Labelling Identities and Strategic Readjustment in the Unrecognised States of the South Caucasus

The dominant emphasis on the role of international actors and mechanisms responsible with conflict resolution and peacebuilding has deprived the South Caucasus' internal actors of agency, in other words, of their ability to make their own choices and instrumentalise democracy and dependency for their own goals in relation with their patron states and the international community. The unrecognised states of the region have been largely labelled as criminalised, conflict-prone, being externally assigned the identity of pariah entities, highly dependent on the financial and military support of their patron states. However, both external and internal forces are important in understanding the dynamics in the secessionist regions of the South Caucasus. These entities, labelled as 'weak', 'dependent' or 'failed' are not mere puppets dependent on their external patrons but are actors exercising their own agency, albeit limited, adjusting strategically to the fluid interplay between democracy and dependency in seeking recognition and at the same time safeguarding the status quo. This is not to claim that the unrecognised states of the South Caucasus are completely independent in making their own political choices or to disregard their various degrees of economic, security and political dependence on their patron states; it is to highlight the fact that they are not solely passive recipients and followers at all times, but that they manifest genuine political preferences as reflected in the electoral choices; that they define and re-define their political identities contextually. With their efforts to prove their compliance with Western norms and standards of democracy, in the mid-2000s Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh reached their highest peak in terms of political pluralism, institution-building and democratic progress (Hoch, 2011; Broers, 2014). Although the democratisation efforts have been impeded by their own internal limitations, as well as by the pariah identity attributed to them by the international community (Caspersen, 2008; Berg and Mölder, 2012; Relitz, 2016), the lack of international recognition does not seem to have impacted on their level of democratic development, as the unrecognised states do not appear to score less on democracy than the parent states, their patrons or other recognised states in the post-Soviet space (Caspersen, 2011; Blakkisrud and Kolstø, 2012; Kanol, 2015; Gerrits and Bader, 2016; Ó Beacháin et al., 2016). Based on these assumptions, the present paper aims to discuss the role of international labelling on the inter- and intra- dynamics of the aforementioned states in face of their in-ability to achieve recognition. To this goal, the labelling theory will be tested on these case studies, labelling being seen as “a fundamental activity of exercising power” (Wood, 2007: 19; Wood, 1985: 347; Eyben, Moncrieffe and Knowles, 2006) based on an “act of politics involving conflict as well as authority” (Wood, 1985: 347) and representing "an act of valuation and judgement involving prejudices and stereotyping” (Wood, 1985: 348).