My latest publication, with Dr John O’Loughlin, from the De Facto States Research Project, funded by the US National Science Foundation, is “Land for Peace in Nagorny Karabakh? Political Geographies and Public Attitudes inside a Contested De Facto State” which is now available online in the new journal Territory, Politics, Governance Vol. 1, No. 2, 158–182. The journal is that of the Regional Studies Association, edited by John Agnew, and published by Taylor and Francis. The ‘redundancy’ in the title — de facto states are, by definition, contested — was an attempt to underscore the particularly sharp territorial divide in the NK conflict. With this we have now published research articles on all four de facto states that were part of the study — Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorny Karabakh. Below is the article’s abstract.

Discussions of the territorial conflict over Nagorny Karabakh often fail to convey the multiple political geographies at play in the dispute. This paper outlines six distinct political geographies—territorial regimes and geographical imaginations—that are important in understanding Armenian perspectives on the conflict only (Azerbaijani perspectives are the subject of ongoing research). It presents the results of a 2011 social survey in Nagorny Karabakh that measures the extent of support these contending spatial visions have among local Armenian residents of the area. The survey finds widespread support for the territorial maximalist conceptions. These results underscore an important chasm between international diplomatic conceptions of Nagorny Karabakh and the everyday spatial attitudes and perceptions of residents in these disputed territories.