Rural property and economy in postsocialist Azerbaijan

Rural property and economy in postsocialist Azerbaijan

In the case of Täzäkänd, my household survey showed that nearly one-quarter of all households had at least one member working elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, and almost half of the households had a kinsman abroad. Migration often involves risks, and the strain it often imposes on kinship obligations feeds nostalgic memories of relative wealth and affluence in Soviet times. Remittances are invested in cars and in new houses, which remain unoccupied.
That some individuals made no use of a good given to them free of charge, preferring instead to migrate, could be partially explained through comparison with the second field site. Pirdinar, primarily a settlement for internally displaced persons (IDPs), is located in a region where the shares of privatized land individuals received were significantly larger than those in Täzäkänd. The IDPs were not, however, entitled to own land in this settlement but were given only use rights to certain communally owned land. Legal restrictions on ownership, together with the politics of regional and ethnic patronage, forced IDPs to appropriate land which legally belonged to others, following its distribution. The appropriations were successful because Kurdish ethnic activists were able to manipulate official policy to support IDPs, who were perceived as distressed (2004).

My data indicated that although land might be treated ‘simply’ as an economic resource in some cases, in others it might carry symbolic meaning as territory. This theme has been discussed in another comparative study (2003c). In it we came to the conclusion that the meaning and utility of land could be assessed only by reference to a range of factors, among the most important of which were economic scarcity, the nature of the bundle of property rights, the regulation of access by political actors, and the role of violence in shaping emotional attachments to land, thereby converting it into territory.
A detailed comparative discussion of the land reforms in Azerbaijan will be found in my forthcoming book. Meanwhile, the questions generated in the course of this project have led me to consider further the migratory movements which have become so strong throughout the southern Caucasus countries in the postsocialist years. In my new project, ‘Citizenship from Below’, I will continue to investigate the changing political economy of this region, paying particular attention to informal networks and to the consequences of new border regimes (both between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia and between these and their powerful neighbours, the Russian Federation, Turkey, and Iran).

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