tells-lukashenka-russia-ready-to-assist-with-military-aid/30786573.html 7. Stephen Sackur, 2019, “Interview of Armenia’s Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan,” BBC HardTalk, October 25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJTGRiBCRkw

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Index

Abdülhamid II, 117, 118, 131, 140, 222 Abkhazia, 184; conflict with Georgia, 191, 198–201 Abkhazians, 153 Adana massacres, 130, 143 Africa, 74; colonial governance in, 25–26, 71–72; conflict in 24–25, 71, 79; subnational institutions in, 85–86 Agency, 15, 61, 131; of conflict actors, 76–77; Soviet ethnofederalism and, 75–76 Agrarian policies/reforms, 106, 111; Armenian community and, 142–44; in Bosnian provinces, 112–13; in Ottoman empire, 132–33, 140–41 Agricultural capitalism, 140 Albanians: in Kosovo, 213 Alexander I, 157, 163, 254n2 Aliyev, Ilham, 195, 196, 197, 241 Alliance politics, 65, 243, 247–48; transcending, 84–86 Alliances, alliance systems, 1, 41, 88, 213, 243; formation of, 69, 244–46 All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 182, 183 Alpine Austria: mercantilism in, 99, 100 Amiras, 120 Anatolia, 71, 79. See also Eastern Anatolia

Arabs, 120 ARF. See Armenian Revolutionary Federation Armed conflict, 5, 6, 11, 26, 56, 69, 190, 233, 237; in Africa, 24–25; in Eastern Ukraine, 207–12; ethnic and subnational institutions, 85–86; imperialism and, 32, 74–75; in Nagorno-Karabakh, 77–78, 192–97; Russia, 80–81; in South Caucasus and Balkans, 57–58, 77; Soviet ethnofederalism and, 34, 75–76; transcending, 86–87. See also Conflict; Wars, warfare Armenia, 22, 42, 155, 176, 180, 191; geopolitical position of, 247–48; and Nagorno-Karabakh war, 77–78, 192–97, 253n1; and Russia, 9, 67, 241 Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), 143, 178–79 Armenians, 5, 10, 47, 61, 71, 78, 120, 132, 138, 141, 154, 160, 162, 174, 184, 220, 239; agrarian reforms, 142–44; and Azerbaijanis, 173–75; genocide of, 77, 78, 116, 117, 130, 137, 145, 185, 186, 249; in Ottoman empire, 116, 119, 125, 135–36; revolutionary movements by, 20, 178–79; Tanzimat reforms, 134–35; and TDFR, 177, 183

278 Index

Armeno-Tatar war, 184 Assad, Bashar al-, 244 Associations, 29, 110; Habsburg empire, 92–93. See also confessional groups/ organizations Assyrians, 116 Austria, 89, 91, 96, 97, 136; linguistic borderlands, 98–99 Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867), 91, 92 Austro-Russian agreement (1897), 107 Austro-Turkish Convention (1870), 103 Authoritarianism, 40, 62, 205, 231, 232, 239, 241; in Azerbaijan, 180, 195; civil society and, 19–20; Ottoman empire, 125, 131 Autocracies: power and, 240–41 Autonomy, 50, 90, 92, 94, 96, 107, 161; in Ottoman empire, 115–16, 119 Azerbaijan, 22, 58, 155, 177, 240, 241; and Nagorno-Karabakh, 67, 77–78, 192–97, 253n1 Azerbaijani Popular Front, 194 Azerbaijanis, 61, 77, 154–55, 173, 178; in Baku, 174–75; in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, 192–97, 220–21; and TDFR, 180, 183 Azeris, 184 Baku, 155, 178, 181, 197; demonstrations in, 193, 194; social stratification, 174–75 Balkanization, 214–15 Balkans, 75, 107, 111, 136, 243, 253n2, 255n17; connectivity, 101–2; and Ottoman empire, 100–101, 147; refugees from, 132, 135; regional conflict in, 57–58, 64, 71, 145, 191, 212–16 Baltics, 5, 8, 11, 58, 70, 151, 159, 188, 223, 224; representative institutions, 166–67; Russian empire and, 153, 173, 217–18; Russification of, 163–64, 165–66 Bargaining, state and nonstate, 41–42

Basayev, Shamil, 200 Beks, 106, 160, 162 Belarus, 241, 243–44 Belarusians, 153, 157, 158, 161, 163, 164, 227 Belgium, 25 Belt and Road Initiative, 21–22, 82, 250 Berlin, treaty of, 117–18, 135 Bohemia, 92; mercantilism in, 99, 100 Bohemian Diet, 96 Bolivia-Paraguay war, 26 Bolsheviks, Bolshevism, 166, 177, 179–80; in Transcaucasia, 181–83, 187 Borders, borderlands, 1, 15, 70, 71, 137, 152; imperial, 43, 68, 82, 83; linguistic, 98–99. See also imperial peripheries Bosnia, Bosnian province, 5, 89–91, 191, 213, 214, 215, 224; Burián de Rajeczi’s rule, 108–12; confessional groups in, 112–13; connectivity, 101–2; and Habsburg empire, 10, 44, 102–3, 190; Kállay’s rule, 105–8; and Ottoman Empire, 100–101, 118; regional fracture, 225–26; subaltern status of, 104–5 Bosnian Diet, 90, 109, 110, 112, 113 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 185 Brexit, 30 Budapest, 110 Bukhovina, 96 Bulgaria, 100, 118 Burián de Rajeczi’s rule, István: Bosnian rule, 108–12, 113, 114 Byzantine empire, 154 Capitulation system, 119 Catherine II (the Great), 151, 153, 157 Catholics, Catholic church, 101, 102, 106, 163, 170, 227. See also Christian communities Caucasian Muslims. See Azerbaijanis Caucasus, 78, 79, 136; centralized governance, 160–62; Muslims in, 154–55, 158; refugees from, 132, 135; Russian empire and, 153–54



Center-periphery relations, 14, 50, 126 Central America, 24, 26 Central Asia, 38, 70, 162; Russian empire in, 150, 156, 176 Central Europe, 224–25 Centralization: autocratic power, 240–41; Russian Empire, 150–51, 154, 156–57 Chechens, 153, 200 Cherkess, 200 China, 6, 87, 156, 246; Belt and Road Initiative, 21–22, 82; continental connectivity, 249–50; Eurasian hegemony, 65, 239 Chinese Malays, 72 Christian communities, 57, 136, 176; in Bosnia, 100, 102, 108; in Eastern Anatolia, 10, 43,130, 132, 133, 138–39, 223; in Ottoman empire, 43, 124; Tanzimat reforms, 134–35 Circassians, 135, 153 Citizenship: in Habsburg empire, 96 Civic diversity: in Ottoman Empire, 223–24 Civic institutions, 2, 44, 45, 46, 47, 105; connectivity, 51–52 Civic militiamen, 29 Civic traditions: in Ukraine, 170–71 Civilizing mission: in Habsburg empire, 104 Civil society, 20, 28–29, 78 Civil wars, 26, 73, 75 Class divisions, 28, 165 Cold War, 220, 236, 238; end of, 24, 25, 57, 58, 188; Turkey in, 203–4 Collective Security Treaty Organization, 244 Colonialism, 24, 116; in Africa, 25–26; British and French, 71–72; extractive economies, 69–70; in Malaysia, 72–73 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) party, 134, 143, 144, 145 Communities, 47, 96, 211; ethnic, 80, 138; institutional obliteration of, 78–79

Index 279

Community of Democratic Choice group, 211 Confessional groups/organizations, 20, 102; Bosnia, 101, 106, 107–8, 110, 113; Eastern Anatolia, 132, 139; Ottoman empire, 115–16 Conflict, 3, 188, 198, 243; ArmenianAzerbaijani, 174–75; South Caucasus and Balkans, 57–58, 77; state-based, 24–25; Transcaucasia, 183–84. See also armed conflict Conflict actors: agency of, 76–77 Conflict theory, 4, 188–89 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 243 Congress of Berlin (1878), 101 Congruence method: comparative historical analysis, 54–55 Connectivity, 7, 89, 206, 250–51; in Bosnian province, 101–2, 108; civic, 51–53; in Habsburg empire, 93–94, 97; in Ottoman empire, 145–46; regional, 2–4, 6, 44–45, 85, 86, 138, 230–31; in Transcaucasia, 178, 196. See also Regional connectivity; Social connectivity Constant-cause approaches, 35, 36 Constituent Assembly (Transcaucasia), 183 Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) party, 183 Constitutionalism, 112, 131 Constitutions: in Habsburg empire, 92 Contemporary theory development, 61 Controlled comparison: dependent and independent variables, 58–59; interviews in, 54–55 Cooperatives: Habsburg village, 92 Core-periphery order, 7, 8–9; in regional fracture, 35–36 Cossacks, 156, 168 COVID-19 pandemic, 30; and deglobalization, 5–6; and global connectivity, 230, 232 Crimea: conflicts in, 191, 207; Russian annexation of, 8, 58, 153, 208, 209

280 Index

Crimean Tatars, 192 Crimean war, 157 Croatia, 89, 96, 101, 102, 213, 214 Croation Daily (newspaper), 110 Croats, 96, 101; in Bosnia, 106, 114 Cross-border influences, 224 Cross-confessional connections: in Bosnia, 107–8, 113 CUP. See Committee of Union and Progress party Czech Republic, 89 Daghestanis, 174 Danube province, 123 Dashnaktsutiun, 183 Dayton Peace Accords, 213 Decolonization, 26, 70 Democracy, democratization, 237, 241, 242; in South America, 26–27; support for, 239–40 Demographic engineering: in Ottoman empire, 71, 222–23 Demonstrations: in Nagorno-Karabakh, 193–94; in Tbilisi, 199 Developmental states, 49–50 Divide-and-conquer tactics/policies, 35–36, 37, 72, 120, 138 Divisions of labor: colonial, 72–73; millet system, 132 Dnieper River: geopolitics of, 169, 170 Donbas, 207; conflict in, 80, 169, 190, 208, 209, 210, 211 Donetsk, 58, 208 Duality, 115, 191 Dual Monarchy, 91, 92–93, 94, 95 Duma, 162 Eastern Anatolia, 5, 9, 10, 22, 117, 190, 217, 218, 222, 223, 249; agrarian reforms, 140–41, 142–44; economy of, 132–33; interethnic polarization in, 139–40; Kurdish communities in, 133–34, 221; millet system in, 122, 132; Ottoman

governance in, 44, 116, 146; regional fracture in, 137, 138–39, 147–48, 203–4, 205; scholarship on, 42–43; as shatter zone, 129–30; Tanzimat reforms and, 130–31, 134–35 East Slavs, 165, 171 Economies, 1, 8, 41, 67, 76, 89, 107; colonial and imperial, 69–70; Eastern Anatolian, 132–33; of Habsburg empire, 99–100; of Ottoman empire, 119, 123, 132; of Russian empire, 164–65; Ukrainian, 170, 172–73 Elites, 9, 23, 28, 29, 52, 77, 90, 172, 215, 227; German, 165, 173, 218; Ottoman, 115, 120, 127–28; in Russian empire, 158, 164, 171; in Transcaucasia, 181, 221 Ems Decree, 171 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 78, 197, 205, 106, 207, 223 Estates: German, 165, 166 Estonia, 70, 153, 167 Estonians, 153, 159, 161, 165, 166, 173, 218; and Orthodox Christianity, 163–64 Ethnic cleansing, 57, 71, 158, 200; Ottoman empire, 116, 130, 137–38, 222 Ethnic conflicts, 75, 77; post-independence, 73–74; studies of, 63–64 Ethnicity, 64, 73, 79. See also ethno-national groups/organizations; ethnoreligious communities Ethno-corporatism, 222 Ethnofederalism, 192; Soviet, 75, 79–80, 155, 197, 228; Yugoslav, 214–16 Ethno-national groups/organizations, 68, 89, 151; in Caucasus, 153–54 Ethno-religious communities, 2, 14, 20, 36, 119, 140, 173, 222; in Bosnia, 108, 110, 226; divide-and-conquer politics and, 138–39; in Ottoman empire, 118, 122, 127–28, 132; in Russian Empire, 158, 159–60, 162–63; and Tanzimat reforms, 124, 134 Eurasia, 3, 5, 8, 12, 29, 74, 238, 239; con-



nectivity, 249–50; great-power rivalries, 246–47, 248–49; security studies, 63–69; statehood in, 6–7 Eurasian Economic Union, 82, 231 Euro-centricity: and global security studies, 63–64 European Union (EU), 1, 7, 30, 65, 82, 207 Federalism: Transcaucasia, 179–80; Yugoslavia, 214–16 Finland, 153, 159, 165 First Republic (Georgia), 199 Foreign policies, 8, 33, 66, 150; neo-imperial, 237, 239 Fortress policies, 244; free trade and, 234–35; global focus of, 235–36 France, 136, 182, 212; colonial rule, 25–26, 27, 71–72 Franz Joseph (emperor), 91 Franz Ferdinand (archduke): assassination of, 101, 112 Free trade: and fortress policies, 234–36 Gajret, 110 Galicia, 92, 96, 169, 170, 172, 210, 219, 224 Galicians, 93, 170 Gamsakhurdia, Zviad, 199, 201 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 7 Genocide, 57, 71, 213; Armenian, 78, 116, 117, 119, 145, 185, 186; Ottoman empire, 116, 130, 137–38, 140, 147, 223, 249; Rwanda, 46, 243 Geography: transcending, 82–84 Geopolitics, 3, 6, 23, 65, 76, 211, 245–46; of colonial Africa, 25–26; embeddedness, 216–17 Georgia, 58, 67, 76, 155, 177, 180, 185, 196, 221, 239, 243, 244; Abkhaz conflict, 198–201; independence movement, 167, 197–98 Georgian National Guard, 199 Georgians, 154, 160, 174, 178, 185; in

Index 281

Abkhazia, 200, 201; and TDFR, 177, 183 Georgia-Russia war (2008), 198 Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Moldova (GUAM) grouping, 211 German empire, 217 Germans, 164; in Baltics, 159, 166, 167; nobles, 165, 173, 218, 219; in PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, 153, 162 Germany, 136, 161, 167, 185, 187, 212; colonial governance, 25, 27 Glasnost, 34, 75 Globalization, 64, 232 Global regions: Post-World War II, 65–66 Gorbachev, Mikhail: glasnost and perestroika reforms, 34, 75, 79 Governance, 51, 73, 123, 236, 245n2; in Caucasus, 160–62; in colonial Africa, 25–26; in Bosnian province, 102–3, 104, 108–9, 111–12; in Eastern Anatolia, 146, 147–48; in Habsburg empire, 94, 95; imperial, 4, 5, 53; in Ottoman empire, 115, 116, 127, 128–29; predatory, 52, 113; regional, 21, 30, 128–29; in Transcaucasia, 175–76 Grassroots initiatives, 18, 20, 28–29, 219 Great Britain, 27, 136, 156, 218; African colonial governance, 25, 71–72; Malaysian colonialism, 72–73; and Transcaucasia, 182, 187 Great-power rivalries, 80, 168; Eurasia, 246– 47, 248–49; Russian-Ottoman, 84–85 Great Terror, 155 Greek Orthodox (Rum), 119 Greeks, 116 Grounded theory development approach, 54–56 GUAM grouping. See Georgia-UkraineAzarbaijan-Moldova grouping Gubernias (province systems), 153, 160 Gulf war, 202, 205 Habsburg empire, 4, 5, 11, 20, 89, 104,

282 Index

105, 112, 136, 169, 217; Balkan region, 215, 253n2; and Bosnian province, 10, 44, 101, 102, 190, 224, 225–26; collapse of, 57, 84; connectivity, 93–94; geopolitical tensions in, 110–11; institutional politics, 94–95; linguistic politics, 98–99; mercantilist economics, 99–100; nationalism, 95–96; and Ottoman empire, 102, 146; politics, 91–92; peripheries, 90–91; and Ukraine, 168, 170; in World War I, 96–97 Habsburg thesis, 170, 209–10 Hamidiye cavalry, 141–42, 144 HDP. See People’s Democratic Republic hegemony: regional, 2, 41, 65, 230–31, 239, 240 Herzegovina, 89–90, 118, 191, 213, 224 Hetmanate, 151 High Commission: in Caucasus, 160 Hindu-Muslim communities, 46 Hub-and-spoke model, 118 Hungary, 89, 91, 92, 96; geopolitical tensions, 110–11 Identity, 15, 72, 171; Bosnian, 105–6 Imperialism, 7, 8, 10, 12, 24, 34, 56; armed conflict and, 32, 74–75; economies, 69–70; regionalism, 13–14, 15–16; regional studies, 14–15 Imperial legacies, 3, 6, 57, 168, 190–91 Imperial peripheries, 3, 5, 20–21, 31–32, 55, 62, 73, 190–91; connectivity, 49–53; divide-and-conquer tactics, 35–36; Habsburg empire, 90–91, 94–95; Ottoman empire, 129–30; pressures on, 43–44; regional connectivity, 4, 48–49, 153, 232–33; regional social capital, 47–48 Independence, 167, 183, 188, 198, 213 Independence coalition: Hungary, 110 Independence movements, 75, 167; Georgian, 197–98

Industrialization, 28, 157, 172, 178 Inference: descriptive and causal, 55–56 Ingushetians, 153 Institutionalism, 65 Institutions, 7, 37; ethnic and subnational, 85–86; obliteration of, 78–79 Insurgency: Kurdish-led, 202, 204–5 International relations theory, 65 International system, 62 Iran, 196 Iranian empire, 20, 47, 145, 154, 155 Iranian Social Democratic Party, 178 Iranians, 178 Iran-Iraq war, 202, 205 Iraq: Kurds in, 197, 202, 205–6 ISIS, 202 Islam, 119. See also Muslims Italians, 137 Italy, 25 Jews, 119, 171; in Ukraine, 171–72, 209, 227 JNA. See Yugoslav national army Joseph II (emperor), 94 Kabardinians, 153 Kállay, Benjamin von: Bosnian rule by, 105–8, 113 Karabakh, 194, 195. See also Nagorno-Karabakh Kasparov, Gary, 194 Kazakhs, 156 Kazakhstan, 70 Kemal Atatürk, Mustafa, 203 Kemalism, 203–4, 221, 223, 224, 228 Kirovabad, 193 Kitovani, Tengiz, 199 Kosovo, 191, 213 Kosovo Liberation Army, 213 KRG. See Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq Kurdish/Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), 58, 202, 206; insurgency of, 203, 204–5 Kurdistan: predatory fracture in, 221–24



Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, 206 Kurds, Kurdish tribes, 10, 71, 138, 140, 143, 146, 197, 222; conflicts, 190, 223–24, 228; Hamidiye cavalry, 141–42; Ottoman empire and, 43, 117, 130, 136, 144–45; power structure, 133–34; stresses on, 132–33; and Turkey, 5, 11, 58, 191, 192, 201–7, 228 Kyiv, 172, 207, 254n3 Land; landownership, 160; Armenian, 143–44; in Eastern Anatolia, 140–41; in Russian empire, 164, 165 Land reform: in Bosnia, 106 Language/language practices, 98, 111, 171; in Austria, 98–99 Latin America, 8, 24; neocolonialism, 27–28; peace and conflict in, 26–27; political participation in, 28–29 Latvia, 70, 167 Latvians, 153, 159, 161, 165, 166, 173, 218; and Orthodox Christianity, 163–64 Lenin, 181, 219 Lithuania, 167, 168 Lithuanian National Council (Taryba), 167 Lithuanians, 161, 163, 164, 167, 227 “Little Russians” project, 171, 172, 210 Livonia, 153 Luhansk, 58, 208 Lukashenko, Alexander, 243–44 Mahmud II, 127 Maidan movement, 207, 210 Malaysia: British colonialism in, 72–73 March Days (1918), 174–75, 184 Marginalization, 166, 200 Maria Theresa (empress), 91 Markets: and Ottoman economy, 132 Mashriq, 116 Massacres, 100, 135, 184; Adana, 130, 143 Mediation: direct, 184 Meliks, 160

Index 283

Mensheviks, 177, 182, 183, 185, 199 Mercantilism: in Habsburg empire, 99–100 Mercenaries: in Abkhaz-Georgian conflict, 200 Mexico, 29 Middle class, 166, 174 Middle East, 5, 15, 22, 68, 71, 223, 240, 246; Kurds in, 205, 206, 228; nationstate system in, 201–2 Military, 8, 67, 91, 112; Ottoman empire, 119, 124; state-building and, 17–18 Militias, 208; Kurdish, 140, 141 Mill, Stuart, 58 Millet system, 105, 116–17, 132, 139, 146; political stratification of, 119–20; structure of, 118–19; taxation in, 125–29; tolerance in, 121–22 Minority language schools, 98 Minsk Agreement, 212 Minsk Group, 195, 196 Mithat Pasha, 123 Mnatsakanyan, Zohrab, 247–48 Modernity; modernization, 93, 157; in Bosnia, 105, 113; in Habsburg empire, 95, 104; in Ottoman empire, 123, 134, 145–46; in Russian empire, 150–51 Moldova, 58 Montenegro, 100, 118 Moravia, 96 Mostar, 107 Multinationalism, 104; in Kállay administration, 106–7 Musavat (newspaper), 110 Musavat party, 183, 186 Muslims, 57, 71, 134, 160; in Bosnia, 101, 102, 103, 106, 108, 114, 225–26; in Caucasus, 154–55, 158; in Eastern Anatolia, 132, 133, 144; in Ottoman empire, 115–16, 119, 120, 124, 136; in South Caucasus, 137, 174; Transcaucasian, 156, 176, 184 Muslim Socialist Bloc, 183

284 Index

Muslims of Russia party, 183 myth-symbolic complexes, 76, 77 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Organization Nagorno-Karabakh, 22, 79, 184, 191, 220–21, 253n1; conflict, 192–97, 243; war in, 67, 75, 77–78, 241, 254n1 Nakhichevan, 193, 196 Napredak, 110 Nationalism, 73, 84, 145, 171, 214; civic, 28, 29, 46; in Georgia, 200, 201; in Latin America, 28, 29; Russian, 157–58; Turkish, 144, 203 Nationalist movements, 43, 49, 90, 124, 165, 166, 198; Bosnia, 106, 113; in Habsburg empire, 91–92, 95–96; in Nagorno-Karabakh, 193–94; in Soviet Union, 75–76; in Transcaucasia, 176–77, 181 Nationalities, 166; in Habsburg empire, 89, 94–95, 97, 99 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Neocolonialism, 30; in Latin America, 27–28 “New” regionalism, 19–20 Nicholas I, 157, 163, 254n2 1908 revolution, 143 Nobility: German, 165, 173, 218, 219; Polish, 153, 157, 168, 227 North Africa, 22, 240 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 7 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 7 North Caucasus, 200 Northern Ireland, 46 Northwest Caucasus, 135, 176 November uprising (1830), 163 Nystad, Treaty of, 152–53 Oil sector: in Transcaucasus, 178

Organic Statute (1832), 157 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 212 Organized crime: in Russia, 46 Orthodox Christianity/Christians, 101, 102; and Russification, 163–64; in Ukraine, 171, 227 OSCE. See Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Osobyi Zakavkazski Komitet (Ozakom), 182 Ossetians, 153 Ottoman empire, 4, 5, 11, 13, 18, 34, 71, 90, 102, 115, 168, 215, 217, 218, 249; Armenians in, 9, 20, 77, 78, 135–36, 185; and Bosnia, 100–101, 103, 111, 112, 225–26; collapse of, 57, 84–85; connectivity, 145–46; demographic engineering, 222–23; and Eastern Anatolia, 42–43, 44, 129–30, 190; elites in, 127–28; ethnic cleansing and genocide, 57, 137–38; interethnic polarization in, 139–40, 144–45; Kurds in, 10, 133–34, 201–2, 203, 223–24; millet system, 105, 116–17, 118–22; politics of, 146–47; regional fracture, 131–33, 138–39; regional governance, 128–29; revolutionary movements, 178–79; and Russian empires, 136–37, 153, 154, 157; Tanzimat reforms, 122–25, 134–35; taxation, 125–29; and TDFR, 177, 184; and Transcaucasia, 155, 177, 182, 184, 186, 220 Ozakom. See Osobyi Zakavkazski Komitet Palestine, 120 Pan-Islamism, 184–85 Pan-Turkism, 155, 184–85 Paskevich, I. F., 163 Path dependencies, 14, 36, 37 Peacebuilding, 18, 86, 233, 236, 241; liberal, 237–38; regional support, 242–43 Peacekeeping, 67, 196, 198



Peasants, 134, 141, 153, 166; in Bosnia, 100, 103, 106; in Russian empire, 161, 164; in Ukraine, 168, 227 People’s Democratic Party (HDP), 206, 207 Perestroika reforms, 34, 75 Peru-Ecuador war, 26 Peter the Great, 152–53 PKK. See Kurdish/Kurdistan Workers’ party, 58, 202 Pogroms: in Nagorno-Karabakh, 193, 194 Poland, 89, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 168, 170 Poland, Kingdom of, 157, 163 Poles: aristocracy, 153, 157, 168; nationalism, 92, 171; in Ukraine, 171, 172, 209, 226–27 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 92, 153, 162, 168–69 Polish question, 151 Political parties, 110, 204; Kurdish, 206–7; Transcaucasia, 179–82, 186 Politics, 15, 62, 98, 105; Armenian, 142–43; Bosnian, 101, 107; confessional groups, 102, 112–13; grassroots participation, 28–29; Habsburg imperial, 91–92. 97; hierarchy in, 66–67; Ottoman empire, 137–38, 146–47; reform, 135–36; regional, 12–13, 29; state-centric, 16–17; symbolic, 76, 77; of Tanzimat reforms, 134–35; TDFR, 180–86; Transcaucasia, 177–79, 182–83; Turkish, 204–5; World, 1, 11–12, 16, 21, 57, 61 Portugal, 25 Potiorek, Oskar, 112, 114 Power, 2, 50, 91; in Kurdish society, 133–34; political agency of, 61–62; regional, 21, 22, 23–24 Property rights, 69, 70, 96 Prosvjeta, 110 Protectionism, 231 Protests: Maidan, 207; NagornoKarabakh, 193–94 Putin, Vladimir, 33, 198, 201, 210, 212, 244, 245

Index 285

Reform Edict (1876), 124 Reform politics: in Ottoman empire, 135–36 Refugees, 100, 176, 191; in Eastern Anatolia, 132–33, 135; Kurdish, 202, 205–6; Nagorno-Karabakh, 193, 194 Regional connectivity, 2–3, 6, 11, 44, 59, 102, 133, 161, 168, 227–29, 236, 247; Bosnian province, 103–4, 107–8; China, 249–50; and civic institutions, 51–52; imperial peripheries, 4, 48–53, 232–33; and regional fracture, 86–87; in Russian empire, 149–50, 153; Soviet patterns of, 81–82 Regional fracture, 26, 59–60, 83, 84, 85, 147, 161, 165, 233, 247; in Bosnia, 106, 108, 113, 225–26; causes and effects of, 33–35, 36–37; core-periphery relations, 35–36; dimensions in, 40–42; in Eastern Anatolia, 131–32, 137, 203–4, 205; institutional planes, 38–39; in Kurdistan, 221–24; as political practice, 37–38, 138–39; Russia and, 67–68, 81, 155–56; South Caucasus, 218–21; structural, 132–33; in Transcaucasia, 176, 184–85; in Ukraine, 168, 226–27 Regional fracture theory, 4–5, 9, 32, 33, 88; and regional connectivity, 86–87 Regionalism, 15–16, 175, 235; comparative, 10, 13–14; connectivity and, 230–31; developmental, 231–32; “new,” 19–20; politics, 12–13 Regional resilience, 38, 39–40, 45, 113, 167; of Habsburg empire, 97, 99 Regions-before-states policy paradigms, 2, 232–33, 238 Religion, 103; in Bosnia, 101, 105, 108. See also Catholics, Catholic church; Muslims; Orthodox Christianity Representative institutions: in Baltics, 166–67 Resilience, 37; regional, 3, 22, 23, 30, 38, 39–40, 42, 45

286 Index

Revolutionary movements: in Transcaucasus, 177–79 Roman empire, 38, 41 Romania, 89, 118 Romanov system, 159 Rural banks: Habsburg, 92 Russia, 8, 30, 37, 46, 65, 77, 87, 106, 122, 135, 136, 145, 199, 201, 245; armed conflicts, 80–81; and Armenia, 9, 61, 241; and Balkans, 100, 101; and Belarus, 243–44; and Nagorno-Karabakh war, 195, 196, 221; nationalism, 157–58; as neo-imperial, 237, 239; regional fracturing, 22, 34, 67–68, 81; Ukraine, 58, 80, 207–12. See also Russian empire Russian empire, 4, 5, 11, 18, 20, 79, 100, 135, 164, 187, 249; and Balkans, 107, 111; Baltics and, 217–18; centralization, 150–51, 154, 156–57; collapse of, 57, 84–85; and Eastern Anatolia, 129–30, 141–42; ethnic cleansing in, 57, 137; ethno-religious groups in, 159–60; governance in, 161–62, 254n2; legitimacy of, 157–58; nationalist movements in, 176–77; and Ottoman empire, 118, 136–37; regional connectivity, 149–50; regional fracture, 155–56; revolutionary movements, 177–79; Russification policies, 162–63; and South Caucasus, 174–75, 218–21, 240; territorial expansion, 152–54; and Transcaucasia, 186, 218–19, 220, 238–39; and Ukraine, 168–69, 170, 171–73, 226–27 Russians, 70, 75, 158, 171, 172, 174, 178 Russification, 157, 159, 162, 177; Baltics, 165–66; Orthodox Christianity and, 163–64; in South Caucasus, 174, 175; Transcaucasia, 176, 181, 219–20; Ukraine, 172, 227 Russo-Georgia war, 201 Russo-Iranian war, 154 Russo-Turkish war, 118, 135, 153 Rwanda, 46, 73, 243

San Stefano, Treaty of, 117–18, 135 Sarajevo, 107, 112 Secessionist movements: in Russian empire, 165 Security, 1, 3, 16, 17, 76, 87; Eurasian, 64–65, 82 Security studies, 68; Eurasian, 63–69 Sejm, 184 Self-governance, 165, 179; Bosnian, 111–12; Kurdish, 197, 205; in Ottoman empire, 115, 119; in Russian empire, 161, 162 Seljuk Turks, 154 Separatism: in Transcaucasia, 179, 181 Serbia, 89, 102, 106, 107, 111, 213; and Bosnian province, 109, 112; and Ottoman Empire, 100, 101, 118 Serbian Word (newspaper), 110 Serbo-Turkish war, 100 Serbs, Serbians, 101, 213; in Bosnia, 106, 114, 225, 226 Serfdom: abolition of, 161, 164 Shatter zones, 68, 83–84; in Eastern Anatolia, 129–30, 142 Sheikh Said rebellion, 204 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 199, 200 Slavs, 165 Slovakia, 89 Slovenia, 89, 213 Social capital, 2, 25, 132, 146; in Bosnia, 101, 103–4; connectivity and, 189–90; Habsburg empire, 92, 95, 97, 99; pacifying quality of, 45–46; regional, 47–49, 52–53; Russian empire, 159, 160; in Ukraine, 172, 209, 210 Social connectivity, 2, 25; in Latin America, 28–29; in Ukraine, 170–71, 189–90, 209–10 Social contract: Ottoman empire, 115–16 Social Democracy (Menshevik) party, 183 Social Democratic Himmat (Endeavor) party (Azerbaijani), 178 Social Democratic Hunchakian Party (Armenian), 178



Social Democratic Workers Party (Russian), 178 Social peace: in Ottoman empire, 115, 116 Socioeconomics, 103; in Transcaucasia, 173–74, 176–77 South America: democratization in, 26–27 South Caucasus, 5, 38, 78, 137, 160, 175, 217, 223, 239, 240; conflicts in, 57–58, 77, 190, 195, 228; destabilization, 245–46; regional fracture, 67–68, 218–21; Russia in, 22, 67, 150 South Ossetia, 184, 198, 201 South Ossetian-Georgian conflict, 191, 200–201 Sovereignty, 90, 103 Soviet Azerbaijani republic, 192 Soviet Union, 34, 37, 41, 64, 77, 84, 167, 193, 199, 254n1; Bolshevism in, 182–83; Cold War, 203–4; collapse of, 7, 188, 197, 211, 216; ethnofederalism, 75–76, 79–80, 155, 192, 228; formation of, 57, 181–82; regional connectivity, 81–82; and South Caucasus, 57–58 Sovnarkom, 182, 183 Srebrenica genocide, 213 State-building, 17–18, 26, 28 Stateless nations, 40 States, 1, 3, 6–7, 20, 40, 70; bargaining, 41–42; classification of, 49–50; developmental and security policies, 233–34; failures of, 18–19; fortress policies, 234–36; weakness, 17, 18–19; and world politics, 16–17 State weakness, 18–19 Steinmeier Formula, 212 Structure, 47 Substance, 47–48 Sugar beet industry, 171 Sumgait pogroms, 193 Sweden: and Russia, 152–53 Switzerland, 179 Sword and quill strategy, 185 Syria, 8, 78, 120; Kurds in, 197, 202, 205, 206, 207; Russia and, 243–44

Index 287

Syrian province, 123 Systems theory, 10–11 Tajiks, 156; civil war, 75 Tanzimat reforms, 34, 116, 117, 118, 125, 130–31, 132, 139; failure of, 123–24; ineffectiveness of, 122–23; politics of, 134–35 Taxation: in Ottoman empire, 117, 124, 125–29 Tax farming, 126, 128 Tbilisi (Tiflis), 178, 182, 183, 199, 254n4 TDFR. See Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic Territorial expansion, 150 Threshold effects, 34 Tiflis Duma, 182 Time horizons: for regional fracture, 33–35 Tito, Josip Broz: federalism of, 214, 215 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 44 Tolerance: in Ottoman empire, 121–22 Trade, trade networks, 1, 41, 42, 92, 130, 132, 207; free, 234–35 Trade groups: Habsburg, 92 Transcaucasia, 5, 79, 159, 160, 167, 187; civil administration in, 182–83; federalism, 179–80; governance in, 175–76; nationalist movements, 176–77; political parties, 180–82; regional fracture, 155–56, 184–85; revolutionary movements, 177–79; and Russia, 77, 152, 154; Russian empire, 218–19, 238–39; Russification, 219–20; socioeconomics in, 173–74 Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR), 176, 177, 178, 179, 200, 220, 238; organizational politics of, 180–86 Transcaucasian Seim, 183–84 Transcaucasian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, 155 Transcending alliance politics, 84–86 Transcending geography, 82–84

288 Index

Transnistria conflict, 58, 80 Transportation infrastructures: Habsburg, 92, 93 Treaties, 117–18, 135, 136, 152–53, 185 Trump, Donald, 207 Turkey, 8, 22, 30, 42, 65, 173, 240, 241; alliance formation, 245–46; and Azerbaijan, 196–97; in Cold War, 203– 4; Kemalism, 203, 224, 228; Kurdish conflict, 5, 11, 58, 190, 191, 192, 201–7; and Nagorno-Karabakh war, 77–78, 194, 195, 220–21, 254n1; neo-imperial policies, 237, 239 Turkic communities, Turks, 133, 184; in Caucasus, 154–55 Turkish Republic, 223 Turkish Straits, 136 Turkmen, 156 Turkology, 155 Ukraine, 5, 70, 76, 89, 157, 165, 167, 191, 217; balanced connectivity in, 189–90; civic traditions in, 170–71; connectivity in, 209–10; democracy in, 239–40; regional fracture, 226–27; Russia and, 8, 58, 80, 207–12, 224; Russian empire and, 152, 153, 168–69; socioeconomics, 171–72 Ukrainians, 158, 161, 163, 164; nationalist, 166, 171, 209 Uniate church, 163 United States, 8, 21, 27, 87, 179, 182, 246; hegemony of, 65, 66; in Middle East, 202, 206, 207 Unkiar Iskelesi treaty, 136 Uvarov, Sergey (count), 157 Uzbeks, 156 Valuev, Petr, 165

Velvet Revolution, 195, 247 Viceroyalty: Caucasus, 160 Violence, 3, 5, 56, 70, 71, 146, 188, 193; Armenian-Azerbaijani, 174–75; in Balkans, 212–16; in colonial Malaysia, 72–73; in Eastern Anatolia, 116, 130, 131, 147; shatter zones, 83–84; statebased, 24–25. See also Armed conflict; Ethnic cleansing; Genocide Volga Tatars, 174 Volhynia, 169 Volosti, 161 Vorontsov-Dashkov, Viceroy, 151, 161, 162 Voting: transethnic, 97 War of Yugoslav Succession, 213–14 Wars, warfare, 11, 26, 61, 74, 100, 184, 188, 202; in Balkans, 64, 212–16, 155n17; Nagorno-Karabakh, 194–95; Russian strategies, 208–9; South Caucasus and Balkans, 57–58 Westphalian region, 4, 10, 13–14, 15–16 World War I, 34, 62, 78, 130; and Habsburg empire, 90, 96–97; in Transcaucasia, 181, 187 World War II: and Yugoslavia, 214–15 Yanukovich, President, 207–8 Young Turks, 78, 142, 179 Yugoslavia: disintegration of, 191, 212; ethnofederalism of, 192, 214–16; wars in, 5, 10 Yugoslav national army (JNA), 213 Zagreb, 110–11 Zelensky,Volodymyr, 212 Zemstvo/zemstva, 161, 165, 171; in Transcaucasia, 175, 182, 183 Zone of peace: in Central America, 26

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