Suspending the antagonism: situated agonistic peace in a border bazaar

Abstract

This article aims to understand how local communities affected by protracted conflicts could maintain a capacity for agonistic interactions in their everyday encounters on the margins of the hegemonic control of conflict-inducing narratives. The article analyses the Sadakhlo bazaar on the border between Georgia and Armenia as a possible example of such interactions. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was the setting for daily encounters of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, whose ethnonational identity narratives have been polarised and heavily securitised due to the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict. The authors suggest that the bazaar in this case appeared as a concrete space of embodied practices of thin recognition of the otherwise antagonised other where the antagonism was not contested but suspended. The article conceptualises the bazaar as a local site of situated agonistic peace by undertaking a critical assessment of theoretical calls concerning the ‘ontological security dilemma’ and ‘transformative power’ of mundane experiences.

Keywords:

• Agonistic peace
• antagonism
• Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict
• everyday
• ontological security
• Sadakhlo bazaar

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Laura Blanco Rengifo, Dovile Budryte, Catia Confortini, Élise Féron, Angel Iglesias Ortiz, Tarja Väyrynen, the guest editors of the special issue and the two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Expert interviews conducted by Marko Lehti and Vadim Romashov, Armenia (May 2018) and Georgia (October–November 2018) under the project ‘Cross-Regional Corridors of Dialogue: Developing a Complementing Track for Transforming Protracted Conflicts’ (OSCE Network of Think Tanks and Academic Institutions).

2 Vadim Romashov’s communication with local residents during ethnographic fieldwork conducted for his doctoral research on practices of co-existence in Armenian–Azerbaijani rural communities, Marneuli municipality, Georgia, 2016–2018.

3 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marko Lehti

Marko Lehti is Senior Research Fellow and the Deputy Director of Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI) and Academic Director of the master’s programme in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research (PEACE) at Tampere University. His research in the field of peace and conflict studies particularly focuses on peace mediation and dialogues, crises of liberal peace, transformation of identities and the idea of Nordic peace. His latest books are Contestations of Liberal Order: The West in Crisis? (co-edited with Henna-Riikka Pennanen and Jukka Jouhki; Palgrave 2020) and The Era of Private Peacemakers: A New Dialogic Approach to Mediation (Palgrave 2019).

Vadim Romashov

Vadim Romashov is Doctoral Researcher in peace and conflict studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University. For his doctoral dissertation, he has carried out ethnographic research on narrative-enabled practices of co-existence in Armenian–Azerbaijani rural communities in Georgia. He also works on alternative peace processes for the conflict-affected Armenian–Azerbaijani relationships.