Abstract
Amidst the disintegration of the USSR, the spatial representation of ethnic groups and their language in public spaces emerged as defining expressions of statehood and belonging to a particular cultural sphere. This led to tensions along ethnic lines in many parts of the former Soviet Union (cf. Hirsch, 2005; King, 2010; Snyder, 2003), highlighting anomalies of early Soviet nation-building and the rise of nationalist movements. The decline and eventual breakup of the Soviet Union resulted in the formation of 15 new nation states and a number of de facto sovereign political entities with varying degrees of national cohesion, political stability and international recognition. Together with eroding central power structures, economic stagnation and political mobilization along the lines of ethnicity, religion and language, territorial conflicts on the fringes of the USSR surfaced, challenging early Soviet policies of nationalization and indigenization (cf. Hirsch, 2005). During this decade of political and ideological uncertainties that began with the rise of Soviet first secretary Gorbachev and reached culmination in the early 1990s, territories such as Chechnya, Ingushetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia became battle grounds of ideological, religious and ethnic contestation (Barbashin, 2008; Coene, 2010; King, 2008). Especially, the conflict over the Autonomous Oblast of Nagorno-Karabakh, located within Azerbaijan but with an ethnic Armenian majority population, became an epitome for interethnic violence in the final days of the Soviet Union. The conflict lasted from 1988 until 1994 and resulted in the death of 30,000, an Armenian victory and the expulsion of the ethnic Azerbaijani minority. Today, Nagorno-Karabakh is an internationally not recognized political entity, backed by neighboring Armenia and the Armenian diaspora in the former Soviet Union, the Americas, the Middle East and Europe.
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Muth, S. (2015). Language Removal, Commodification and the Negotiation of Cultural Identity in Nagorno-Karabakh. In: Rubdy, R., Said, S.B. (eds) Conflict, Exclusion and Dissent in the Linguistic Landscape. Language and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426284_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426284_4
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