1st Edition

Ethnic Minorities in the South Caucasus Everyday Ethnopolitics

By Vincenc Kopeček Copyright 2027
336 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This monograph offers the first comprehensive comparative analysis of ethnic minorities across the South Caucasus, examining how their contemporary situations are shaped by nationalism, imperial legacies, informal politics, religion, language, and migration. The book develops the concept of “everyday ethnopolitics” to analyze how ethnicity is enacted, muted, and negotiated in daily struggles... Read more

Introduction  Part 1: Ethnicity and ethnic minorities 1. Ethnicity, ethnic groups, and ethnic categories  2. Ethnic minority, ethnic community, and everyday ethnopolitics  Part 2: Setting up the stage: from ethnies to nations to nation-states  3. From ethnies to modern nations in the South Caucasus  4. Ethnicity in the Soviet Union  5. Ethnicity and ethnic mobilization in the post-Soviet South Caucasus  6. Minority policy and integration of ethnic minorities in nationalizing states of the South Caucasus  7. Ethnic policy and ethnic minorities in de facto states: the case of Abkhazia  Part 3: Ethnic minorities in the South Caucasus  8. Our people behind the border: the Ingiloys  9. The “guests” who seceded: Abkhazians and Ossetians in Georgia  10. How many heirs to Caucasian Albania?  11. Nakh peoples in Georgia: Kists and Tsova-Tush  12. Tat speakers: unravelling the myth  13. Talyshis: oppression, assimilation, or successful integration?  14. Meskhetian Turks: longing for home 15. Caucasus Jews: the lost tribe of Israel  16. Caucasus Greeks: progeny of the Roman millet  17. Assyrians in the South Caucasus  18. Kurds and Yezidis in the South Caucasus  19. Caucasus Gypsies or Roma? The complexity of identities  20. Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians: from colonists to refugees  21. Babel in the Caucasus: Germans, Estonians, Poles, and Czechs  Part 4: Ethnic communities and everyday ethnopolitics: case studies  22. Javakheti Armenians  23. Borchalo Azerbaijanis  24. Pankisi Kists  Conclusion

Biography

Vincenc Kopeček is an Associate Professor of political geography at the Department of Human Geography and Regional Development, Faculty of Science, University of Ostrava, Czechia. He is also the head of the Centre for Political and Cultural Geography established within the Department.