Natural Nation: Cultivating a Post-Extractive

Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar

2020

Word count: 31264

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Research), Department of Sociology and Social Policy, School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney.

Year of Award: 2021

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Statement of originality

I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.

Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar

30th December 2020

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Abstract

The past decade has witnessed the proliferation of numerous ‘greening projects’ across

Azerbaijan, aimed at transforming environments vandalised by hydrocarbon exploration and industrial agriculture into biodiverse havens, zones of conservation, and sustainable residential developments. This has been achieved via the uptake of remediation, horticulture, and naturalisation technologies by both state and corporate actors, shifting practices of extraction towards that of an alleged ‘post-extraction’. Here, ecological initiatives designed to cultivate and alter physical environments, as well as material interactions, seep into intimate circulations of life, reconfiguring relations between an array of human, vegetal, and animal beings. With a marked capacity for worldmaking, these initiatives have also become foundational elements in state- sponsored projects concerned with the renewal of national identity, territorial borders, and articulations of a cosmopolitan agenda.

This dissertation attends to the ways in which more-than-human life has been mobilised by

Azerbaijan's government, particularly for the purposes of nation-making and the creation of post- extractive environments. I look at how these processes have led to the reconfiguration of more- than-human relations and the transformation of everyday life in the name of a bourgeoning form of eco-nationalism. Simultaneously, I attend to the rejection of such reconfigurations by communities who articulate alternative understandings of the more-than-human, and locate value and potential in relations deemed unviable, unruly, and disordered by the post-extractive Azeri state. To this end, drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), relational ethnography, and more-than-human geography, I extend the concept of ecologized biopolitics to examine how the cultivation of seed orchards, mass-tree planting campaigns, urban greening projects, and

3 biodiversity monitoring work in tandem with processes of militarisation, securitisation, and urban gentrification. In addition, I speculate on the continued viability of nature as a general concept and instead propose a reformulation of nature as a set of substantive material conditions with exploitable affordances. Finally, I offer an extended theorisation of environmental naturalisation

(and remediation) as foremost a political practice, allowing the Azeri state and select members of its populace to mobilise a range of material practices and affective logics around nationhood, land, and belonging in the attempted realisation of a 'clean', 'green', and 'cosmopolitan' future.

Such practices and visions, I stress, do not go uncontested.

The promissory register of environmental care is shown to be particularly vulnerable to co- optation by the state, with nationalist rhetoric increasingly mimicking concepts of multispecies entanglement and ecological harmony, assuring the revival of life in zones of acute contamination, conflict, and ruin. I explore the emergent relations between humans and nonhumans incorporated into state-sponsored environmental projects, as well as the differential framings of life. I foreground the experiences of those outside of the category of biological ally and charismatic companion, cast off as a killable invasive and pest. Through this, the conceptualisation of environmental custodianship as a morally unproblematic venture will be contested and instead linked to practices of displacement, resettlement, and extermination – whether through the unquestioned razing of industrial zones to make way for state-owned property development, or the entrenchment of militarism in the everyday.

Within the scope of my research I use cultivation as a touchstone for several interweaving processes: technologically produced 'natural' environments, the obfuscation of militarism via environmental greening, and the collapsing of boundaries between the nation and nature in the general imaginary. These processes allude to the non-existence of an originary or intrinsic natural world which could come to constitute the 'authentic' or 'legitimate' sovereign state. Ultimately,

4 through cultivation material arrangements settle into political attachments to land, imposing authority, and encouraging an investment in productivity and further exploitation. Despite the role that cultivation has in nation- and nature-making, I propose that it may also foster the creation of nonsovereign imaginaries, where environments resistant to co-optation by nationalist agenda, and the mandates of the state, are dreamt up and put into practice. By returning to its root kwelə-, meaning to 'move around, sojourn, dwell', cultivation transforms into a practice of wandering – moving through feral communities, ruderal allotments, and pockets of messy, experimental, and unlikely co-existence.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Abbreviations 8

Chapter 1. Cultivating 9

Chapter 2. Field of Play: Militarised Environments and a Biodiverse State 27

-An Axe to Grind 35 -Pollution as a Weapon of War 50 -Border Trees and Biodiverse Arsenals 62

Chapter 3. Unruly Subjects & Unsupervised Worlds: Finding an Alternative 71 through the Cracks

-The ’s Oasis 77 -Tending to a Ruderal Home 81 -When Stray Becomes Yoldaş 92 -Breaking Bread with Uninvited Guests 97

Conclusion. Uprooting 103

Bibliography 105

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Acknowledgments

This thesis would not have been possible were it not for the support and guidance of many people. First and foremost, my friends and interlocutors in the Black City, for inviting me in for a cup of tea and proceeding to spend countless hours sharing stories of survival and know-how.

Most especially, Aytəkin, who put up with my faulty Azerbaijani and showed me kindness amidst confusion. In line with confidentiality agreements, others remain unnamed — though this does not lessen my gratitude and admiration. My supervisors, Associate Professors Sonja van

Wichelen and Astrida Neimanis, have been unwaveringly generous, patient, and attentive; encouraging me to not only develop my own habits as a scholar but also my own language. I would like to thank Dr. Sophie Chao for believing in my capacity to do justice to the work. The collectives I had a chance to be a part of also deserve mention – particularly the MSJ reading group, Everyday Militarisms, and, the Biopolitics of Science Network. Amidst the pandemic, these groups ended up being a salve against loneliness and solipsism. I am grateful for the care and love of my friends during my time as a graduate student — with special thanks to Zachary

Moore-Boyle and Emma Cross for the crisis meetings, ocean dips and sneaky book discounts.

Thank you to my parents for constantly asking and helping, particularly during times I opted for silence and stubbornness. My partner, Gabriel, for showing me that one does not require elegant proof. And finally, to Spánik Erzsébet, for everything.

This work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP), the

University of Sydney Grants-in-Aid scheme, and the Kath O'Neil Scholarship.

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Abbreviations

AZERCOSMOS: Azercosmos Open Joint Stock Company

AZERTAC: Azerbaijan State News Agency

BP: British Petroleum

IDP: Internally Displaced Person/People

MENR: Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources

MFA: Ministry of Foreign Affairs

OECD: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

OIPA: The International Organization for Animal Protection

OSCE: Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

SOCAR: The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic

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Chapter 1

Cultivating

Opening Invocation

Arriving in the capital city of Azerbaijan by plane provides a bird's-eye view of vast turquoise waters dotted with black smudges and the reflective sheen of rigs. The Caspian Sea seemingly bleeds into an arid landscape where metallic shapes merge with uneven buildings and miscellaneous clusters of life, rejecting simplification all whilst demanding absolute attention. It is dizzying and messy but manages to accurately depict the complexity of a country undergoing considerable economic, political and social shifts – a space where there might just be enough leeway for something provisional and unexpected to emerge. However, at ground level and away from the expansiveness of higher altitudes, one settles into a different line of sight. The smudges, gradients, and vast vistas of water and land seen during the flight to are all but obstructed and hidden by the walls and barriers lining the highway between airport and the rest of the city.

Whilst some are made of sandstone and resemble archaic city walls, most of the structures are made of uniform plastic panels decorated with vivid illustrations and digital renderings of flora and fauna. With illustrations of sprawling scenery, vivid garden beds in bloom, and an assortment of animals dotting the landscapes with softened and quasi-humanised features, the worksite walls are transformed into billboards depicting the desired future of the Azeri nation. I distinctly remember my surprise at the extent of the walling alongside the highway, prompting me to ask

9 my cab driver, Cavid, whether the entire city was under construction. He replied that the "entire country" was, explaining that whenever allegations of corruption or governmental misconduct arose, either of two things appeared in Baku: a wall hinting at a new sustainable development, or a new park. He reiterated this point just before I exited the cab, telling me that in Azerbaijan "it is always a wall of concrete or a wall of trees...both do the job of making sure we do not see or know what the government is up to".

The cab ride, in many ways, kickstarted an impulse to spot as many gaps, fissures, or holes as I could. I would carefully trace each wall spotted during my fieldwork or on nightly walks home, hoping to find an incomplete edge or an opportune crevice. Later on, it became something of a friendly competition with one of my interlocutors and friends, Amir, who challenged me to guess what lay behind random stretches of walling every time we drove from Hazi Aslanov to

Balakhani. Occasionally we would stop on the roadside and he would hoist me up high enough to peer over the panels and confirm the correct answer. It allowed me to witness the numerous human interventions needed to remediate and 'green' the sparse oil-contaminated plains of the

Absheron peninsula. I would see metres of irrigation piping, paraquats and metal traps for the removal of ruderal and feral species, as well as piles of recently transported soil from the fertile valleys of Southern Azerbaijan – the shrouded and innocuous materials animating the seemingly miraculous greening of an oil nation.

Instead of digging into the subterranean for veins of oil, it has become more lucrative for the

Azeri state to cultivate and toil over land. Securitised pockets of greenery have been carved out through projects of ecological management and remediation, with tendrils of resembling barbed wire and rows of trees standing heavy as if brick and mortar. In this space, nature is something to be engineered and cultivated – an exercise in imagining the nation anew, whilst

10 simultaneously obscuring the violent legacies of gentrification, urban displacement, and spatial inequality haunting the national imaginary. Yet, in the midst remediated zones circled by temporary fencing and walled-off nature reserves, there are ways to see beyond. One may even notice the garden walls start to crumble.

Context: Green Miracles and Post-Extractive Parks

On the 30th of November 1991, the Supreme Soviet of Azerbaijan declared its intention to restore Azerbaijan's independent statehood. The youthful nation would be inheriting decades worth of infrastructural mismanagement, environmental degradation, and rampant resource extraction – acquired under both Russian Imperial and Soviet governance (Dudwick 1996).

Indeed, Chris Kutschera, a journalist who visited the city during the period of transition, described a scene of 'industrial scarring' with districts reduced to a 'number of mostly deserted factories set alongside refugee-built shanties of plastic, wood, and corrugated iron' (1996), whilst

Neft Dashlari – a celebrated off-shore settlement and hallmark of Soviet technological innovation

– lay in ruins, with rusting buildings and company employees in worn uniforms (Hoffman 1999;

Boghossian 2017). Concepts of nature, community, and nationhood were all heavily imbricated in a system defined by inefficiencies, waste, uneconomic practices, technological lag, and environmental contamination (Gustafson 2014; Domjan & Stone 2010). Azerbaijan was a country struggling to mediate socialist principles of production and allocation with a more diffuse international system of capital and commodity (Blau & Rupnik 2019). Alongside material and economic turmoil, it was also a period marked by political unrest and the bolstering of the nation- state via tactics of military aggression and the semi-authoritarian management of land and people

(Kaldor 2007). The eruption of a bitter territorial war with over the province of

Nagorno- was at the heart of this resurgence of nationalism, creating a rippling and

11 ferocious desire to securitise and tightly control all aspects of the country and its border-zones

(Altstadt 2017; van Heese 2018). As a result, over the span of the nineties Azerbaijan slipped further and further into a 'free-for-all of corruption', with no 'accountability, no judicial system, and no rule of law' (Cornell 2015, pp. 58-59).

However, all this began to change around the mid-2000s (Blau & Rupnik 2019). A new phase of modernisation1 was implemented by President and his ministerial team, involving a decidedly post-industrial take on both urbanism and nation-making (Darieva 2018; Krebs

2015). Akin to the turn-of-the-century Azeri and European oil barons, who channelled their profits into ambitious infrastructural and greening projects in order to extend their influence, the

Aliyev government began configuring nature as a potential technology of statehood. Launched by presidential decree, the 'Comprehensive Action Plan for Improving the Ecological Conditions in the Azerbaijan Republic during 2006-2010' was foundational in kickstarting a range of construction and remediation projects across the capital. The program prompted the transformation of Baku's old industrial districts into sustainable residential zones, alongside the cultivation of major parklands and hundreds of hectares of green space throughout the city

(Darieva 2016). For a time being, it also entailed a 6-billion-USD 'carbon neutral' resort – to be built on Zira Island on the Caspian Sea – though it ultimately failed to secure adequate funding

(Harris-Brandts & Gogishvili 2018). According to the former Minister of Foreign Affairs (2004-

2020), Elmar Mammadyarov, the reason behind the shift towards urbanism and was, in many ways, to signal the country's 're-emergence into the international community' through adequately showcasing a range of 'achievements since independence' (Grant

2014, p. 515). By incorporating the natural world and its nonhuman subjects into the nation's

1 Inspired by Baku's third historical oil boom (Guliyev 2012). 12 infrastructure, public life, and governing structure, the state aimed to produce material evidence of change – a redemptive narrative of a blasted landscape salvaged and made anew.

In addition to policies and practices of deindustrialisation and greening within the emergent republic, there was a turn towards environmental care as a patriotic duty and a distinct component of civic life (Cornell 2015). This was particularly pronounced in the midst of Azerbaijan's post- socialist transition, with the newly independent nation facing simmering anarchic impulses, as well as a massive demographic shake-up resulting from the exodus of ethnic Russians,

Armenians, and Jewish minorities (Guliyev 2012). With an increasingly insubordinate population, the state was prompted to come up with new discourses of collective identity and civic responsibility. Whilst mainstream scholarship has traced the establishment of a semi- authoritarian government via a constitution which gave extensive powers to the office of the president, less present were accounts of soft and diffuse power (Ottaway 2003). Mass tree- planting events involving the community and volunteer clean-up initiatives were examples of emergent modes of governance, designed by the state to attain support from the population and to deter revolt (Cornell 2015). It invoked the environment as a potent site of patriotism, with the bolstering of the nation-state firmly intertwined with the upkeep of nature. Indeed, one of the most ambitious projects in Baku's recent history – the part-conversion of Baku’s Black City (Qara

Şəhər) into the much-lauded environmental district of the White City (Ağ Şəhər) – entailed the labour of hundreds of volunteers tasked with planting rows of mature olive trees. Reminiscent of the traditional groves seen in ‘ancient’ Absheron villages like Nardaran2, the community initiative was linked to the restoration of traditional naturescapes and a gesture of public investment in the

2 Whilst for many urban residents evokes a pastoral ideal – of sandstone houses, Soviet built greenhouses and a supposedly 200-year-old olive tree –, it is also a heavily policed settlement. After a 2015 crackdown on suspected Islamist radicals, the government reopened a long-closed police station and set up a local branch of the Ministry of National Security. For a number of years, a security checkpoint controlled all traffic in and out of the settlement (Chai Khana 2017) and residents were subject to frequent raids by the authorities. 13 future of the nation 3 (Harris-Brandts & Gogishvili 2018; Fikret, Huseyn, & Mammad 2012). I see these events as key to the gradual establishment of, what I term, Azerbaijan's 'post-extractive era'.

It should be noted that there is a distinct entanglement between the country's oil industry and state-endorsed practices of environmentalism. Many of the ecological projects launched over the past three decades derived their funding from a thirty-year production-sharing agreement signed in 1994 between Azerbaijan and ten foreign oil companies from six countries (Blau & Rupnik

2019). The 8 billion USD 'contract of the century' kickstarted the economy and highlighted the centrality of oil within processes of policy implementation, diplomacy, and environmentalism

(Sagheb & Javadi 1994). Whilst the link between oil-derived revenues and state-building in hydrocarbon-rich republics is quite apparent, the manner in which ecological projects contribute to the reification of the nation-state remains much more elusive. Within the context of

Azerbaijan, both oil and nature have been historically linked to technologies of governance and population management, constructing distinct epistemological and material infrastructures. By acknowledging the way in which extraction and environmentalism dovetail, there is a chance to reassess the narrative of Azerbaijan's transition from an isolated, polluted, socialist state to a globalising, peaceful, liberal state. Ultimately, one is left with a more complex account of enduring logics and entangled histories.

3 The development of an environmentally friendly image has been especially crucial in the restoration of Azerbaijan’s image following the BTC pipeline protests. International attention led to widespread claims of corruption within the government (including the use of oil money to fund ‘White Elephant’ projects), alongside the exposure of practices aimed at punishing dissenting voices and silencing environmental activism (AFP 2015; Allnutt 2006).

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Research Aims:

This thesis will focus on projects of environmental remediation and renaturalisation taking place in the capital city of Baku and the contested territories of Nagorno-Karabakh, exposing the ways in which 'nature' is taken up as a powerful technology of the Azeri state (Dovey 2009; Darieva

2015). I argue that most of the ecological initiatives launched by the government of Azerbaijan have been premised around the manipulation of the more-than-human world4 to either create mythic pre-industrial naturescapes or tightly regulated urban zones (Lewis-Kraus 2016). Through greening, the state has sought to disrupt webs of existing human and nonhuman life deemed incompatible with the modern, independent nation-state, continuing an interventionist approach frequently witnessed under conditions of resource extraction (Moore 2015).

It will be suggested that there is a congruence between systems of capitalist accumulation and the post-industrial environmental city, with both reliant on the manipulation of species-environment relationships – severing it 'symbolically, and then acting accordingly' (2015, p. 11). Though, what has become distinctly clear in the case of Azerbaijan is that in shifting away from conventional extraction as the basis of national identity and its affiliated systems of social organisation, nature has turned into a 'crucible of legitimation' (p. 11). It has allowed the rendering of certain populations, beneficial to the upkeep of the nation, desirable, whilst those who resist are cast-off as unwanted relics of a past era. It will be argued that projects of greening reveal the protracted nature of capitalist and extractivist logic which, in the words of Stoler, saturates the 'subsoil of people’s lives' and persist into the 'post' period (2013, p. 5).

4 Including atmospheres, technologies, discourses, and spaces. 15

Furthermore, the cultivation of the nation-state through the greening of former industrial zones complicates the narrative of ruination attributed to post-extractive environments. Rather than being ontologically and epistemologically inert zones, naturescapes effaced by resource extraction present a productive sphere for the state to implement and trial strategies of governance and population management. The dissertation will argue that discourses concerned with , sustainable urbanism, and the restoration of biodiversity have become central to asserting claims of sovereignty, territorial rights, as well as a cohesive national identity in a region marked by instability.

Providing somewhat of a counterpoint, the thesis will also put forward the capacity for post- extractive environments to foster alternate visions of nation- and world-making. It will provide examples of communities averse to, or outside of, the nation-state, who have flourished within the ruins of the post-industrial landscape, organising social and political life in ways uncanny and surprising. With ruination being 'an active, ongoing process that allocates imperial [and capitalist] debris differentially' (Stoler 2013, p. 7), there are opportunities to intervene and sabotage, with marginal communities exploiting the affordances found within the post-extractive landscape.

Conceptual Framework:

There are two concepts which dovetail to form the main theoretical framework drawn upon throughout the dissertation – that of 'post-extractive naturescapes' and 'ecologised biopolitics'.

Within the context of the Anthropocene – an epoch characterised by extreme environmental degradation, contamination, and exploitation (Haraway 2015) – more and more landscapes are being rendered uninhabitable and devoid of collective existence. In his work, The Anti-

Landscape, David Nye (2014) describes these environments as lacking the infrastructure and material components necessary to sustain human and nonhuman communities. Maunu 16

Häyrynen expanded on Nye's point by linking anti-landscapes to places which have not only experienced a physical hollowing out but have lost earlier cultural importance as a result of political, social, and economic developments (Häyrynen 2014). Similarly, recent writing on environmental history has attributed the emergence of these deathly landscapes to land abuse, industrial pollution, rampant extraction, as well as the careless storage of hazardous waste.

Timothy LeCain's Mass Destruction (2009) and David Zierler's The Invention of Ecocide (2011) both serve as notable examples of scholarship which renders post-industrial environments as lacking in vitality and existing as empty sites of non-life.

The most visible discourses on post-industrial sites emphasise the need for intensive intervention via processes of pollution mitigation, soil remediation, and adaptive reuse (Langhorst 2014).

Within the scheme of these interventions, terms such as 'landscape urbanism', 'sustainable urbanism', and 'ecological urbanism' arise as savvy conceptual and practical alternatives to the mainstream strategies of urban development and 'gentrification by demolition' (Valiyev &

Wallwork 2019). Yet, scholars such as Harvey (1973) and Talen (2010) show that the emergent ecologies and urban naturescapes informed by these concepts perpetuate the same hegemonial agendas of capital circulation, global development, and systematisation seen in past environmental projects. Indeed, amidst the fractured promise of urban modernity, remediation and renaturalisation re-establishes an infrastructural ideal (Graham & Marvin 2001) in which the environment finds itself once again tightly bound to technologies of control and frameworks which inhibit unintentional and uncanny circulations of human and nonhuman lives (Silver

2019).

The notion of a post-extractive naturescape, however, draws closer to Anna Tsing's patchy anthropocene (2019). Rather than describing industrial zones as blasted landscapes where only

17 negative or absent relations are possible, Tsing locates patches of modular simplification and feral proliferation – patches where humans and nonhumans are heterogenous and messily entangled. Modular simplification refers to the increased density of some kinds of individuals as a result of the clearing out of species diversity, whilst feral proliferation describes the rapid and strange spread of nuclear, toxic, viral, bacterial, fungal, or animal kinds; both describe forms of worldmaking which evade prediction, curtailment, and management. Refusing an impossible choice between 'technotheocratic geoengineering fixes and wallowing in despair' (Haraway 2016, p. 56), environments damaged by capitalist extraction are instead seen to reverberate with multiple histories and unexpected encounters (Mathews 2018). A number of publications in the field of environmental studies have contemplated the affiliations and entanglements which co- exist between the history of technology and environmental history, describing in rich detail the social lives of pipelines (Widener 2013), highways (Gordillo 2019), power-grids (Benson 2015), pumps (Bakker 2013), rigs (Appel 2012), and the matrix of life they exist within. The examples of scholarship listed move beyond the treatment of the post-extractive environment as a mere backdrop (Nash 1993; Jaramillo 2020), recognising how the relics and debris of industry can come to possess agency and act as a key conduit of relation.

Ashley Carse’s (2019) work, chronicling unruly growth in the province of Colón in Panama, is particularly illustrative of the distinct angling that can be found in studies of environments in the midst of the Anthropocene. The spaces of focus usually tend to be those that have endured multiple planetary crises, forms of vampiric capitalist exploitation, and the material injury caused by various resource industries, paying close attention to the indices through which more abstract configurations of power, discourse, and affect become tangible and communicable. Crucially, through focusing on emergent naturescapes, scholars such as Carse speak to the capacity of post- industrial flora and fauna in storying a complexity which cannot be reduced to simple ideas of

18 harm and repair. This is also seen in Matthew Gandy's work on the formation of ruderal ecologies in Berlin's former military and factory spaces (2016) – described as sites of non-design which invite the formation of provisional and incidental relationships between the more-than-human world.

This takes us to the second concept of 'ecologized biopolitics'. The term itself is appropriated from an article by Lorimer and Driessen (2016), in which they define the process of rewilding

Heck cattle as an 'ecologized biopolitics' whose target is 'securing desired systemic properties emergent from, and primary to, populations of nonhuman life' (p. 640). Whilst both scholars attribute the origins of the concept to Foucault (2007) and his seminal writing on biopower as

'the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy' (p. 1), they elect to make a significant intervention to the original definition by extending the term to nonhuman life. Here, the more-than-human world becomes tightly imbricated with geopolitical and biopolitical dimensions, and a way to exert influence and power over emergent social and ecological 'milieux' (Foucault 2007, p. 20; Massumi 2009). This extension allows other processes of environmental management and intervention – including remediation and renaturalisation – to be considered biopolitical in character and a marked way for the state to exert its authority.

Indeed, a range of scholars have connected processes of remediation and environmental decontamination with the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state and its emphasis on discourses surrounding hygiene, urban order, and public health (Gandy 2006; Baviskar 2011;

Silver 2019). The material exigencies of the industrial city, characterised by a 'threatening autonomy' and the potential 'proliferation of the abnormal' (Massumi 2009, p. 157), comes to justify the imposition of harsher and more explicit forms of governmentality. For Langhorst

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(2014), environmental maintenance – in the form of soil decontamination, tree-planting, the introduction of irrigation systems, or even investment in public greenery –, turns into an effectively strategy for the state to recompose the cultural, political, economic, and biophysical aspects of the nation and its contested spaces. However, for Langhorst, nature is also capable of producing its own 'spatial tactics and acts of resistance' (2014, p. 1113), occupying marginal and marginalised spaces which leak out of the grip of hegemonial powers. A regime of ecologised biopolitics lends itself to the co-emergence of 'transgressive ecologies' (2014, p. 1113).

Out of the two primary concepts of the 'post-extractive naturescape' and 'ecologised biopolitics' arises the epistemological offering of this dissertation – 'unsupervised worldmaking'. It is the point at which the more-than-human evades the systems and discourses constructed by the state and invites a different conceptualisation of nature. The post-industrial and post-extractive landscape provides this point, allowing marginal and marginalised communities to forge alternate affective and relational practices which jar with development and capital (Langhorst 2014; Mah 2012). In

Derek Gladwin’s Ecological Exile (2017), this is conveyed through the loss of ‘place-home’, where the exacerbation of ecological degradation brings on an array of new feelings and attachments towards natural spaces rendering it unfamiliar, strange, and open. Gladwin, via the work of Smyth, refrains from a deterministic reading by imploring that space occupies ‘various forces vying for power’ and that what we consider ‘nature’ is itself ‘ambivalent, often unfinished and incoherent’ (2017, p. 5), leading to the constant potential of not only domination, but also resistance, animatedness, and intimacy (Smyth 2001, p. 16).

The contestation of a stable and coherent nature, particularly as it slides against the industrial and infrastructural, is continued in the work of Stefan Berger. Eco-projects are made strange and concepts of heritage are reconfigured, beyond merely scopes of loss and ruin. In Berger’s (2019)

20 project regarding the deindustrialization and subsequent heritagisation of the Ruhr region of

Germany we encounter an array of representational and relational modalities which resist congealing into a coherent picture. The re-emergence of ‘nature’ in the Ruhr, through the cleaning up of the river Emsche, as well as the transformation of brownfields into biodiverse forests, becomes messy in its affiliation, denying a clear-cut story of a ‘return of the pre-industrial’

(2019, p. 37). The multi-perspective nostalgic memory described by Berger, which conjures up a past of wilful destruction, contradictory regional identity, as well as the extinction of particular ways of living, can also be seen as the animation of the ‘ghosts of a bad death’ (in the words of

Gan et al. 2017, p.6). In this particular version of things, the emergent nature that unsettles does so because it shows us how ‘living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces’. The nature that returns to the extractive zone recalls a death ‘out of time’ (p. 7) despite positing an anterior future, firmly carrying with it the difficult, yet necessary weeds — be it of violations, ruptures, or obituaries.

Ultimately, when environments are hard to witness, they generate what can be described as feelings of biocentric urgency and immobilizing anxiety, echoed by the appeasing narratives of foreclosure. How do you reject band-aid naturescapes which are meant to soothe us into complacency? Gomez-Barris’ cataloguing of life otherwise, or the ‘emergent and heterogeneous forms of living’ (2017, p. 4) which exceed destruction or mere survival, seems to provide such disruption. In her book, Extractive Zone, Gomez-Barris provides rich emergent alternatives which exist alongside, and in spite of, extractive capitalism. Her reading never denies the enduring scars left by resource extraction, nor the ever-evolving capacities of state and corporate actors to inflict damage, but she refrains from the paradigm of no future (Mol & and Spaargaren

1993; Fagan 2017) so often encountered in similar literature. The concept of unsupervised worldmaking, similar to Gomez-Barris' submerged perspective, seeks to recognise the

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‘microspaces of interaction and encounter’ (2017, p. 4) in ways which err against the mandate of visibility or exposure. It seeks to follow suit in providing a decolonised method of studying communities wishing to remain peripheral and separate from grand projects of renewal or repair.

Through a deep commitment to methodology, as well as ethnographies which refuse depoliticisation, there is a potential to discursively enact alternative modes of understanding which ‘challenge and change pre-existing order’, thus provoking ‘new orderings of subjectivity, society, and culture’ (Fortun 2015, p. 123).

Methodology:

The research project involved a total of five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azerbaijan, starting in July 2019 and ending in November of the same year. My primary research site was

Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, where I was hosted by a state university as part of their annual summer school program. As a participant, I was able to visit a number of sites linked to both the extractive industry and environmental management – including SOCAR's Bibi-Heybat Oil & Gas

Extraction Department, Temiz Seher solid waste landfill and sorting plant located in Balakhani, and a section of the Baku––Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. After the successful completion of the program, I relocated to a makeshift settlement in the southeast of Baku, spending the remaining months conducting site-specific research and living in the family house of one of my interlocutors. Beyond the capital, I spent a week conducting fieldwork in Kuzanly, a village in the

Ağdam Rayon of Azerbaijan proximal to the contested territories of Nagorno-Karabakh. I conducted a total of 51 semi-structured interviews: twenty-one with IDPs residing in the Black

City of Baku, eight with environmental scientists working on state funded projects, two with soldiers in the Azerbaijani Armed Forces, nine with residents of the new White City development, three with landscapers contracted by the state, three with representatives from

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SOCAR, one with a conservation scientist, one with a state-employed pest controller, one with a former SOCAR engineer, one with an Azeri historian, and one with an employee of the Temiz

Seher waste disposal agency.

From the start, my fieldwork was characterised by the sustained observation of institutional practices and governing bodies. I did not want to continue 'practices of defamiliarization' (Nader

2011, p. 212) so often found within histories of Anglo-American and Western anthropology, with researchers moving to places removed from their own culture so that they can be inspired by

'newness and unfamiliarity' (p. 213), nor did I want to restrict my focus and critique to my immediate surroundings. Instead, I wanted to respond to the challenge set by Nader5 in the 1970s in turning towards the oft neglected middle and upper ends of the social power structure (1972)

– apprehending the banal spaces of governance where both authority and jurisdiction are consolidated. If ethnography is defined as a 'family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents' (Willis & Trondman 2000, p.5), in a context of rapid globalisation, the rise of new imperialisms, and ever-expanding circuits of capital, it has become necessary to directly insert oneself into structures of decision-making and to thoroughly interrogate processes of knowledge-production (Mukhtarov, de Jong & Pierce 2017).

Within the context of Azerbaijan's greening, this has meant conducting semi-structured interviews with representatives of the state – including staff within the Ministry of Ecology and Natural

Resources, council workers, members of the armed forces, and policymakers, as well as researchers involved in state-sponsored projects of environmental management, conservation, and remediation. In order to gain access, I had to become somewhat of a non-confrontational

5 Nader referred to this as the act of 'studying up' (1972; 1997) social structures, Wright and Reinhold (2011) went further and argued that researchers must 'study through' sites and situations of decision-making. 23 supporter, rendering me complicit in the very extractive practices I was meaning to critique. Not only was I enrolled in a summer school run by a state university with direct links to the Aliyev family, but my participation was effectively funded by BP, SOCAR and Total. It reminded me of similar issues faced by social scientists working within institutions with known links to violent industries or practices — from the corporate business world (Sedgwick 2017), the military (Weiss

2019; Sørensen & Weisdorf 2019; Lucas 2009), to the police force (Jauregui 2013). Crucial questions are raised regarding the type of knowledge produced under conditions which demand different levels of appeasement, the downplaying of activist impulses, and, at times, the abandonment of professional ethical standards. This is particularly the case when a researcher finds themselves materially and financially bound to certain bodies and structures of power.

Upon reflection, these concerns encouraged the emergence of a paranoid perspective within my writing (Sedgwick 2003). I would catch myself inferring that violence was inevitable and inescapable at times; often as a result of the heaviness which permeated the institutional atmosphere. I would read articles concerning environmental pollution, or the conflict in

Nagorno-Karabakh, already under the presumption that it would be in accordance to the state's version of events. All this compounded into a distinct sense that I was lacking adequate methods needed to avoid yet another fatalistic narrative of capitalist domination and authoritarian oppression.

When it came to the fieldwork I conducted in the Black City, my primary concerns were to do with academic knowledge-production as an extractive practice. What did it mean to derive data and stories out of land already privy to processes of geological and material extraction? What role did I play for a community already familiar with 'consultation' and the presence of outsiders with specific purposes? I wondered throughout my time in Baku if I had the capacity to conduct a reparative reading as a 'tourist-scholar'. Whether I had the right to? In thinking through these

24 issues, I turned to Kim Fortun – particularly her call to reconceptualise ethnography as a technology or a ‘crafted means through which things are enabled’. Rather than mining for data,

I decided to use my time in the Black City to forge friendships and to enjoy everyday life. Part of this entailed noticing uncanny interactions, as well as the array of ingenious methods and practices cultivated by the community. I thought of these observations less as raw material and more akin to thread which could be spun and woven into a story attesting to the ethics of my interlocutors.

Not a 'speaking for' but a witnessing.

The nonhuman world also inspired my methodology. Being bitten by a stray dog during fieldwork and having consistent allergic reaction to the camelthorn weed made me quickly realise that ‘nature’ in spaces of extraction does not greet in ways envisioned or expected. The post- extractive landscape challenges scholars to develop methods which ultimately draw us into different conversations — conversations which may engender sensitivity, produce new textual encounters between diverse world-making projects, and militate for us to continue engaging and experimenting (Fortun 2015). It asks for an approach which may ‘give rise to the unanticipated’

(Rees 2018). Indeed, much like the ‘way toxics inhabit the bodies of those exposed’ (Fortun

2012, p. 449), the landscape of post-extraction sites allow us to think more closely about forms which emerge not as logical machines, but as an open-ended assemblage, giving way to a

'determinism, but without the straightforward directives of teleology’ (Fortun 2012, p. 448). It asks for methodology capable of holding artistic interpretations, poetry, recipes, imprints, myths, urban legends, and folklore. Within the brief word-count allocated, I tried to touch upon, or at least hint at, as many experimental genres as I could. Ultimately, I hope to give my own rendition of Marran's obligate storytelling: a kind of storying which ‘emphasizes the bond, the fetter, the bowline, the ligare, of one being to another at the level of care and substance, of thought and matter’ (2017, p. 27).

25

Chapter Overview:

The dissertation is split into two distinct ethnographic chapters, exploring the same post- extractive context from a different vantage point — however, they both take cultivation as their centrepiece. The first chapter examines cultivation as a practice of state-building, where land is appropriated as a symbolic terrain of governance and nature is strategically implemented to assert authority. The second chapter returns to the root meaning of cultivation as a practice wandering, with both human and nonhuman communities engaging in fleeting relations which exist outside of the matrix of ownership, territory, order, and sovereignty. In Chapter 2, “Field of Play,” I explore the mobilisation of ecological issues by the Azeri state as a way to fuel nationalist sentiment and legitimate state power. The title of the chapter refers to the uptake of natural spaces — from oak forests to olive groves — within political power-moves and militaristic games.

I argue that over the past three decades in Azerbaijan, practices of remediation, decontamination, and renaturalisation have begun to carry distinct biopolitical connotations (particularly within state discourse). In Chapter 3, “Unruly Subjects & Unsupervised Worlds”, I examine the human and nonhuman populations inhabiting the former extraction and petrochemical production zones of Baku – namely, communities of Internally Displaced People (IDPs), stray dogs, ruderal plants, and ghostly beings. I argue that for marginal communities the post-extractive landscape provides a context in which alternate modalities and articulations of relation can be cultivated, without the need to forge nationalistic attachments to land, or to engage in grand projects of restoration. Furthermore, the inhospitable and hostile nature of the exhausted oilfields, sparse wastelands, and decommissioned factories provide an escape from hegemonic state powers, as well as their affiliated systems of management and surveillance. Directly following the chapters, the dissertation closes with a brief note on the afterlife of extractive spaces and the communities inhabiting them. 26

Chapter 2

Field of Play

Militarised Environments and a Biodiverse State

'July 6th, Saturday, 2:14AM, 2019. An earthquake occurs in Armenia.'

The simulation began with a short time-stamped update, informing all participants of an earthquake rippling through the Caucuses. The instructor stood at the centre of the room with a sense of gravitas as she ran us through the technical details, providing hour-by-hour updates of the situation as it unfolded. We were told of Azeri seismographs visualising the strike-slip event in the form of furious, tri-coloured lines on a dark screen, contradicting neighbouring Armenia's claim that nothing of significance occurred within its territory in the AM hours. There were allusions to the lack of communication between the two nations being commonplace, hindering the development of an appropriate emergency response. Students spoke of Armenia's obfuscation of scientific data and their reluctance to join international initiatives concerned with security and safety. However, despite these criticisms, it seemed to be a straightforward narrative of natural disaster management – concerned with pragmatics and 'neutral' in its politics. As the class gathered around the half crescent boardroom table to brainstorm potential strategies, the instructor suddenly switched to a PowerPoint slide showcasing photographs of outdated control panels and crumbling cooling towers. The threat of an earthquake was suddenly subsumed by the possibility of something far more ominous and politically charged in the minds of Azeri participants: the full-scale meltdown of the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant. 27

Located in the Armavir Province of Armenia, the power plant has long been a symbol of

Armenia's persistent belief in and commitment to nuclear energy, an inheritance of Soviet technological utopianism (Josephson 2003, p. 283). With the inclusion of this extra detail, the mood in the room shifted from the type of anxiety elicited by unavoidable geophysical phenomena, to a sense of righteous anger. Unlike the hushed murmuring that filled the room prior to Metsamor's mention, classmates were audibly comparing the situation to Chernobyl and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Some pointed out the inability to discern whether the photographs of Metsamor were taken in the 1950s or in 2019; some reprimanded the neighbouring country for their lack of investment in new and sustainable technologies; some thought of the aged power plant as a potential weapon if conflict escalated even further between the two nations; whilst others clumped it with what they deemed to be a track-record of environmental neglect6. As part of my fieldwork, I decided to enrol in a summer school run by a local university and funded partly by oil giants BP, SOCAR, and Total7. The curriculum entailed a series of interactive workshops on pipeline security, the diversification of the oil industry and corporate focus, as well as emergent environmental policy. Considering that the dissolution of the rendered the Caspian a zone of fraught diplomacy between five sovereign nations, each with heavy investments in (and attachments to) the extractive industry, I was curious8

6 Scholarly engagements have further reinforced Metsamor's reputation as a spectre of archaic and hostile technology. Focusing on the impact of seismic activity, system malfunction, and outdated policy, Azeri and Turkish scholars have produced vast amounts of literature and investigative research on the powerplant, arguing that it is an enduring liability to the safety of the region (Nadirov & Rzayev 2017; Altikat, Dogru, Argun & Bayram 2015; Kabasakal & Albayrak 2012). The institutional affiliations of the researchers do cast doubt on the impartiality of the articles, emerging out of countries with known antagonism towards Armenia. 7 Whilst Laura Nader called for anthropologists to 'study up' (1972; 1997) social structures, Reinhold (2011) went further and argued that researchers must 'study through' sites and situations of decision-making. My ability to examine the role of state-corporate collaborations in the uptake of ecological issues was made possible through an 'improper affiliation' (Chen 2012, p. 104) with the petrochemical industry, one that rendered me complicit as an insider (Hepsø, p.151) and a participant of Baku's petrochemical institutions and culture. I discuss this in further detail in the Introduction of the thesis. 8 Observing the sudden proliferation of environmental projects around the capital city, I often found myself thinking of Félix Guattari's prediction in The Three Ecologies (2000) of capitalist enterprise, with its logic of accumulation and resource exploitation, burrowing further and further into seemingly immune spheres of life – be it nature, social relations, or human subjectivity. 28 as to why there seemed to be a sudden prioritisation of ecological issues in the region, particularly by a nation that had been the lawless playground of a transnational petrochemical industry for nearly three decades (Marriott & Minio-Paluello 2012).

Within the context of the simulation, Armenia was portrayed as an enemy of both the Azeri nation and the environment. It was depicted9 as a country willingly endorsing a risky energy infrastructure which leaked radioactive material, relied on the mining and extraction of uranium, and threatened ecosystems painstakingly restored next door. This was to be expected with renewed strife between politicians over the territories of Nagorno-Karabakh during the month of the program, compelling both countries to introduce new discursive strategies in order to appeal for the support of the international community (Atanesyan 2020; Bliesemann de Guevara &

Kostić 2017). The rhetoric of fragile biodiverse zones and pristine ecosystems, vulnerable to malicious acts of contamination, helped Azerbaijan forge much needed alliances with various organisations, intergovernmental institutions, and NGOs – including the OSCE Minsk Group, the OECD, and the Green Cross (Mammadov 2020; AZERTAC 202010). Metsamor was referenced as a looming threat in numerous articles, social media posts, as well as news reports, with accounts compounding the controversial plant with other forms of environmental destruction and ruination – including the deliberate polluting of the Araz river and the illegal dumping of tailings (Pashayeva 2006; Heintz 2020; AZERTAC 202011; Virtual Karabakh 2020).

9 It should be noted that both countries have engaged in an information war which paints the other country as the chief antagonist. This has been reliant on inflammatory political speeches and the production of extensive propaganda. Whilst the Azeri population and media have both focused on the lack of awareness shown by international organisations when it comes to Armenian aggression, as well as the material consequences of the conflict, Armenian reporters and news stations mainly see the conflict as the result of a sinister alliance between Turkey-Azerbaijan, aimed at territorial expansion and the destabilisation of the Armenian nation-state. As a result, most of the accounts in mainstream media attend to issues of land-grabs and dispossessed Armenian communities, victim to another era of ethnic genocide (Shafiyev 2020; Gulesserian & Phillips 2020). 10 Article titled: 'Ministry of Ecology: Armenia commits environmental terror against Azerbaijan' (October 30, 2020). 11 Article titled: 'Environmental Public Council of Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, Environmental Civil Society Organizations make joint statement on Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan' (October 20, 2020). 29

Here, only a hardened border assured protection from the leakiness of Armenia's environmentally unfriendly practices. Even in the context of the previously mentioned simulation, most of my fellow classmates ended up recommending strongman policies, military intervention, and legal proceedings when it came to issues like Metsamor. In the post-extractive space, the environment had suddenly turned into an arena for nationalist sentiments and the bolstering of the nation-state, with more-than-human relations at its centre.

Since the 19th century, resource nationalism has defined Azerbaijan, with oil conceptualised as the primary source of modernity, state legitimacy, and wealth (Koch & Perreault 2018). It provided the state with an assurance of 'economic sufficiency and hence self-sustaining growth’

(Williams & Smith 1983, p. 509), underscoring an array of domestic policies and directives – including the financing of social and welfare-oriented projects, the securitisation of territorial borders, as well as diplomatic manoeuvres to appease different ethnic communities.

Furthermore, possession of oil by the nation-state encouraged a certain level of autarchy during periods of external governance, granting Azeri leaders a way to negotiate with imperial administrators and, later, the centralised system of the Soviet Union. However, the exclusive role held by oil has found itself increasingly contested over the last fifteen years, particularly with financial downturns becoming commonplace across the fossil fuel industry (Skalamera 2020) and key reservoirs ending up depleted and unviable. These logistical issues have been accompanied by distinct shifts in political consensus – as a result of the introduction of global climate change mitigation measures12 (Le Billon & Bridge 2017), the establishment of green economies by a number of oil-rich nations (Al-Sarihi 2020, Isik 2018), as well as the move toward renewables as multinational corporations diversify their investments (Kassinis & Panayiotou 2018). These

12 Particularly those concerned with reducing fossil fuel consumption. Such policies have threatened oil-dependent economies in a manner similar to that of price shocks. 30 factors have contributed to the emergence of nature as a promising replacement for oil, signalling the beginnings of a post-extractive future. Within this context, a mutually constitutive relationship has been forged between the environment and the nation, with projects concerning biodiversity, ecological wellbeing, and conservation, imbricated with the production of new national identities, new scales of political action, and new ways to achieve and/or strengthen sovereignty.

This chapter examines recent intersections between environmentalism in Azerbaijan and emergent forms of nationalism. It argues that ecological issues are increasingly treated by the state as matters of security and means to achieving political legitimacy. This is especially so for a country vying to diversify its longstanding international reputation as an oil nation, plagued by decades of environmental mismanagement and petrochemical contamination. Incorporating news and governmental reports on recent afforestation and decontamination projects around the border region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the chapter draws attention to the greenwashing of

Azerbaijan's national identity and the development of an 'eco-subjecthood' which correlates environmentally friendly policies and practices with both a moral and an ethical right to territory.

Through this, nature and its nonhuman inhabitants have become prospective agents in the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, with claims of environment pollution and degradation wielded with a sense of authority and judgment. I argue that the discursive heft of the environment – including the right to an unspoilt naturescape and the imperative to safeguard biodiverse ecologies –, has replaced crude oil when it comes to the attainment of support from both the local and the international community. Drawing on interviews conducted with workers contracted by the Ministry of Ecology, state diplomats, as well as local community groups, the chapter centres environmental programs in the creation of a sovereign post-extractive nation.

Here, the move away from a totalising hydrocarbon reputation will be seen to dovetail with a move toward the restoration of territorial integrity and a nationalistic attachment to land, with

31 nature making the state legible in new and distinct ways. It will be seen as part of a larger framework of ecologised biopolitics, in which nature functions as an extension of state authority and legitimacy. Whilst seemingly met with next to no opposition on a political level, the chapter will hint at alternative sites of resistance – particularly as the state's ambit ripples through communities already left out of the national imaginary.

The first section begins with one of the earliest instances of environmental activism in

Azerbaijan's history – the Topkhana demonstration. Aimed at hindering the alleged plans of

Armenian authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh to cut down an old-growth forest and construct an aluminium plant in its place, the protest was foundational in its recognition and articulation of nature, specifically the oak tree, as a symbolic subject of the sovereign nation. It was seen as deserving of protection and select political rights due to its incorporation into the framework of the state13. Whilst projects of nation-building have been envisaged as reliant on mechanisms of exclusion (Skey & Antonsich 2017) – justified and organised through socially, politically, and biologically constructed hierarchies –, the section will highlight the emergent role of human/nonhuman entanglements in serving nationalistic ends. It will be argued that the state's ability to demonstrate a connection to the oak tree was not only essential in establishing control over the old-growth forest, but also in indexing sovereignty more generally. This was particularly so with the Soviet Union approaching its twilight years, bringing forth the task of negotiating borders and discrete national identities as an independent Caspian region began to gradually come into view. Borrowing Ian Hodder's term, it inspired the creation of a rhetoric founded

13 These rights include recognition within the legal system and the affordance of certain protections and forms of representation. By being included in the country's Convention on Biological Diversity, flora and fauna are advocated for by the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources within local courts and a range of international forums (including the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe). Most of the plants found in Nagorno-Karabakh have also been listed in the Red Book of Azerbaijan, which contains updated information on the status of rare, threatened and endangered wild plant and animal species for the entire territory of the country, including Azerbaijan's section of the Caspian Sea. 32 upon 'webs of interconnection' (2014), foregrounding historical and affective relations between the forest of Topkhana and the Azeri population. The state produced a narrative of an ancient forest, which, if injured or damaged, would compromise the integrity and wellbeing of the nation itself. I argue that this rhetoric of imbrication led to new forms of securitisation and territorial line-drawing, dissolving boundaries between nation and nature, yet maintaining borders between nation and the unnatural – specifically Armenia and its affiliated industrial pollutants. To this end, the nation retained its role as the primary organising structure of ecological justice, with deservingness and protection accorded only to 'Azeri' life-forms compatible with the image of flourishing biodiverse havens.

I then examine the emergence of a militarised conceptualisation of nature, with the state increasingly rendering reserves, national parks, and waterways into zones of conflict and contestation. This has led to the on-ground implementation of various techniques of management, securitisation, and surveillance, which not only seek to track, but also indict, subjects challenging the power regime. The section will look towards the documentation of environmental damage and contamination by both the state and the media, as well as its use in crafting narratives of unruly and threatened ecosystems, requiring the entrenchment of secure enclaves and other forms of militaristic enclosure. It will also examine the rendering of environmental data collection as a highly politicised pursuit within the context of the nation- space. As a result of this framing, it will be argued that flora and fauna are engendered with new meaning and reconceptualised as biological sentinels capable of informing the state about the presence of formerly invisible, untraceable, and ungovernable matter. Additionally, technological devices, usually utilised for purposes of land remediation and environmental management, are also being incorporated as methods through which alleged 'environmental sabotage' can be evidenced. Both these strategies mark forms of naturalcultural knowledge-making (Oppermann

33

& Iovino 2016) which foster the maintenance of a sovereign territory. The section ultimately reveals the epistemological implications of investing ecological bodies and materialities with biopolitical meaning.

The final section will pivot towards the Azeri government’s mobilisation of ecological projects in, and proximal to, the contested territories of Nagorno-Karabakh. Rather than simply being an environmental mission, the combination of mass tree-planting campaigns and conservation/de- extinction schemes will be recognised as activities central to the territorialisation of land for the state, populating conflict-ridden areas with flora and fauna symbolically and historically associated with a sovereign Azerbaijan. It will be argued that the planting of pomegranate/olive trees, as well as the breeding of the Karabakh horse, serve to ultimately reproduce the nation-state – evoking a sense of belonging and laying claim to an area marked by centuries of shifting occupants and titles. Following this point, the section will turn to the loss of Armenian cultural relics and the destruction of historic settlements, occurring in tandem with the restoration of natural ecosystems and the establishment of biosphere reserves by the Azeri state. Here, the creation of protected conservation areas will be seen to provide a strategy by which landscapes under contested jurisdiction are increasingly de-historicised and resignified, exercising the political will of

Azerbaijan's governing bodies without offending the sensibilities of the international community.

The restoration of nature becomes the ideal guise through which nationalist projects can be launched and implemented – from the demolition of churches as part of greening initiatives, to the deliberate wilding of Armenian farmlands. In many ways, the protective areas and nature reserves found in the contested territories build upon frameworks and practices already established by privately secured mineral-extraction enclaves, geared around technologies of spatial and social regulation, the exploitation of readily available resources, as well as economic growth. The chapter will conclude by examining the futures envisioned by the state as prospective

34 ecological projects begin to materialise in Nagorno-Karabakh. It is worth noting that not every instance of replanting, tending, gardening, loving 'nature' is a hostile act of war, nor always driven by a militaristic attitude. Indeed, greening lends itself to slippages, with the aims and policies of the state not always being in perfect alignment with its implementation on ground.

An Axe to Grind

Ilyas lived in well-sized unit in the Nərimanov district of Baku. Filled with bicycle paths, newly built apartment complexes with Azeri (Aglay) limestone facades14, and abundant parklands15, it was an urban area increasingly affiliated with young professional families with attitudes closely resembling those found in Baviskar's work on bourgeois environmentalism (2011). Whilst

Baviskar conceived of the term to describe the middle-class-rooted conservation and beautification16 movement Delhi, India, it is useful in understanding the interconnections between class identity and the creation of distinct spatial orders within 'natural' environments elsewhere. In Baku's Nərimanov, it was an aspirational mimicking of an environmentalist praxis concerned with upkeep, diversified vegetation, and so-called Western techniques of waste management and urban maintenance. During my last month of fieldwork, I found out that the district had been handpicked for a UK/Azerbaijan pilot project seeking to implement and formalise practices of recycling within the city (Alakbarov 2020), providing a further nod towards its reputation as a hub of ecologically conscious citizens, seeking to integrate innovatory practices.

These practices not only mobilised discourses of environmental benefit, but also public interest

14 Sourced from the Qaradag district. 15 The most recently established park in the district boasts more than 2100 trees of 19 species and over 137 thousand flowers and shrubs. 16 Defined by clean and green urban spaces, protected parklands, and curated flora and fauna. 35 and civic duty – maintaining order, hygiene, and the surveillance of public space (Baviskar 2011, p. 392).

An environmental scientist with an expertise in the assessment of anthropogenic impacts, Ilyas thought of Nərimanov as an exemplar of eco-conscious practice and a source of national pride.

It was the latest iteration of an environmental ethic which went hand in hand with the birth of the independent Azeri nation. He told me during the course of one evening: "this district demonstrates our capacity as a country to govern well and bring even the arid, sparse, and difficult

Absheron peninsula into bloom. As people we have moved from drilling oil in our backyards, our vegetable patches and gardens, to recycling and reforesting thousands of hectares of land17...ever since Topkhana we have been people unafraid to mobilise and to fight for the rights of nature". He referred specifically to the mass demonstration which took place on the 17th of

November 1988, with hundreds of thousands of gathering in Baku's Lenin square to protest plans by Nagorno-Karabakh authorities to cut down a 300-year-old forest. According to Ilyas, most of the slogans concerned "proud and sturdy oak trees" populating a "sacred grove” which had served as inspiration for Azeri writers, poets, playwrights, musicians, composers, and intellectuals for centuries. This account, however, downplays the populist arguments put forward within both press reports and public discourse at the time, with the forest assuming a distinctly politicised form. A notable example of this can be seen in an excerpt from the newspaper Pioneer of Azerbaijan, declaring that: 'when the homeland is in distress and its soil is encroached upon, the descendants of...[Azerbaijani heroes] are ready to fight and perform heroic deeds in the name of their people'.

17 The Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources carried out a total 60674 ha of reforestation from the establishment of its Forest Fund program, till the present day, with 24132 ha comprising of newly planted forests. At the same time, a total of 200 million plant materials were cultivated in various herbariums and laboratories. Seed harvesting totalled to 1155 tons. 36

The period preceding Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost18 (Cheterian 2009, p.71) was characterised by tight restrictions on independent political activism across the Caucuses. Environmental issues were centrally managed by the Soviet Union and divorced from the internal workings of national governments, leaving no opportunity for populist mobilisation. Within this framework, satellite countries like Azerbaijan were recognised only for their lucrative petrochemical and agricultural production, antithetical to any form of nature-making or collective ecological imperative. Whilst the 1969 Law on the Protection of the Nature of Azerbaijan established seven specially protected state nature reserves (referred to as Zapovedniks), alongside three already in existence, it essentially had the effect of fragmenting the landscape of the nation both conceptually and materially. It rendered nature ontologically separate, cleaved from a national space which could be exploited and extracted according to the whims of state authorities. Topkhana was the first instance of an environmental issue fusing with a national movement. It was a movement vying to shake off the association between Azerbaijan and a degraded national character, defined by exploitation and a constantly undermined sense of sovereignty – the "oily...greasy workhorse of the Soviet Union, sent either to tap the oilfields or to toil the cottonfields" in the words of Ilyas.

The Azerbaijani government homed in on the fact that the forest would be replaced with an aluminium plant headquartered in Yerevan19, with Nagorno-Karabakh officials yielding power to

Armenia and allowing the tarnishing of a region which had been a national shrine for Azerbaijan, commemorating a notable victory against Iranian forces in the 18th century (Veliyev, Gvasalia &

Manukyan, 2019). A series of mass demonstrations took place alongside meetings between government officials. Newspapers printed stories about the 'building threat to the surrounding countryside' (Rost 1990, p.79) in order to stir up anti-Armenian and pro-Azerbaijani sentiments

18 Meaning openness and freedom. Refers to Gorbachev's policy of a more open government and culture in the twilight of the USSR. 19 Conflicting accounts are provided when it comes the original plans and intentions of the Karabakh committee. In some sources the proposed structure is described as a workshop, whilst in others it is referred to as a recreational facility for workers from Yerevan's Kanaker aluminium factory. Azeri news articles take it even further and describe the structure as an entirely new factory (Rost 1990). 37 which could justify any defensive gesture or retaliation. Within a week of the Topkhana protests, anti-Armenian and anti-central government activity escalated to alarming and dangerous forms, eventually spilling into full-scale conflict.

Azer Panahli, a journalist from Azerbaijan, stated that 'the demonstrations about Topkhana were not about trees or ecology at all' (Panahli 1994, p. 1), with the environmentalist movement more closely emulating a 'nationalizing stance' (Brubaker 1996, p. 63) advancing the formation of a sovereign state in the midst of a weakening Soviet Union. Within Panahli's account, the trees took on purely metaphorical form, standing in for political motivations which were, at the time, still emergent and somewhat embryonic. Indeed, Panahli repeatedly mentions the fact that in the lead up to independence, the populace lacked the lexicon needed to articulate notions of national identity, solidarity and a sense of territorial boundedness. In his words, Azerbaijan had yielded to 'the systematic effort to neutralize national identity in the Soviet Union' (p. 2), with all political decisions deferred to the regime's central authorities located in . Having previously been defined by 'generalization, not individualism...the masses, not the personal' (p. 2), an organised around a forest with instrumental, cultural, and historical value, provided the Azeri state and its people with much needed particularity and purpose. It dazzled the imagination, inspired a sense of solidarity, and offered an exclusive connection to place.

An editorial in Bakinskiy Rabochiy (Baku Worker) went as far as calling it a 'Natural History

Museum of Living Nature' (JPRS 1989, p. 60) which had the striking effect of rendering the forest a mythic artefact from the past, whilst at the same time attesting to its enduring vitality (Kaufman

2001, pp.66-67). Furthermore, the very depiction of the forest as 'a true miracle of nature' and a

'sacred grove' filled with rare plants, bears, wolves, wild boars, foxes, hares, deer, partridges,

38 pigeons and a range of other flora and fauna (AZERTAC 202020) differentiated the Azeri population spatially and politically from the rest of the Caucuses. Whereas Topkhana represented nothing more than an ordinary stretch of land for Armenia and the rest of the Soviet

Union, devoid of any symbolic or instrument value21, for Azerbaijan it was primordial and exceptionally generative; full of compelling landscapes, charismatic species, and cultural significance.

In addition to signalling the inextricable link between nationalism and environmentalism,

Topkhana became the moment in which a new civic society was envisioned and put into practice.

It was a society based around affective, historical, and political ties between the natural world and the nation-state, which had to be cared for by the general populace and secured by relevant authorities (Cheterian 2009). The importance of Topkhana to the operation and legitimacy of the state is elucidated by the fact that the very day of the mass demonstration has since become a foundational holiday within the republic, referred to as 'National Revival Day (Milli Dirçəliş

Günü)'22. Here, the choice of the word 'revival', or 'dirçəliş' in Azerbaijani, reinforces 'the inheritance of collective accountability across generations' (Borneman 2011, p.16), initiating a cycle of repetition which roots the rebirth of the Azeri nation in both injury and progress. The commemoration of Topkhana as a national holiday hints at the instrumental value assigned to nature and its integration into statecraft, with environmental projects providing another domain for the cultivation of a country still in its infancy.

20 Article titled: 'Лес Топхана' (August 22, 2020). 21 Indeed, journalist Yuri Rost and anthropologist Galina Starovoytova described it as home to 'just one rather spindly tree and some scrubby bushes' (Rost 1990, p. 78). 22 The Day of National Revival symbolizes the beginning of the national liberation movement for the Azeri people. Azerbaijan became an independent state in 1991, just 3 years after the historic demonstrations. 39

Much like Strathern's (2020, p.15) point that 'relations open up the capacities of properties in unexpected ways', with capacities coming into existence 'through new relations' (p. 15), this nature-nation entanglement led to the production of novel civic identities, as well as narratives of state legitimacy. It awakened an industrious temperament (Panahli 1994), not only driving Azeris out into the streets in protest against environmental injustice, but also inspiring a newfound appreciation of the natural world as inherently political and tied to the consciousness of the nation. Ilyas echoed these sentiments during our interview by attesting to the fact that Topkhana led to a "spirit of environmentalism", with both proactive care23 and an awareness of environmental issues considered to be the "national and personal duty of all citizens of the republic" from then onwards. It spoke to a growing civic nationalism within Azerbaijan in general, encouraging the attainment of a good life defined by the growth of liberty and an opposition to any form of social and political organisation deemed tyrannical or violent (Freeden 1998, p. 755).

Through the emergence of an ecologically conscious population, concerned with the wellbeing of land and its affiliated systems of life, Azerbaijan's own complicity in extractive logic and practice was effectively obfuscated (Silova et al. 2014). It was replaced by the imperative to protect the national ecosystem from the threat of Armenians in Karabakh and their 'anti-environmental behavior' (AzerNews 202024). Despite having nearly identical agricultural and horticultural practices to the Azeri population prior to the outbreak of conflict, Armenians were frequently portrayed by the Azeri state as motivated by malicious intent (Veliyev, Gvasalia & Manukyan,

2019) and lacking the environmental ethics cultivated in other parts of the former Soviet Union

(Cheterian 2009). The sudden moral attention directed at the forest was further intensified by the introduction of a cast of compelling and charismatic subjects (Birch 1993). Here, the

23 Defined by Ilyas as participation in environmentally friendly practices like "tree planting...recycling...cutting down on car use...maybe even eating less meat". 24 Article titled: 'Armenia carries out eco-terrorism against Azerbaijan' (October 23, 2020). 40 government's eagerness to incorporate certain flora and fauna as emblems of the sovereign state became a mechanism through which the desirable qualities of beauty, governability, and similarity could be encouraged in order to neutralise the increasing unruliness of the sociopolitical context

(Silova et al. 2014).

Stories of butterflies with iridescent hues spotted in Topkhana Forest, native flowers growing around the city of , and stout red oaks dotting Hajishamli, proliferated in both popular conversation and in state decision-making, offering moments of harmonious co-existence which were difficult to come-by in a region defined by animosity and violence. Furthermore, the endemic nature of the plants and critters meant that they could be easily claimed as unique to the Azeri territory and integrated into a nationalist project founded upon 'mutuality, amity and solidarity' (Strathern 2020, p.27) – at least when it came to lifeforms designated worthy of moral consideration. Such species, formerly indistinguishable from the rest of the ecological landscape and deemed unremarkable, underwent a significant change as the very fabric of the former Soviet regime dissipated. Amidst the reorganisation of social structures, biopolitical categories, and the divisions between the killable and the non-killable (Clark 2015), the charismatic beings of

Topkhana gained admission into the symbolic terrain of the sovereign state25, championed as the figures through which the country could 'define the human and their political space' (Dobson

2006, p.185).

25 In the popular imaginary, these charismatic species have often been pitted against the violent and feral species of Armenia and the Soviet Union. A striking example of this was provided via a chance visit to the Nizami Gəncəvi State History and Ethnography Museum in Gəncə, Azerbaijan. Walking through the exhibition space, I came across a vivid painting titled 'Tank Gorbachev', depicting a Soviet tank (emblazoned with a red star on the cupola) firing in the direction of the viewer. Out of the tank arose a half-human, half-animal version of Mikhail Gorbachev, with claw-like hands and a body covered in fur. He held a spear and prodded at the flesh of a zoomorphized Azerbaijan (complete with a beak, rabbit-like ears and sturgeon-like eyes). From the corners of the painting, one could spot numerous jackals dashing across the border from Armenia, whilst sharks gathered for a feeding frenzy in the Caspian Sea. The painting perfectly encapsulated the mobilisation of animals (and nature more generally) in the establishment of a new sphere of political narration and mythmaking, with the more-than-human world differentiated into national 'Azeri' species (obedient, innocent, and cute) vs. enemy species (unruly, feral, and violent). 41

The state effectively turned an ambiguous border zone, with a forest that held very little value in the past, into a site of cultural, social, and political significance (Souleimanov 2013). It offered visibility and legibility to new domains and zones of life, expanding the jurisdiction of the emergent nation to include the formerly inconsequential, ungoverned, and peripheral.

Furthermore, with both Armenian and Azeri sides reporting similar numbers of human casualties, the recognition of nonhuman lives, and its inclusion in the state's narrative of the conflict, became a foundational element in granting Azerbaijan leverage as the victim of aggression, rather than its perpetrator. Since the early 2000s, the Ministry of Environment and

Natural Resources has engaged in a practice of casualty estimation, meticulously tracking and counting the loss of species across Nagorno-Karabakh (Ekologiya və Təbii Sərvətlər Nazirliyi

2020) through the enlistment of environmental scientists, volunteers from the general public, and military staff. Indeed, over 4,000 different species have been included in the state's registry as either having been intentionally destroyed by Armenia, or otherwise looted en masse and transported abroad. Whilst the logic of quantification has been integral to the state's measurement and evidencing of compromised sovereignty, there are distinct affective dynamics involved in the case of Azerbaijan (Lombard, 2016; Dwyer et al. 2016). Through the course of our interview, Ilyas reminded me that the loss of species could not be fully grasped via "lifeless numbers" that lacked the vitality of the "nation's spirit". When discussing the logging of the forest,

Ilyas repeatedly used the term "şəhid'" (meaning martyr in English) to refer to the disappearance of the "sacred oak trees". Associated with both religious26 and secular subtext (Sayfutdinova 2014;

Baker 2018), the choice of the descriptor accorded a distinct moral status (Herzog 2002; Clark

2015) to the trees, connecting them to a longer lineage of human martyrs (şəhidlər) in the wake of Azerbaijan's liberation27.

26 Şəhid has its roots in the Quran, particularly in reference to the act of holy martyrdom (Sayfutdinova 2014). 27 The term şəhid' was heavily associated with the events of Black January (Qara Yanvar). A violent crackdown on the civilian population of Baku by Soviet special forces, Black January occurred amidst the dissolution of the Soviet 42

The social and psychological qualities evident in the context of a post-independence Azerbaijan complicate the argument put forward by James Scott (2020), where nations operating under large- scale capitalism are all assumed to function according to the tenets of rationalization, commodification, and standardization (Ferguson 2005). Instead, through the mass demonstrations and spiritual awakenings engendered by the clearing of Topkhana, one becomes palpably aware of the affective contours of nationalism, particularly when ecological or environmental issues are involved. Here, I think of Thongchai Winichakul’s concept of the

'geobody' (Winichakul 1994), where natural space on the political map is more than territory alone: '[i]t is a component of the life of a nation. It is a source of pride, loyalty, love, passion, bias, hatred, reason, unreason' (Winichakul 1994, p. 17). This was very much the case when Ilyas described the steel blades hacking away at the soul of his country, or the "monstrous" logging trucks, like "the metal gurneys you see in morgues...carrying corpses". Anti-environmental action was equated to a case of psychic mutilation, with assumed injury justifying the eventual armament of the nation and the emergence of a defensive posture which could, according to Ilyas, "tend the wounds of the land and everything that had been barbarically maimed by the enemy". For

Knezevic, the structures of affective nationalism stem from the inability of societies under

Communism to organize their communities ‘rationally’, so nationalism was preserved as 'the most articulate expression of an irrational sense of belonging to a community' (Knezevic 1997, p. 67).

However, I would contend that it was more a case of everyday meaning-making based upon the

'reactive effects' (Borneman 2003, p. viii) of largescale environmental transformation as the country shifted towards a post-extractive and post-Communist framework.

Union and became a distinct marker of the struggle, trauma, and violence entailed in Azerbaijan achieving independence and sovereignty (Borneman 2011; Rumyantsev & Huseynova 2011). 43

Previous scholarship, particularly in the field of multispecies studies, has shown there to be a heterogenous ecology of affects present in more-than-human spaces (Whatmore 2006). Forests, plantations and an array of other 'natural' landscapes are seen to be replete with fear, awe, trepidation, and curiosity. For many Azeri citizens and politicians, the flora and fauna of

Topkhana belong to a 'visceral cartography' (Baker 2018) of nationhood. Ordinary landmarks and landscapes are regularly imbued with affective-discursive significance, capable of shifting relations of power and introducing new approaches to statecraft (Kahneman 2011; Elden 2013).

However, whilst scholars in multispecies studies tend to prioritise moments of wonder – attesting to radical reconfigurations in relation and 'ontological openings' (Marisol de la Cadena (2017, p.

2) which make space for care and compassion –, Azerbaijan's dominant framework of nationalism calls for the acknowledgment of different affects. During the course of multiple interviews with Bakuvians who had either participated in the protests, or witnessed Topkhana unfold over the news, memories of forest clearance were recalled in a tone of fear, trepidation and pain. It was never a simple retelling of the act of logging, or the state of the trees, but a complex compounding of different timeframes and places. Interviewees spoke of entire townships being razed in the regions of Nagorno-Karabakh, the appalling conditions of the shantytowns where most internally displaced refugees ended up residing, as well as the shrill nationalist rhetoric of Armenian press reports, which had described Azerbaijanis as murderers and subhuman beasts.

Ramil, a landscaper and friend of Ilyas, echoed this sentiment, telling me that:

[T]hings were tied together during the early days of the conflict...the disappearance of

butterfly colonies. The disappearance of families. The cutting down of trees. The cutting

down of statues and powerlines and infrastructure. The spilling of pollution into the rivers

44

and the spilling of blood. Their [Armenia's] violence created a total system of destruction,

with the war like the ripples you see in water after the stone has been thrown.

Here, the pain of ecological destruction was interwoven with the pain of dispossession at the hands of Armenia, remembered and reanimated through an expanded notion of victimhood. It encompassed flora and fauna as fellow maimed subjects of the nation-state and rendered the environment a preliminary stage for future securitisation and militarisation. These affective dimensions activate national categorisations and forms of nation-making (Closs Stephens 2015;

Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010; Berlant 2008). Indeed, the power and scale of feelings regularly influence investments within national imaginaries and directly contribute to a willingness to participate in public, social, and cultural life in ways that are, in the words of Lorimer (2005),

'more than representational'. Within the scheme of this, bodies (and their attendant sensations) constantly generate, reconfigure and mediate nationalisms – as processes which uphold the material structure and the ideological framework of the nation (Wetherell 2014; Smith et al.

2016). When it comes to the interconnections between bodies and structures of governance and territory, the more-than-human world28 shows itself to be equally capable of affective generativeness (McSorley 2014). Indeed, Ramil's choice of words evokes an embodied positionality where one is constantly entangled with multiple material agencies, flows and processes, leading to sensations of pain being registered through an array of different bodies and mediums – be it oak trees, rivers, or entire ecosystems. Arzu, a student from one of Baku's local universities, compared this process with the example of expanded voting rights:

28 Notable works that have attempted to consider the nonhuman in discussions of nationalism include Yamini Narayanan's work on the eulogization of cows as the national motherland itself in India – a figure of the racially pure, 'upper' caste vulnerable to the violent manoeuvrings of Muslims and lower caste Hindus –, and Nasser Abufarha's analysis of the role of orange trees and cacti within the Zionist movement and its claims to place and space. These case studies influence the manner in which 'we come to know the natural world' (Weiner 1993, p.11) and reveal significant shifts in narratives of national struggle. 45

Before, only people and oil counted in Azerbaijan. Only the streets and the oilfields were

seen as lively, full of energy and spirit. Those were the two things that people fought for,

fought over, believed in, talked about, argued about...lived with day to day...oil and their

local community. My parents' generation and before that didn't really think about the

different birds, and plant types and the like. Nature was something you'd visit on the

weekends in the regions or in the reserves [zapovedniki]. It was a separate space...but now

it is part of our society, our country. The animals and plants are citizens. It is similar to

how voting used to be restricted to men, but gradually, women and people in different

social categories also gained the right to participate.

There are convergences between Arzu's account and the ‘greening’ of sovereignty described by scholars like Eckersley, emerging in order to reinstate the state 'as a facilitator of progressive environmental change rather than environmental destruction’ (Barry and Eckersley 2005, p. X).

Whilst this conceptualisation maintains the orthodox underpinnings of sovereignty as a guarantor of positive law and the most 'over-arching source of authority within modern, plural societies'

(Barry and Eckersley 2005, p. 172), it expands the cast of symbolic citizens worthy and deserving of recognition, protection, and care by the state. Through this 'greening', the more-than-human world is incorporated29 into a scheme of relations and provided with some of the privileges of being a subject of the nation – from inclusion in the wider imaginary and societal narrative, to immunity from environmentally and socially damaging activities via the allocation of certain legal protections30 (Kymlicka & Donaldson 2014). However, despite seemingly facilitating a move

29 Scholars like Stacy Alaimo (2010) and Puig (2012) push this further, linking the entanglement of subjects with the emergence of an ethico-political obligation to care for those beyond our own immediate community, and to do it in ways which depart from abstract well-wishing. Their work recognises the capacity of contact and relation to transform subjects and institutions – even those who may be complicit in causing harm. 30 In Azerbaijan, most of the legal protections emerged in the 1990s and sought to replace Soviet-era environment- related legislation (Asian Development Bank 2005). Some of the notable legislations include: the 1992 Law on Environmental Protection and Utilization of Natural Resources (which introduced the polluter-pays principle), the Law on Environmental Protection and the Law Environmental Safety of 1999, as well as the Partnership and 46 beyond the individual human as the sole recipient of justice, this shift towards ecological subjecthood does not always lead to ideal or utopic ecological politics. On the contrary, it can be co-extensive with 'the imposition of emergency measures and potentially disastrous technological, even militaristic fixes' (Smith 2009, p. 110), as sovereign power reduces non-human beings to

'standing reserve' to be governed, managed, and exploited31.

In the years after the Topkhana protest, Azeri state leaders began to increasingly use and deploy a rhetoric of nature as part of the nation's body – inviolable and highly political. Brubaker (2011, p. 1785) marks the break-up of the Soviet Union following 1989 as ‘a transition to a new kind of nationalist politics’ where the 'organizational shells' of newly independent states 'had to be filled with national content’. The configuration of nation and nature as one cohesive unit, capable of inspiring mutual feeling and shared pain, was one such way to elicit and mobilise an emergent nationalism. Heydar Aliyev, the third from October 1993 to October

2003, elucidated this forcefully in a speech given on the topic of environmental rights and his own personal experience of tree planting:

When I came to Baku in 1993, we planted trees on our arrival, when I saw some of the

trees we planted cut down, I thought I was injured. I have said it many times. And I repeat

- whoever cuts down a healthy tree, consider that you are cutting off my arms, fingers...

Man must build, must create…Everyone must plant, cultivate, and grow trees. If someone

cuts down a healthy tree, he will not only harm his people, his nation...he betrays his

Cooperation Agreement with the European Union of 1999. These legislations have been critiqued for their narrow definition of environmental problems; the discrepancy between policy focus and the scale/nature of the problem; and the absence of contemporary legislation relating to emergencies, disasters, and conflict/war (Schmidt, Busse & Nuriyev 2017). 31 It is also a salient reminder that the more-than-human is not only a form of biopolitics and state-making, but also a form of biological citizenship. There is a productive tension here between the two, producing a politics which is not merely symbolic or representational but fast becoming embodied and ontological. 47

country, he betrays his family, he betrays himself. That's why you must fight for the

protection of every tree.

As President Aliyev’s statement makes clear, illegal logging within the sovereign nation was equated to grievous bodily injury, registered on the level of the nation and its population. Whilst collapsing categorical differences between the Azeri and the nonhuman body, this rhetoric essentially linked notions of dignity and the very integrity of the nation-state to the maintenance of an environment untarnished and unharmed, composed of biopolitical bodies willing to respond to the activities of the sovereign power (Agamben 1998). In doing this, the President enclosed nature within the jurisdiction of the state, furthering the division between the internal and the external, which, in turn, created distinct enemies and outsiders. The very word 'cultivate' is referenced within the speech, alluding to the use of horticulture, landscaping, and renaturalisation by the state in an attempt to bolster nationalistic governance. With the cultivation of forests, there is a chance to cultivate nationalism and authority. Inscribing the rhetoric of the former president onto an even more contentious scale of mattering, current President Ilham

Aliyev argued that environmental measures which safeguard against pollution not only protect the bodily health of citizens, but also the "national gene pool"32 (Musayeva 2009, pp. 34-37).

Through this, both the nation and the environment were simultaneously understood on the level of the molecular, shifting the scale of perception from the macro to the micro – from the body of the nation to the gene pool of the nation. It conferred new gradations of possible injury and vulnerability which in tandem required an intensification of existing defence and security measures.

32 President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev quoted in a governmental audit on 'Environmental Equilibrium as the Basis of Economic Development'. Full sentence: "the protection of the environment means protection of the health of our people, our national gene pool." 48

Taking these speeches as part of a lineage established by the events of Topkhana, we arrive at an overtly militaristic conceptualisation of nature. Here, greenery is merely a hue of war; animals are flagship species and boundary objects, organising the moral imperatives and strategic manoeuvres of the country's military powers; and ecological contamination is reason for geopolitical conflict. It conceals a more complex and complicated terrain of power, where discourses and narratives of militarism are always interwoven with other strands of power and sociopolitical organisation – from nationalism to multispecies citizenship. I think of an article forwarded to me by Ilyas, which described workers at a plant responsible for the manufacturing of oil and gas pipes finding a rare orchid, endemic to Karabakh, in the yard of their factory. The

Khary Bulbul ( caucasica) is known to grow only around the occupied city of Shusha, with local folklore33 attesting to its inability to survive even a single day on foreign land. Within the article, the orchid was described as a victim of aggression, "expelled from its native land", akin to an IDP, and needing the restoration of territorial integrity in order to flourish and resume lively interdependent relations. More recently, with Azeri military 'reclaiming' swathes of land in the contested territories, my social media feed is yet again suffused with posts depicting soldiers holding 'liberated' pomegranates and standing near newly planted fruit trees, promising to heal the fragmented region "from the ground up" (in the words of one soldier interviewed). Cultivation is becoming synonymous with the process of restoring sovereign power and governance over

Nagorno-Karabakh, with Ilyas in our most recent conversation telling me that for every soldier deployed in the region, there needs to be a gardener, or a horticulturalist following suit: one to liberate the land and its nonhuman subjects, the other to tend to the wounds.

33 The Azeri folk story begins with a wedding between the daughter of the Karabakh Khan and the Iranian Shah's son. In order to alleviate the homesickness of the new princess, the prince creates a garden for his beloved, containing all the trees and flowers native to Karabakh. The only plant absent is the Khary Bulbul, which cannot survive even a single day in foreign soil or on foreign land. 49

I am reminded of Uma Kothari's argument that the very act of inclusion, of being drawn in as participants, citizens, and victims, is synonymous with the goals of counterinsurgency strategy

(Cooke & Kothari 2001) – integrating and subordinating populations into the 'political, legal, and economic systems that establish or reaffirm regional hierarchies' (Dunlap and Fairhead 2014, p.

946). Within the post-extractive space of Azerbaijan, the inclusion of nonhumans into new spheres of relation and care is part and parcel with the political and material fortification of the nation itself. More-than-human life is deployed in a military imaginary of 'dispersed territorial technologies' (Duncan & Levidis 2020), with orchids, oak trees, and pomegranates not only wielding affective force, but occupying a key role in the justification of surveillance, territorial expansion, and the bolstering of existing borders. Nature is the point at which the post-extractive nation is arranged and cultivated – its structure, history, identity, governance and overarching narrative –, turning spaces of greenery into fraught sites of geopolitical negotiation.

Pollution as a Weapon of War

It seemed fitting to meet for the first time in a cafe in Nasimi's Zorge Park, near the monolithic monument in memory of Richard Sorge, the Soviet military intelligence officer whose eyes are etched firmly into the rounded stone, casting a penetrating gaze over passers-by. Ismat, a water quality analyst born in the autonomous republic of , was formerly employed by the state as an adviser on transboundary water pollution. He brought a large manila folder to our meeting, his cautionary sideward glances invoking an atmosphere suited to that of a clandestine encounter. The folder was brimming with photographs evidencing the scale of contamination present in the Aras river. There were pictures of argent fish on the banks of the water, paled and dried out by the sunlight, pools of foaming chemical run-off, algal blooms, and industrial debris in the form of used canisters, containers, and scrap metal. He began by saying:

50

The rivers are the arteries of our nation, but their [Armenia's] industry is causing blood

poisoning...making us all sick. If you start in Azerbaijan, at the point of the dead sturgeons,

the numerous dead zones where runoff pools, the perishing microorganisms... you can

trace the reason as to why there is so much death all the way back to Armenia and its

nuclear power plants, aluminium smelters, and open-pit copper mines. They've left their

footprints and fingerprints everywhere.

With the statement above already alluding to it, Ismat admitted during our interview that most of his previous work was concerned with tracking sources of pollution from Armenia. For Ismat, the material strata – composed of soil, water, crops, plants, molecules, and animals –, became the primary site of knowledge-making around violence, as well as the evidence required to legitimate claims of environmental sabotage and eco-terrorism. Instead of a Latourian 'speech prosthesis', allowing 'nonhumans to participate in the discussions of humans when humans become perplexed about the participation of new entities in collective life' (2004, p. 67), Ismat's samples in and of themselves assumed a representative voice for the river and its ecosystem.

During the course of my fieldwork it became apparent that the practice of environmental data collection was a highly politicised pursuit in Azerbaijan – one which was intimately linked to the desire of the state for knowledge forms capable of solidifying and facilitating the management of lands, bodies, and matter (Myers 2017). In the words of Rob Nixon, it provided the 'social authority of witness' (2011, p.16), demarcating that which would count as violence in the eyes of the government and the country's population.

Alongside the state's mobilisation of affective and emotional histories – linking nonhuman life to the maintenance and preservation of the Azeri nation –, the depiction of the environment as a

51 zone of potential criminal activity, with animals and plants transformed into evidentiary matter, has also become a central tactic for the attainment of political legitimacy in the post-extractive period. Indeed, a litany of references can be found in both popular press and government reports, citing 'large-scale ecological terrorist acts' (Lmahamad 2020), as well as practices of 'water terror' (Mammadov 2020) involving the release of chemicals like copper, molybdenum, zinc, and phenols into local waterways by Armenian factories and the country's military forces. These claims have bolstered appeals to the international community by the Commissioner for Human

Rights (Ombudsman) of Azerbaijan and resulted in the adoption of a resolution titled 'Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water' by the Parliamentary

Assembly of the Council of Europe. In addition to polluted water, the submissions put forth the idea that Armenian armed forces were deliberately cutting off water supplies during sowing periods and flooding farms during non-sowing periods, damaging transboundary portable water resources and irrigation systems.

In his work, 'Water Nationalism', Allouche (2005) provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding conflict in transboundary water settings as it relates to the nation- state. According to Allouche, the principle factor encouraging the securitisation of waterways is the fact that 'water is perceived, treated and managed just like land, at least in the primitive stages of nation making, which renders joint management undesirable' (p. 880). Indeed, when it comes to contested spaces, the predominant way of achieving 'regional eco-balance' (p. 881) has been through the use of military force, simultaneously leading to territorial wins, as well as the restoration of complete control over associated water units. This sentiment of necessary military mobilisation has been echoed in recent comments by the Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Hikmat Hajiyev, who asserted that "30 years long environmental terror came to an end with the de-occupation of Sugovusan village of Azerbaijan". His comment

52 framed ecological rehabilitation as inherently tied to the re-establishment of sovereignty, with both social and environmental good resulting from military might. Reflecting on Hajiyev's statement and extending Allouche's point, this section argues that the Araz river, as well as the riparian ecosystem alongside it, has not only been treated as land to be reclaimed, but as an experimental more-than-human space which can be reengineered, marshalled, and incorporated into the state apparatus. In zones of contested sovereignty and apparent ecological sabotage, environmental scientists working for the ministry have located new materials and subjects to forge relationships with, recognising the more-than-human world as a potential ally in the restoration of territorial integrity and the actualisation of a unified, modern, and post-extractive nation.

Indeed, the very forms of scientific knowledge-making, utilised in projects concerning the environment and environmental pollution, have ended up neatly fitting into militarised narratives and technologies. Here, knowledge under the banner of science and ecological care has not only contributed to the continued mechanisation and commodification of living processes, but has also assisted in reifying science as a practice which legitimates institutions and social structures of authority and control – whether through the university, state, armed forces, or border security.

When it comes to the work of scientists employed by the state (like Ismat), three key regimes of environment evidence-making have emerged: the renewed understanding of chemicals as discrete and trackable entities within ecosystems; the transformation of charismatic species into biological sentinels; and the repurposing of technology usually employed in military operations and reconnaissance missions for the purposes of environmental management and conservation.

Starting with the first form of evidence-making, industrial chemicals within Ismat's research papers (and subsequent state reports) were often portrayed as discrete and isolated entities

(Boudia and Jas 2014) allowing seemingly neat cause-and-effect relationships to be established

53 between external agents and resulting manifestations of ecological harm (Roberts 2017). There was an overt focus on 'placement' (described via the use of the Russian term razmeshcheniye) which seeks to measure the concrete numerical amount of waste disposed (Schucht & Mazur

2004, p. 14). On a molecular level, placement specifically concerned the rate of suspended solids, categorised according to five different charge rates – from non-hazardous to extremely hazardous.

Whilst this technique can be crucial to quantifying the amount of waste dumped into local pits or released directly via channels, when removed from the actual site of industrial production it can obfuscate the 'chains of association' (Sawyer 2014, p. 6) which the mattering of toxins is itself suspended in. With Ismat collecting samples across the border in Azerbaijan, downstream and often hundreds of kilometres away from the Armenian factories or power plants in question, there was often a failure to consider the different relationships forged by waterways and the limitations of scientific indexing.

Indeed, state environmental data generally ignored the many variables contributing to ecological harm and injury – from the spatiotemporal complexity of chemical compounds themselves, which are only activated or rendered volatile when grouped into specific arrangements or exposed to certain environmental condition, to the different regulatory standards across industries. Instead, the reports projected a political fantasy whereby ecologies were organised according to a logic of sovereign affiliations, where elements and matter could be attributed to a clear source – a specific country, territory, waterway, household. Within this framework, scientists were assigned with the task of discerning which pollutants belonged to the nation-state and which did not, ignoring the fact that most contamination in the regional waterways arose as a result of a complex matrix of industry, spread across geographical locations. With notions of chemical discreteness organising Azerbaijan's environmental regulation, the mapping of pollutants became an exercise in the politics of perception, shifting matters of concern into matters of fact (Latour

54

2015). It relied on the imagined distinction drawn between weaponised waste from outside sources, versus 'negligible' waste from the country's own industries – frequently rendered nonharmful.

The contrasting depiction of effluent provided a clear example of this, with wastewater released by Azeri factories and industries portrayed as having been treated to the "point of purity" in the words of Ismat, unproblematically fusing with the nearby ecosystems, whilst the release of wastewater across the border was routinely seen to constitute an act of eco-terrorism by aggressors. According to Ismat, they were full of "hostile molecules" wielded to damage those downstream. In this way, sensing technologies utilised within water analysis have been specifically deployed to bring forth politically desired conclusions about environmental violence, echoing

Michelle Murphy's understanding of truth as the 'result of historically specific practices of truth- telling – laboratory techniques, instruments, methods of observing' (Murphy 2006, pp. 7-8).

Here, the needs of the state have directly influenced the realities derived and sourced from the more-than-human world, with chemical matter configured so as to bolster political subject positions (Latour and Woolgar 1986).

Alongside mapping pollutants, during our conversation Ismat had shown particular interest in developing a catalogue of "biological sentinels". He described their potential in signalling the bioaccumulation of external industrial toxins in the local environment, as well as more amorphous instances of ecological harm originating from spaces beyond the oversight of

Azerbaijan. Nonhuman beings – including birds, rabbits, dogs, and cows – have long served as

'sentinel devices' (Van Der Schalie et al. 1999) for humans, functioning akin to early warning

55 systems for the assessment and management of environmental pollution and risk34. However, instead of merely being quantitative indicators, like chemical pollutants, there has been a growing interest in sentinels providing more intimate information to do with interdependencies between species (Kéck 2019), different forms of attunement, and changes to idiosyncratic behaviour. This was evident in Ismat's belief that through nonhuman beings one could grasp the way military threats were changing relationships between animal communities and human communities. He expanded on this point, saying:

[A]nimals and microorganisms are like little sensors that pick up when something is amiss

or wrong in an ecosystem. They migrate across and cross borders, picking up information

about things that may not be disclosed in the human world. In some ways they are like

spies, gathering evidence. For example, you can take a look at the gills of fish and see

suspended solids. That is sign of mining waste. Or you might see molting in the wrong

season in other species. That tells you about radioactivity. All these things result in strange

behaviour... animals start to act strange and then humans start to act strange.

A number of political ecologists and anthropologists have illuminated the constitutive role of nonhuman beings and biological matter in the politics of border enforcement and military technologies in the war on terror (Comaroff 2017; Kosek 2010; Sundberg 2011). The sentinels of the Araz river are yet another iteration of nation-states forging alliances and entanglements with 'nature' and the more-than-human world for the purposes of mastery over an otherwise messy and criss-crossing space, with transboundary waterways frequently evading total sovereign control (Allouche 2005) and supervision by relevant authorities.

34 One might also think of the term ‘keystone species' which, in the biological sciences, indicates the health of an ecosystem (see Watson 2011). Unhealthiest within this context is most often characterised by an abnormal decline in numbers or the emergence of behaviour deemed strange. 56

It is worth noting that the sentinels chosen by state environmental scientists as indicators of cross- border pollution tend to not only be charismatic but also emotionally and culturally compelling.

Akin to the classic example of the miner's canary – a creature invested with working-class sentiment due to its capacity to inspire 'devoted attachment and loyalty' from miners (Burton

2014, p. 144) – the sturgeon, in the case of Azerbaijan, has emerged as the sentinel of choice by human actors, due to their presumed alignment with the ideals of the nation-state. Ismat went as far as referring to it as a "model animal" during one of our conversations, whose presence indexes a "healthy ecosystem" in addition to a "productive and well-functioning country". Indeed, since the 1990s, the sturgeon has been associated with extensive state-run hatcheries and lucrative breeding enterprises, with both economic development and subsequent frameworks of conservation tightly interwoven with the securitisation of environments and guarded waterways

(Garcelon et al. 1998; Gasimov 2018). Recently, new value has emerged for the sturgeon in the sphere of biomonitoring, with a series of state-endorsed research projects incorporating the fish as a subject of interest in the early detection of industrial pollutants from upstream sources

(Suleymanov et al. 2010). In many ways, these biological sentinels are more than merely subjects with technical and military uses. Beyond surveillance and a means of fostering preparedness, more-than-human beings (like the sturgeon) anticipate future threats (Kéck 2019, p. 252), providing the means for the state to deal with its own fears around compromised sovereignty35 and the realities of living in a porous space, where countries are tightly clustered together and waterways criss-cross borders and militarised zones.

35 Including information which compromises the authority and jurisdiction of the state. With the Azeri government reliant on maintaining a semi-authoritarian grip on ecological narratives, anything which contradicts the newfound eco-friendly and environmentally conscious identity of the nation-state is immediately rendered threatening and unwarranted. 57

The most obvious convergence between the more-than-human world and a militarised lens when it came to Ismat's research was the repurposing of technology itself. Much of the visual data relied upon by environmental scientists working for the state was sourced from the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan and Azercosmos – a satellite operator entirely owned by the Government of Azerbaijan, providing geoinformation services for commercial, research, and defence purposes. New monitoring technologies, including drones, have been increasingly incorporated into environmental management around the contested territories, gathering evidence of illegal activities which are seen to 'seriously breach territorial integrity and sovereignty'

(MFA 2019). These have included images alluding to the dumping of tailings near the Gyzylbulag underground copper-gold mine in the contested district; deforestation caused by mining activities near Chardagly village in the contested district; forest cutting for construction of water canal near the Sarsang Water Reservoir; exploitation of agricultural lands and the establishment of newly sown fields; as well as the construction of new artesian wells, pump- stations and irrigation canals. Through incorporating a visual language known for its firm entrenchment in projects of military containment and spatial enclosure, the environment has been transformed into a space of political leverage (Millner 2020; DeLoughrey 2013). The satellite images, used by Ismat and other environmental scientists, are instilled with a sense of perceptibility and visibility, necessary for the establishment of control by state powers. They seem to depict ecosystems explicitly, rendering complex material circulations, chemical entanglements, and forms of worldmaking as linear and flat grids (Duffy 2014) – a bird's-eye view into the political and legal economy of nature as a sovereign good to be secured, guarded, and kept within the ambit of appropriate authorities.

Akin to the techniques, epistemologies, and discourses mentioned in the previous sections, the incorporation of military technologies into more-than-human worlds functions to reframe what

58 could be considered environmental crime in the eyes of the state into organized crime, warranting the use of force, heightened policing, and potential prosecution (Kelly & Ybarra 2016, p.174).

Indeed, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Azerbaijan has recently launched a number of criminal cases to investigate the illegal activities of Armenian armed forces in the contested territories (MFA 2019), incorporating satellite images, captured by Azercosmos in their 2019 investigation, in addition to environmental reports produced by Ismat's team, as key evidence.

By obtaining a 'view from above' (Adey 2010), geopolitical power relations take place through both the making of maps and the management of flows, as well as the monitoring of humans, nonhumans, and matter (Elden 2013; Millner 2020). This has not only contributed to the bolstering of the national body politic but also the mobilisation of intergovernmental political actors and the further escalation of conflict between the two neighbouring countries36.

During my fieldwork, many interlocutors, affiliated with state environmental programs, justified the use of drone technology and security strategies through insisting that they were operating within a state of ecological "war" (ekoloji müharibə), thus, depicting certain suspensions of normal practice as both necessary and desirable. Through the 'promises and practices of security', in the words of Massé and Lunstrum (2016, p. 234), they could reiterate performances of legitimate authority and facilitate the containment of populations deemed to be a ‘natural threat to national sovereignty’ (Ybarra, 2012, p. 197). Indeed, according to a co-worker of Ismat, the satellite images used in the identification of eco-terrorism by Armenia simultaneously allowed conservationists and environmental groups to remove communities of feral nonhuman species and unwanted

36 Caren Kaplan and Michael Richardson's work on drones and aerial perception is particularly relevant, attesting to the capacity of militarised technological apparatuses to produce their own politics, spaces, and temporalities. These assemblages not only provide new ways to witness, but also bolster claims and narratives central to projects of nation- making. For more see: Kaplan, C 2020, 'Atmospheric politics: protest drones and the ambiguity of airspace', Digital War, pp.1-8. Richardson, M 2018, 'Drone’s-eye view', in K Schankweiler, V Straub, & Wendl T (eds.), Image Testimonies: Witnessing in Times of Social Media, Routledge, London, UK. 59 debris from the landscape. Contained within this notion of restoration into a pristine and unspoilt form, is the corralling of the nonhuman world into an orderly, innocent and pure imaginary at the behest of the state and the erasure of Azerbaijan's own continued participation in capitalist extraction37.

In addition to upholding an idea of innocence, the portrayal of Azerbaijan as an eco-guardian (as opposed to the eco-threat of Armenia) articulates a distinct 'racialized, spatialized, and national constellation of power' (Kelly & Ybarra 2016, p. 174), clumping together select populations as environmentally damaging and, thus, disposable. This has been key to the authorisation of dispossession and other forms of violence, as well as the production of new kinds of borders

(Massé & Lunstrum 2016; Mollett 2014; Loperena 2016). Throughout my fieldwork, most interviewees explicitly mentioned Syrian Armenian communities, and their cattle, as the primary perpetrators of ecological destruction in the contested territories, homing in on subjects already deemed displaced, marginal, and not quite belonging to the landscape of the Karabakh highlands.

Descriptions of these communities often led to a collapsing of human and nonhuman into the same category of "foreigner", complicit in both processes of occupation and environmental degradation. Within these accounts, Syrian Armenian refugees were painted as settlers who routinely engaged in the "ruthless exploitation" (amansız istismarı) of agricultural and water resources (Azercosmos OJSCo 2019), with their actions comparable to that of feral Armenian cattle. Indeed, stories were shared of cows and pigs, belonging to the refugees, uprooting endemic plants, ruining the soil, and desecrating mosques, which had been allegedly turned into pigpens

37 Following recent military victory by Azerbaijan and the seizure of the Vejnaly mining area (near district), Baku-based Anglo Asia Mining saw its stock significantly rise. Recently a spokesperson from Anglo Asia stated that: “It is the intention of the Government of Azerbaijan to thoroughly inspect and assess the mineral resources in the area,” adding that the company was in “close contact” with the authorities to determine when it would be safe to begin work. The Azerbaijani government, according to company literature, is entitled to 51% of the company’s profits.

60 and barns in province (Mammadli 2019). It led to a narrative of ferality which crossed and blurred species lines, whilst simultaneously establishing a category of environmental criminals. Despite being accused of environmental mismanagement, and agricultural practices antithetical to Azerbaijan's recent ecological ethos, the Syrian refugees that I had corresponded with via a series of emails and video calls continually stressed that they were just trying to make a living on land that was tarnished long before they arrived.

One farmer residing in the Karkar River Valley, who had moved to Nagorno-Karabakh with his family after the outbreak of war in Syria, described the work of planting lemons, apricots, olives, wild greens, stevia, kumquats, and flowering gardenias as a practice of care, patience and good intention. He sunk his lifesavings into a sparse area of land, previously home to a few neglected olive trees that had been planted during the Soviet era and abandoned in the post-Independence period due to a lack of interest and waning agricultural investments in the region. Whilst there was an element of nostalgia at play in the recreation of an ecosystem found predominantly around the coastal regions of Syria – not the temperate highlands of Karabakh – the practices of horticulture found amongst the refugees lacked the malice and notions of ownerships ascribed to them by the Azeri state and its affiliated media. There was a sense that livelihood and the everyday practices of sowing, harvesting, and tending, came before any consideration of territoriality, fortification, or securitisation. Indeed, many of the farmers didn't even know if they were technically owners of the land that they were caring for, and it did not seem to matter all that much. The common consensus was that as long as they could cultivate enough for a meal around the family table, then it was more than enough.

Ultimately, there has been a cleaving of more-than-human relations within the context of

Azerbaijan's move towards a post-extractive future, resulting in the demarcation of certain human

61 and nonhuman populations as enemies of the state, whilst others are celebrated as potential allies and quasi-citizens. The next section examines the speculative forms of 'nature-making' occurring in Azerbaijan's border regions and recently liberated territories, with greening projects and experimental breeding programs re-organising ideas of ecological harmony, belonging, and citizenship.

Border Trees and Biodiverse Arsenals

A few weeks after meeting him, Ismat introduced me to a group of men who had been involved in the re-naturalisation of "border region" environments. Most members of the group had served in the armed forces and saw horticulture and landscaping as an extension of their duties to the nation, giving military personnel a clear post-conflict role to carry out and abide by. The very understanding of 'greening' as an activity with military connotations aligned with earlier experiences that I had observing tree-planting events in the capital city. Indeed, even when it came to volunteer-run initiatives, there was a sense that the trees were being used as fortification and armament – part ceremony to affirm the vision of an ecological-sound Azerbaijan, and part offensive to populate the city with stable and predictable subjects who could serve as a bulwark against unruliness and ferality. Often whilst walking through districts undergoing processes of urban renewal, the sudden appearance of elder pines, pomegranate trees, or olive trees, arranged in perfect grids, reminded me of observation posts. I thought of the long and enduring history of securitisation and restricted access in Azerbaijan, spanning across imperial gardens, Soviet zapovedniks, to the present-day proliferation of protected nature reserves38 (Schmidt, Busse, &

Nuriyev 2017). All three examples are connected by their absolute governability, with nature

38 Over the last 15 years, Azerbaijan has doubled its protected areas territory to almost 10% of the country's surface area. There is a notable absence of inter-alia participation by local communities and rural stakeholders. The protected areas are predominantly managed by the state ministry, in a top-down fashion (Schmidt, Busse, & Nuriyev 2017). 62 demarcated via the use of extensive fencing and upkeep, bounded by regulation and law, and managed through abundant scientific and institutional expertise (Bridge & Perreault 2009).

Many of those involved in revegetating, renaturalising, or greening the borderlands saw the trees as "allies" (müttəfiqlər) of the state; there to solidify territorial acquisition, deter occupation, and to thrive alongside military forces and occupying settlers. During a group interview in mid-

October, the group was asked to reflect and elaborate on these alliances and the importance of tree-planting. Some of the responses from Ismat's friends included:

Novruz: “When I see a recently planted pomegranate tree or an olive grove, I know that

there is a future. Armenia plants trees that have no uses, trees that look dead and wiry.

We plant trees that grow fruit...feed families...sustain the nation...our trees stand for a

future” (personal interview, October 16, 2019).

Elnur: “An Azeri tree is better than a barbed wire fence. It shows the enemy that the land

is ours and that we are committed to it" (personal interview, October 16, 2019).

Ali: "Seeing an oak tree or a pomegranate tree, or any plant that belongs to us...makes

me feel at home. Armenia has tried all that it can to make Nagorno-Karabakh feel strange

and hostile...by putting up their monuments, logging our forests, building their own

houses in their own styles...however...now that we are planting...it's starting to feel like

home again" (personal interview, October 16, 2019).

During the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and in the aftermath of Karabakh's partial liberation, the trees planted along the borderlands assisted the state and its military forces with a number of practical and symbolic projects. The trees had a clear role in the resumption of the agricultural industry, with newly established farms, orchards and olive groves providing a source of

63 employment for relocated families and serving as viable investments for private entrepreneurs.

For army personnel, the physical presence of the trees helped shore up territorial lines in borderland areas, in addition to concealing military outpost. Indeed, when it came to matters of securitisation and occupation, Elnur39 told me early on that it is "sometimes better to plant a tree than to deploy a soldier". Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the trees symbolised the possibility of a future for the nation-state, evoking a hospitable atmosphere suited to settlement, cultivation, and inhabitation. I was reminded of Alfred Crosby's work on a range of plants and animals which excelled and multiplied as they accompanied explorers in their geographical expeditions across soon to be settled (and colonised) land – the 'biological allies' (2003, p. 52) complicit both symbolically and instrumentally in the forging of nations40.

In many ways, this productive aspect was linked to the form that conifer and ornamental plantations took in the border regions. They were described as "sturdy" (möhkəm) and "reliable"

(etibarlı), exuding qualities of manageability and orderliness. Most of the trees were planted in neat and orderly rows, acting akin to 'machines of replication' (Tsing 2016, p. 2) – swallowing large swathes of land and requiring the constant upkeep by a team of horticulturalists, soldiers, and landscapers. These qualities were key to transforming both the aggressiveness of vegetal expansion, and the interventionist methods of the state, into the seemingly innocent by-products of greening. However, this concealed the way that these trees effortlessly folded into a capitalist, nationalist, militaristic logic of land-management. Whether through providing a steady and

39 Elnur's point brought up an important caveat: sometimes it was better that soldiers retrained to be gardeners than as drone pilots. In a space ravaged by decades of violence, greening was often the lesser evil despite the underlying nationalistic and militaristic intentions. 40 It is worth noting that the act of nation-making through afforestation has also involved acts of destruction and erasure. Over the last decade or so, there have been numerous instances of Armenian artefacts, monuments, and churches being 'accidentally' destroyed, or damaged, in order to make way for Azeri protected areas and nature reserves, agricultural projects, and tree-planting schemes (Zambon 2010; Maghakyan & Pickman 2019). Here, claims of environmental benefit overrode those of cultural significance or value (at least when it came to the perspective of Azerbaijan). Despite being in the early days of Karabakh's alleged liberation, many Armenian activists have expressed worry over the use of ecological arguments to justify the destruction of historical structures and cultural artefacts – particularly those deemed as threatening to Azerbaijan's assertions of sovereignty (Eakin 2020; Nikolova 2020). 64 uniform commodity, or by acting as 'planted flags' to indicate territorial claim, the trees had become the shadow workers carrying out the task of being the nation's frontline. Indeed, this symbolic vocational quality was even echoed in Elnur, who at one point during our interview told me that the trees do "a lot of good things...they do the work of making Armenian settlers feel uncomfortable and out of place... they mark out zones that have been liberated.... they begin clearing and making healthy the soil again". Because of this capacity, one of the first campaigns launched after the most recent military victory in Nagorno-Karabakh, was the planting of oriental plane trees and oaks on the territory of the Gargabazar village41 as part of the 'Breath to the Future,

Breath to the World' program by the state's Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources.

The forging of biological alliances has also entailed the strategic breeding of species. With the escalation of military conflict and the acquisition of key pieces of territory, there has been a renewed interest in the cultivation of mythic animals tied to the region through state-run breeding programs. In particular, the Karabakh horse has emerged as an ideal candidate during the last few years, recognised as a historical and originary inhabitant of the region. Due to being perfectly calibrated to the environmental conditions of the Nagorno-Karabakh prior to the outbreak of conflict, the horse has been understood by many as indicative of a promissory return to a natural state and a model animal for subsequent more-than-human communities to emulate. As we sat talking one evening, Elnur took his phone out and showed me a series of black and white photographs of his father working as a farmhand at the Agdam horse-breeding farm in Karabakh, which closed in 1993 as a result of the civil war. During the Soviet era, the production of

Karabakh horses was tied more closely to their assumed economic value and worth, however, the outbreak of war shifted relations significantly. Many families had to abandon their horses,

41 During the campaign's formal launch, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated: “Our Azerbaijani brothers will again return to Karabakh. Let’s start planting trees in these territories".

65 whilst some of the mares and stallions were transferred to Baku as part of a rescue mission organised by local horse keepers. The horses spent the following winter in Baku, with around 70 dying from a combination of hunger, as well as the sudden change in elevation and climate. This recent history of loss, displacement, and re-settlement informed subsequent representations of the Karabakh horse as a breed which can only survive and thrive in a space of reclaimed sovereignty – a version of Nagorno-Karabakh under the complete jurisdiction of Azerbaijan. For

Elnur and his family, the Karabakh horses are creatures who rely on the seemingly contradictory notion of "freedom with fences" (hasarlanmış azadlıq). When pressed to explain, Elnur told me that akin to the mazelike corral, essential in directing a bull before it is released into ring, the idea of a sovereign Karabakh region is vital for the wellbeing of the Karabakh horse and its release into the wild of the highlands. The complete liberation of the region worked in tandem with repopulation, as territorial occupation through military gains amplified the flourishing of specific more-than-human relations.

The prospective breeding program has also brought about an understanding of experimental gene science as a norm and an essential component in borderland nature-making. During my time in Azerbaijan, much of the public debate concerning the Karabakh horse concerned its genetic purity. As a result of crossbreeding with Arabian horses, the effects of war, and a rotation of different owners and organisations responsible for the country's breeding stock, the genetic make-up of the horse had become significantly diluted. Some of my interviewees claimed that there were no pure-blood horses left, whilst others gave varying numbers. Jokingly referred to in the past as 'Internally Displaced Horses', there is a sense that the horses have instead become

'Genetically Displaced' now that their homeland has been reclaimed, lacking appropriate genetic make-up to be considered appropriate inhabitants. Indeed, Elnur informed me that there was palpable anxiety amongst ministerial members and state scientists regarding the possibility that

66 the Karabakh horse was potentially "too mixed" to be considered a legitimate national animal.

This has inspired urgency within Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Agriculture to update the documentation of the horse so that it meets international standards, and to analyse the genealogical profile of the breed.

Recently, the ministry’s Azerbreeding division submitted hair samples from 137 Karabakh horses for DNA testing at a German laboratory. Additionally, President Ilham Aliyev has ordered

$US2.6 million (AZN 2.8m) of the Presidential Reserve Fund to be put into the construction of a National Artificial Insemination Centre to increase the numbers of alleged 'pure-bred' mares, as well as to institute a passport-like system of identification to track the breed in the future. These initiatives seem to superimpose the logic of citizenship onto the Karabakh horse, whereby belonging to the nation is realised through an adherence to notions of purity, biopolitical management, and an incorporation into a technoscientific fold. Furthermore, it also seems to assert that a genetically ambiguous species, privy to centuries of modification according to the wiles of empire and political regime, can be transformed back into a mythic and originary form via the help of genetic science and ecological engineering. It speaks to the entire project of a post- extractive and post-conflict multispecies world, comprised of what Lorimer and Driesser refer to as an 'ecologized biopolitics', whose target is 'securing desired systemic properties emergent from, and primary to, populations of nonhuman life' (2016, p. 640).

It is worth noting, that alongside the state and the military, oil companies like SOCAR have also taken a central role in environmental management and custodianship – an ideal neoliberal convergence of capital and care. Alongside IDP communities, frequently exploited as political pawns, they've sponsored tree-planting programs in the contested territories, agricultural research into new and novel food crop strains, as well as seed banking initiatives concerning plants

67 endemic to the 'regions'. The production of 'the environment' through discourses of security

(McDonald 2012), as well as post-extraction renewal, has allowed for the state system (often in collaboration with corporate enterprises) to remain uncontested in its role as an 'effective provider of an ecologically sustainable future' (Fagan 2016). These discourses uphold the premise that the revival of lifeworlds and post-industrial environments need not entail critiques of sovereignty, state structures, nor forms of governance. Nature remains interpreted through the fiction of ‘the world’ and its account of the modern subject, drawing a veil over the ‘hairline cracks’ in which the anthropocene manifests itself (Clark 2013, p. 19). Furthermore, such accounts neglect to consider the interplay of nature and culture in contemporary security politics.

Conclusion

As the simulation of the Metsamor meltdown played out in the classroom, I remember noticing the distinct smell of neft42 in the air. Seeping through the small cracks along the window frame, it not only penetrated the airconditioned space but also the fantasy of a contained and bolstered nation-state. It was a reminder that the neighbouring country, whilst complicit in negligent practices affecting downstream communities, was not the only perpetrator of ecological malpractice. Armenia's pollutants intermingled with the waste products of Azerbaijan's own deeply entrenched extractive industry, creating a lingering pool of murky and indiscrete chemicals, eventually flowing out into a sea shared by five other industrialised nations. The neft was a reminder of a material inheritance in the process of being covered up by more-than-human aspirations and visions, cultivating a sort of Edenic paradise to be guarded by security fences, military outposts, and drones.

42 Azerbaijani for 'crude oil'. 68

As I write this chapter, both Azeri and Armenian lives are being lost due to a decades long armed standoff over Nagorno-Karabakh. Away from the glimmering capital cities of Baku and Yerevan, where greenwashed oil and mining companies collude with greenwashed strongman governments, those living in (or hoping to return to) the contested territories face the enduring ecological consequences of militarism – munitions, fuel spills, leftover toxic debris, as well as human and nonhuman casualties. This is the reality of the post-extractive imaginary, where the conclusion of one violence begets the start of another. It is a "twilight realm" in which "everyday life remains semimilitarised by slow violence" (Nixon 2011, p. 227), with suspicion, hypervigilance, and hostility inscribed into the mundane. Nature comes to provide the perfect guise of neutrality and innocence, as ecosystems turn into ideal arsenals for ethnonationalism, securitisation, and the making of a new Azerbaijan.

However, there are nonhuman lifeworlds and relations which interrupt the assumed naturality of the nation; providing an alternative to the more-than-human communities created and primed to partake in the fantasies of the state and to cater to its biopolitical needs. I think of Eldar

Badirkhanov’s novel Mesiats Marsa, where the narrator’s Armenian grandfather Grigori, a disabled World War II veteran, is being expelled from Baku and describes it as having turned into "vicious...predatory city...shaken down, through the walls of the building like monstrous cockroaches, running along the cracks (Badyrkhanov 2013, p, 9; Mamedov 2019). Here, instead of noble horses or towering oak trees, the militarised nation is rendered synonymous with the cockroach – perhaps capable of surviving a nuclear meltdown, but at the cost of its relations with all other beings and things. Instead of the more-than-human worlds created according to the sovereign ideals of the state, in the next section I look towards communities that have been deemed too foreign, illegitimate and feral to deserve inclusion. I shift to the possibility offered by

69 nonsovereign naturescapes, which cultivate worlds that exceed governability, boundedness, and, sometimes, the nation itself.

70

Chapter 3

Unruly Subjects & Unsupervised Worlds

Finding an Alternative through the Cracks

There are zones within Baku which disrupt the ordinary course of the state and its administrative powers. Hints appear almost immediately upon first arriving in the capital city. Cab drivers will tell you of urban legends where crude oil snakes its way through the pipelines of flagship eco- builds, marking porcelain sinks akin to that of an ominous stain. You will find that watermelons grown in the soil of the Absheron peninsula taste distinctly of petrol mixed with fructose, with suspect particles lingering despite talk of extensive remediation and ambitious agricultural rebranding. You will see carbon neutral buildings give way to ad hoc constructions, made of scrap metal sheets and discarded pieces from decommissioned refineries, and overhear municipal workers complain about weeds thriving despite the gung-ho use of paraquats. In all of these instances, the 'patchy landscapes' (Tsing, Mathews & Bubandt 2019, p. 186) of the Anthropocene encourage the negotiation of life otherwise, with resistant forms of social and environmental organisation muddying the aspirations of the state and bringing forth different conceptualisations of both nature and nation. Here, the premise of the extractive zone as an empty and antisocial wasteland, bereft of 'collective existence' (Nye 2014, p. 11), is firmly rejected and rendered untrue. Instead, an array of provisional, informal, and surprising approaches to worldmaking arise from areas left unsupervised and untended – particularly by marginal and fringe communities who are, in many instances, already left out of the 'collective'.

In this chapter, I return to the Black City (Qara Şəhər) and examine the human and nonhuman populations inhabiting the former extraction and petrochemical production zones of Baku – 71 namely, communities of Internally Displaced People (IDPs), stray dogs, ruderal plants, and ghostly beings. Borrowing Lauren Berlant's term of 'nonsovereign relationality' (2016, p. 394), I argue that for marginal communities the post-extractive landscape provides a context in which alternate modalities and articulations of relation can be cultivated – particularly those that hold space for the 'unevenness, ambivalence, violence, and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence' (p. 394). Whilst Berlant's piece focuses on the glitches interrupting the normal and expected reproduction of political, social, and/or collective life, exposing the breakages contained within particular forms of sociality, I argue that there is potential to extend these glitches to the environment itself. For Berlant, the notion of nonsovereignty becomes particularly useful when applied to 'the commons' (p. 395), allowing her to imagine social and political structures oriented around 'ongoing infrastructures of experience' (p. 395). These infrastructures resist the reparative imaginary of the state – reliant upon the premature celebration of repair, consensus, and resolution –, and instead, posit ambivalence as an appropriate (even necessary) response to crisis and the damages wrought by capitalism. Returning to the former industrial zones of Baku, nonsovereign relations provide a generative counterpoint to the state and its fantasy of undisputed authority and jurisdiction. It highlights the glitches present in the remediation of Baku's crude oil landscape, where the extension of state control and management into the peripheral and marginal spaces of the city is not always met with celebration, nor absolute compliance.

This chapter is ultimately interested in how IDPs, weedy allotments, stray dogs, and spectral forces challenge narratives of post-extractive remediation. Despite the seeming transformation of the Black City into a controlled and orderly urban environment, there are residues and leftovers which hint at resistance, calling into question the desired outcome of deindustrialisation and greening (Grant 2014; Gould & Lewis 2016). With many of Baku's state-led clean-up projects transforming nature into an asset, displacing communities deemed undesirable, and advocating for the securitisation of green spaces, divisions have emerged amongst the occupants and 72 residents of the city (Valiyev & Wallwork 2019; Harris-Brandts & Gogishvili 2018). Those on the fringes have called out the exclusionary qualities of environmental remediation and the violence carried out by eco-friendly development (Valiyev 2014) – particularly when it comes to the demolition of existing settlements and the removal of feral/unruly species. Instead, the marginal residents of the Black City have envisioned a different model of inhabitation and worldmaking, capable of impeding the sovereign power of the state, as well as the everyday contingencies of capitalism. They have crafted an array of spontaneous and experimental relationships with the environment of the Black City, forging unlikely alliances and nifty collaborations whilst simultaneously shifting away from practices of mastery, rootedness, privatisation, and proprietorship. Through this, the thread between cultivation and expertise is severed, challenging the idea that tending to land and interacting with nonhuman life requires institutional knowledge or appropriate training. Instead, in a space where life oozes and pushes through the cracks and gaps of imposed infrastructure, cultivation turns into a practice of attentiveness and adaptability. The next three sections examine an archipelago of 'humanimal households, niches, nodes, contact zones, enclaves, cultures, communities, social networks and passages' (Gabradi 2017, p. 153) where subjects considered to be 'masters of intervention' thrive.

It will bring forth a post-extractive naturescape which embraces an emancipatory politics and foregoes the need for urban renewal, the securitisation of territory, and that of the bounded and orderly nation-state.

The first section begins by briefly outlining the strategies implemented by the Azeri state to regain control of spaces deemed to exceed the normative biopolitical framework. Reflecting on the history of the Black City and its gradual subsumption by the White City, it will be argued that the conceptualisation of nature as a scientific enterprise – necessitating expert opinion, institutional involvement, economic investment, as well as specialised knowledge –, is a response to the threat posed by those on the peripheries and fringes of the urban landscape. Furthermore, the section 73 will re-position extractive zones as historical hubs of imperialist trade and botanical commerce, where oil industrialists, with a particular fondness for seemingly unspoilt environments (Åsbrink

2011), facilitated the development of prototypical ecological interventions.

Shifting away from the colourful ornamental flowerbeds and manicured lawns of the White City and the historical testing grounds of the Black City, the second section homes in on contemporary ruderal ecologies. An assortment of common weeds will be examined, found amongst the makeshift IDP settlements which skirt the edges of encroaching developments. In these informal spaces, IDPs grow backyard gardens next to decommissioned oil production units, tend to allotments of thorny plants hugged by barbed wire fences, and care for seeds collected from their former homelands. It will be argued that these human-vegetal encounters and interactions are examples of what Michelle Murphy has called the 'experimental otherwise'

(2017, p. 105), with unruly weeds, like the camelthorn and branched plantain, drawing together multiple knowledges and practices in order to craft an entangled and dynamic politics. Through examining the everyday narratives of IDPs, I propose that the ruderal ecologies foster 'mutualist relations' (Langwick 2018, p. 431) between things, people, and plants – inspiring attentiveness and actions of care. Furthermore, having survived and grown in a context of acute contamination and decades of neglect by the state, the weeds demonstrate a capacity 'to make livable again'

(Haraway 2016, p. 33), transforming the "broken earth" (parçalanmış torpaq) of the industrial wastelands into something “life-giving” (həyatverici) and potentially pedagogical. The weeds also become useful in a practical sense, assuring forms of 'collective continuance' (Whyte 2018) in the absence of official or institutional structures of support and assistance. I argue in this section that alongside attenuating – at times even diminishing – the toxicity of the former industrial zones, the wasteland plants serve as a vital barrier against inspections and evictions by representatives of the state and the police. It allows the settlement to remain a place of (what I term) unsupervised

74 worldmaking, where both humans and nonhumans experience the freedom of being able to craft alternate practices, whilst also avoiding the strictures of the state.

The third section examines the formation of an ambivalent alliance between the stray dog population of the Black City and the IDP community. It is a connection based predominantly upon a shared experience of exclusion from the legitimate spaces of the city, resulting in an identity rooted in marginality (Weaver 2015; Valiyev 2013). Because of this, both populations have developed a similar philosophy regarding territory and the landscape of the Black City, embracing the notion of temporary inhabitation and the safekeeping of resources. When it comes to the perspective of the state and local Bakuvians, the section will show that both the stray dogs and the IDPs are collapsed into the same category of ferality, deemed to be ungovernable, undesirable, and part of an informal urban system (Reese 2015; Holmberg 2015; Beck 2002). It will be argued that the successful development of the district, as envisaged by the government, relies upon the re-settlement and removal of these populations. Indeed, the remediated naturescapes of the White City leave no space for informal infrastructures, nor fringe communities (Blau & Rupnik 2019). What little remains of the Black City provides a rare exemplar of a different kind of relationship between inhabitants and former industrial sites, erring away from the extensive alteration of the environment, as well as the need for the ownership and securitisation of territory. In the words of Berlant, they 'generate a form from within brokenness'

(2016, p. 393).

The chapter concludes by turning to the boisterous and disruptive workings of ghostly subjects in the Black City. It will consider the urban legends devised by IDPs to make sense of the

‘overdetermined landscapes of human capitalist gain-making’ (Hoag, Bertoni, Bubandt 2018, p.

89), with spectral encounters allowing histories of violent industry, contamination, and

75 environmental exploitation to be acknowledged – histories otherwise effaced and obfuscated by narratives of progress and promises of renewal. Whilst urban theorists like Matthew Gandy have argued that corporeal interactions need to be considered when making sense of the modern city and its 'post-industrial permutations' (2006, p. 497), the last section extends this to immaterial forces and the storying of nonsecular phenomena. The extractive zone as an always-already haunted space provides scope to consider the novel sensoriums, affects, and materials which come to constitute former industrial zones and their adjacent naturescapes in often uncanny ways.

In many instances, unruly forces in the White City have materialised as crude oil – staining spotless limestone facades and erupting from newly installed pipelines (Blau & Rupnik 2019) –, attesting to the varying temporospatial qualities of pollutants, as well as the inability to ever completely purify an extractive zone. Whilst a nuisance for property developers and new residents, for IDP communities these unexplainable and strange events turn into useful strategies, capable of affirming the history of the Black City, deterring evictions, and slowing down the pace of construction.

The chapter will accompany both human and nonhuman communities in the midst of several shifts, as extractive zones turn post-extractive. Material arrangements, political circumstances, and historical relationships have all been destabilised and reappraised in the context of urban nature, allowing the emergence of novel practices by marginal and fringe subjects. Skirting the clearly demarcated boundaries of the White City, with its immaculate hedges and glistening limestone blocks, the informal settlements of the Black City leak, ooze, and spill over, inspiring the creation of new arrangements and relations43. It is a space where, instead of referring to an act of intervention and development, cultivation returns to its originary linguistic root, kwelə – meaning

43 Much like Macarena Gomez-Barris in the Extractive Zone, I hope to highlight various social ecologies in Baku which disrupt the trajectories and structures established by extractive capitalism. In 'cataloguing life otherwise' (2017, p. 4), I aim to challenge the either/or framing of the environment in Baku – as either a petrochemical production zone or a site of miraculous urban renewal and greening. Instead, I bring into view spaces that defy and define other potential engagements with the arid landscape of the Absheron peninsula. 76 to 'move around, sojourn, dwell'. Here, amidst the wildcat circulation of industrial debris, where particles of rogue pollutants are swept up by the wind and the soil bleeds crude oil, communities cultivate a practice of wandering through a nature unexpected and strange.

The Black City’s Oasis

One of my frequent rituals in Baku was to ride the bus down Nobel avenue, starting at the headquarters of SOCAR44on the side of the boulevard and getting off in the White City.

The road would curve along the Caspian Sea, which, by late afternoon, presented curious hints of the offshore hydrocarbon infrastructure usually relegated to offshore spaces: the oil stains, company vessels, and floating trash from employee lunches. I’d always find myself walking past a large marble monument, erected in 2006 to commemorate the ‘Comprehensive Action Plan for Improving Ecological Conditions in the Republic of Azerbaijan during 2006-2010’. Alongside stating the key promises of the White City’s extensive remediation, it featured a quote by the late

President Heydar Aliyev: “the Black City throughout centuries will turn white, clean, there will be grown flowers, and it will come to be a beautiful sight of Azerbaijan”. For me, this quote exemplified the use of the environment as a powerful tool of state building (Sutton 2007; 2011), where the scientific practices involved in landscaping and horticulture have simultaneously become prospective tools of mastery – especially over a disorderly and often ungovernable post- extractive space.

In order to realise a new cosmopolitan Baku, on territory marked by a legacy of heavy industrialism and ecological exploitation, the state needed to import commodities, people, and, most strikingly, nature – or at least a host of appropriate plants and animals stripped of their

44 The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic 77 wider relations. In the White City, this has involved the planting of sprawling flowerbeds, exotic cacti and palms, as well as neatly arranged olive trees which mirror the pastoral illustrations of olive branches seen on billboards advertising property. These purchases have entailed the inclusion of various corporate actors as well as commodity chains. Indeed, most plants were acquired either from foreign industrial nurseries, or from the recently constructed greenhouse complex, Baku Agropark, located in the Zira settlement. A high-tech agricultural enterprise, requiring vast quantities of electricity, water, and land, the Agropark is reminiscent of the type of hybrid nature-making described by the anthropologist Anna Tsing in her work on transnational plant nurseries – a collision between industrial technologies and plantation ecologies.

Indeed, the remediation of the White City has been premised upon foreign flora and wildlife, imported under the guise that it is essentially recreating a pre-industrial environment. This has been the case with the rose-ringed parakeet, which was recently released into a green area in

Ataturk Park as part of IDEA Public Union`s Urban Ecology Project, aimed at protecting and restoring urban ecosystems and preserving ‘fauna once widespread in the past’ (apa.az 2019).

This neglects the fact that the parakeet is not an endemic species to Baku and has been historically introduced into urban green space as a result of its aesthetically pleasing qualities. As fauna, they are desired as an ornament but detested once they turn feral – spreading rapidly and displacing other bird species. Similarly, the thoroughfares of the White City have been lined with olive trees imported from elsewhere, despite native species growing abundantly across the peninsula.

The incorporation of species like the parakeet, alongside exorbitant foreign vegetation, has entailed the establishment of specific more-than-human hierarchies and the removal of beings deemed ‘feral’ or ‘ruderal’. Both terms are linked to nonhuman species thriving in neglected spaces, without care or assistance from humans. Ruderal ecologies, in particular, refer to 78 ecologies that spontaneously inhabit disturbed environments – the spaces alongside train tracks or roads, wastelands, or rubble (Stoetzer 2018). In the White City, widely distributed ruderal plants, like the common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia), buffalo bur nightshade (Solanum rostratum) and the Russian knapweed (Acroptilion repens), have been sprayed with a cocktail of chemicals. Extensive maintenance schedule prevents any potential for further sprawling.

Meanwhile, stray dogs have been systematically culled despite co-existing with IDP populations for decades and posing no threat to the community. Their disposal was justified as a preventative measure against the diffusion of rabies by City Hall Officers (OIPA 2019). During my fieldwork, the Bakinets45 described the removal of such environments and nonhumans as a return to a bygone ‘order’ (poriadok). Such environmental orderliness conjured up memories of a Soviet

Baku which preceded the decline of industrialism in the Black City and the gradual emergence of urban wastelands.

In addition to being linked to the expansion of 'living regions' (zhiloy raion) – comprised of extensive green spaces, public transportation, day care, education and health services (Bater

1980) – it was a time defined by a cosmopolitan (Russophone) culture directly reflected in the orderly and manicured arrangement of the natural landscape. The maintained greenery of the

Soviet era defined a time prior to the alleged loss of city's unique urban identity. This loss was attributed to the arrival 'rural migrants' (IDPs) who, in the words of one interviewee, had brought with them "the dirt and mud of the fields...to soil the good reputation of Baku"46.

Indeed, the environmental remediation of the White City has neatly dovetailed with the demolition of numerous makeshift settlements in the neighbourhood. The monolithic venture has accelerated what is essentially the cleansing of a potentially lucrative district, in proximity to

45 A local term denoting those ‘native’ to Baku. City dwellers with multi-generational ties to the capital, as opposed to the IDP population from the regions. 46 Audio recorded interview with anonymised interviewee. Took place on the 15th of October 2019, in the Khatai district of Baku. 79 both the urban downtown and the seaside boulevard. Via the re-settlement of the chushki (Russian slang for an IDP), a naturescape has been strategically engineered to attract the upper and middle class, commercial businesses, in addition to tourists from the West and the

Gulf states. Another interviewee47, Sahib, who recently moved into a newly constructed apartment building in the White City, made the observation that “with each weed removed, we see less poverty and waste”. Here, the removal of both feral vegetation and the IDP community evoked a feeling of control and the return of civilised order. It harked back to the very first instance of greening in the Black City: the creation of the parkland surrounding by the Nobel

Brothers, which, by mobilising a discourse of recreation and aesthetic beauty, facilitated the removal of select communities48 posing a challenge to governance and assimilability. It was a project premised upon controlling the city and its population amidst rapidly shifting sociopolitical and economic conditions.

Already occupied by Keshle’s landowning peasants, the site of Baku’s 'green miracle' encroached on the boundaries of land essential for everyday livelihood and subsistence farming. A lease was eventually signed between the peasants and the oil industrialists after a sustained stand-off and the introduction of aggressive strategies by both imperial powers and the private firm of the Nobel brothers. Consisting of payoffs and the selective provision of incentives, the strategies weakened bonds of political solidarity and essentially pitted members of the community against each other.

The park turned into a tightly restricted oasis, no longer accessible to anyone outside of the oil industry and only to be used by foreign and senior employees. Alongside the displacement of the community, it is also telling that the park required the intensive re-engineering of the entire

47 Audio recorded interview. Took place on the 14th of October 2019, in the Khatai district of Baku. 48 Such as landowning peasants of Keşlə (the settlement in part constituting and in part bordering the Black City). 80 ecosystem49 in order to import European flora50 – often using the technologies of the oil industry itself. A notable example of this was the irrigation system, with freshwater needing to be transported all the way from the Volga river in oil tankers due to the arid conditions of the peninsula. Later, condensed steam generated in the refineries of the Nobel brothers was used and routed to the park via special pipelines. Through the strategic use of greening, the more- than-human world came to represent the potential for dispossession, as well as an additional stratum in the hierarchy of living things for subjects in already compromised positions (Parreñas

2015; Chen 2012).

However, even an oasis has its limits. When it comes to the present day, there are communities who refuse to repeat history and bend to interventionist regimes of greening and nature-making.

The next three sections attend to unruly and lawless subjects who have found ways to retain their freedom and their wastelands. They have made worlds which exceed reductive masterplans and threaten the neat outlines of the White City.

Tending to a Ruderal Home

Approaching Amir’s house, I’d often spot steady rivulets of water flowing through the gaps of what, initially, seemed to be an impenetrable metal-cladded door. The water smoothed the edges of a small patch of land out the front of the property that had been progressively eroded – mainly by construction work on a new main road connecting the White City with the Khatai (Xətai) district metro station. Rather than simply being an unruly border zone between what remains of the old industrial Black City and the newly established White City, the strip in combination with

49 The greening of the capital itself began as a result of foreign merchants arriving in Baku by sea in the mid-1800s (Ibrahimov 2009), who were obliged to bring several cubic metres of fertile soil and seedlings as a special duty, or tax, upon landing. The scheme was established in 1880 by Military Commandant R. Foven.

81

Amir’s unintentional watering had given way to modest articulations of life – including clusters of branched plantains, capillary wormwood, and ryegrass, growing in a canal-like ridge alongside sewage and pieces of trash. Amir, fifty-nine and technically retired, moved to the Black City in the early nineties when his hometown of (Laçın) was occupied by Armenian forces during the height of the Nagorno-Karabakh war. He had worked as a kolkhoznik51 in the 'regions' during the Soviet Union and as a smallholder, primarily growing potatoes and grains as cash crops. Amir described the regions52 as a contradictory place – wild and sylvan, yet also a place of intense agricultural development. Indeed, Soviet governmental agencies and research groups trialled a range of technologies out on the pastures and lowland farming fields of Lachin, manipulating the natural environment via labour-intensive agricultural interventions and the planting of non- endemic species. This led to the exposure of provincial Azeri communities to an industrial conceptualisation of nature, where variables could be toyed with through an array of apparatuses and techniques. In many ways, it disrupted a romantic storying of nature as a space free of human intervention and the possibility of contamination. In Amir's words, "the plants, the crops...the soil...everything on the fields and pastures became technology...and as technology it could oppress as much as it could lead to unexpected results and, sometimes, invention53". Here, technology straddles a space somewhere between Western knowledge practices and local 'non- scientific' practices, contesting the idea of a binary episteme. Indeed, Amir invoked values of innovativeness and usefulness – frequently found within Western scientific epistemologies –, yet these values remained firmly connected to his own material context and embodied experiences.

51 Those who work on a collective farm. Predominantly used during the Soviet period. 52 There are seven districts de jure part of Azerbaijan that make up the territory in dispute in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Lachin is a town which is the de jure centre of the of Azerbaijan 53 Examples of invention mentioned by Amir during our interview included workers establishing hidden patches to harvest for their own families, growing certain plants with recreational or financial value (e.g. opium poppies and saffron), in addition to finding and isolating rare strains of plant species to propagate and develop privately (such as black pomegranates). 82

Environmental technology was useful not for a grander biopolitical purpose, but for everyday subsistence and creative praxis.

Whilst engendering an array of novel relationships, alliances, connections, and subjectivities, the rural environmental policies of the Soviet period also led to distinct experiences with displacement. Occurring well before the outbreak of civil war with Armenia, and the subsequent resettlement of IDPs, the Soviet central government elected to move a sizeable chunk of the

Karabakh population to different provinces and townships in order to strengthen struggling agricultural industries. Policies of this kind became a hallmark of 'austerity and a highly militarised economy' in the context of the Azeri state, not only increasing productivity in the agricultural sector, but also distributing expertise across the country. Such policies also became the source of significant shifts in the social ecologies of rural populations, muddying ideas of land- based belonging and necessitating the development of novel ways to relate to the natural world.

Instead of a close attachment between nature and people, there was newfound recognition of the very temporariness of inhabitation and the importance of practically (and pragmatically) managing difficult environmental conditions. This could be observed in the relocation of Azeri kolkhozniks from Armenia to the Kura-Araz lowland of Azerbaijan by Soviet authorities, in order to expand the cotton-growing industry during 1948-1953 (Shafiyev 2015). The Azerbaijani population was moved from a distinctly mountainous area to underdeveloped lowlands, where the careful study of strange and unfamiliar vegetal life, alongside necessary adaptation to harsh and stubborn conditions, underlined everyday life. It was a prototypic moment for an emergent identity based upon the capacity to live in hostile ecologies and to make do with particularly obstinate soil. This identity would resurface decades later in the IDP settlements of Baku.

83

Amir’s father had worked as part of the sovkhozes in the lowlands but had returned to Lachin after gaining permission to do so. In the present day, it has provided a familial biography tangled up in a cluster of different plants – from cotton to pines to olive and fig trees –, each materialising a different relationship to land and identity. Amir tells me of the callouses on his hands from cutting pine; the numbness that lingered in his father’s left arm from the haze of weed killers and chemical fertilisers used on the cotton, and the stains of mulberry and pomegranate juice on his children’s clothing. Tsing refers to these sensorial and physical traces as the 'histories of encounter' (2012, p. 2) – the way structures and relationships set up by given political and economic decisions continue to ripple through our surroundings and the mundane moments of life itself. For many IDPs interviewed in the Black City, these early encounters in the regions refuted the commonly held notion that within the land one could locate a continuous line of family, blood, inheritance, and ownership. This severance between cultivation and right to territory was eventually transposed from the sovkhozes to the makeshift settlements of Baku's industrial zones. In these spaces, ruderal plants elicited an array of ambivalent relations and feelings. They could ‘entice entire ecologies of other creatures to participate in their care and their propagation' with the 'know-how to entrain others in the service of their rhythms, their wiles, and desires’ (Myers 2017, p. 297), yet the weeds could just as easily rebuff and act in ways obstinate and harmful.

This adaptiveness was interpreted by Amir as the very quality which allowed the weeds to thrive in the difficult and unideal context of brownfield land. He would often speak fondly of the plants growing in the industrial lots, highlighting their tendency to forgo “beauty” and "pleasantness" in order to “make an attempt at growing wherever they might end up…and to teach us to do the same”. Instead of a Western scientific lens, which frames structural qualities and physical processes as objective phenomena, Amir showed great interest in the parts of the plant which

84 were for the "service" (xidmət) of “others as much as itself”. Whenever we passed by a certain patch, Amir would regale stories of spotting rogue bird nests, woven into the thick and unruly stems, and the way in which certain weeds would flower all year round, providing nectar and pollen, despite the possibility of both the searing heat and the chilling cold characteristic of the

Absheron peninsula. He described “strange shapes and angles” found in knotted clusters, which not only kept the weeds protected from pests, but also provided ample shelter for “rodents, moths, even small birds in need of rest”, as well as the “clever filtering” of leaves which “absorb toxic gases without wilting or dying…so that we can all breathe better air”. Another interlocutor from the settlement, Toğrul, had also marvelled at the skilfulness of common weeds when it came to the nurturing of fragile ecosystems. As an amateur apiarist, who has made persistent attempts at populating the area with honeybee colonies, he noted that the weeds were a crucial element in the creation of a hospitable environment, capable of fostering symbiotic – or what he called “generous” – relationships between species54. One could always register the slight hum of a zealous hive, reliant on the ad hoc clusters of loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and camel thorn

(Alhagi Camelorum)55 covering the now idle grounds of the industrial compound. For both Amir and Toğrul, paying attention to the conduct of the weeds generated graspable information about more obscure ideas and concepts (such as ‘the environment’, ‘harmony’, or ‘pollution’). Objects became placeholders for patterns of activity pliable in form – they could be mimicked, accelerated, or restricted (Langwick 2018, Archambault 2016).

54 For further thoughts around human-plant relationships see: Langwick, SA 2018, 'A Politics of Habitability: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World', Cultural Anthropology, vol. 33, no.3, pp. 415–43. Archambault, J 2016, 'Taking Love Seriously in Human-Plant Relations in Mozambique: Toward an Anthropology of Affective Encounters', Cultural Anthropology, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 244–71. 55 Interestingly, in Azeri folklore the camelthorn also protects from malicious gaze and brings happiness into the household. Many believe that the sharp needles of the plant will prick the evil eye and so it is common to see the plant hanging at the entrance of houses and front doors. Indeed, it was one of the first plants I noticed when visiting Amir’s house. 85

Thinking of industrial and brownfield ecologies as sites of pedagogy and sociality stands in stark opposition to accounts which depict Anthropocene environments as facilitating only processes of ruination, death, and the breaking down of relations. In his 2019 article, ‘Being Dumped’,

Michael Marder proposes that the contemporary, post-industrial landscape is ontologically toxic, meaning that it encourages the separation of people from both their bodies and the world itself.

He conceives of toxic environments as inciting an aggressive containment of the self, occurring simultaneously with the indiscriminate removal and filtering of everything else – the ‘projection of the alienated I, severed from the environment' (p. 191). The global dump is offered up as an anti-social place where everything exists in pure abstraction: elements, people, and things all unshapen and unable to connect, or even relate, to one another. Indeed, the very material context is, in the words of Marder, ‘too volatile to support anything’ (p. 192), let alone a social milieu.

The Black City could easily be portrayed as part of this hostile world, bereft of vitality and defined purely by forms of death resulting from the toxins in the soil, airborne pollutants, and contaminated waterways. It is a reading which threatens to become too rigid, obscuring the existence of liveable and social brownfield ecologies, which hold the capacity to be sites of worldmaking despite their toxicity, given opportune configurations and imaginations.

Indeed, the residents of the Black City have consistently engaged in projects of co-becoming, refuting the fatalistic outcomes of 'lethal individuation' (Marder 2019, p. 189), indifference, and alienation. This was evident in the reluctance shown by many of my interviewees to remove weedy clusters via the use of over the counter paraquats – readily available and encouraged by the local council. It was also demonstrated by the recognition of ruderal plants as subjects occupying similar social niches to the IDPs. Indeed, Amir's parting remark affirmed this kinship, marvelling at the abundance of greenery “in a place so close to the factories…a place without irrigation, without council maintenance, without money, or attention from the rich”. Within the

86 scope of this framing, the extractive site ceases to be merely a temporal landscape, a ‘spatial materialization of time’ (Zani 2017, p.160) edging towards a pre-destined state of exhaustion, and instead becomes a context capable of holding divergent and shifting relations to land. It offers a counterpoint to the perspective of native Bakuvians presented in the first chapter, who speak of historical binds to the environment and a future-orientation predicated on the revival of pre- industrial naturescapes (Blau & Rupnik 2019). Undeterred by the oil industry's violent reorganisation of the landscape (Shankar 2018), IDPs unearth opportunity in the conditional forms of fracture, breakage, and ruination. The leftover materials of industry become wrapped up with people's words, thoughts, and actions, turning the extractive zone into a space where creative manifestations of knowledge, political life, and everyday practice constantly emerge

(Gómez-Barris 2017). Furthermore, it dispels technocratic visions of 'green capitalism' as the only just mechanism through which life can be salvaged within the post-extractive context (Caprotti

2014).

Arzu, a family friend of Amir, was one of the most industrious residents in the neighbourhood when it came to unearthing opportunity in a very literal manner. Upon meeting her for the first time, she showed me an overflowing green patch backing onto the refinery’s barbed wire fence, filled with “cabbage, carrots, beetroots, pomegranates, apricots, and strawberries…all growing happily in the oily soil”. Seemingly, by midday, the entire garden was transplanted onto the kitchen table, where a multicoloured display had been carefully arranged – showcasing plates of (soft cabbage wrapped around meat and rice), crisp slices of apple, freshly brewed tea, and pomegranate seeds. The leftovers were carefully placed in jars of brine and stored in the deep recesses of the cupboard. Whilst the primary use of the vegetables and fruits harvested from the allotments was in the preparation of homecooked meals, they ended up circulating throughout the neighbourhood. Standing in front of a freshly dug patch of soil, Arzu explained

87 to me, “whatever is left unused ends up in the hands of my neighbours and relatives instead of the bin…I will save some of the pomegranates for my cousin’s wedding as it represents eternal love, give a few sacks of the apples to the mechanic helping to fix my son’s car, and maybe make preserves of the apricots in case more of the government officials come to appraise the land”.

Additionally, on weekdays Arzu and her friends would set up a small stall at the corner of the settlement in order to sell their produce to refinery workers clocking off from work, in addition to those in the settlement without garden space.

Whilst weediness has often been depicted as an index of disinvestment56 and neglect, foreclosing potential futures and reinforcing inequality, for Arzu the 'counter-gardens' of the Black City provided essential forms of subsistence and access. It did so without subscribing to the 'gleaming spectacle of education and entertainment' (Myers 2018) encountered in the community gardens of Baku's remediated and gentrified districts – particularly around the Bayil and Narimanov areas. Whilst official parklands have relied upon the re-organisation of plant and animal life into legible, orderly, and governable forms, the gardens of the Black City have retained distinct qualities of marginality. Indeed, weediness has been conceived of as the point of entry when it comes to an education in resistant civics shared between co-inhabitants, with both the human and nonhuman populations working together to retain privacy and autonomy from the rest of the cityscape. It has meant freedom from reliance on government handouts which often entail strict obligations to report and participate in bureaucratic process, in addition to a capacity to remain in a space where the residents feel part of the socio-historical milieu. This has been aided by a decrease in the finances allocated to city councils, as well as clear gaps in current legal structures

56 See Kregg Hetherington's work on the Panama’s San Lorenzo National Park. In his work, Hetherington (2019) explicitly links the formation of unruly naturescapes to neglect by both global institutions and capitalist industry. 88 concerning the eviction of IDPs and the allocation of rightful ownership in the context of former industrial spaces.

In this sense, the informal nature of backyard gardens fostered feelings of "liberty" (azadlıq) for many of the IDPs, freeing them from exhausting bureaucratic processes and lingering anxieties.

Indeed, one will rarely encounter a resident in the settlement who pays property tax. Water and electricity are regularly siphoned from networks, cloaked by the inaccessible flora and the overflow of illegal arrangements. Government workers sent with eviction notices turn back in defeat, fearing the potential tearing of their suits and obstructed by the thick and dense matts of camelthorn57 growing across the arid border between the Black and the White City. All of these aspects allow for the emergence of distinct articulations of freedom – what I call unsupervised worldmaking –, for a population routinely depicted by state policy reports and media accounts as disempowered and politically underrepresented. In many ways, the existence of the noxious weeds and the reluctance of the IDP population to remove them forges a potent form of community activism and mutual care, erring against the impassionate and apolitical gesture of mainstream greening initiatives. It is a distinctly oppositional ethos which embraces the potential of disjuncture and avoids relying on slippery assumptions of common goals or metrics.

With no way to revert to the extractive industries that once bolstered the neighbourhood, particularly as oil prices continue to shrink and investment veers towards sustainable industry, residents have reinvented these marginal spaces as sites of fringe horticulture. A post-extractive farmers' market which has breathed new life into the industrial and ecological remnants of both the imperial and Soviet legacy. It has allowed IDPs to graft their own farming culture, developed

57 One resident told me that since the "sharp needles of the plant" are believed to "prick the evil eye" and protect from "malicious action", it was appropriate for the camelthorn to behave in this way. Indeed, the planned demolition of the settlement and the further displacement of the community was seen by others as warranting distinct articulations of vegetal vengeance. 89 in their former homelands as well as the sovkhozes, onto the roots and rubble of the former extractive industry, ushering in an array of unanticipated human–vegetal relations and unsupervised worlds. With many of the ruderal plants the remnants of the former Nobel

Brother's Black City estate58, and others growing from seeds rescued from Nagorno-Karabakh and smuggled to Baku via amateur and DIY forms of seed banking, there is a sense that the backyard gardens are the active reworkings of the ruins of past interventions – of urban planning, environmental management, and industrial agriculture. They are the surplus plants of both empire and Communism, that have ended up under the custodianship of an equally out-of-place community. With the gradual demolition of Black City to make way for the stone clad apartments59, unbroken marble slabs, and strictly maintained gardens60 of the White City, the primary worry of Arzu was that she would lose access to the allotments around the industrial area. Each time that we met during my time in Baku, she expressed anxiety and fear over becoming reliant on the supermarkets in the Khatai area, which sold produce at prices far too expensive for IDPs like her. Wrapped in clingwrap and with blocks of convoluted text, she expressed suspicion over the quality, telling me that the fruits and vegetables from these shops often tasted of plastic and pesticides. Unlike the produce grown in the industrial land, she couldn’t trace the toxicity to a tangible source, nor attempt to ameliorate.

Despite official studies conducted by the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources confirming high concentrations of benzene and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in soil samples taken around the oil and gas processing factories, and the circulation of these findings within the settlement, most residents interviewed have retained a marked keenness to stay with the “oily”

58 Particularly the apricot trees which were cultivated heavily by the Nobel family. 59 In the style of the late nineteenth century arrondissments of Louis-Napoléon’s Second Empire Paris. 60 Alongside classic ornamental architecture, the White City has also opted to emulate the aesthetics of Dubai and other capital cities of oil-rich states, with vast expanses of high-rise towers and glazed surfaces.

90 and “black” earth, creating methods of growing and harvesting which mitigate the risk of the pollutants in the ground. There is a shared belief that, whilst the produce “tastes different…more bitter than the fruit and vegetables grown in the clean nature of the regions…causing stomach aches and diarrhea”, these unpleasant qualities are not inherent nor intrinsic to the industrial environment. By conceptualising plant roots as companions, and the toxic molecules as beings one can interact with (“the oil was here long before we were” in the words of Amir), IDPs have opted to develop careful habits and practices which aim to counter, or at least neutralise, harm.

Indeed, over the years there has been a proliferation of weeds and shrubs in the allotments, planted as buffers around edible plants; rainwater has become standard for irrigation instead of groundwater; produce is always attentively washed and prepared, and pickling in brine has turned into a nifty way of disguising taste. These practices exist as distinct counterpoints to the swift strategies of relocation and redevelopment advocated by the government of Azerbaijan. Such practices prioritise environmental mediation instead of remediation, which shift from associations of removal or remedy in meaning, toward its past participle of mediare – to "be in the middle”. They become pragmatic ways (Coles 2016) to stay amidst, and within, environments where livelihoods had been cultivated despite being deemed uninhabitable, thus challenging the temporal dispossession, or the ‘inability to plan, predict, or build futures in an incremental way’

(Smith 2011, p. 17) often felt by communities living in similar spaces of alleged industrial ruination.

Furthermore, the vegetal organisms described above have provided key lessons regarding the recognition of agency’s distributive character, shifting the subject matter away from hypothetical individual agents towards the understanding of different types of actants – human, material, discursive – as events or points of mediation. The ruderal plants of the Black City reveal that the formation of generative relations to land, different species, and each-other, lies in the ability to

91 extricate oneself from ‘'assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm’', and to 'enter into the proximity of assemblages whose conglomerate effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends’' (Bennett 2010, p. 464) – rather than simply fixating on a singular object or individual self.

This has been especially important for marginal communities frequently depicted as severed from a tangible home and prone to social disconnection.

When Stray Becomes Yoldaş

If I had arrived two months earlier, I would have found numerous governmental workers patrolling the streets of Baku. Driven by the municipal council's desire to "cleanse the city" in preparation for the 2019 Azerbaijani Grand Prix, those contracted to work were armed with guns in the weeks leading up to the event and given the task to indiscriminately shoot any stray dog in sight61. This usually occurred in the AM hours with unmarked vehicles driving around the capital, waiting for four-legged 'pests' to cross the streets, emerge from hiding, or trawl around the public dumpsters. According to local activists, strategies were sometimes altered slightly, and the dogs ended up being poisoned, burnt alive in furnaces, or slaughtered with shovels. Whilst tourists and residents in secure apartment complexes enjoyed a seemingly cosmopolitan and orderly cityscape, remaining oblivious to the nocturnal cull, most locals did notice spots of blood on the concrete footpaths and could recall hearing gunshots at odd hours of the night. In addition to the violence encountered on the streets of the city, some activists suspected that similar misconduct was occurring within the confines of Baku's most recent state-of-the-art animal care centre – referred to as ‘Toplan'62. Built on the grounds of Balakhani's former 'dog reception camp', which

61 Under Azerbaijani legislation, the torture and killing of stray animals is not regarded as a crime, and those who commit such acts simply get an administrative penalty - a fine of about 500 Manats (289 USD). Indeed, there are only three articles in the Code of Administrative Offences: one pertaining to veterinary medicine, the second concerning pet ownership, and the third (Article 274) disclosing the fine for killing or maiming an animal. Previously, the fine was only 25-45 Manats (about 15-26 USD), but animal rights activists lobbied for the fine to be raised. 62 The name was chosen as Toplan is the most common dog name in Azerbaijan. 92 had been made infamous via a slew of lawsuits alleging misconduct and animal abuse, Toplan was meant to herald the implementation of animal-friendly practices within government policy63.

However, instead of following the CNVR (Catch, Neuter, Vaccine, and Release) program under transparent and open conditions, the managers of the highly secured64 complex have been accused of cultivating an atmosphere of neglect and cruelty65, as well as getting paid up to a hundred manats66 to kill dogs caught by authorities and police officers.

Instead of wielding guns, in the Black City matters were handled with what Amir referred to as

"peace treaties". Left out in front of the makeshift houses, I could always spot dozens of plastic containers filled with water, as well as the occasional offcut of mutton thrown amidst the dirt and tumbleweeds. Perhaps the most meaningful of these offerings were the pieces of tandir bread scattered around the canals – a much appreciated staple inscribed with connotations of abundance, hospitality, and binding friendship. Dog houses were assembled by residents out of miscellaneous pieces of timber and scrap metal sheets, both remnants of the decommissioned oil production units. They were usually rough constructions, without creature comforts or embellishments, but they provided a refuge from the intense winds which would sweep over daily from the direction of the Caspian Sea. According to Amir, these gestures were enough to keep the strays from nipping or attacking any of the residents in the settlement, whilst also imposing certain conditions and boundaries. Indeed, neither Amir nor any of the other interviewees expressed a desire to incorporate the strays into their households or familial units – they were to remain unnamed and undomesticated. In doing so, the population of the Black City resisted the

63 The centre itself was part of a portfolio of highly publicised humanitarian projects spearheaded by Leyla Aliyeva, the daughter of President of Azerbaijan and Vice President of . 64 Protected by security guards, multiple CCTV cameras, and occasionally a police unit. 65 Some of the methods used by Toplan employees (according to the eyewitness reports of locals and activists) include huddling dogs into the cars with shovels, nets, and using a fishing line with metal hooks. These techniques have caused the dogs to suffer an array of injuries – including fractures, broken jaws and eyes, and torn limbs. 66 Equivalent to $60USD. 93 notion (or even possibility) of full mastery over nonhuman beings, with feral characteristics no longer something to be corrected through an array of medical, scientific, pedagogical, and other disciplinary or regulatory interventions (Mitchell & Snyder 2005, pp. 628–29). This attitude was echoed in the comments of Amir's neighbour, who told me during the course of our conversation that a "stray dog should snarl if it feels like it, bite if necessary, and bark as much as it wants to".

In the context of the Black City, the disappearance and systematic erasure of ferality by the state was a threatening prospect, with the community recognising that the seamless integration of the stray dogs would inevitably lead to, and accelerate, the displacement of both human and nonhuman populations. It would remove the very qualities which had successfully deterred authorities and prospective buyers from approaching and demolishing the settlement in the past.

Here, the very 'machine of feralization' (Yoon 2017, p. 137) was turned on its head by the residents of the Black City, with the 'technics and technologies' (p. 137) – entailed in the production of feral bodies – used as a shield to maintain conditions of nonsovereignty and privacy. Amir would refer to the presence of the strays as something which kept the forces of gentrification at bay, laughing at the idea of a rowdy and boisterous pack of dogs wandering over to the White City and proceeding to upset the fantasy of order which had been cultivated; intimidating the small apartment dogs, urinating over the polished marble facades, digging up garden beds full of expensive imported flowers, and generally causing a ruckus. Living alongside the feral dogs reflected Harlan Weaver's notion of 'becoming in kind' (2013, p. 689), offering a chance for both human and nonhuman to negotiate across differences in the 'midst of disturbance' (Tsing 2017, p. 52). Despite the destabilisation of political, economic, and material conditions in the Black City, with informal economies circulating in a space unsupervised and neglected, there seemed to be no need for stable categories nor a reliance on familiar structures of ownership, domestication, or even that of the family unit.

94

Interviewees like Amir opted to use the term ‘yoldaş’ instead. An Azerbaijani word for friend, or comrade, stemming from yol (road) and daş (sharer), it spoke to the similarities between the experiences of the feral dogs and the IDPs. Affected not only by the outbreak of war, the transition between the Soviet system and the independent nation-state, the dissolution of previous modes of social organization, but also messy re-settlement schemes, both subjects experienced a state of uprootedness prior to arriving in the Black City, with the refusal of a stable homeland or home space a central feature. Indeed, in the context of these historical and social forces, marginal humans and nonhumans had to devise different understandings of straightforward concepts like that of the home, family and the natural world. The polluted post-extractive space, where rogue molecules circulated and structures of governance fell apart, served as a perfect fit for an alternative vocabulary of relation and inhabitation. The road-sharer, being one such term, linked the experience of contested sovereignty with that of necessary travel: the Black City was a site of temporary and provisional kinship for populations used to being moved along, it was not a final place of settlement. There were no connotations of proprietal or familial attachments in road- sharing, merely an image of two species walking side-by-side on the fringes of something yet to properly emerge. It echoed the definition of ferality provided by Kelly Montford and Chloe

Taylor as the movement 'to a less tamed or untamed state after (failed) domestication' (2016, p.

9).

Furthermore, the transspecies encounter between IDPs and the stray dogs refuted the violence of 'normative taxonomy' (Yoon 2017, p. 138) all whilst questioning the biopolitical hierarchies present in the capital city. IDPs interviewed in the Black City settlement would often call into question the arbitrariness in the state's conceptualisation of strays as agents of de-civilisation

(Griffiths et al. 2000) or, in local terms, "unsanitary dogs", with value only ascribed to

95 domesticated dogs and those in service of the state. They would instead stress that the canines accepted into the urban fold – like the security dogs guarding the new developments of the White

City – often ended up being more violent and anti-social than the feral dogs. The presence of these dogs would actively prevent relationships by intercepting familiar walking paths, inducing anxiety and fear amongst the IDPs, and making near impossible the informal types of worldmaking which occurred in the post-extractive space. Indeed, the large German Shepherds patrolling the construction sites of Khatai belonged to a lineage of dog breeds incorporated into the state body for the specific purpose of policing and keeping marginal populations at bay. They were often specifically trained to attack squatters, those scavenging the grounds for spare metal or miscellaneous debris, as well as the feral dogs of the Black City.

These strategies of closure, securitisation, and normalisation were triggered by the very fact that

IDPs and stray dogs threatened the cultural and biopolitical order (Yoon 2017) of the post- extractive space. They did not fit into the remediated naturescapes nor the city's emerging urban identity – premised upon strict spatial regulation and zoning laws, the maintenance of formal economies, and participation in institutional and bureaucratic frameworks. One needed to have an identity card, appropriate finances, sufficient documentation, and a permanent address to be considered a Bakuvian, allowing the enjoyment of the city's new greenspaces. Rural migrants

(IDPs) were instead deemed to be, in the words of one Bakuvian interviewee and White City resident67, as “feral as the stray dogs and cats that roam around Baku” and symbolically affiliated with the wastelands and industrial zones. Indeed, when I asked a few Bakuvians to provide me with common descriptors assigned to the chushki (Russian slang for an IDP), all of the answers carried connotations of pollution, uncleanliness, and former industry. The chushki, according to

67 Audio recorded interview with participant named Narmin. Took place on the 17th of July 2019, in the Khatai district of Baku. 96 my interlocutors, had greased up hair "like an oil spill", smelt like a mix of the refinery and heavy cologne, and could be identified by their dirty fingernails from repurposing debris all day. They were inseparable from the extractive context and incompatible with Azerbaijan's post-extractive future. A friend of Amir expressed this quite explicitly, telling me that: "for Bakuvians, us IDPs only have a future in the homeland, till that day comes [when we can return] we are just waiting around, a nuisance to the rest of the city".

An array of different feral trajectories emerged during my fieldwork in Baku, attesting to the capacity of the post-extractive environment to function as a sanctuary for marginal populations and a place where biopolitical orders (of species, race, migrants, and nation) are actively reconfigured. The IDP community and the stray dogs both represented a potential fracture in relationships of domination and control, acting as liminal subjects 'apart from the society in which they nonetheless live' (Montford & Taylor 2016, p. 6). However, even the fringe naturescape of the Black City has found itself moving towards a familiar form in recent years, with processes of remediation and deindustrialisation encroaching the industrial zones of the capital and necessitating the removal of any subject or object deemed to be unruly or unwanted. Via the convenient cover of greening, the government (in partnership with the corporate world) has reinstated many of the technologies of management and authority found elsewhere in the city, exposing marginal populations who disobey to violence and re-settlement68. Ultimately, the return of nature has turned into a convenient way to weed out resistance and the flourishing of nonsovereign worlds.

68 It is worth noting that many of the re-settlement projects have been framed via a rhetoric of social responsibility and care, despite transferring communities to less than ideal locations. Gobu Park-1, a major IDP settlement established in the area of Baku’s Qaradağ (Garadagh) district is a striking example of this. The three-year construction was contextualised in the words of President Aliyev as the transformation of a 'wasteland', where 'there was nothing', into a beautiful and sustainable city. However, many of the IDPs subsequently moved to Gobu Park, have complained about a range of issues present in the space; from the dusty air of the Garadagh plains exacerbating a range of respiratory conditions, the heavy presence of agro-industrial chemicals in the district, to the sense of remoteness from familiar and familial networks. 97

Breaking Bread with Uninvited Guests

Yuri suggested the idea of going on a ghost-tour of Baku during a particularly ominous week of dust storms and overcast skies. The entirety of the city was covered in sand blown over from the deserts of . It cast a strange golden hue over the landscape, effacing the white marble and glistening surfaces of the downtown area, all whilst accentuating the oilfields on the periphery of the city. We chose to meet on a Thursday afternoon when the air quality was predicted to be its highest and the wind speed at its lowest. A former petrochemical engineer turned tour guide (and amateur poet), he picked me up in a bulky and much-loved Land Rover with a SOCAR sticker on its bumper. I remember brashly assuming that the day trip would consist mostly of touristy places like the Old City (Icheri Sheher), the natural gas fire of Yanar

Dağ, or the Flame Towers near Highland Park, with its hypnotising LED screens. It would have been in line with the plethora of city tours advertised in the downtown area which sought to portray a carefully curated version of the capital, dotted with ambitious megaprojects (Harris-

Brandts & Gogishvili 2018) and provisional zones of scaffolding and building materials. Indeed, there had been a marked uptake of Baku's transformation as a sellable tourist product – an urban marvel or miracle – which, in many ways, aligned with Aihwa Ong's term 'hyperbuilding' where

'spaces of spectacle animate an anticipatory logic of valorisation...speculations that anticipate economic, aesthetic, and political gains through circulation and interconnection' (2011, p. 209).

Yuri seemed to follow suit by choosing a large apartment complex as our first stop, complete with ornamental stone cladding and a style resembling late-nineteenth century French arrondissments (Blau & Rupnik 2019). I expected him to show me grand avenues and public squares, with the addition of ghosts merely reinforcing a sense of faux historicity amongst the new

98 builds. I prematurely thought of it as an attempt to recall a time when Baku was still considered the 'Paris of the Caspian' (Lewis-Kraus 2016).

Instead, he got out of the car and stood before a darkened patch right where the pavement met the main road. Similar marks could be seen near the base of the apartment building – a blackish impression on the otherwise spotless stone. Noticing my confusion, he explained:

This is where the truth leaks out. All of this used to be a former oil production...processing

zone for the state oil company. There were always spills from the wells and the storage

units...so what you ended up with was soil mixed with everything...benzene, VOCs,

mercury, lead...you name it. The company removed a little bit of topsoil after demolishing

the factory so that they could tick-off having done a remediation phase. Now they've built

this very fancy apartment...most of the apartments are being given to journalists sympathetic

to the state as a bit of a reward for their compliance. But as you can see...the oil manages

to find its way to the surface. This will always be a graveyard for the oil industry.

For Yuri, spectres of the past materialised regularly in Baku, appearing as residues, traces, imprints, and forms which evaded manageability. As our tour went on, Yuri attempted to impart his techniques of noticing and registering what he called "the hidden side" of the city. He made sure that I became aware of the phantomic smell of oil wafting through urban parklands, the exoskeletal outlines of oil wells at the edges of backyards and back fences, as well as the hints of petroleum in the lamb we ate for dinner. We ventured down to the foreshore of the Caspian

Sea, beyond the bustling crowds and stalls on the promenade, so that he could show me the "oily rocks" and the surreal metallic sheen on the surface of the water. He took me to an informal marketplace where scrap metal and other industrial debris, collected from decommissioned

99 factories, were in the process of being alchemised and repurposed, entering shadow circulation.

Finally, we finished up on the fields of Balakhani with black crows circling hollow plots filled with black crude sludge, transforming the landscape into a cemetery of sorts. In the town adjacent, locals spoke of crude oil as an essential part of the living world and a force to be simultaneously respected and feared. Unlike the rhetoric of the state, they did not deny that the oil industry continued to haunt the capital and its peripheral towns in very salient ways, entering their bodies and houses like a "ghost" (kabus). Indeed, whenever somebody coughed heavily, or became sick from "wet lungs" (Ağciyər iltihabı69), it was common to conclude that it was a case of possession by the kabus. The marginal (predominantly IDP) population residing within the industrial districts of Baku understood oil to be matter exceeding both containment and predictability, transgressing the normative relations between humans and non-humans, as well as the

‘overdetermined landscapes of human capitalist gain-making’ (Hoag, Bertoni, Bubandt 2018, p.

89). Sites like Balakhani, the Black City, and parts of Bayil countered the possibility of clear-cut environmental rehabilitation found within corporate and governmental environmental assessments (Medovoi 2014; Papagiannakis, Voudouris & Lioukas 2013) by presenting a space where 'stretches of ancient time and contemporary layerings of time collapsed together' (Gan et al. p. G8). Here, metal cylinders failed to perform their sarcophagus-like duty of burying all traces of the city's rampant extractivism, leaking and bleeding incessantly into the soil. Inevitably rogue hydrocarbons would bind to grass and other greenery, emerging only as a slight aroma when one was to bite into a juicy cut of mutton. Or they would blow into houses with the afternoon wind in the form of black sediment, gathering in-between furniture and the cracks of the floorboards.

All these instances had the capacity to dirty the sanitised account of the state, which had begun

69 Whilst referring to the medical condition of Pneumonia, most interviewees used an array of Azeri words to describe the condition without explicitly naming it. Words included wet (islaq), watery (sulu), and moist/damp (nəmli). 100 to prime the wasteland as a tabular rasa for development and urban gentrification, rather than a

'site of contestation and uncertainty' (Gandy 2006, p. 498).

Locals residing in industrial districts grasped that the crude oil and other pollutants possessed distinctly 'ephemeral, spiritual, magical qualities' (Bubandt 2018), often exceeding forms of scientific categorisation and political manoeuvring. The leftovers of extraction were caught up in an array of emergent relations which couldn't be sufficiently grasped through discourses of relative risk nor environmental harm, and instead required forms of storytelling and speculation.

Locals would tell stories of milk cleaning their blood and refreshing their spirits. Superstitiously, if the winds were blowing from the direction of the Absheron peninsula, they would often hang large bedsheets in the courtyard to prevent unwanted visitors in the form of both humans and the nonhuman – from familial enemies, antagonistic creatures, to particulate matter. Some would even tend to mini-pumpjacks located in their backyards as a gesture of appeasement, enticing the oil out of the ground and preventing the possibility of any build-ups or blockages of "energy"

(enerji) underground. These practices of mediation seem to extend Michael Watts’ concept of the oil complex (2005) – the configuration of social, political, and economic forces which accompany spaces of oil extraction – into spheres of nonsecular experience, with extractive debris evoking forms of mythmaking, affect, and ritual.

I would argue that this also lent itself to the possibility of vengeance and the failure of appropriate mediation. Members of the makeshift settlements in the Black City would often share with me urban legends of taps in the nearby apartment complexes surging with blackened water when turned on, or of hearing new tenants complaining about unexplainable dark markings on the freshly painted walls and ceilings. These stories presented the folly of attempting to manage and curtail industrial land, and the danger of effacing it through aggressive development. For marginal

101 populations, the figure of the kabus also served as a potent strategy against displacement, with some of the IDP interviewees living proximally to the White City mentioning the delays in construction caused by exploding pipelines and random veins of oil spluttering through newly laid concrete. Real estate sales had also been stalled with rumours of high-level radiation discouraging any potential buyers, turning many of the districts into ominous and deserted zones

– off-limits to investors and cursed to the locals. Indeed, walking through the White City during my fieldwork, I would rarely encounter people nor see any visible hints of life. Shops were unoccupied, with their front windows covered in a hazy film of dust and faint markings. Balconies remained empty and without decoration, whilst windows rarely had curtains or any sign of activity behind them. Bins remained empty of waste and car-spots unfilled. It was a ghost-town.

The figure of the ghost in this chapter aims to speak to the capacity of a substance to be both responsible for incredible environmental and bodily damage, yet also generative of complicated feelings of affinity, as well as connectedness. In a shifting world, which aims to move beyond fossil fuel extraction, it becomes necessary to understand crude oil as not only discursively produced, but as discursively productive – forging itself anew through the various ways in which it is attended to and evoked. Any world seeking to absolve itself from the violence of petro- capitalism, has to reckon with the fact that extraction is an open-ended practice. Ghosts allow the aftermaths of extraction to be confronted instead of leaning prematurely towards the blank slate of the post- (post-extractive, post-capitalist, or even post-human)70. It also embraces an ethic of wandering which acknowledges attachment without requiring aggressive ownership or inhabitation. In their transparency and lightness, they are beings unsupervised and free.

70 Many of the proposed eco-projects in Baku are set to be built on land which bore witness to harrowing acts of state violence. This includes the 6 billion USD 'carbon neutral' luxury resort slated to be built on Zira Island (known locally as Nargin Island) – the former site of a notorious Stalin-era prison camp where numerous people perished and/or faced brutal torture. According to Yuri, it would have become the "most haunted eco-lodge in the world". 102

Conclusion

Uprooting

After leaving Azerbaijan in November 2019, my Whatsapp correspondence with Amir's daughter, Aytekin, began to resemble a detailed tapestry of pixels. With language retaining its broken and imprecise form on my part, we chose to predominantly speak through images. I would find myself waking up to a picture of the Caspian Sea at dusk, all oil spill and pinkish haze, or, perhaps, a video of a stray dog running toward its pack with a stolen piece of fried fish. Each notification received was akin to the crevices and cracks I would spot on the highway walls during my fieldwork, allowing me to observe vignettes of life amidst the refineries, oilfields, and factory spaces of the Black City. These were landscapes which required diplomacy and a sense of ingenuity to overcome their otherwise inhospitable nature. As the months passed by, however, I began to be privy to another stream of content. With the intensification of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict over the span of 2020, I found myself scrolling through endless images of tanks and artillery, civilian drone footage depicting alleged territorial trespass, as well as patriotic messages glorifying Azerbaijan and deriding the enemy as a barbarian nation.

Amidst the fervour of the war (and an intensifying pandemic), the ambivalence of the margins offers welcome relief. However, the future of the Black City is to be determined not by the vitality it inspires amongst IDPs and stray creatures, but by city plans and national ambitions. Whilst clusters of camelthorn and stray packs still manage to ward off eviction notices to this very day, most families in the makeshift settlement have begun hearing of potential re-settlement by word of mouth, whilst others have received concrete offers to return to their 'homeland'. It is tricky, however, with most residents not only settling into, but feeling comfortable in, a form provisional 103 and uprooted. They have found pleasure mediating between the past and future, the industrial and the natural, the homely and the strange.

104

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