SUMMARY:

Sevil Huseinova and Sergey Rumiantsev suggest new ways to approach the political/nationalist conflicts that accompanied the dissolution of the USSR. In their research, they seek ways to overcome mythologizing, historicizing (rooting into the past), and essentializing narratives of the so-called ethnic conflicts, by changing the scale of their analysis from the macro level to a microanalysis. If the first approach presents political conflicts as a clash of homogeneous and coherent groups, the second approach is inspired by Rogers Brubaker’s criticism of the “realism of the group.” It privileges decentralized, nonstate and local mechanisms of everyday intra-ethnic cooperation along the lines conceptualized by James Fearon and David Laitin. This methodological approach is applied to the case study of a peaceful collective population exchange between two villages during the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. The long-term research included participant observation and the collection of biographical interviews. As a result, the authors deconstruct the broad net of local interethnic cooperation that is usually invisible in a macro-level analysis. They trace the escalation of the conflict and its perception on a local level, the emergence of the idea of the population exchange and stages of its implementation, the changes in individual and collective understandings of belonging (to a territory, a region, a state, a nation), the transfer of collective traditional practices and rituals, and so on. Huseinova and Rumiantsev conclude that the Karabakh conflict, as many other similar cases that resulted from the dissolution of the USSR, should be analyzed as new and modern conflicts and contextualized at a micro level. Overall, their research undermines the validity of approaching the post-Soviet ethnic conflicts as having “resumed,” as incidents of historical and lasting struggles and disagreements.