After a wave of ethno-nationalist violence in Armenia and Azerbaijan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the only rural communities, mainly made up of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, to remain in the South Caucasus and perhaps throughout the world are a few villages in the municipality of Marneuli, Georgia. This dissertation is an academic attempt to provide a detailed ethnographic interpretation of the narratives and practices related to the coexistence of these rural communities.
It focuses primarily on the villages of Tsopi and Khojorni in the Georgian-Armenian border region and asks how and why group members of different rural communities live together with differences when, in the prevailing ethno-nationalist representations, group differences are presented as incompatible and opposing.
The dissertation aims to answer these questions by utilising concrete examples of communal coexistence and developing new concepts. The development of concepts has been accelerated by ethnographic experiences and observations collected during three research visits, over a total period of six months between 2016 and 2018. The study is located at the intersection of peace research and social anthropology, where different groups living together are studied. The dissertation deals with groups whose identity has been built in a nationalist antagonistic framework in a situation where the groups have direct or indirect experiences of continuous or recent intergroup violence.
The doctoral dissertation of Vadim Romashov in the field of Peace and Conflict Research titled Living Together with Difference: Narratives and Practices of Co-existence in Armenian-Azerbaijani Rural Communities in Georgia will be publicly examined in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University at 12 o’clock on Saturday 13 August 2022, in the Main Building, Auditorium D11 (address: Kalevantie 4, Tampere).
The dissertation is available online at https://trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024/141110
The public defence can be also followed via remote connection.
A press release with more information about the dissertation will follow soon.