Ethnicity, regional (dis)integration and “borderscapes” in post-soviet South Caucasus

An area of transition between East and West and a landbridge between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, today the South Caucasus (SC) is divided, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, into three independent States: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The ethnic mosaic of the SC is most intricate: ethnolinguistic groups belonging to the Caucasian, Indo-European and Altaic families inhabit the region following a territorial distribution that rarely matches borders, while Christianity, particularly Orthodoxy and Gregorianism, and Islam, predominantly Shiite, coexist in a condition of latent conflict. The SC is considered a strategic area and a geoeconomic crossroads for the trade of goods and hydrocarbons on the East-West route, as well as a geopolitical “fault” and a region “at risk” (Giragosian 2010) because of the instability linked to the ethnic conflicts that broke out after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to self-proclaimed Republics backed by Moscow and to the emergence of strategic-military barriers along instable cease-fire lines. The situation of the borders, drastically modified in 1991 by the dissolution of the USSR, has since undergone further, dramatic distortions after the ethnic conflicts that involved the three SC States, deeply transforming their territorial composition and demographic structure, hindering their normal functioning and transition to the rule of law and conditioning their sovereignty, today greatly limited both by breakaway entities and the Russian presence, which exerts a military, economic and cultural influence on the region that is very difficult to escape. The old barriers dictated by the Cold War have been replaced by others, less stable and predictable, and, in a way, even more impenetrable. Thus, the aim of the paper is to take stock of the region’s shifting and unstable borderscapes, in view of the ongoing geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics.