Properties of War: The Militarization of Housing Policy and Urban Planning in Contemporary Azerbaijan

War has defined Azerbaijan for more than three decades. The unresolved conflict over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has not only structured the sociopolitical climate of the nation but also everyday relations and the very manner in which both the private home and the homeland is imagined. Increasingly, the line has blurred between housing policy and military strategy, with desires for greater securitization and armament seeping into proprietary arrangements, construction plans, and mainstream narratives surrounding the domestic. I examine three sites where inhabitation has seemingly become inextricable from the military apparatus — a state-sponsored apartment block for the families of martyrs (şəhid ailəsi) and those disabled by war (müharibə əlillərinə), a newly built housing complex for servicemen (yüksək rütbəli hərbçilər), and, finally, a makeshift settlement for internally displaced people (məcburi köçkünlər). In these spaces, both temporal and material qualities of war seep into the quotidian, informing the ways in which individuals negotiate the intimate aftermaths of violence, injury, and severed relation. Whilst the article begins by examining state-sponsored settlement forged along lines of allegiance, masculinized duty, and capacity, it concludes by attending to moments that upend oppressive forms of homemaking.

militarism, housing policy, nationalism, urban planning, Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh

An atmosphere of fervent militarism saturates spaces of everyday life within Baku, Azerbaijan. Despite being nearly four hundred kilometers away from the contested territories of Nagorno-Karabakh, military presence and paraphernalia proliferate across public and private space within the capital city—from military supply trucks stationed in downtown parking lots, army recruitment ads towering above commuters in metro stations, to creaseless Azerbaijani flags decorating courtyards and gardens. Framed by the ongoing conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia (1987 to present day), residential developments (yaşayış məntəqəsi), gardens/backyards (yaşıl sahələr), and makeshift settlements (müvəqqəti məskunlaşma) have turned into sites where the local population actively engages with ideas of nation-making, post-conflict futures, and the potential restoration of territorial integrity (Askerov 2020). Feelings of both homeliness and unhomeliness pervade these spaces, with potent affective landscapes influencing political identity, forms of inhabitation, and everyday habits. Whilst traditional conflict zones and military fronts remain, this article will argue that the interior spaces of urban Azerbaijan have taken on central importance for both projects of nation-building and the securitization of existing territories. In other words, the city is where militarism assumes a quotidian form, bleeding into language, affect, spatial organization, and neighborly relations.

I suggest that by influencing housing and urban policy, the Azeri government's process of ever-intensifying militarization has taken on a seemingly civic, if not welfare-oriented, quality—shaping sociocultural understandings of the private and domestic, intervening in proprietary arrangements, and altering the demographic makeup of neighborhoods. It indicates the reliance of militarism on a politics of spatial ordering, where ideas of inhabitation and domesticity are mobilized as technologies of management and governance amidst, and in the aftermath of, conflict. Specifically, in Baku, the private domestic space has become an essential part of the state's toolkit, with housing projects firmly entangled with both wartime and postwar plans. Homes are used to conceal some, reward others, and keep the rest in productive limbo. The article will turn towards three sites of domesticity in downtown and peripheral Baku to demonstrate the points above: a state-sponsored apartment block for the families of martyrs (şəhid ailəsi) and those disabled by war (müharibə əlillərinə), a newly built housing complex for servicemen (yüksək rütbəli hərbçilər), and, finally, a makeshift settlement for internally displaced people (IDPs/məcburi köçkünlər).¹

Informed by notions of spatial relativism, I will argue that the first site relies on the assimilation of casualty populations. The state's housing program for war invalids and their equals in many ways conceals and sanitizes the violence, injury, and death wrought by the country's military activity (Mammadli 2022). Within the mainstream imaginary, the state is rendered into an apparatus of care and welfare, rather than aggression. The second site invokes processes of demolition and subsequent gentrification to turn former industrial areas into forever homes for the army. As a reward for gaining back territory on the frontiers of the country, soldiers and army staff are granted a permanent "space" right in the heart of the capital. Home ownership offers a celebratory endpoint to service and marks the attainment of properly earned inhabitation. The third site describes the link between temporary settlements and the creation of a strategically surplus population (Gureyeva-Aliyeva and Huseynov 2011), with IDPs at the mercy of a clear gap in Azerbaijan's wartime housing.²

Whilst specific to Azerbaijan—a country underrepresented within humanities scholarship—this article borrows from the work of several feminist thinkers, across different geographical regions. Since the early 2000s, the consolidation of imperial democracies and securitized regimes has prompted the emergence of notable cross-border feminist solidarities. A sense of connectedness between national struggles has laid the foundation for abundant scholarly engagement with militarization—particularly in critical military studies and feminist geographies (Staeheli, Kofman, and Peake 2004; Woodward 2004; Dowler 2012; Massaro and Williams 2013; Fluri 2014; Tyner and Henkin 2015). Both fields have drawn attention to the ways in which sociospatial power relations shape individual and collective identity, highlighting the influence of the military on the lives of both normative and marginal populations. Indeed, as borders and boundary lines crisscross the spheres of the everyday, militarized settings have provided scholars with a way to examine power, violence, and securitization in areas frequently ignored or devalued.

Unlike conventional studies of militarization, feminist geopolitics and military geographies have succeeded in turning attention away from sites of power occupied by men (e.g., the Security Council or the Oval Office), bringing innocuous spaces, primarily associated with women, to the fore (see Giles and Hyndman 2004; Hyndman 2004; Staeheli, Kofman, and Peake 2004; Woodward 2004; Koopman 2011). Through analyzing the micropolitics and microgeographies of war, scholars have also highlighted the many gendered implications of militarization—from Alexandra Hyde's (2017) examination of the lives of British military wives residing in German garrison towns, to Sarai Aharoni, Amalia Sa'ar, and Alisa C. Lewin's (2021) work on the impact of separatist, state-centered discourses on the communitarian ethics of Jewish-Israeli women living in the Gaza envelope. In both, militarization informs domestic policies and domestic spaces, altering identities, modes of participation, and the everyday tasks affiliated with social reproduction.

The article follows suit in using gender as a lens through which particularity and localism are prioritized, though it also seeks to highlight the effects of militarization on other marginal populations—including veterans, IDPs, and the disabled. I build upon cross-sections of community introduced by "Cultures of Militarism," a 2019 special issue of Current Anthropology. The issue interrogates "established and emergent forms" of militarism, probing genealogies and highlighting its "facility at colonizing daily life" (Gusterson and Besteman 2019, S4). While previous studies grappled with militarism by examining statistics on the percentage of state finances devoted to military expenditure, the frequency of military coups, and the role of military officers in politics interests (Cohn 1987), contemporary analysis recognizes that militarism is contingent and deeply entangled with longer trajectories of social injustice and violence. In Baku alone, one cannot approach militarism, nor militarization, without first attending to the intersecting forces of global capitalism, post-socialist conflict, militarized patriotism, and national cultural traditions.

When it comes to the military's connection to domesticity, the article holds in equal interest the Azerbaijani state and its deployment of housing policy as a distinctly militarized technology of population management. It builds on Cris Shore and Susan Wright's 1997 publication Anthropology of Policy and their conceptualization of policy as a device that produces certain possibilities and restricts others. Indeed, applying Shore and Wright's approach to different categories of proprietary relation found in Azeri policy, one notices the production of unequal social identities and subjectivities, with policy emboldening certain communities while occluding others. Tess Lea's Wild Policy (2020) is also a foundational text, highlighting the way in which militarized and securitized forms of domesticity emerge out of the bureaucratic sphere. For Lea, it is through the "surfeit of documents...designed not to be read" (2014, 1) that the covert politics (and discriminatory effects) of housing become apparent, with the state wielding notions of deservingness, scarcity, and procedural order to excuse moments of neglect or failure. Indeed, marginal populations are often arbitrarily barred from inhabiting certain spaces on the grounds of lacking appropriate documentation or the approval of elite institutions and governmental bodies.

In this article, I try to emulate what Lea refers to as a "purposely fragmented ethnographic gleaning technique" (2020, 27). Rather than merely carrying out multisite ethnography, I follow Lea in establishing a "policy ecology" (50) that maps the circulation of seemingly uninteresting and unremarkable policy documents in different spheres of social, political, and material life. I hope to utilize Lea's methodology to examine how policy ecologies merge with domestic ones, and to answer the following questions: What sort of interior spaces emerge as a result of particular housing initiatives and strategies? How do certain specifications, restrictions, criteriums, and descriptions set up different material and affective contexts? What forms do proprietary relations take and how are they legitimated? While Lea uses extracts from original policy documents, my analysis relies on parts of policy already highlighted by the press, grassroots organizations, and various interlocutors.

Alongside secondary sources, I also rely on a collaborative process of interpretation, enabled by fieldwork conducted in the summer and autumn of 2019.³ I often mentioned particular expressions and terms during conversations with interlocutors to ascertain which aspects of policy were conceived of as important by the communities they were designed for. I attended openings and project launches to observe celebratory moments of policy materialized and, subsequent to the departure of state representatives and state-endorsed press, loitered to notice immediate aftermaths. Most importantly, my methodology entailed living with my interlocutors for several weeks. I was very fortunate to spend time as the guest of a serviceman and his family in the Sabunchu district of Baku, as well as a family of IDPs who resided on the fringes of the Black City. Whilst the positionality of "the guest" offered me a curated and idealized view into the private domain of the home, it also fostered an attunement to the small-scale worries, malfunctions, and difficulties experienced by active servicemen, disabled veterans, the families of martyrs, and IDPs. It allowed for the observation of what Elizabeth Povinelli refers to as the "numerous small quasi-events" (2011, 183) that shape the flow of the everyday, sometimes inspiring hope, sometimes resulting in exhaustion.

The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region can be traced back to late 1987 (Geukjian 2016; Altstadt 2017; Van Heese 2018). Following Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, which officially lasted from 1985 to 1991, several nation-state-based sovereignty movements emerged across the Caucuses (de Waal 2002; Gasparyan 2019).⁴ Small-scale demonstrations by ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis snowballed into a full-fledged war over the territory in 1991 (Najafizadeh 2013; de Waal 2002). Although fighting ostensibly ended in 1994 with a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement (Garagozov 2016),⁵ years of military action rendered most towns derelict (Mirzeler and Jafarov 2012), with houses burnt down or dismantled brick by brick. Everything that had made the region livable—from lush orchards filled with pomegranate trees to a tight-knit network of farms, markets, and community spaces—disappeared, giving way to barren landscapes and invasive military infrastructure.

When life finally resurfaced it did so hundreds of kilometers away from the conflict zone. A plethora of businesses, organizations, and materials followed the displaced population, carving new spatialities across Baku both publicly and privately. Automobile repair shops, theaters, butchers, schools, restaurants, carpet-weaving workshops, and stud farms run by IDPs from Karabakh began to dot the cityscape. The impossible homeland was transplanted onto industrial wastelands, brownfields, and empty urban lots (Balikci 2004). While initiated by the displaced communities, many of these spaces also assisted with the state's sustained "propaganda war," oriented around fear, anger, and a constant state of anxious armament (Mamadaliev 2020).

The distant conflict still pervades the cityscape.⁶ The daily forecast on Azerbaijani television outlines weather conditions in Nagorno-Karabakh, fusing on-screen weather satellite information with a seemingly static avatar of territory. Posters next to the entrances of grocery shops exclaim, "everything free to children of fallen soldiers, your fathers have already paid," accompanied by images of fully armed soldiers drenched in the colors of the Azerbaijani flag. The outline of the region is often found graffitied on the peeling walls of apartment blocks. On numerous occasions, while exploring Baku's underground shopping walkways, I'd spot t-shirts with machine guns and clear block letters spelling out Karabakh. Home—whether one's apartment or neighborhood—was always simultaneously the frontline, the two merging seamlessly (Garagozov 2016).

Given the commonality of these experiences, it soon becomes apparent that in the context of Baku the "domestic" is multiscalar, constantly under negotiation and experienced by the population as both a national and personal condition.⁷ In this paper, the home is conceived of as an intimate site of identification during periods of conflict, moving beyond state-centric approaches (Wilson and Bakker 2016) that confine processes of militarization and securitization to spheres of governance, policy, and politics. Instead, the contested Karabakh homeland is understood to be an ever-present feature of not only the intimate "home"-space, but also cultural notions of personhood and family.⁸ It is reminiscent of a cosmological system, with the imaginary qualities of a house (and by extension, the homeland) intersecting with the "concrete reality of security technologies and infrastructures, a realm of affects and asymmetries" (Maguire and Low 2019, 17).⁹

The next section will recount the official opening of an apartment complex for disabled veterans and the families of martyrs, held in the Ramana settlement of the city. With press reports representing the residential projects as extensions of President Ilham Aliyev's alleged "care and attention" (Azeri-Press Agency [APA] 2021) towards Azerbaijani armed forces and affiliated civilians, the section will explore the servicemen and martyr apartments as reorienting the timeline of the military—from trauma and potential death to one of domestic bliss.

Despite leaving Baku in November 2019, notifications from friends, acquaintances, and former interlocutors continued to pop up frequently on my mobile screen. Their early messages tended to contain vignettes of quotidian life—a photo showcasing a generous plate of parcha-dosheme plov on an aquamarine PVC tablecloth or a video of an old Lada being attentively repaired in someone's front yard, for example. There was a distinct lack of politics in the images they sent me. By early 2020, however, this began to change. With the escalation of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, I found myself scrolling through endless images of tanks and artillery, civilian drone footage depicting alleged territorial trespass, as well as patriotic messages glorifying Azerbaijan and deriding their barbarian neighbors.

The atmosphere of militarism was equally palpable in footage sent from Baku, with military recruitment ads towering next to apartment blocks and Azeri flags lining the sandstone boulevards. Amidst all the dispatches I received, a short clip from Azim stood out the most. I met Azim while conducting an interview with a team of construction workers in downtown Baku. Like many Bakuvians, his affiliations were tangled; he swore allegiance to both the military and the state. Professionally, as a builder, he had been involved in a number of housing projects across the capital—particularly state-sponsored developments on former oil extraction sites. During our discussions, he would often complain about the lack of oversight and the risk of workplace injuries. Azim himself suffered from reoccurring pain as a result of back injury. At home, he identified as a part-time carer to his girlfriend's brother, Mohammed, who was injured while serving as a conscript in the Karabakh region. He saw both his body and Mohammed's as interlinked by duty and vulnerability—their shared moments of pain testaments to proud service.

The amateur video was taken at the grand opening of an apartment complex, purpose-built for the families of martyrs and those disabled by the war in Karabakh. Located in Ramana, a semi-urban settlement twenty kilometers away from downtown Baku, the still-empty apartment blocks seemed to rise out of the arid and flat landscape. The camera zoomed onto men in wheelchairs and widowed mothers as President Aliyev began his speech, describing the "spacious and bright" quality of the individual apartments.¹⁰ These homes, according to Aliyev, were symbolic rewards for "heroism, bravery, and self-sacrifice," gifted to subjects deemed worthy and deserving by the state. A proprietary relationship was thus established along lines of patriotism and nationalist fantasies of heroism and sacrifice (Açıksöz 2012), with apartment launches reminiscent of martyrs' funerals, military processions, and flag campaigns (Bora 2003). Yael Navaro-Yashin invokes the expression "rituals of thralldom for the state" (2002, 119) to describe the transformation of the quotidian and private into collective spectacle. Indeed, such rituals were evident throughout the president's speech (APA 2021), as Aliyev linked each straightforward descriptor to an affectively charged pronouncement. Aliyev began by listing the facilities in the residential compound and ended with declarations of "moral norms" and calls to "avenge the blood of martyrs."

Alongside a discourse of patriotic duty, the apartments also turned into an extension of governmental goodwill—to quote from the same speech, a gesture of "care and attention." The provision of housing by the state, according to Aliyev, was a virtuous action that set Azerbaijan apart from Armenia, where vulnerable populations were regularly sentenced to homelessness and destitution. Indeed, the president emphasized that, in Armenia, "the relatives of those killed in the war do not even receive a hut, not to mention a house" (APA 2021). In addition to professing a moral obligation, Aliyev equated the degree of domestic comfort available to the population with military power. Aliyev correlated an expansive, all-encapsulating militarism with the ability to shelter one's population. Indeed, in Aliyev's speech, victory became an assurance of shelter. Much like the American bunker, which, as a structure embodies the "long-running American fantasy about achieving an absolute and total form of security" (Masco 2009, 13), wartime and post-conflict housing in Azerbaijan cemented the restoration of territorial and national integrity. It attested to the capacity of the home to become an "everyday extension of national security and concerns" (Bird-David and Shapiro 2019, 213), with an ability to render military gains tangible in places distant from existing frontlines and contested territorial lines.¹¹

It also obfuscates the extent of traumatization and injury, shifting grieving families and disabled citizens to both physical and political peripheries. Not only are the state-sponsored apartment complexes located on the outskirts of Baku, but their allocation further reifies the status of martyr families and disabled war veterans as "politicized victim-heroes" (Açıksöz 2012, 9). It restructures the material-symbolic relationship between the state and potentially "volatile victim figures" (9), with domestication acting to ensure the integration and placation of those "at risk" of potential revolt or complaint. The celebratory tone of the "apartment-handover" events also often concealed the reality facing families who have experienced the loss of a breadwinner, individuals with newly acquired disabilities, and those traumatized by conflict (Najafizadeh 2013; Trupia 2017)—which, in Azerbaijan, often includes disenfranchisement, infantilization, discriminatory labor markets, and entrenched social stigmatization (Titterton and Smart 2019). Here, the home renders private aftermaths and repercussions that would otherwise be difficult to witness—whether post-traumatic stress disorder or other articulations of pain, distress, or psychological injury.

Disability rights activist Sanan stated that although the state has been making efforts to construct residential complexes, there is very little concern for the life inside it. He expressed his frustrations, stating that "whilst a roof is provided, the government is reluctant to tackle the widespread bureaucratic and administrative corruption happening in their own offices," which makes the lives of disabled individuals exceptionally difficult. Government workers are reluctant to deal with disabled individuals unless they "get a few manats slipped into their pockets." Unlike independently run centers (like Umkor's Rest and Labour Home for Young Disabled), where communal activities and courses for disabled individuals are regularly organized, the residential complexes have contributed to intensified feelings of loneliness, stasis, and segregation.

Nazim, a veteran disabled during the first Nagorno-Karabakh War, described the challenges of encountering his state-allocated home. The very materiality of the newly built apartments was a cause of irritation, with Nazim describing several "barriers"—steep stairs, which he found tiresome to navigate; thick concrete walls, which made his neighbors feel far away; and essential fittings at the wrong height. Beside material concerns, his grief felt "private" (Crociani-Windland and Hoggett 2012) as he had no one to talk to, nor any community events to look forward to. Whilst privacy has always been regarded as a crucial aspect of domesticity in Azerbaijan, with traditional architecture characterized by walled plots and interior courtyards (Roth 2020), Nazim found his surroundings "claustrophobic" for the first time in his life. In one of our interviews, he described feeling "forgotten" by his government, and only thought of during "military parades and public commemorations." He experienced loneliness and a lack of support, with the home environment feeling akin to a "storage unit...where you keep all the waste you have no use for anymore." Unlike the governmental rhetoric, which described the apartments as a salve (and reward) for suffering and service, for Nazim this housing felt like a matter of pragmatics—to keep "bothersome" members of the public out of the way.

It is important to note the gendered dynamics of both Azerbaijan's military culture as well as its welfare and housing policies (Rzayeva 2013). Whilst articles chronicling the state and army's organization of medical trips to Turkey (another militarized nation where disabled veterans supposedly receive miraculous treatments) still circulate in the media (Rehimov 2021), the brunt of the necessary work is undertaken by wives and daughters of ex-servicemen (Ismayilov and Fuad 2002; Ziemer 2018; Drožđek, Rodenburg, and Moyene-Jansen 2020). Many women take on additional part-time work or pick up loans to support their spouses, since the welfare support given to disabled individuals fails to add up to half the minimum amount required to survive (Mukhtarli 2014). The masculinization of the domestic is further exemplified by patrilineal bias present in Azeri housing, with men usually receiving ownership of a house or an apartment. Even during socialism, it was men who usually gained permanent and inheritable usage rights of urban dwellings (Roth 2019, which is still the case with veteran and martyr homes as ownership is allocated to ex-servicemen first and foremost, or to their male siblings.

The second example focuses on Azeri government's long-standing habit of commissioning apartments for military servicemen. After the passing of a 2011 presidential decree titled "on measures to strengthen social protection of servicemen of Azerbaijani Armed Forces," specially designated buildings began to be built across Baku, using taxpayer money. The apartments were usually launched with ministers, high-ranking military staff, and the press in tow. Unlike the strategies of obfuscation discussed above, the military apartments put soldiers and their families in full public display, leading to a saturation of militarism both in symbolic and spatial terms (Woodward 2005). An interlocutor, Samir, living in a raion, or district, with multiple servicemen apartments described the normalcy of seeing men dressed in full combat uniforms walking through the local supermarket, or military trucks arriving in the early morning hours to collect and drop off soldiers. The previously nondescript neighborhood seemingly turned into a garrison town (Bernazzoli and Flint 2010), with servicemen holding privileged status. Indeed, my interlocutor complained to me on multiple occasions of the preferential treatment given to those affiliated with the military, with police officers refusing to fine soldiers for parking in otherwise illegal spots or to reprimand them after noise complaints.

The sustained effort by the Azeri government to normalize militarism through its transfer into the domestic fold is also evident in the recently opened Military Trophy Park. Spanning five hectares, the park contains around three hundred exhibits that display a range of tanks, combat vehicles, artillery, anti-aircraft missile systems, small arms, and military vehicles. While the alleged purpose of the trophy park is to provide a recreational space for members of the public and to educate the country's "youth in the spirit of patriotism" (APA 2021), the entanglement of military artifacts with civic infrastructure tells a different story. Looking over photos taken by Azerbaijani media at the park's inauguration, I was struck by scenes of children playing amidst the helmets of dead Armenian soldiers and wax mannequins of disfigured Armenian troops. It was a moment that brought the mundane together with wartime propaganda, all in the context of a downtown park—a new ontology of dwelling within threat (Bird-David and Shapiro 2019). Through the mannequins and elaborately staged rooms, the enemy was literally internalized and brought into the residential neighborhood, albeit in a disarmed and degraded state.

Both examples attest to Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman's argument that militarism is a cultural system—shaped through "ideology and rhetoric, effected through bodies and technologies" (2019, S4). Militarism spreads through social and communal life via imagery, knowledge production, and infrastructure, creating a sense of familiarity through continual and sustained exposure. The effectiveness of this cultural system is only increased by its entanglement with the intimate and private—it latches onto the cultural, political, and social values already affiliated with domesticity and homemaking. Through the already evocative biography of the home, militarism finds a comfortable nook to proliferate and render itself even more inseparable from the everyday. To return to the previous example of the servicemen apartments (as well as those allocated to disabled veterans), it can be argued that the seemingly utopic residential space essentially rewrites the timeline of the military (Maguire and Low 2019, 19). Here, service doesn't end with injury, death, or disenfranchisement; rather, it turns into a domestic fever dream. The ultimate reward for obedience and the defense of the nation-state is state-sponsored housing in the heart of the capital city, with an array of symbolic and material privileges.

Unlike the domestic Cold War American underground bunker—which relies on the movement of happy families into subterranean spaces until danger passes and life renews above (Masco 2009)—in the post-victory space of Azerbaijan, militarization molds into the grooves set by domesticity. A co-existence is forged between states of armament, securitization, and a hopeful, future-oriented version of homemaking. Temporality, however, is beset by inequality. As my friend Aylin put it during a WhatsApp conversation a few months ago, "whilst the state rewards pro-government journalists and soldiers with brand new apartments, the rest of us are left with the task of cleaning up after decades of war...they get fancy monuments, processions, houses...whilst we get to pay more taxes, rebuild from the wreckage, and take care of brothers and sisters scarred by the battles...who lost homes, relatives, land." Through the inclusion of state-sponsored homes as a reward for service, domesticity becomes stratified according to one's political allegiances and investments.

Indeed, the grand openings, lavish boulevards, and ornate servicemen apartments are smokescreens, concealing deeply entrenched discrepancies when it comes to home ownership and the right to the city—including rising homelessness, intensifying gentrification, and the continued displacement of marginal populations. Around the downtown district of Khatai—a former industrial zone heavily populated by IDPs and other disenfranchised populations—the presence of military servicemen is thought of by many interviewed as representing yet another wave of gentrification. Mukhtar, Aylin's partner, and the son of an IDP from Agdam district, noted that the construction of a fourteen-storey residential building for servicemen in 2016 not only relied upon the demolition of a vibrant IDP settlement, but had subsequently increased rental prices throughout his neighborhood. The clearing away of former factories and makeshift settlements led to a notable demographic shift, attracting investors and white-collar workers, whilst moving lower-income populations to the outskirts of the capital. According to Mukhtar, the presence of military staff not only displaced populations but imposed a "stiff...orderly atmosphere...the feeling of always being under surveillance...of being a potential enemy if you don't swear allegiance to the state."

Local women experienced a more pronounced sense of psychological and spatial intrusion (Tohidi 1999; Najafizadeh 2003). A young student residing in a nearby (non-military) block of flats told me of the intense pressure she felt to remain as "invisible as possible." When pressed to elaborate, she explained that there has been a palpable shift in the atmosphere of the neighborhood, with servicemen often forming quasi-vigilante groups, monitoring behavior, and handing out impromptu, often arbitrary, penalties to those seen as causing offence—a loose category pertaining to anything from refusing to give up one's spot in a supermarket line to reacting negatively to catcalls. The young woman noted that she already had to obey her father and older brother; she did not need an "army of men" to also take note of and abide by. Even those who are integrated into the military complex as wives, widows, or other related kin are at risk of judgment and exclusion. One woman told me that she often worried she wasn't "grieving properly." Even though it had been more than two decades since her husband's death, she still felt self-conscious in her community—tight-knit and composed of mainly of military families. Indeed, a number of men who served with her husband lived proximally and often reminded her that a "woman's duty is to be eternally loyal."

These experiences are echoed by Narmin Shahmarzade, a feminist activist based in Baku, whose articles describe the lives of military wives and widows in the postwar context. Shahmarzade notes the reverence afforded to women affiliated with the military, as long as "they remain unquestioning, undemanding, and at peace" (2022, 1) with the traumas that they, and their families, experience as a result of war. She describes a culture of condemnation that utilizes shame and judgment as a source of communal togetherness. Indeed, women who decide to opt out—for example, by breaking off engagements with veterans or critiquing the military administration—are berated in person and on social media platforms.¹² The pressure placed on women to be staunch supporters of the military effort reveals an ideal of a post-conflict future firmly rooted in the re-inscription of gender roles and patriarchal power. Even the state's securitization efforts depend on a gendered division of labor, with the domestic sphere transformed into a home front to be defended from enemy influence.¹³

Whilst the militarization of the domestic attests to the capacity of the nation-state, and agents of national security, to occupy even the most intimate spaces of everyday life (Goldstein 2010), the domestication of war complicates the narrative. It reveals that the military-industrial complex is not an unchanging and monolithic thing, but one interwoven with how we live and who gets to live (González 2016). The next section will interrogate similar questions. However, they will be approached from the perspective of those allegedly "not at home —IDPs who have been residing in temporary, semi-legal, and/or ad hoc settlements in Baku for nearly three decades.

As a result of the first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, between 750,000 to a million ethnic Azerbaijanis were expelled from their homes in and around Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia (Najafizadeh 2013; de Waal 2018). As of December 2019, roughly 651,458 people retain status as either refugees or IDP (IDMC 2020) in Azerbaijan, with many still residing in dilapidated public buildings and ad-hoc settlements. The precarious living situation of IDPs is predominantly due to their temporary residence status, which prevents registration for both property rights and land tenure outside of Nagorno-Karabakh (IDMC 2010).¹⁴ Additionally, some IDP fear that registration of legal title would result in the loss of IDP status and associated benefits. The absence of proprietary relations to urban space reifies the commonly held belief that most IDPs associate the city with a sense of unhomeliness.

The position occupied by IDPs fixes the concept of the home to the originary homeland, which simultaneously legitimates military investment and a territorial mindset. The blurring between the home on the scale of the intimate and that of the national is evident in the colloquial Azerbaijani term for homeland, dede baba yurdu —meaning, "the home of one's grandfather." The term reflects the traditional Azeri belief that one's spiritual and ancestral ties are rooted to the earth itself, forging a direct relationship between displaced communities and the forests, mountains, and animals of Karabakh (Watts 2013). Such ties are reproduced in patrimonial fashion, further blurring the line between a primordial sense of homemaking and a masculine military culture. Indeed, both domesticity and militarism rely upon the establishment of proper male claim to land. Yusif, a soldier with familial roots in occupied Agdam province, said to me, "the homeland is a man's first and true home. He may build many houses all over the world, but his home will always be where his father was born and where he lived. It is a man's duty to protect this home before anything else, by any means necessary." This line of thinking is evident in government rhetoric, with Aliyev attesting to the primacy of Karabakh as "the land of our ancestors," which can only be reclaimed via the "professionalism, heroism, technical capacity, and sense of patriotism" of Azeri servicemen (President of the Republic of Azerbaijan 2021).

As part of a ceasefire agreement signed in 2020 , large swathes of territory in Nagorno-Karabakh are in the process of being returned to Azerbaijan. However, soldiers are finding that much of the recovered land is uninhabitable, with both parties responsible for unfurling a "carpet of land mines" that will take decades to identify and remove (Kuzio 2021). Ali, an IDP from Qubatli, described feeling "terrified" of seeing the scale of destruction firsthand: "to see houses looted and graves desecrated...in our minds our villages are frozen in time...they haven't changed for the decades we have been gone...to return and see it all changed...would completely destroy us." For Ali, returning to a home that no longer exists in a recognizable and familiar (or even inhabitable) form risks an entirely new form of traumatization. In the confines of memory, free of militarism and violence, the home of the past can remain.

Critiquing the necessity of return also allows for a more diverse conceptualization of domesticity, as well as an appreciation of the homes created in the makeshift settlements of Baku. For the IDPs I interviewed in the Black City, the informal and semi-legal nature of the settlements fostered feelings of "liberty" (azadlıq), freeing them from exhausting bureaucratic processes and lingering anxieties. Indeed, one will rarely encounter a resident in the settlement who pays property taxes. Water and electricity are regularly siphoned from networks, cloaked by thorny flora and the overflow of illegal arrangements. Government workers sent with eviction notices turn back in defeat, discouraged by barking stray dogs and the matting of camelthorn. There is a homemaking that occurs without bureaucratic intervention and supervision, where agency and resourcefulness coalesce. It is a far cry from depictions of the IDP population in state policy reports and media accounts as disempowered and passive.

In many ways, the decision made by IDPs to remain willingly and intentionally in a so-called wasteland forges a politically charged form of inhabitation. My friend Arzu, the daughter of an IDP from Agdam province, spoke of her makeshift home with fondness and pride. Her attachment to the domestic space was not one filtered through a sentiment of nationalism or patriotism, but an awareness of the "effort" and "work" entailed in its creation. She could see the labor and the love of her family in each "window frame hammered together" or "sheet of scrap metal" collected to assemble her bedroom. Since the family house was constructed entirely with the use of found material, and without the assistance of a construction crew or developers, an intimate signature was inscribed into every nook and cranny. It wasn't a home dependent on the campaigns of a hypermasculine military, nor the funding of a semi-authoritarian state. Instead, it was quietly assembled from the debris of post-extraction, capable of still yielding purpose and use. The makeshift construction disrupted the relationship between the maintenance of territorial integrity and the process of homemaking; one did not need to fight to earn the right to inhabit. Instead, values of resourcefulness and an attentiveness were prioritized. The value system of many IDPs centered upon a sense of "hereness" rather than a nationalistic turn towards an idealized former homeland.

During my time in the Black City, I was privy to several emergent counter-movements, which seemed responsive to the peripherality of the space and the sense of non-representation in mainstream housing policy. While some of the younger residents living in the settlement expressed support for both the military and nation-state, there was a sense of productive opposition, particularly among second generation IDPs. Alongside contesting traditional forms of homemaking, younger IDPs had a habit of questioning other conventions of society, particularly those pertaining to early marriage and conservative family models. According to Arzu, there was growing skepticism surrounding the necessity of armament and the amount of state resources invested in defense.

For IDPs like Arzu there was also growing doubt around the homogeneity of Armenian populations. Indeed, for Arzu, respecting one's home was equated with respecting one's neighbor. Throughout our conversations, there was a sense that homeliness relied upon forging good relations with the "other" or those deemed to be the "enemy." One couldn't feel at home without expanding the sphere of consideration beyond kin or nation-state, to those deemed to be outside of it. Being a good host, for Arzu, was a central tenet to homemaking and home-keeping. These values were echoed by Mohammed, the son of another IDP from Agdam, who added that hospitality was central to Azeri culture, more so than "the military might," rendering the animosity felt towards Armenians as "strange and, ultimately, paradoxical."

The un-fixedness of IDP domesticity—the fact that it often bears no paper trail, nor does it conjure nationalistic attachments to land and soil—seems to be the quality that elicits the greatest apprehension from the state. On both a practical and an ideological level, it has the capacity to cause problems for bureaucracy. Amidst the logistical chaos of the first exodus of IDPs from Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s, state and private companies often neglected to check the legal status of properties, allowing residents to forge "shadow" infrastructures—linking their makeshift homes to existing electrical grids and water lines. Wires, pipes, and necessary tools were shared among neighbors, as the wastelands generously yielded scarce resources. The commoning of materials harked back to a socialist "economy of favours" (Ledeneva 1998, 2), within which informal practices and informal relationships functioned as integral components in the upkeep of economic, political, and everyday relations (Sayfutdinova 2015).

In the contemporary context, such relations jeopardize the monopoly of the state on housing, infrastructure, and governance, inviting alternate ways to inhabit the industrial zones of Baku (Safiyev 2015). The economy of favors amongst IDPs has led many to reject the monetization of resources and a dependence on municipal services. Furthermore, it has created a fracture between the IDP community and the rest of the nation-state, rendering the makeshift settlement a space apart, with its own systems, beliefs, and values. This split is particularly risky for the Azeri state, which aims ultimately to impose its militaristic ideology on all spheres of social and political life. The makeshift settlements foster the emergence of an IDP identity not bound to victimhood or military allegiance. Rather than being casualties or children of war, IDPs emerge as resourceful inhabitants of post-extractive spaces, capable of establishing stable communities in informal and often difficult environments.

From a militarism defined by both home and homeland, we find ourselves in the makeshift living rooms of the Black City, decorated with Karabakh kilims and lined with metal panels salvaged from regional armories. Yet, even amid an atmosphere of armament, securitization, and hostility, the home asserts itself as a space of potential otherwise. There is something malleable about the act of inhabitation, reflecting its roots in the Latin word inhabitare, "to dwell in." Much like inhabitation, dwelling can happen within a thought, a concept, a possibility. It is as cerebral as it is material. Speculative as much as it is rooted. Servicemen, veterans, widowed families, and IDPs all dwell differently—their habits of homemaking shaping as much as reflecting the rest of the urban fabric. Despite the aggression, ambitiousness, and reach of the state's housing-based military strategy, fissures and failures remain. Whether Nazim's dissatisfying experiences of living in state-allocated housing for disabled veterans, or Arzu's moments of quotidian rebellion, I found individuals eager to defy the spatial logics of the military state. Since my departure from Baku, key alliances have formed between different populations in the name of a homeland organized around care and hospitality. From youth rallies designed to stave off demolitions (like the rescue of the pre-Soviet Molokan Temple in downtown Baku so that it can be used as a cinema), or the efforts of grassroots architectural collectives like PILLƏ, individuals have come together to imagine life not merely after conflict but in spite of it. Whilst for some, the home functions as an extension of territorial lines, for others it is a line of flight. There are deviations in narrative that subvert the tightly regulated language of housing policy and state-sponsored articles, repurposing words and properties associated with war into the very materials through which peace can be built.

¹ The respective housing models were selected due to their prevalence in the media landscape, and their connection to the military. During my time in Baku, popular news outlets (like the Azerbaijan State News Agency and AzerNews), were littered with articles celebrating project completions, move-ins, and house tours sponsored by the military.

² Since IDPs are expected to eventually return to Nagorno-Karabakh, those who receive state-sponsored housing are denied ownership rights (UNHCR 2009). The houses provided by the state often have "sinking foundations, poor plumbing, and/or leaky roofs" (International Crisis Group 2012), further discouraging permanent settlement.

³ This article stems from a larger project examining the expansion of military infrastructure, strategy, and culture into "non-military" spaces—including parks, promenades, arboretums, and agricultural land.

⁴ The fracturing of the Soviet peripheries was further exacerbated by a series of historical publications exposing the impact of nineteenth-century territorial engineering and imperial interference (Muth 2014; Saparov 2022).

⁵ There was relative peace until the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, which saw Azerbaijan regain control over 5 cities, 4 towns, and 286 villages in Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as most Armenian-occupied territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh (Nikolić 2021).

⁶ There is a commonplace understanding of conflict as both national and personal. Every individual spoken to during my time in Baku had ties to Karabakh. One interviewee surmised this best by saying, "we are all related to the Karabakh somehow...we built our republic on a warzone."

⁷ This multiscalar quality is also reflected in linguistic conceptualizations of the home within Azeri culture. Ev, from the Proto-Turkic eb (dwelling place) refers to both the home, as a conceptual unit, and the house, as a structural term encompassing materials, techniques of construction, and spatial organization. The two terms are further entangled by their role in social reproduction, demonstrated by the verb evlənmək, literally meaning "to become enhoused" as well as "to marry." It draws the domestic structure into a familial assemblage of kin groups, new households, and social bonds, with enclosure assuring the transference of historical and cultural lineage (Roth 2020).

⁸ A similar double meaning is found in the Azeri word for homeland, vətən, which derives from the Arabic وطن (waṭan), referring to both the process of choosing and settling in a particular place, as well as the accustoming of one's spirit to something or someone.

⁹ It should be noted that the use of the domestic to capture at-risk populations (Bahloul 1996, 28; Waterson 1990, 1995) precedes the war in Azerbaijan. Through a socialist system of "bureaucratic allocation," the Azeri state was granted complete control over the distribution, management, and monitoring of domestic spaces—achieved through routine inspections, strict housing codes, and municipal recordkeeping (Valiyev 2013). Through these strategies, the Soviet state sought to "make use of the materiality of dwelling to produce new social forms and moral values" (Humphrey 2005, 39-40).

¹¹ In his speech, Aliyev collapsed the topic of housing provisions with reforms intended to forge "a more agile, more combatant and more capable army" (APA 2021).

¹² A notable example of this public condemnation was the treatment of Samaya Hashimova, the mother of the deceased General Polad Hashimov, who was severely criticized when she questioned her son's death ("Slain General's Mother," 2022).

¹³ The reinforcement of gendered labour within military cultures has been examined in detail by Cecilia Åse and Maria Wendt in Gendering Military Sacrifice (2019).

¹⁴ Many argue that the convoluted process of attaining permanent resident status contributes to the state's plan to repopulate the contested territories, with IDPs as "political pawns" (Refugees International 2002).

Açıksöz, Salih Can. 2012. "Sacrificial Limbs of Sovereignty: Disabled Veterans, Masculinity, and Nationalist Politics in Turkey." Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26 (1): 4-25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41409639.

Aharoni, Sarai B., Amalia Sa'ar, and Alisa C. Lewin. 2021. "Security as Care: Communitarianism, Social Reproduction and Gender in Southern Israel." Feminist Theory 23 (4): 444-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/146470012110236.

Altstadt, Audrey. 2017. Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan. New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Columbia University Press.

Åse, Cecelia, and Maria Wendt, eds. 2019. Gendering Military Sacrifice: A Feminist Comparative Analysis. New York: Routledge.

Askerov, Ali. 2020. "The Nagorno Karabakh Conflict." In Post-Soviet Conflicts: The Thirty Years' Crisis, edited by Ali Askerov, Stefan Brooks, and Lasha Tchantouridze, 55-82. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Bahloul, Joëlle. 1996. The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Balikci, Asen. 2004. IDPs in Baku: A Qualitative Approach. Report prepared for World Bank.

Bernazzoli, Richelle M., and Colin Flint. 2010. "Embodying the Garrison State? Everyday Geographies of Militarization in American Society." Political Geography 29, (3): 157-66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.02.014.

Bird-David, Nurit, and Matan Shapiro. 2019. "Domesticating Spaces of Security in Israel." In Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control, edited by Setha Low and Mark Maguire, 163-283. New York: NYU Press.

Cohn, Carol. 1987. "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (4): 687-718. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174209.

Crociani-Windland, Lita, and Paul Hoggett. 2012. "Politics and Affect." Subjectivity 5 (2): 161-79. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.1.

Drožđek, Boris, Jan Rodenburg, and Agnes Moyene-Jansen. 2020. "'Hidden' and Diverse Long-Term Impacts of Exposure to War and Violence." Frontiers in Psychiatry 10 (975): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00975.

Fluri, Jennifer L. 2014. "States of (In)security: Corporeal Geographies and the Elsewhere War." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (5): 795-814. https://doi.org/10.1068/d13004p.

Garagozov, Rauf. 2016. "Painful Collective Memory: Measuring Collective Memory Affect in the Karabakh Conflict." Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 22 (1): 28-35. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/pac0000149.

Gasparyan, Arsen. 2019. "Understanding the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Domestic Politics and Twenty-Five Years of Fruitless Negotiations 1994-2018." Caucasus Survey 7 (3): 235-50. https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1674114.

Geukjian, Ohannes. 2016. Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the South Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Legacy of Soviet Nationalities Policy. New York: Routledge.

Giles, Wenona, and Jennifer Hyndman. 2004. "Introduction: Gender and Conflict in a Global Context." In Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, edited by Wenona Giles, 2-23. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520230729.003.0001.

Goldstein, Daniel M. 2010. "Toward a Critical Anthropology of Security." Current Anthropology 51 (4): 487-517. https://doi.org/10.1086/655393.

González, Roberto J. 2016. Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State. New York: Routledge.

Gureyeva-Aliyeva, Yulia, and Tabib Huseynov. 2011. "Can You Be an IDP for Twenty Years?": A Comparative Field Study on the Protection Needs and Attitudes toward Displacement among IDPs and Host Communities in Azerbaijan. Brookings Institution-London School of Economics Project on Internal Displacement. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/12_idp_host_communities_azerbaijan.pdf.

Gusterson, Hugh, and Catherine Besteman. 2019. "Cultures of Militarism: An Introduction to Supplement 19." Current Anthropology 60 (S19): S3-S14. https://doi.org/10.1086/700648.

Humphrey, Caroline. 2005. "Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (1): 39-58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2005.00225..

Hyde, Alexandra. 2017. "The Civilian Wives of Military Personnel: Mobile Subjects or Agents of Militarisation?" In The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military, edited by Rachel Woodward and Claire Duncanson, 195-209. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hyndman, Jennifer. 2004. "Mind the Gap: Bridging Feminist and Political Geography through Geopolitics." Political Geography 23 (3): 307-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2003.12.014.

Lea, Tess. 2020. Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ledeneva, Alena. 1998. Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maguire, Mark, and Setha Low. 2019. "Introduction: Exploring Spaces of Security." In Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control, edited by Setha Low and Mark Maguire, 1-30. New York: NYU Press.

Mamadaliev, Anvar M. 2020. "Military Propaganda around the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War: Official Materials of Armenia and Azerbaijan Defense Ministries (as Illustrated by the First Day of the Conflict-September 27, 2020)." Propaganda in the World and Local Conflicts 7 (1): 29-40.

Massaro, Vanessa A., and Jill Williams. 2013. "Feminist Geopolitics." Geography Compass 7 (8): 567-77. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12054.

Mirzeler, Mustafa Kemal, and Agshin Jafarov. 2012. "The Memory of Loss: Voices of Azeri Storytellers from Nagorno Karabakh." Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 32 (2): 253-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2012.694669.

Muth, Sebastian. 2014. "War, Language Removal and Self-identification in the Linguistic Landscapes of Nagorno-Karabakh." Nationalities Papers 42(1): 63-87. https://doi:10.1080/00905992.2013.856394.

Najafizadeh, Mehrangiz. 2003. "Women's Empowering Carework in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan." Gender & Society 17 (2): 293-304. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594693.

Najafizadeh, Mehrangiz. 2013. "Ethnic Conflict and Forced Displacement: Narratives of Azeri IDP and Refugee Women from the Nagorno-Karabakh War." Journal of International Women's Studies 14 (1): 161-83. https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol14/iss1/10.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Nikolić, Aleksa 2021. "Nagorno-Karabakh in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights." Medjunarodni Problemi 73 (1): 106-23. https://doi.org/10.2298/MEDJP2101106N.

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. 2021. "Ilham Aliyev Attended the Ceremony to Give Out Apartments and Cars to Families of Martyrs and War Disabled in the Khojasan Settlement." News release. July 14, 2021. https://president.az/en/articles/view/52446.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Roth, Sascha. 2019. "Ideologies and Informality in Urban Infrastructure: The Case of Housing in Soviet and Post-Soviet Baku." In Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures, edited by Tauri Tuvikene, Wladimir Sgibnev, and Carola S. Neugebauer, 54-71. London: Routledge.

Roth, Sascha. 2020. "Curtains, Cars, and Privacy: Experiences of Dwelling and Home-Making in Azerbaijan." In Home: Ethnographic Encounters, edited by Johannes Lenhard and Farhan Samanani, 45-57. New York: Routledge.

Rzayeva, Sara. 2013. "Oil and Health Care in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan." European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 54 (1): 33-63. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975613000027.

Safiyev, Rail. 2015. "Informality in a Neopatrimonial State: Azerbaijan." In State and Legal Practice in the Caucasus: Anthropological Perspectives on Law and Politics, edited by Stéphane Voell and Iwona Kaliszewska, 133-148. Farnham: Ashgate.

Saparov, Arsène. 2022."Place-name Wars in Karabakh: Russian Imperial Maps and Political Legitimacy in the Caucasus." Central Asian Survey: 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2022.2085664.

Sayfutdinova, Leyla. 2015. "Negotiating Welfare with the Informalizing State: Formal and Informal Practices among Engineers in post-Soviet Azerbaijan." Journal of Eurasian Studies 6 (1): 24-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euras.2014.08.002.

Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright, eds. 1997. Anthropology of Policy: Perspectives on Governance and Power. London: Routledge.

Staeheli, Lynn, Eleonore Kofman, and Linda Peake, eds. 2004. Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography. London: Psychology Press.

Titterton, Mike, and Helen Smart. 2019. "Improving Inclusion and Access for People with Disability in the Causasus: The Case of Azerbaijan." In Inclusion, Equity and Access for Individuals with Disabilities, edited by Santoshi Halder and Vassilios Argyropoulos, 201-22. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tohidi, Nayereh. 1999. "'Guardians of the Nation': Women, Islam and the Soviet Legacy of Modernization in Azerbaijan." Journal of Azerbaijani Studies, 63-94.

Trupia, Francesco. 2017. "Unfreezing the 'Other': Collective Trauma and Psychological Warfare over the Nagorno-Karabakh Rivalry." Journal of Liberty and International Affairs 2 (3): 30-44. https://e-jlia.com/index.php/jlia/article/view/74.

Tyner, James, and Samuel Henkin. 2015. "Feminist Geopolitics, Everyday Death, and the Emotional Geographies of Dang Thuy Tram." Gender, Place & Culture 22 (2): 288-303. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2013.879109.

Van Heese, Marja. 2018. "The War over Nagorno-Karabakh and Its Lasting Effects on Cultural Heritage." In Cultural Contestation: Heritage, Identity, and the Role of Government, edited by Jeroen Rodenberg and Pieter Wagenaar, 177-96. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Waterson, Roxana. 1990. The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

Waterson, Roxana. 1995. "Houses, Graves and the Limits of Kinship Groupings among the Sa'dan Toraja." Bijdragen tot de taal-, land-en volkenkunde 151 (2): 194-217. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-90003046.

Watts, Vanessa. 2013. "Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!)." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (1). https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/19145.

Wilson, Lee, and Laurens Bakker. 2016. "Cutting Off the King's Head: Security and Normative Order beyond the State." Conflict, Security & Development 16 (4): 289-300. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2016.1200311.

Woodward, Rachel. 2005. "From Military Geography to Militarism's Geographies: Disciplinary Engagements with the Geographies of Militarism and Military Activities." Progress in Human Geography 29 (6): 718-40. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph579oa.

Ziemer, Ulrike. 2018. "'The Waiting and Not Knowing Can Be Agonizing': Tracing the Power of Emotions in a Prolonged Conflict in the South Caucasus." International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (3): 331-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1480900.

Zsuzsanna Ihar is a PhD candidate and Gates scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in researching garrison towns, disused army bases, reclaimed conservation areas, as well as former military trial sites. She recently published a chapter titled "Multispecies Mediations in a Post-Extractive Zone" in The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022).