Bordering Practices and Border Crossings in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Caucasus

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were crucial periods in structuring the political and social map of the South Caucasus. Political borders increasingly penetrated the everyday lives of people across the region, who were forced to adapt to modernization processes that aimed to replace social and economic ambiguities with fixed clarities. The proliferation of new borderlines affected traditional cross-border movements of peoples and ideas between the late Russian and Ottoman empires, as well as the movements of herdsmen between Armenia and Azerbaijan under Soviet rule. This panel examines the various ways in which inhabitants of the South Caucasus navigated the imposition of borders by state officials who sought to reorder and exert greater control over ethnically and culturally heterogeneous spaces.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Stephen Badalyan Riegg, Texas A&M U

Papers

• Take Me to Karbala: Body, Piety, and the Imperial Thanatopolitics in the Shiʿa Community in the South Caucasus - Sergey Salushchev, UC Santa Barbara

• A Phantom Pan-Islamist: The Russian-Ottoman Border and the Curious Case of Ahmed Kadıoğlu, 1912-1913 - Harrison King, UC Berkeley

• The Spatial and Temporal Development of the Borderlands between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Early Twentieth Century to the 1930s - Arpine Maniero, Collegium Carolinum (Germany)

• The 'Pasture Issue' between Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan - Stephan Rindlisbacher, European U Viadrina (Germany)

Discussant

• Paul William Werth, U of Nevada, Las Vegas