Azerbaijan’s National Minorities

Migrations, forced and voluntary, have transformed the context of Azerbaijan’s national minority politics. In 1989 Azerbaijan’s two largest minorities, Armenians and Russians, comprised more than 10% of the population and were linked to neighbouring republics undergoing their own nationalist mobilizations that then became states. Twenty years later, Azerbaijan’s two largest minorities, Lezgins and Talysh, comprised less than 3% of the population and did not have external homelands configured as sovereign states. But border issues still remain salient, especially in the case of the Lezgins, a North-East Caucasian group straddling Azerbaijan’s border with the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation, home to a larger population of 385,240 Lezgins (Rosstat 2012–2013, 77). The Talysh, an Iranian-related group, also straddle the Azerbaijani-Iranian border in the south.Footnote ² Although these minorities lack external homelands configured as states, sponsorship of minority cultural activity, such as conferences and minority language media, by neighbouring states contributes to the securitization of ethno-nationalism among them (Siroky and Mahmudlu Reference Siroky and Mahmudlu2016; Kotecha Reference Kotecha2006, 44–45), meaning their depiction as threats to national security justifying the imposition of restrictions on civil liberties or new security measures. Azerbaijan’s other minorities are generally small in number or geographically dispersed.

Articles 44 and 45 in the Constitution guarantee rights to nationality and the use of the mother tongue. Azerbaijan signed and ratified the Framework Convention on National Minorities (FCNM) in 2000. With the specific exception of the Armenian minority, Council of Europe assessments initially praised implementation of the FCNM in Azerbaijan (Council of Europe 2004, 2008). Criticisms generally concerned more procedural than substantive issues. Yet if Azerbaijani legislation complies with international standards on non-discrimination, active mechanisms institutionalizing minority participation have not taken root. Constraints on separatism prohibit the formation of regional or ethnic parties; a Consultative Council for National Minorities established in 1993 is defunct and a single State Counsellor on National Policy advises the President, a post that has not always been occupied.Footnote ³ There is no law on the protection of national minorities, envisaged since 1992. Rather, it was the Ministry of National Security (remodelled in 2015 as the National Security Service) that emerged as the primary institution dealing with minority issues, through a securitizing lens (Cornell, Karaveli, and Ajeganov Reference Cornell, Karaveli and Ajeganov2016, 56). A resulting irony was that while national minority representation was better in Azerbaijan than in several neighbouring states, international criticism focused on the fact that there were no formal mechanisms ensuring that this is so (Popjanevski Reference Popjanevski2006, 69; Council of Europe 2008, 4–5; Council of Europe 2013).

The demographic homogenization of the republic has been accompanied by increasing assertions of its multicultural character. In 2014 a Baku International Multiculturalism Centre was established, teaching “Azerbaijani Multiculturalism” courses at home and abroad; 2016 was Azerbaijan’s Year of Multiculturalism (see Cornell, Karaveli, and Ajeganov Reference Cornell, Karaveli and Ajeganov2016, 48–57). Geopolitical factors and the management of secessionist conflict explain pressures to embed Azerbaijani nationalism within a bordered civic frame making multicultural inclusivity explicit. Yet as Bruce Grant argues, the post-Soviet idiom of tolerance follows a Bakuvian tradition of egalitarian discourses “most often advanced by those looking to assert or assume the mantles of power” (Grant Reference Grant2010, 125). Azerbaijanism, hinging on the ambiguity embedded within distinct geographic and ethno-national meanings of “Azerbaijan,” renders implicit the fact that Azerbaijanis already dominate in all spheres of social and political life. But if the majority refrains from ethno-nationalist nation-building, it is a core plank of the majority-minority compact in Azerbaijan that minorities should do so too. This is a form of tolerance, yet it is clear where the power lies. As Krista Goff puts it, Azerbaijanism “tells minorities that identifying themselves as Azerbaijanis connects them to a civic identification while disregarding the ways in which it is defined in practice by the Turkic Azeri nation and culture” (Goff Reference Goff2020, 217).

There is a harder edge to Azerbaijanism. Where minorities straddle borders, the securitization of secessionism has the potential to intersect with securitizations of both external sponsorship and civic activity. In 2007 and 2012 Talysh journalists of the Talysh-language newspaper Tolishi Sado were arrested and imprisoned on charges of espionage for Iran (Mamedov Reference Mamedov2012; Goff Reference Goff2020, 235–6). Some NGO reports by outside actors, such as the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples’ Organization (UNPO), have complained of assimilatory policies and a lack of cross-border access for Lezgins. Yet other field-based reports have indicated mingled identities and respondents uninterested in sharpening them (Gerber Reference Gerber2007, 16; Kotecha Reference Kotecha2006, 34–35). It is debatable whether such conflicting claims are symptomatic of wider issues in the legal environment and conditions for independent civic activity, or of active discrimination. More evident is the decline of formal procedures and criteria for the adjudication and mediation of such claims. If minorities adapt to the majority Turkic culture, coded civically as Azerbaijanism, they face few obstacles. But there are few avenues for bottom-up calibrations of Azerbaijanism outside of state-sponsored cultural forums, themselves a vehicle for the expression of Azerbaijanism as a harmonious but apolitical multiculturalism.

Language

Owing to both structural legacies and transitional factors, linguistic nationalism has played a subdued role in Azerbaijani nation-building. Although Soviet rule had subjected the Azerbaijani language to successive script reforms, by the 1980s Azerbaijan was significantly less russified than Central Asia.Footnote ⁴ While a segment of the Azerbaijani intelligentsia was russified, the depth and demographic scope of russification were insufficient to make this a salient intra-ethnic cleavage. The early “decolonizing” policies of the APF in 1992–3 involving the Latinization of the previously Cyrillicized Azerbaijani language and its renaming – later reversed – as türk dili (Turkic, sometimes parsed confusingly as Turkish), were largely symbolic and became less relevant after emigration had diminished the numbers of Russian-speakers in Azerbaijan. The return to power of the prior communist leadership also embedded a Russian-speaking ethos among parts of the elite structure, associated primarily with the previously influential Head of the Presidential Administration and later head of the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences, Ramiz Mehdiyev, author of several major policy documents published in Russian in the mass media (Mehdiyev Reference Mehdiyev2014; Mehdiyev Reference Mehdiyev2015a, Reference Mehdiyev2015b). Without either a substantial settler population of unassimilated Slavs or a demographically significant constituency of russified Azerbaijanis to incite Azerbaijani linguistic nationalism, Russian remained resilient in the early post-Soviet period. Although divested of official status Russian-language materials continued to dominate curricula by default and by virtue of the long-standing respect accorded to the Russian pedagogical tradition.Footnote ⁵ The number of Russian sections in Baku’s schools, and number of students in them, has remained stable compared to the 1990s despite ethnic Russian demographic decline, indicating that most of these pupils are Azerbaijanis (Azadlıq Radiosu 2009). There is also a wide range of Russian cultural and media organizations active in Azerbaijan promoting Russian language and civilization.

Twenty-five years after independence, the language market had been fragmented by the entry of Turkish and English, alongside Russian and Azerbaijani. Each of these languages was associated with different realms of civic and educational activity, although neither is as structurally embedded as Russian. Turkish-language linkages have been associated with the activities of Turkish businesses and, until 2016, a largely non-governmental educational network (Ismayilov Reference Ismayilov, Ismayilov and Graham2016; Balci Reference Balci2013). English-language linkages have been associated with the neo-liberal civil society sphere of Western-funded NGOs, the foreign policy milieu, and educational institutions with an internationalist outlook, such as the Azerbaijani Diplomatic Academy. Multilingualism consequently remains a salient feature of post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The fragmented linguistic landscape points on the one hand to the absence of a single salient cleavage that would sharpen Azerbaijani linguistic nationalism. On the other hand, it points also to the unifying role of the national language in a context where language repertoires for upwardly mobile citizens must nonetheless also include Russian, English, and Turkish. Without external sources of funding and support, the teaching of minority languages in Azerbaijan remains a problem area. Against the backdrop of a relatively low and declining budget for educationFootnote ⁶, minority language instruction appears limited to transitioning students from minority groups to proficiency in Azerbaijani (Cornell, Karaveli and Ajeganov Reference Cornell, Karaveli and Ajeganov2016, 62).

Religion

A complex concatenation of internal and external factors has mediated the role of religion in post-Soviet Azerbaijani nation-building (Altstadt Reference Altstadt2017, Ch. 6). Although Islam was the dominant identity in Azerbaijan since its introduction in the seventh century, a sectarian divide between majority Shi‘a and minority Sunni populations has always been an underlying cleavage, and a key determinant of secularism as a core pillar of nationhood in the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) of 1918–1920. Official figures put the ratio between Shi‘a and Sunni at 85:15, although some Azerbaijani scholars estimate a higher Sunni share at 65:35 (see Lonardo Reference Lonardo2016, 241). The historical, pre-Soviet precedent of state secularism in 1918–1920, with its concomitant incorporation of Islam as a cultural component of nationhood, implies that Islam poses less of a challenge to the legitimacy of the nation-state tradition in Azerbaijan as compared to Central Asian republics lacking this precedent.

In the 1990s–2000s, research indicated that Azerbaijan is one of the most secular Muslim societies in the world (Wiktor-Mach Reference Wiktor-Mach2012), although 94% of the population surveyed claimed a (cultural) Muslim identity. Despite commitments to secularism, sovereignty nevertheless re-introduced religious identifications (Yunusov Reference Yunusov2004; Balci Reference Balci2004; Kotecha Reference Kotecha2006; Bedford Reference Bedford2009; Sattarov Reference Sattarov2009; Mammadli Reference Mammadli2015; Altstadt Reference Altstadt2017, 186–191). Azerbaijan’s multi-sectarianism is both geographically patterned – with Shi‘a predominance in the south and Sunni predominance in the north – and geopolitically inflected through linkages to neighbouring and transnational faith communities. Some public and governmental discourses have portrayed contemporary orientations within wider Sunni trends, such as Salafism and “Wahhabism,” as threats to the Azerbaijani secular model. Yet Sunni Islam also has an indigenous, historical presence in Azerbaijan preceding these tendencies, and connects Azerbaijan to other Turkic nations. Shi‘ism not only links Azerbaijan to Iran, but also constitutes the core field for the projection of Iranian influence into Azerbaijan. This projection has typically been imagined reciprocally in terms of threats of theocratic political Islam (for Azerbaijan) and irredentism (for Iran).

Post-9/11, as a small but strategically located power, Azerbaijan positioned itself as both an ally of Western powers in conflict with Islamist extremism, for example by facilitating over-flight routes for American forces engaged in Afghanistan and deploying troops as part of the coalition in Iraq, and a model of moderation from within that “same” Islamic world out of which extremism has emerged. Reprising Azerbaijan’s bridging role between Marxism and the Middle East in the 1920s, Azerbaijan’s positioning in the overall context of the “War on Terror” bridged the problem and its putative solution. This is a strategic response to Islamophobia salient in the Western world, and an astute appraisal of the privileging of secularism over democracy in Western evaluations of friend and foe in the Islamic world after 9/11. It is also a position enabling “double-dipping” between the championing of (moderate) Islamic values against Islamophobia within international, especially Western-defined, discursive fields, and the domestic securitization of Islam through policies including closures of religious parties and mosques; co-optation of religious organizations; beard-shaving; enabled departures of alleged insurgents; and anti-terrorism legislation. The scope to bridge secular and Islamic values has been narrowed, however, by the increasing proximity of Islamist conflict to Azerbaijan. An estimated 800 Azerbaijanis are thought to have fought in Syria and Iraq, with some 200 estimated killed; this is the largest cohort of Azerbaijanis ever involved in jihadist violence (Lonardo Reference Lonardo2016). However, high battle casualty rates and executions of Azerbaijanis by the Islamic State, combined with the tightened security response of the Azerbaijani state to the threat of returnees, suggested that Islamist insurgency did not pose a threat to domestic stability.

Muslim religious practice rose significantly in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. If a cultural Muslim identity was claimed by some 94% of the population in 2012, 44% of respondents to the Gallup religiosity index in 2012 considered themselves “religious.” This represents a rise of more than 20% compared to 2007–2008 (Crabtree and Pelham Reference Crabtree and Pelham2012; Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism-2012, Win-Gallup International, Press Release 2012). Three discursive approaches competed to interpret and “place” this rise in religiosity. From different angles, any rise in religiosity was interpreted by supporters of secularism in both government and among the liberal opposition as evidence of the risk of “political Islam.” From the perspective of government mitigating this risk required the deferral of democratization; for the liberal opposition, it required its acceleration. A countervailing stance portrayed increased religiosity as evidence of disenchantment with political cultures of elitism, corruption, and amorality. In this view, advocacy of Islam offered an ideological alternative to political opposition (Kotecha Reference Kotecha2006). A third stance found in increased religiosity the potential for an encompassing cultural-civic component to Azerbaijanism, given that population movements in the terminal and early post-Soviet periods led to the dramatic depletion of minorities traditionally identified with Christian cultures. Despite multi-sectarianism, in cultural terms post-Soviet Azerbaijan has become significantly mono-confessional. Provided “extremist” tendencies can be contained, a cultural Muslim identity can serve as a supporting buttress to the kind of integrative, inclusive identity underpinning the project of Azerbaijanism (Siroky and Mahmudlu Reference Siroky and Mahmudlu2016).

The interaction of internal and external factors underscores that religion is a highly contingent aspect to Azerbaijani nation-building. Policy on religion charts an unstable and potentially incompatible course between securitization (whether of certain Islamic practices, or Islam’s potential to express a social justice agenda in general), and institutionalization of a domesticated Islam as an inclusive cultural identity, rooted in an indigenous tradition of secularism opposed to both sectarianism and transnational currents. In other words, it is a unique “Azerbaijani Islam” that is “interreligiously tolerant, non-aggressive and apolitical” (Bedford Reference Bedford, Ismayilov and Graham2016, 127). The Azerbaijani government has invested considerable efforts in this direction, for example through the institution of a “Unity Namaz” performed by representatives of different denominations as a symbol of Azerbaijan’s Year of Multiculturalism in 2016 (“Unity Prayer in Baku’s Heydar Mosque,” Trend, January 15, 2016; “Prayer for unity held in Baku’s Heydar Mosque,” Vestnik Kavkaza January 16, 2016). More recently, to promote national “Azerbaijani Islam,” the government has introduced “Traditional Islam” as the main religious policy of the state (Bedford, Mahmudlu, and Abilov Reference Bedford, Mahmudlu and Abilov2021).

But a more lasting insulation of Islam in Azerbaijan ultimately implies its incorporation into domestic channels of political contestation as one of a number of interest groups in society.Footnote ⁷ This was the role played by the Islamist Ittihad party in the era of Azerbaijani parliamentary democracy in 1918–1920 (Swietochowski Reference Swietochowski1995, 77; Balaev Reference Balaev2012, 373–374). The prospect of radical Islamism in Azerbaijan is often over-stated in securitizing discourses of whatever provenance. But whether Azerbaijan can once again incorporate religion through civic modes compatible with secular values depends on the quality and openings offered by institutionalized channels of representation and contestation.

The Cult of Dynasty

Post-Soviet Azerbaijan was crowded with billboards depicting portraits of former president Heydar Aliyev, sometimes accompanied by his son. This imagery, juxtaposing the person of the former president with the “poetic spaces” (Smith Reference Smith1991, 65) of the nation and unmediated by any other symbols (except usually the Azerbaijani tricolor), visualized the identity of Heydar Aliyev as the Ümmumilli lider, all-national leader, and founder of Azerbaijani statehood.Footnote ¹⁰ These visualizations of a founder myth enacted the symbolic elision of earlier presidents of Azerbaijan to transform Heydar Aliyev into an icon of the civic Azerbaijani nation, often accompanied, as on the backdrop to his tomb in Baku, by the outline of Azerbaijan within its internationally recognized borders.

Although visually prominent, the kind of personality cult practiced in Azerbaijan lacked the all-encompassing ambition and ideological eccentricity of leaders, for example, in Turkmenistan or North Korea. Although a “Department of Aliyevology” (Aliyevshunasliq) existed in the Academy of Sciences in the mid-2010s (“Inside the Department of AliyevScience,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 16, 2013), this did not appear to be implemented. Over the first decades of Aliyev family rule, the cultic emphasis was on dynasty rather than a single individual. It was not only Heydar Aliyev but also the current president and his wife Mehriban Aliyeva who featured; the Aliyev daughters, Arzu and Leyla, also assumed prominent public roles. The cult of the Aliyev family performed several regime-building roles. Dynasticism provides a straight-forward solution to the problem of regime continuity, legitimating the derogation of presidential term limits and averting succession issues. This was possible because the dynasty served as a symbolic nexus, and in some cases a real kinship network, for influential families and networked factions comprising the informal politics of the Azerbaijani state. Predicated on a neo-patrimonial distribution of oil windfalls, this framework allowed for durable divisions of labour, resource flows, and networked franchises between a number of key figures, families, and factions constituting the backbone of the state (Guliyev Reference Guliyev, Heinrich and Pleines2012, Reference Guliyev2013).

The Aliyev dynasty also overcame an ideologically problematic continuity with the Soviet past. It symbolized continuity with a de-ethnicized, cosmopolitan, and internationalist outlook, ostensibly the positive values of the Soviet legacy that it could legitimately claim. Simultaneously, the generic device of dynasty also cued a pre-existing historiographical tradition of identifying Safavid dynasties, including its founding dynasty, as “Azerbaijani,” and hence “national” (Shaffer Reference Shaffer, Babak, Vaisman and Wasserman2004, 21). Thus, the Aliyev dynasty cued multi-layered symbolisms in its affirmations of traditional patriarchal values, agnatic succession and ruling Turkic dynasties in history, simultaneous to the assertion of modern secular values. The latter were represented by an ex-communist ethos, the high profile of Mehriban Aliyeva as a female politician and public figure embodying a modern Western aesthetic of dress and appearance, and the presence of both russophone and russophile tendencies within the elite. The continued viability of internationalist cosmopolitanism as a framing device is also rooted in key moments of the Azerbaijani national narrative, such as the commitment to secularism transcending sectarian divisions, Baku’s mythos as a cosmopolitan milieu transcending narrow ethnic proclivities, symbolized in Kurban Said’s novel Ali and Nino (filmed as a blockbuster film in 2016 with Leyla Aliyeva, daughter of President Ilham Aliyev, in the role of executive producer), and a dual reading of the Soviet past, in which negative moments are balanced by acknowledgment of its contribution to the development of an Azerbaijani national tradition.

Azerbaijan as Petro-Nation

A narrative of Azerbaijan as a “petro-nation” provides a second pillar of civic mythology. Azerbaijan’s oil industry was integral to the advent of modernity, urbanization, and class-based ideologies that incubated the national tradition in the early twentieth century. At the beginning of that century, for a brief moment, it led the world in oil production. Over one hundred years later, in 2015, Azerbaijan was endowed with an estimated seven billion tonnes of oil (0.4% of global reserves) and 1.2 trillion cubic metres of gas (0.7% of global reserves). Beginning in the mid-2000s and peaking in 2010, Azerbaijan’s second oil boom has run parallel to the presidency of Ilham Aliyev. Oil (and to a lesser extent gas) played enormously significant roles, from the imagining of nation to the consolidation of sovereignty and regime building.

Oil indigenizes nation and state in the elemental physicality of place. Spontaneous fires burning on oil surfacing to ground level are a staple of historical accounts of the area. They offer a link to an ancient Zoroastrian pre-history (and can still be observed at preserved fire temples on the Absheron peninsula), provide a heraldic device for the state’s crest, and serve as a branding leitmotif of the “land of fire.” As the defining natural resource of the national patrimony, oil also offers a decolonization narrative from the imperial logic of mise en valeur to sovereign control. Throughout the twentieth century, Azerbaijan’s oil industry transitioned from domination by foreign and Armenian capital in the first oil boom, to post-Second World War desuetude as the Soviet Union privileged Siberian reserves, to a final “nationalization” under Heydar and Ilham Aliyev (LeVine Reference LeVine2007). Oil can thus be read as a metaphor for the Azerbaijani nation itself, in turn dominated, exploited, and neglected, before achieving emancipation in the national golden age of the present. But in characteristically ambiguous fashion, the petro-nation narrative simultaneously yields symbols of internationalist connectivity. It is a narrative that deeply embeds and internalizes external influences, from enabling foreign capital of figures such as the Nobel brothers in the first oil boom, to the synthesis of European and local aesthetics in Baku’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, to providing the original magnet for Baku’s celebrated multiethnic mix. Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet oil boom is founded on the partnership between the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijani Republic (SOCAR)Footnote ¹¹ and multinational oil companies sealed in the Azerbaijani International Operating Company (AIOC), which in its original form recruited oil companies from all relevant global powers in a moment of consensus on the existence and legitimacy of what was at the time a fragmented and fragile Azerbaijani state. Midwife to the traumatic rebirth of the nation, oil has underpinned consistent affirmations of both its geopolitical importance to global partners, and its independence from Russia in the critical field of energy. A rebranding of SOCAR in the mid-2010s replaced the company’s oil derrick logo with a simulacrum of the state’s flame-based crest reproduced in the colours of the Azerbaijani tricolor, a symbolic trinity of regime, nation, and state.

Oil revenues have also provided the ruling elite with more than sufficient resources to concentrate and protect its own power, to enable substantial public spending mitigating socio-economic grievances that could structure political mobilization, and to postpone structural reforms in the direction of diversification, despite rhetorical commitments to this goal.Footnote ¹² In addition to financing a substantial coercive apparatus, government revenues enabled a larger proportion of the population to remain employed in the public sector than in Georgia or Armenia (Guliyev Reference Guliyev, Heinrich and Pleines2012, 120–122). Oil revenues supported public expenditure campaigns to serve as the elite’s preferred lever of influence over public opinion, helping to secure “supermajority wins” in elections affirming the incumbent (Kendall-Taylor Reference Kendall-Taylor2012). They also financed showcase policy initiatives such as the ASAN “one-stop-shop” public service centres both embodying an Azerbaijani iteration of post-modern e-governance and mitigating petty, predatory and cash-based corruption.Footnote ¹³ Furthermore, oil revenues replenished the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ), a sovereign wealth fund intended for the future benefit of the nation. SOFAZ flows have paid for important social initiatives, such as re-housing communities displaced by the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, and they have also played a central role in balancing the state budget. Although SOFAZ earned plaudits for transparency on the revenue side, rules of transparency do not cover the ultimate fate of oil revenues once they flow into the state budget (Meissner Reference Meissner, Heinrich and Pleines2012).

Oil revenues also fund more opaque funding streams that are close to key regime figures, such as the Presidential FundFootnote ¹⁴ and the Heydar Aliyev Foundation administered by the First Lady. From what can be discerned from public scrutiny, oil revenues have sustained informal patterns of patronage constituting the core networks of the state and which make the popular politics of elections – and consequently an institutionalized contestation of what national values are or should be – irrelevant to power. In sum, oil provided a core narrative for the post-Soviet Azerbaijani state melding the regime tradition within internationalist multilateralism and asserting Azerbaijan’s geopolitical relevance. Oil revenues simultaneously displaced representative politics at home with depoliticizing development and financed a political economy resistant to institutionalized forms of political mobilization, including the electoral contestation of national identity.

Globalizing Azerbaijani Multiculturalism

A third vector of civic nation-building entails a complex process of the mutual embedding of Azerbaijani multiculturalism and multiple globalizing frames drawing on Azerbaijan’s membership of plural worlds: Middle Eastern (Iranian, Turkic, Muslim), Western (European, secular, cosmopolitan), and Eurasian (Russian-speaking, post-Soviet, Caspian). This parallel construction of Azerbaijan as both host and friend to all major world cultures and religions is enacted across diverse domestic settings, notably elite promotion of diverse geo-cultural discourses: Azerbaijan’s hosting of the World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue or the “Baku Process” after 2008, the holding of high-visibility international events (such as the Eurovision Song Contest, European Games and Islamic Games in 2012, 2015, and 2017 respectively), the advent and encouragement of Western-style consumerism in the Absheron peninsula, the establishment of international traditions of higher education in the country, toleration (albeit declining) of a Western-funded neo-liberal civil society, the embrace of Turkish popular culture and toleration of Turkish-sponsored mosques, the enduring status of Russian within parts of the elite, and many others (Ismayilov Reference Ismayilov2012, 2015 2016; Ismayilov and Tkacik Reference Ismayilov and Tkacik2009; see also Balci Reference Balci2013, Militz Reference Militz, Isaacs and Polese2016). The melding of different, counterpoised worlds is evident in numerous discursive and visual dichotomies in the oil windfall era, ranging from elite affirmations of apparently contradictory moralities (Ismayilov Reference Ismayilov2015, 7) and architectural juxtapositions of the new Flame Towers and Baku’s old town, to formulas advocating Azerbaijan as bridge absorbing the values of both European and Islamic civilizationsFootnote ¹⁵ and marketing the country as the “European charm of the Orient.” Spectacular new architecture and mega-events mapped onto urban landscapes dissolve the differences between downtown Baku and developmentally distant hinterlands of the republic. They disguise the informal networks of economic power that have structured the distribution of Azerbaijan’s oil wealth (Grant Reference Grant2014), and transform a local variant of multiculturalism into a synecdoche of a globalized and inclusive cosmopolitanism. Azerbaijan’s civic identity manifests itself as a congruent heterogeneity, a myriad of discourses unified only by the transcendent quality of the person of the president at its apex.

Such congruent conjunctures are not new to Azerbaijani imaginaries. Syncretism is built into the iconography of the Azerbaijani nation in its tricolor flag,Footnote ¹⁶ as well as the cultural and tactical chameleonism of key figures in the Azerbaijani cultural and national revival movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Mirza Fath Ali Akhundov, Ali bey Huseynzade, Ahmad bey Ağaoğlu, and Mammed Emin Rasulzade.Footnote ¹⁷ Indigenized globalization melds easily with, and nationalizes, the inherited tradition of Soviet internationalism, which underpins the state’s formal celebration of ethno-religious tolerance and civic values. But as Murad Ismayilov (Reference Ismayilov2015, 12–13) has observed, an implicit question accompanies these tactical emphases within a highly heterogeneous canvas. Over the long term, this strategy could lead to the dilution of the over-arching values associated with the nation, and a disconnect with more ideologically inflected silos within it, experiencing divergent socializations and generating conflicting visions of the nation’s “proper” values and orientation. As Ismayilov and Tkacik (Reference Ismayilov and Tkacik2009, 93) note, the emergence of new Azerbaijani elites educated in Turkish, Western, and Russian milieus introduces not only differences in outlook but parallel civil society structures, inhibiting the formation of a unified civic space between state and citizen. In its Western-oriented, neo-liberal variant that space contracted significantly as a result of activist arrests and organizational closures in the 2014–2015 period, thereby contributing further to authoritarianism (Welt Reference Welt2014, Altstadt Reference Altstadt2017). This leaves unclear the question of the identity and agency of brokers between a state committed to eclectic discourses of nation-building, and a heterogeneous society with varying cultural and ideological commitments and potentially dissonant visions for the nation’s future. Whether the person and institution of the president can maintain an englobing transcendence above these currents, particularly in an era beyond oil windfalls, is uncertain.