Masaryk university

MASARYK UNIVERSITY

Faculty of Social Studies

Department of IR and European Studies

PhD Dissertation

Brno 2014   Zinaida Shevchuk

MASARYK UNIVERSITY

Faculty of Social Studies

Department of IR and European Studies

Mgr. Zinaida Shevchuk

Understanding Armed Conflicts: Evolving Nature of Conflicts
in the South Caucasus

PhD Dissertation

Supervisor: doc. PhDr Zdeněk Kříž, Ph.D.

Brno 2014

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Zdeněk Kríž, for his guidance throughout my research and my professional development. You have set an example of excellence as a researcher, mentor, and instructor along this journey. Second, I express my profound gratitude to Professors Vít Hloušek and Peter Suchý, both of whom have contributed tremendously to my professional growth. I would also like to thank my best friend, Radana Kubová, for her support. Last but not least, I would like to thank my soul mate, Ondřej Bechný. Your love and support helped make the completion of this dissertation possible.

I dedicate this dissertation to

my parents, Svetlana and Vladimer Shevchuk

Declaration

I hereby declare that this PhD dissertation is my own work, that it has been written on the basis of the sources listed here, and that these listed sources have been referred to and acknowledged in the text.

Table of Contents

List of Tables 7

List of Figures 8

List of Maps 9

Chapter 1:Introduction 10

1.1Research Questions and Argument 10

1.2Contemporary Research 17

1.3Research Challenges and Contribution to the Field 21

1.4Data Collection 22

1.5Structure of the Study 24

Chapter 2:Theoretical Framework 26

2.1Typology of Issues at Stake in Armed Conflicts 26

2.2Ethnic Conflict 29

2.3Conflict Over Political Arrangements 34

2.4Ideological Confrontation and Its Consequences 36

2.5Economic Conflict 39

2.6Territorial Cross-border Conflict 41

Chapter 3:Methodological Framework 44

3.1Conflict Analysis Framework: Research Design 44

3.1.1Research Design: “Building Block” 46

3.2Categorization of the Concept 47

3.3Conflict-mapping Framework 48

3.3.1Conflict Parties 49

3.3.2Issues at Stake and Incompatibility 50

3.4Conflict Typology by Process—Violence Intensity 51

3.4.1Conflict Phases 55

Chapter 4:Armed Conflict Over Nagorno-Karabakh 59

4.1 Phase A: From Latent Conflict to Escalation 61

4.1.1The Dynamics of Politicization of the Nagorno-Karabakh Issue for Armenian National Identity 63

4.1.2Politicization of the Nagorno-Karabakh Issue and Azerbaijani Statehood 65

4.1.3From Nonviolent Demonstrations to Violent Events 66

4.1.4Conflicting Parties and Emerging Issues at Stake 68

4.2Phase B: Trigger Events – Emergence of Sporadic Clashes 71

4.2.1The Road to Armed Conflict: Political Mobilization in Armenia and Azerbaijan 75

4.2.2Violent Stage of the Armed Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh 81

4.3Phase C: “Frozen” Conflict 83

Chapter 5:Armed Conflicts in Georgia: Case Studies of South Ossetia and Abkhazia 86

5.1Political Development in Georgia: Struggle for Independence 87

5.2Case Study: Armed Conflict in South Ossetia 90

5.2.1Phase A: The Spiral of Conflict: The Process of Escalation to War 91

5.2.2Phase B: Economy of Conflict in South Ossetia 96

5.2.3Phase C: Red Lines in South Ossetia 104

5.2.4Putting the Armed Conflict into the Context 107

5.3Case Study: Abkhazian-Georgian Conflict 112

5.3.1Phase A: Latent Conflict Between Georgians and Abkhazians 114

5.3.2Phase B: The Logic of Violence in the Georgian-Abkhazian Conflict 131

5.3.3Phase C: Changing the Paradigm – Backwards Instead of Forwards 140

Chapter 6:Conclusion 148

Appendix 158

Bibliography 162

List of Tables

List of Figures

List of Maps

Chapter 1:Introduction

1.1Research Questions and Argument

Armed conflicts in the Caucasus represent one of the most complex challenges that emerged with the breaking apart of the Soviet Union. Patterns of political, economic, and cultural discrimination, intensified by historical grievances, as well as the effects of political transformation and economic development, national doctrines, and the role of external actors have all contributed to the escalation of conflicts in this region. That created a challenge for the conflict analysis and has led to the development of different interpretations emphasizing the role of weak states, economic depression, and external support.

The aim of this research is not merely to illuminate the factors that are responsible for armed conflict in the South Caucasus. This study follows the logic of qualitative research to “scale down” and trace the bellicose aspects of armed conflict. The objective is to take the analysis of these factors one step further by tracing the path of evolution of the life cycle of the conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh during the two decades. In this way, we avoid a static study of the causes of conflict in the selected case; instead, we follow the transformation of the issues at stake of the conflict over time.

While the number of academic studies about the conflicts in the South Caucasus region has considerably increased during the last decade, studies combining theoretical and empirical knowledge are relatively few. This dissertation aims to bridge theory with empirical knowledge and enrich academic knowledge about one of the most volatile post-Soviet regions in the world—the South Caucasus. The major objective is to provide a solid, elaborate picture of the conflict processes in the South Caucasus region. This small area has a high number of unresolved conflicts, which might lead to an escalation in the future.

After the end of the bipolar world order, attention of scholars and policymakers was turned to the armed conflict, mainly because of the extent of violence involved. However, if we want to understand this conflict, it should be taken into consideration that escalation of conflict to a violent form represents only one of the stages of the conflict. What is more, not every conflict escalates and transforms to armed conflict. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union witnessed the outbreak of a new wave of ethnic conflicts that were suppressed during the Cold War period. International violence has become less problematic than it was during the last century. This means that there are more intrastate conflicts than interstate struggles and the number of ethnic conflicts has increased considerably. The emerging political map has complicated the prospects for peace. This complication includes particular types of societies and governments, the rise of ethnic nationalism, and distinctive nationalist doctrines that divide national states and contribute to tensions across ethnic lines. Perceived grievances, patterns of political, economic, cultural discrimination, intensified by historical grievances, the effects of political transformation and economic development, as well as national doctrines divide humanity into distinctive nations. These nations raise their claims for self-determination and cultivate a peculiar identity of their own, demanding their separate spaces.

We can hardly find a mono-ethnic state without any ethnic animosity inside its borders. Dividing lines between “us” and “them” contribute to ethnic awareness; however, such a situation does not always lead to armed conflict. For example, in Georgia, there are many ethnic groups, but its ethnic divisions have not lead to an escalation of conflict in Adjaria or Southern Georgia, populated by ethnic Armenians. The question is if it is correct to label every conflict that has some ethnic element (for example, enrolled conflict parties are ethnically different) as an ethnic conflict. Following this logic, it is legitimate to ask: Was World War I an “ethnic conflict” too? In accordance with one outstanding political scientist, Michael E. Brown, every conflict has multiple causes, and while the issues at stake could be different, the conflict is “ethnic” if conflict parties are “ethnic groups.”¹

This study argues that in order to increase scholarly knowledge about evolving nature of armed conflicts, it is necessary to address the issues at stake. In order to determine the casus of escalation of the conflict, the intensity of ethnic hatred is not treated as an independent variable; rather, the explanation of ethnicity and its role in transformation of the conflicts is needed. For this purpose, the claims of conflicting parties have to be analyzed and the reasons why they contradicted each other must be explained. This research does not deny that perceptions, historical narratives, and images of the enemy have a negative influence on the mutual relationship between conflicting parties. However, in order to understand their positions, it is important to understand the claims of political elites and their strategies. Furthermore, as argued by Valerii Tishkov, existing typologies of the armed conflict fail to explain decisions and strategies of political leaders, as well as of individuals, the roots of political disorder, the desire to attain specific status, and the reasons for outside interventions in the post-Soviet space.² It means that we cannot place any armed conflict in this region into a single category.

The reason for this is that there are a lot of factors that influenced the outbreak of bloody and unresolved conflicts in the South Caucasus. These include competing interpretations of historical injustice, ethno-demographic, territorial, political, legal, ideological, and socioeconomic factors that aggravated tensions and unrest in this region.³ As this dissertation will illustrate, the armed conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh contain all of these dimensions, but what is most important to understand is which of these issues (or which combination of issues) caused escalation and transformation of conflict from one phase to another.

Many researchers and analysts have emphasized different aspects that caused the violent upheavals in the South Caucasus region. This dissertation brings key events to analysis without disregarding alternative useful interpretations, such as the role of ethnicity, geopolitical contexts, and neo-imperial policies, developing a newly structured analysis of conflict processes. The central questions of this dissertation are formulated in the following way: First, what types of conflict do we have in the South Caucasus? Second, what are the issues at stake leading to an escalation of conflicts? Third, are these issues different now, and if so, how are they different? This research does not aim to present a comprehensive history of the armed conflicts in the South Caucasus. Nor does it aim to assess the mistakes of conflicting parties and the consequences of the conflicts. Rather, what this dissertation aims to do is to overcome the static study of the various factors determining the type of the conflict by tracing its evolution over time. From there, the dissertation sheds light on the conflict processes, provides a balanced and overarching approach, and draws some tentative conclusions about common factors of unresolved conflicts in the South Caucasus region.

This research is important for three reasons. First, the dissertation presents five analytical categories of armed conflict to frame my discussion and that of the literature. Second, these types are then applied to the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. Third, by uncovering complexity of and linkages between domestic and structural factors, the dissertation studies the modes of escalation and transformation of issues at stake in time.

This dissertation makes two basic arguments. First, ethnic diversity is not sufficient condition and does not provide a strong enough explanation of conflict to become violent. Contrary to the way in which the relationship between ethnicity and armed conflict has been conceptualized in the post-Soviet space, and in the South Caucasus in particular, the linkage between ethnicity and violent conflict is indirect and requires in-depth analysis. In other words, it is necessary to reconsider the relationship between ethnicity and armed conflict and to create an analytical framework for better understanding of these conflicts.

Second, this dissertation argues that the key issue at stake, which transforms low-scale violence to full-scale armed conflict, has its political goals. Political elites play a significant role in mobilization of masses and transformation of low-scale struggles into organized, full-scale war. This is not to purely support the instrumentalist account about manipulative leaders. The argument sheds light on the question whether political leaders are the cause of armed conflicts or whether they merely contribute to the escalation processes. I argue that escalation of armed conflict is the outcome of a decision made by political leaders in order to impose, institutionalize, and legitimize their rule over a territory.

South Caucasus has been a frontline for the collision of empires, as well as the location of considerable migration by different national groups. Unrest in this region has had a significant impact on the demographics of the local population. This small region has heterogeneous demography composed by a mixture of various ethnic and linguistic groups. This makes the South Caucasus as a test case for explanatory power of ethnicity as a cause of armed conflicts. As illustrated in Map 1, Armenia is the most ethnically homogeneous state in the South Caucasus: 98,1% Armenians, the Kurds compose 1.1%, Russians 0.5% and other compose 0.2% of population.⁴ Azerbaijan has more minorities: Lezgian 2%, Russian 1.3%, Talys 1.3% and other 2.4%. Armenians live in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.⁵ Georgia is the most ethnically heterogeneous state in the South Caucasus even after the separation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. According to the 2002 census, 83.8% are Georgians, Armenians compose 5.7%, Russian 1.5% and other 2.5%.⁶

Giving the ethnic heterogeneity in the South Caucasus, this study demonstrates that the argument about ethnic hatred across ethnic lines fails to explain why violence has occurred in some places and not in others. Ajara represented the third autonomous region along with Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the Georgian Soviet Republic, the population of which was 250, 000 Ajars in accordance to the 1989 census. Historically, Ottoman Empire ruled this region and imposed Islam. Consequently, Ajars “tended to associate with the “Turks” rather than the “Georgians”⁷ due to Islam. However, the reason why armed conflict did not occur in this region lies in the political goals of the Ajarian leadership.  As political leader of Ajara, Aslan Abashidze, claimed: “We have never had, and never can have, any territorial claims against Georgia... Ajara is historically a part of Georgia, and there has never been any instance in history in which Ajara has created problems for its motherland. The conflict which occurred in 2004 was largely political.

It has to be emphasized that Abkhazias and South Ossetians were not the largest ethnic groups in Georgia. According to the Soviet census in 1989 Armenians, Russians and Azerbaijanis (8.1 percent, 6.3 percent, and 5.7 percent of the population, respectively) constituted the majority of ethnic groups in Georgia. Ethnic Armenians live in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region in Georgia. According to the 2002 census, almost 55% (207, 600 people) of population is Armenian.⁸ Azerbaijanis are concentrated in the Kvemo Kartli region (45% of population). Both of these ethnic groups have strong ethnic identities and weak sense of Georgian identity. Lack of knowledge of Georgian, the official state language, strong Armenian and Azerbaijan ethnic identity, economic underdevelopment in comparison to the rest of Georgia, and poor representation in the government, are the factors that contribute to the tensions between Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis communities. Theoretically, these tensions could have transformed into armed conflict similar to Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. If ethnicity is the sufficient condition to explain the occurrence of armed conflict, then Pankisi Gorge inhabited by Muslim Kists (related to the Chechens) could have been area of irredentist conflicts. While ethnic animosity is the outcome of conflicts, it serves to prolong unresolved conflicts in the South Caucasus region. This dissertation argues that trigger events and sporadic waves of tension cannot be transformed into full-scale war without the support of political leaders.

Map Ethno-linguistic Distribution in the South Caucasus, 2004.

Source: UNEP/GRID-Arendal, Ethno-linguistic Distribution on the South Caucasus, http://www.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/ethno-linguistic-distribution-in-the-southern-caucasus_99d4#

In order to address the main objectives of this dissertation – the type of armed conflict in the South Caucasus region, the modes of escalation and transformation of issues at stake – I differentiated between two intellectually different tasks. First, one has to explain the issues at stake and the nature of the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Second, one can try to understand the causes and reasons why the conflict turned violent. Through the process of conceptualization and operationalization on the theoretical level, the objective of this research is to present the most balanced approach in studying the armed conflicts in the South Caucasus. This study defines the armed conflict in that region by the nature of issues at stake, and then traces the absence or presence of operationalized aspects in the theoretical part.

The findings of this study could pave the way for a future academic study, which is to explore why these conflicts took a violent form and what the causal mechanisms are between the issues at stake that keep these conflicts “frozen” for more than two decades. There are three reasons for choosing the Caucasus for this analysis: the strategic importance of the region; the potential for re-escalation of these conflicts in the future; and ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus can be viewed as examples for ethnic problems in other parts of the world.

The strategic significance of the region attracts the attention not only of regional leaders, but also of great power actors. The Caucasus is a relatively small region with a high number of unresolved ethnic conflicts. It lies in relatively close proximity to other strategically important regions such as the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Because of its strategic importance, the Caucasus was a battlefield of numerous wars among Persian, Ottoman and Russian Empires. Strategic significance of this region attacks attention of the West due to the oil and natural gas reserves in the Caspian Sea. Russia is reluctant to lose its dominance in the South Caucasus and its military presence in the region is the highest in the last twenty years. From the Russian perspective armed conflicts and instability leads to security vacuum in the Caucasus and Russia’s role is to maintain control over the region. Otherwise, these countries can be pulled into the orbits of other great and regional powers, such as Turkey, Iran, United States or China.

Conducting an assessment of stability in this region is important, as those conflicts can re-escalate and may lead to broader conflicts in the region. Escalation of Caucasian conflicts has implications not only on the stability in the region and its neighboring countries, but on the broader European security architecture.

As mentioned above, South Caucasus is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the world. The armed conflicts in this region represent case studies to tests the theories about the causes of ethnic conflict and uncover the explanatory power of ethnicity as a variable responsible for escalation of conflict into full-scale war. The results could be applicable to the unresolved conflicts in the post-Soviet space.

Armed conflicts in the South Caucasus have gained less scholarly interest than, for example, the former Yugoslavia or conflicts in Africa. Scholarly studies about this conflict are sophisticated, but still unsatisfying. The conventional wisdom about causes and consequences of these conflicts lies on an assumption that they are driven by “ancient hatreds” or a “spill over” effect, which are processes beyond human control.⁹ “Because of the multi-ethnic composition of almost all major areas of the former Soviet Union (the only exception is Armenia after the exodus of the Azeris from this territory), practically all kinds of conflicts and clashes - social or political (from young men's fights in local discotheques to collisions at the highest levels of power) - easily acquire an ethnic manifestation and flavour, making these conflicts and contradictions deeper, more complex, and extremely hard to resolve.”¹⁰

These conflicts remain unresolved and can lead to other armed conflicts in the future. The so-called “frozen conflicts” in this region limit the internal development of these countries and have a huge influence on their security and foreign policy goals. Consequently, it has an impact not only on the development inside the state boundaries, but also has a regional and international dimension involving different regional and great powers.