CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 93

NAREK SUKIASYAN
mobilization along ethnic lines. 15 Furthermore, “ethnofederal arrangements
institutionalize competing national projects, increasing chances that
secessionist conflict will develop” 16 , reducing the costs of secessionism and
augmenting it. 17 This school of thought also argues that institutions
consolidate autonomy. 18 Pessimistic views of institutional autonomous
solutions are particularly shared among the case studies from the Eastern
Bloc societies. 19 A special issue of Regional and Federal Studies summarizes
that federalism in itself is neither panacea, nor a path to conflict. 20
In our approach, we are inclined to a “third way”. We agree with
Hechter’s approach of studying each case in its own right, since we believe
that in federal institutional arrangements, context matters and they usually
vary in form and essence and across determining factors. We believe that for
proper evaluation of territorial autonomy as a strategy of managing multi-
ethnic societies, considerations of institutional design only fall short of
yielding substantial explanatory value. Those that argue for federal
autonomy as an arrangement leading towards secession and violence,
especially those who rely on big data, usually favour their design at the
expense of the actual content of those arrangements. Considering the above,
we will examine the on-the-ground manifestations of the autonomous design
of the NKAO in order to evaluate its efficiency (or the lack of it) for the
management of ethnic relations.
The early years of Soviet Karabakh were marked by corrupt
management of the region accompanied by oppression and violence. In the
1920’s, these acts triggered the migration of some Armenians from
Karabakh to Iran 21 . Many Armenian communists of Karabakh, who had been
supporting the reattachment of Karabakh to Armenia, were imprisoned. The
discontent of the Armenian population with the situation was expressed by
“Karabakh to Armenia” movement, which included members from the entire
spectrum of traditional Armenian parties, as well as Bolsheviks, Mensheviks
and Social Revolutionaries. In 1927, the movement realised a campaign of
15
I. S. Lustick, D. Miodownik and R.J. Eidelson, “Secessionism in Multicultural States: Does
Sharing
Power Prevent or Encourage It?” American Political Science Review, Vol.98, No.2, (2004):
209–229.
16
Erk and Anderson, “The Paradox of Federalism”, 199.
17
Lawrence Anderson, “The Institutional Basis of Secessionist Politics: Federalism and
Secession in the United States.” Publius 34, no. 2 (2004): 8,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331204.
18
Elena Pokalova, “Conflict Resolution in Frozen Conflicts: Timing in Nagorno-Karabakh”,
Journal
of
Balkan
and
Near
Eastern
Studies,
17:1,
(2015):
68-85,
DOI:10.1080/19448953.2014.986378.
19
Erk and Anderson, “The Paradox of Federalism: Does Self-Rule Accommodate or
Exacerbate Ethnic Divisions?”, 195.
20
Ibid, 199.
21
Libaridian ed., “An eyewitness account of events in 1920’s by a refugee from Mountainous
Karabakh to Iran”, 40.
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