Questionable Borders

This chapter situates today’s reluctance to contemplate territorial compromises in the multiple and contested territorialisations of both republics throughout the twentieth century. Loosely deploying the concept of the ‘geo-body’, meaning the bordered space of the national homeland, it tracks different territorial traditions of ‘Armenia’ and ‘Azerbaijan’ over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how these traditions generated different commitments to borders within each nation’s geopolitical culture. These in turn resulted in overlapping conceptions of homeland that supply the historical, ideological and moral weight behind contemporary territorial claims, and resistance to compromise.