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- Convenors:
-
Ramil Zamanov
(Free University of Berlin)
Lala Darchinova (European University Institute)
Sevinj Samadzade (Gent University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how the post-Soviet South Caucasus embodies global ideological crises, examining coloniality, neoliberalism, and moral imaginaries while tracing feminist, queer, and decolonial disruptions beyond East/West and democracy/authoritarian binaries.
Long Abstract
Since the fall of socialism, the South Caucasus has come to embody a condensed version of the global crisis of ideologies: a region suspended between competing imperial and epistemic projects, where the unfinished legacies of Soviet modernity intersect with the disillusionments of the liberal international order. Emerging as a byproduct of Russian coloniality, the postcolonial “inferiority complex” (Tlostanova 2012) has manifested as a symbolic form of self-whitening, suppressing alternative political and social imaginaries. Yet this landscape of ideological exhaustion also holds potential for new beginnings: for re-grounding thought and politics in locally generated vocabularies that neither imitate nor reject external hegemonies but seek to provincialize and disrupt them.
As Russian imperial power reasserts itself through war (Shevtsova 2024), authoritarianism, and conservative moral governance, Euro-Atlantic coloniality simultaneously reproduces hierarchies of “civilizational belonging” (Tlostanova 2010) and neoliberal governance under banners of integration and democracy promotion. The clash of hegemonies fractures societies, compelling intellectuals, activists, and citizens to navigate a shrinking field of possibility between two collapsing universalisms. Yet it also opens space for imagining how minor theory, as conceptual sabotage and creative misalignment, might emerge from these fractures, refusing new universals while dismantling architectures of global reason that frame the region as derivative.
This panel invites anthropological and interdisciplinary contributions exploring how the post-Soviet condition shapes ideological divisions, moral imaginaries, and alignments in the South Caucasus not as static binaries (East/West, tradition/modernity, democracy/authoritarianism) but as dynamic, contested, and relational processes. We seek to understand how coloniality, post-socialist transition, and global economic, ecological, and epistemic crises co-produce new configurations of belief, belonging, and exclusion: through afterlives of Soviet internationalism confronting neoliberal and nationalist imaginaries; entanglements of local moral economies with competing “civilizational projects”; feminist, queer, and decolonial disruptions of ideological capture; and everyday reinventions of solidarity among those caught between shifting regimes.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
I examine ethnonationalist identity and anti-Soviet memory politics as narratives promoting a return to a supposedly lost European modernity. I critique state-sanctioned liberal nationalism and Western epistemic dominance in CSO research, linking both to a broader crisis of hegemony.
Paper long abstract
With increased institutionalization, professionalization, and bureaucratization of Armenian social movements after the deficient revolution of 2018, development aid dictates that common-sense neoliberalism (Hall and O’Shea 2013) shape policy and, by extension, public understanding of national identity and civilizational belonging. This trajectory gained momentum after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, as post-Soviet states became tangled in the clash of civilizations, with European securitization narratives framing Putin and Russia as sole antagonists of the global order, while an allegiance to Euro-Atlantic militarism as a moral choice between forces of light and evil (Foley and Unkovski-Korica 2024). Employing the framework of liberalism as empire (Shirinian 2025), my paper studies the development aid-dominated knowledge production economy in Armenia, offering a critique of its subsequent decolonial turn. By treating liberal ideology as indispensable to capitalism and neoliberalism, I study ethnonationalist identity frameworks and anti-Soviet memory politics as narrative projects promoting a return to a supposed European modernity that was lost upon the communization of Armenia. Based on my professional and academic experiences within civil society organizations in Armenia and Europe, I offer a critique of the current government’s liberal nationalism and the prominence of Western epistemic frameworks in CSO research projects, demonstrating how the crisis of hegemony--characteristic of all post-Soviet states (Ishchenko 2024)--underlies these developments. I study how, in this political economy, the two defining characteristics of the decolonial turn are the promotion of (ethno)nationalism and neoliberalism, a dangerous insurgence that threatens radical political imaginations and leads to anti-welfare, anti-class political movements.
Paper short abstract
This research examines the exclusion of the post-Soviet space from the postcolonial theories on the global accumulation of the capital through Fernando Coronil’s (1997) magnus opus “The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela” and Azerbaijani case of "magical" petro-state formation
Paper long abstract
This paper aims to examine the natural resource extraction in the post-Soviet space through the theoretical framework on the relation of land, capital, and spatial hierarchy established in Fernando Coronil’s (1997) magnus opus “The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela” and critique Coronil’s (1997) exclusion of the post-Soviet space from the global accumulation of the capital which serves as an exemplar to the dismissal of the global postcolonial theory of the post-Soviet space. Azerbaijan has been chosen as an example here first because of its unique positioning between Europe and Asia as well as local important actors, second, because it is a particularistic case within the post-Soviet space due to being the only republic where presidential system has been operating on the basis of familial succession presenting a particular case of "magical statism", and thirdly, because of its renewed international importance in the aftermath of the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Representing the intersection of territorial, political, national and international manifold of the time-space, the historical and theoretical analysis on the development of petroleum industry in Azerbaijan will present us with a “Second World” petrostate case study complementing Coronil’s (1997) work and debate the universalizing and particularistic categorizations of primitive accumulation. I argue that this analysis reveals 1) the limitations of historical boundaries global postcolonial theory expects of its units of analysis and 2) suggests that the analytical framework of the postcolonial thought extends beyond the fixed geographical and historical limits it imposes upon itself.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines Russian war-induced migrant entrepreneurship in Armenia as a site where geopolitical fractures and post-imperial moral imaginaries are negotiated. Based on five ethnographic cases, it shows how business visibility becomes both a strategy of belonging and a source of vulnerability
Paper long abstract
This paper examines visible migrant entrepreneurship as a site where geopolitical fractures, moral imaginaries, and postcolonial tensions are negotiated in everyday life. Drawing on five ethnographic case studies of Russian-run businesses (restaurants, bars, board-game cafés, and cultural venues), the paper explores how entrepreneurial visibility becomes simultaneously a strategy of survival, a claim to belonging, and a source of vulnerability.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Armenia became a key destination for Russian war-induced migrants, producing what has been described as a “relocant effect” marked by rapid growth in self-employment, cafés, cultural venues, and small businesses in Yerevan. While often framed through economic indicators, these entrepreneurial practices unfold within a deeply ambivalent ideological landscape. Situated within Armenia’s contradictory positioning as both a refuge from Russian authoritarianism and a state maintaining close political and economic ties with Russia, Russian entrepreneurs find themselves navigating overlapping regimes of power. For many anti-war migrants, Armenia represents both protection and proximity to imperial reach, where public presence may expose them to transnational repression. At the same time, segments of the local population interpret these new businesses through post-imperial moral economies, framing Russian visibility as symbolic occupation, cultural appropriation, or the reproduction of unequal post-Soviet relations.
Rather than treating entrepreneurship as an economic activity alone, the paper conceptualizes it as a moral and ideological practice through which migrants negotiate responsibility, distance from the Russian state, and future imaginaries under conditions of uncertainty.
Paper short abstract
Mingrelians, a population in Western Georgia, engage in scale-making in the face of conflicting projects of political integration through narrations of how natives, who have risen to influence in power centres, change the course of history.
Paper long abstract
The endeavour of global and regional powers to dominate the Caucasus as strategical crossroads in a great power game is both a prominent trope as well as still the dominant academic gaze on the region. Phrased in anthropological terms, the Caucasus can be described as ‘field of forces’ and space over which a multitude of ‘projects of political integration’ have yielded conflicting hegemonic claims (Wolf 1982). Inhabitants of the Caucasus region make sense of this field of forces through scale-making by relating to the centres of these projects of political integration. I call these processes, which I call ‘geopolitics in vernacular’, often find expression in humour, irony, rumours and ‘conspiracy theories’ as forms to navigate ambiguity.
My paper inquires how Mingrelians, a population in Western Georgia, who lives on both sides of the Georgian-Abkhazian administrative boundary line, have manoeuvred this field of forces over time and how they make sense of this predicament, in-between such diverse projects of political integration as Russian and Ottoman Empire, Soviet Union, Georgian (nation-)state, Abkhazian de-facto state and the Russian Federation. The paper argues that Mingrelians’ geopolitics in vernacular involves narratives of natives of Mingrelia, who have risen to influence in the power centres. The ascription that they have steered the course of history during crucial events is a wide-spread pattern. Based on ethnographic field notes, the paper details rumours that narrate why during the 2008 invasion of Zugdidi, the capital of the Georgian province of Samegrelo-Svaneti, the town was not plundered by Russian forces.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines conflicted experiences of organising around the Movement to Save the Rioni Valley from damming, articulates opaque queerness (Blas 2018; Davis 2019; T. 2020), and argues for constantly (re)configured environments of South Caucasus.
Paper long abstract
Within the broader ‘project of transition’ (Barry and Gambino 2024) in the South Caucasus, smaller, variegated post-independence infrastructure projects accumulate alongside the post-post-Soviet decay (Bennett 2021). As a Soviet as well as a post-Soviet project, the Namakhvani dam is a continuous link between the two, demonstrating that projects and environmental struggles that resist them are a result of histories of colonialism, nationalism, and extractivism (Ocaklı and Ibele 2023; Rekhviashvili and Aroshvili 2025) rather than disparate and binary ideologies. Nonetheless, critiques of infrastructure projects in the South Caucasus center linear logics of development and modernity rooted in contemporary Liberal (Dis)Order. They advance extractivisms (Rekhviashvili and Aroshvili 2025) or social movements perspectives (Antadze and Gujaraidze 2021), both of which imply reproduction of a future-oriented environment and nation-state - assumptions often articulated through claims to ‘land-water’ (Gogua and Tsotsoria 2020).
The Namakhvani project was stopped, but the materialities of an unfinished project are tangible and decaying in a cut down forest, built tunnels, accumulated garbage, etc. Though they are othered as harmful to linear projections of/for post-Soviet futures, when taken together, these geographies showcase that they are constantly reconfigured. Situated there, the paper argues that through embodied queer relationality to altered landscapes, defamiliarisation, and “unbelonging” (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), the environmental struggle of Namakhvani complicated, problematised, and laboured against static, binary visions of non/Soviet. It demonstrates the existence of opaque queerness in trans-socialist environments (Krёlex zentr, Pagulich, and Shchurko 2021) which accumulates with failure, ruin, and decay of unbounded (post)Soviet infrastructure (Silver 2021).