1 Introduction

Notes 1 Introduction 1. Well into that century, the absolute majority of Tbilisi’s population was ethnic Armenian: mostly traders and artisans brought there by subsequent Georgian kings aiming to complement their largely agrarian co-ethnics with an urban population (Suny, 1994: 86–95, 116–117). The co-habitation of Armenians and Azeris (then called ‘Caucasian Tatars’) in Baku, Shushi, Yerevan and throughout the territories that now make up Armenia and Azerbaijan – where both groups were substan- tially intermingled – was relatively peaceful until 1905 (Altstadt, 1992: 28–33; Bournoutian, 1996). 2. Most of the literature approaches the Southern Caucasus from issue- or actor- specific angles, often in combination with the Northern Caucasus, Central Asia, the Black Sea or the ‘Caspian Basin’, social-scientific monographs and edited volumes have concentrated on secessionism/nationalism and state weak- ness (Chervonnaia, 1994; Closson, 2007; Coppieters, 1996b; D. Lynch, 2004; Matveeva, 2002), bilateral inter-unit relations (Croissant, 1998), the regional role of single great powers (particularly Russia) (Baev, 1997; R. Menon, Fedorov, & Nodia, 1999) or have limited their view to single issue-areas: geopolitics/military- strategic matters (Gadzhiev, 2001; Matveeva & Hiscock, 2003), or the one issue that elicits real interest in Western policy circles – energy security (Ebel & Menon, 2000; Karagiannis, 2002; Van der Leeuw, 1999). Very few have tried to take a compre- hensive and theoretically systematic view of security in the Southern Caucasus as the regional interplay of multiple phenomena emanating from both material and ideational factors (e.g. Cheterian, 2008). 3. In fact, RSCs are described as ‘process formations’ within the Waltzian interna- tional system (p. 209). 4. De-securitisation is, in effect, the reverse of ‘securitisation’: a referent object is deemed to be no longer under existential threat, and any extra-ordinary measures taken to safeguard it are rolled back. Its urgency diminished, the issue (re-)enters the political realm and becomes an object of everyday, routine politics. 5. One such notable expansion is Frazier and Stewart-Ingersoll’s (2010a, 2010b, 2012) Regional Powers and Security Framework (RPSF). Aimed at conceptualising the varying roles of regional powers in the provision of regional order, it includes regional structure (polarity), regional power roles (leadership, custodianship or protection) and regional power orientation (status quo or revisionist/unilateral or multilateral/proactive or reactive) among its explanatory variables. The authors subsequently devise a typology of ‘regional order’ (hegemony-, strength-, concert-, integration-based and unordered) and discuss the role of regional powers in shaping global security, using case studies in Central Eurasia, South America and South Asia. As such, RPSF’s focus is quite different from this volume’s: ‘regional powers and order’ rather than the more indeterminate ‘interaction between state incoherence/amity-enmity/great power penetration’. Its quite alternative framework is an indication of the versatility and as yet largely untapped potential of RSCT. 179 180 Notes 6. Regional sources were confined to documents and reports in Russian, Armenian and English, in order of preference. This might raise some issues regarding the potential distortive effects of not relying on the language of origin in, for instance, Georgia and Azerbaijan, with the ever-present risk of the discourse being ‘adapted’ to the particular target audience at hand. Whether your readers or listeners are co-nationals or Western outsiders will matter, if only because both governments and oppositionists will skew their rhetoric to the specific requirements of pro- paganda and PR. Two elements are of importance here, however, in minimising such distortions. Firstly, this effect is less pronounced in the case of the Russian (as opposed to the English language) versions of particular articles; in fact, quite often, material that might seem offensive to Western ears was simply not trans- lated into English, while it was into Russian (still the lingua franca of much of the region’s elite in the time period under consideration). Secondly, any such distortions should have been minimised by the multi-faceted and cross-cutting nature of my (multiply triangulated) analysis, with its combination of primary and secondary sources, supplemented by interviews and ethnographic, immersive research and drawn from a wide variety of outlets in a range of different languages. 7. In one particularly memorable instance, I was refused an interview by a prominent pro-government intellectual in Nagorno-Karabakh after revealing my country of citizenship (Belgian) and the topic of conversation (regional security), with the friendly advice that only the local foreign ministry would have the authority to comment on such sensitive matters. 2 Amity and Enmity in Its Regional Context 1. Those of a more post-structuralist inclination will no doubt be uncomfortable with my insertion of ‘securitisation’ – a heavily discursive, process-oriented concept – into the hybrid, material/ideational world of RSCT. Buzan and Wæver have, however, on several occasions pointed out the basic compatibility between RSCT – and, by implication, its ‘securitisation’ component – and a ‘Wendtian’, soft-constructivist meta-theoretical framework, with both material and ideational elements, combining the theoretical pedigree of both neo-realism and constructivism. For a more detailed discussion of the compatibility of RSCT and Wendtian constructivism, see Oskanian (2010: 39–44). 2. Note that this does not imply the chronological precedence of the argumentative identification of values as referent objects. As Huysmans (1998: 494) and Wilkinson (2007: 11) have argued, values and identities are often constituted dur- ing the securitising act/move proper. Nevertheless, from a logical perspective, a successful securitisation can, as a rule, not take place without the referent object being identified as the premise, the starting point of the speech act calling for ‘extraordinary measures’. One takes measures in order to safeguard an object of value; an object does not become of value only because one has taken certain measures to preserve it. 3. To some extent, this notion of the ‘argumentative’ and ‘instrumental’ ties in with Wæver’s (2002) three-layered view of ‘sedimentation’ in discourse. In the deep first layer, one finds relatively immutable and constant discourses on identity. The slightly more variable middle layer concerns itself with the formulation of interests based on the identities formulated in the first. The relatively changeable top layer deals with the formulation of policy. The immutable, bottom ‘identities’ layer clearly correlates with the argumentative aspects of security discourse Notes 181 discussed here, while the top, policy-layer corresponds to its instrumental facets, with the middle layer of interests representing an intermediate category between these two poles. 4. It must be stressed that these two types of discourse are ideal-types, seldom, if ever, occurring in pure form. In a way, they could be seen as an interlocked continuum, with argumentative discourses largely ideational and value-based, and the instrumental extreme plugged into material reality to a greater degree. Those of a post-structuralist slant may consequently argue that it is impossible to disentangle the instrumental and argumentative, that identities and values stand in an inseparable, mutually constitutive relationship with techno-scientific, ‘Zwecksrationalität’/logic-of-consequences knowledge (March & Olsen, 1989). Just as argumentative discourses shaping state identity cannot contain the purely ideational, instrumental discourses cannot be devoid of elements of state identity and its specific value-set. 5. ‘Patterns’ or ‘networks’ of securitisation will henceforth refer to these major inter- linked processes of securitisation and/or de-securitisation (both institutionalised and ad hoc) that, constituting the theory’s amity/enmity variable, form part of the very definition of a Regional Security Complex (Buzan & Wæver, 2003: 44; Buzan et al., 1998: 28–31). 6. ‘Armed conflict’, in this sense, will be defined as any unresolved military con- frontation involving at least one state-like unit, having caused 1000 or more battle-related combatant or civilian deaths, loosely following the criteria spec- ified for ‘war’ in the PRIO and Uppsala University DPCR datasets (Strand, Wilhelmsen, & Gledits, 2003: 3–4). 7. The Middle Eastern RSC is, perhaps, the prime example: the Jewish State and the Palestinians have dramatically overlapping notions of ethno-territorial identity, Israel’s very right to exist is not recognised by most Arab states – albeit to different degrees – and war is very much seen as a legitimate policy tool and ever-present possibility by most units in the RSC (Halliday, 2005; Newman, 2006; Wallach, 2011; Yiftachel, 2006). Intense securitisations lie at the heart of an intense security dilemma driving a multi-polar regional arms race with a nuclear element: between the Jewish State, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and others. Similarly, South Asia (India/Pakistan) and East Asia (China/Taiwan, North/South Korea) are revisionist conflict formations, with enmities and securitisations based either on overlapping territorial claims, or the wholesale denial of entities’ right to exist as sovereign, independent states (Heo & Horowitz, 2003;

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