Svante E. Cornell

Svante E. Cornell’s two works – “Small Nations and Great Powers – A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflicts in the Caucasus”[1] and “Autonomy as a Source of Conflict – Caucasian Conflicts in Theoretical Perspective”[2] could be taken as significant investigations, analyzing the role of politization of ethnicity in the post-Soviet Caucasian conflicts through comparative perspective, closely looking at the role of agencies – both regional and international – playing crucial role at the period of formation and escalation of conflict, later contributing to the persistence of the gained status quo. Evaluating the post-Soviet regional ethnic upheavals in the light of the Soviet time regional policy, the idea that distribution of power between majorities and minorities, artificially constructed territorial-administrative borders and borderlands (in the North Caucasus in particular) found to be the subject of manipulation in the post-Soviet period, transformed as a bone of contention between various ethnic groups as a result of the Soviet time policies, implemented in the filed of education, administration, governmental organization, etc, is strongly stressed.
Cornell closely looks at autonomy, to be precise, the Soviet time autonomous statuses, separating it as one of the major sources of the post-Soviet conflicts, providing minority ethnic groups with certain power through local administrative institutions, contributing to exercise independent policy, in most cases directed against central governments, thus successfully pushing them towards conflicting behavior.
Territorial autonomy was the major institution escalating situation between center and peripheries in the post-Soviet Caucasus. This is particularly true in respect with Georgia and Azerbaijan. After the dissolution of the USSR, in the newly independent states of the South Caucasus, ethnic problems arose in those regions and ethnic sentiment was exacerbated among those minorities, which were provided with territorial autonomous status in the framework of the Soviet Union. Minority elites, driven by rational calculations and desire for retaining their positions, with the significant external encouragement, found autonomy as a toll and the main institution, providing plenty of political and economic resources, serving as the basis for shaping and expressing their aspirations.[3]
Through manipulation of the various aspects of territorial autonomy, i.e. when, how, under what circumstances it was created, as well as through hypothetical bargaining over the future type of relations with the political entity it formed part and with the former center – Moscow, territorial autonomy served as a fruitful basis to form and ground the new type of internal and external loyalties and allegiances, quite often, directly or indirectly, uniting the former center and the former second order unit against the newly independent state. In the framework of our research, the abovementioned idea could be formulated as follows: Tskinvali + Moscow vs. Tbilisi.
[1]Svante E. Cornell. Small Nations and Great Powers – A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus. (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001).
[2]Svante E. Cornell. “Autonomy as a Source of Conflict – Caucasian Conflicts in Theoretical Perspective” World Politics, Vol. 54: 2. (The Johns Hopkins University: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 24.
[3]Svante E. Cornell. Small Nations and Great Powers – A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus. (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001).