THE UNRECOGNISED POLITICS OF DE FACTO STATES IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE Yerevan 2015 UDC 32.001:94 THE UNRECOGNISED POLITICS OF DE FACTO STATES IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE. – Laurence Broers, Alexander Iskandaryan and Sergey Minasyan (Eds.) – Yerevan: Caucasus Institute and International Association for the Study of the Caucasus. 2015. - 240 p. This volume originated at a conference held in Sevan, Armenia, on 4-5 September 2014, entitled “De Facto States in the Post-Soviet Space”, organized by the Caucasus Institute and the Academic Swiss Caucasus Net. The Sevan conference was the first academic event engaging an English-speaking audience in the Caucasus to be dedicated to the various theoretical and practical aspects of de facto states’ development in the post-Soviet space. This collection of articles has also been published as a special issue (Vol.3, No.3, 2015) of Caucasus Survey, a journal of the International Association for the Study of the Caucasus published by Taylor & Francis. Edited by Laurence Broers, Alexander Iskandaryan and Sergey Minasyan Copy editing by Laurence Broers and Nina Iskandaryan Cover design by Matit www.matit.am Layout by Collage www.collage.am ISBN 978-9939-1-0260-3 © Caucasus Institute (CI) © International Association for the Study of the Caucasus (IASC), reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of IASC. This volume was produced and published with the support of the Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN). Papers included in this volume reflect the personal opinions of the authors and not those of the publishers, sponsors or any other organisations including ones with which the authors are or were affiliated. TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................. Introduction: the unrecognised politics of de facto states in the post- Soviet space. Laurence Broers, Alexander Iskandaryan and Sergey Minasyan ................. 5 In quest of the state in unrecognised states. Alexander Iskandaryan ...... 17 De facto statehood in Eurasia: a political and security phenomenon. Sergey Markedonov .............................................................................. 35 Western academic discourse on the post-Soviet de facto state phenomenon. Galina M. Yemelianova ................................................... 54 Elections without recognition: presidential and parliamentary contests in Abkhazia and Nagorny Karabakh. Donnacha Ó Beacháin ....................... 86 Gender and political representation in the de facto states of the Caucasus: women and parliamentary elections in Abkhazia. Karolina Ó Beacháin Stefańczak and Eileen Connolly ............................................................ 117 Resourcing de facto jurisdictions: a theoretical perspective on cases in the South Caucasus. Laurence Broers ........................................................ 135 The political economy of a de facto state: the importance of local stakeholders in the case of Abkhazia. Giulia Prelz Oltramonti .............. 169 The engagement policies of the European Union, Georgia and Russia towards Abkhazia. Nino Kereselidze .................................................... 196 Post-Soviet de facto states and European integration: the case of Transnistria. Iulia Kirnitki ..................................................................... 219 Notes on contributors ......................................................................... 229 Abstracts ............................................................................................ 231 CI publications .................................................................................... 237 INTRODUCTION: THE UNRECOGNISED POLITICS OF DE FACTO STATES IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE .................................................................................................................. By Laurence Broers, Alexander Iskandaryan and Sergey Minasyan THE LIMITS OF ‘LOCAL’ In a world in which we are increasingly told to ‘go local’, there are still limits. As the othering binaries of imperial, ideological and developmental geographies have ceded ground to a hegemonic vision of a global community of equal states, new binaries have emerged. These contrast the state as the sole legitimate arbiter of sovereignty and primary actor in international relations with a host of challenges from above and below. Although generally invisible at the global level of politics, certainly compared to transnational threats, there are nonetheless perhaps few challenges as unsettling to contemporary states as that posed by unrecognised states. Revealing what Harvey and Stansfield (2011, 11) call the “organised hypocrisy” of the sovereign state system, un- recognised states expose the artifice of statehood, as they demonstrate the con- tingencies, occlusions and more often than not, coercions, on which many, if not most, of today’s recognised states were also built. The legitimacy of locality is therefore relative and can be withheld, as the alternate lexicon of ‘non-place’ – of margins, interstices, shadows, limbos, badlands and black holes – frequently applied to unrecognised states bears witness. ‘Going local’ in these spaces implies an unsavoury tinge of collusion with some of the least welcomed actors on the contemporary international stage. The anathematization of territorial contestation is of course not new. In an earlier era, this was expressed as “Balkanization”. As Maria Todorova observed, “By the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe had added to its repertoire of Schimpfwörter, or disparagements, a new one that, although recently coined, turned out to be more persistent than others with centuries-old tradition. “Balkanization” not only had come to denote the parcelization of 6/Laurence Broers, Alexander Iskandaryan and Sergey Minasyan large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian” (Todorova 1997, 3). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, contested territoriality in the post-Soviet space has not shaken off these stereotypes. Furthermore, de facto states in this region are implicated in the eyes of many observers in revanchist desires for another kind of reversion: to a pre-sovereign, neo-colonial politics controlled by a former and distant metropole. Yet as Harvey and Stansfield (2011, 18) observe, bottom-up splinter group secessionism – separatism – may not necessarily be the starting point of contested territoriality. They point instead to top-down dissolutions in four successive waves of “geopolitical failure” leading to territorial revisio- nism: decolonisation in Latin America in the nineteenth century, Europe following the First World War, de-colonization in the 1950s-1960s and the dissolution of socialist federalisms in the 1990s. To these a fifth wave, the implosion of Middle Eastern states in the new millennium, can be added, providing a further striking reminder of the precariousness of geopolitical orders. Furthermore, developments in the Middle East have led to the emer- gence of a new type of de facto statehood. As Mylonas and Ahram observe, what previous de facto states and entities (which they call “bounded”) strive to achieve is “just” international recognition and the acceptance of their territorial claim, whereas new de facto states such as ISIS (which they call “unbounded” de facto states) appear to disrupt the international system, seeking to undo the very foundations of sovereignty (Mylonas and Ahram 2015, 1). Yet if earlier waves of territorial revisions were ultimately accepted and le- gitimated in the post-Second World War era, the dissolution 40 years later of federalised socialist states lingers on in the form of contested territorialities in three of the Soviet Union’s successor states, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldo- va. Secessionist challenges claiming sovereignty and statehood have survived in Abkhazia, Nagorny Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria for more than 20 years, despite isolation, exclusion, endemic weakness and chronic securitization. A fifth, Chechnya, was reabsorbed by Russia at devastating cost after two wars.1 Since 2014 an apparent reprise of these 1990s outcomes in eastern Ukraine, thereby expanding and embedding contested territorial- ity across the wider post-Soviet space, has revivified interest in unrecognised statehood in the post-Soviet space. Introduction: the unrecognised politics of de facto states in the post-Soviet space/7 Understandings of events and processes within de facto states remain deep- ly encrypted within predominant geopolitical discourses on the wider course of developments in Eurasia. As John O’Loughlin, Vladimir Kolossov and Gerard Toal observe, a pervasive tendency to homogenise de facto states is evident across tabloid, analytical and political audiences (O’Loughlin, Ko- lossov and Toal 2015, 3). Metropolitan narratives, whether emanating from Baku, Chisinau, Tbilisi, Kiev, or Moscow, conflate highly variable situations on the ground (Cooley 2015, Ker-Lindsay 2014); narratives emanating from de facto capitals also engage in a discursive project in homogenization, mirroring back to world opinion symbolically resonant frames justifying their presumed quest for recognition (Broers 2014). Outsider stances on de facto states are more often than not read as metonymic cues “revealing” positions on a whole host of issues, many of them unrelated to actual realities in de facto states. Hence beyond non-recognition,