Knowledges that Cannot Be Known: Structuring Azerbaijani Attachment to Nagorno-Karabakh

Abstract How do people form durable cognitive and affective bonds to state territories? How do these place attachments become rigid? I argue that territorial attachments rest on what social epistemologists call structural ignorance — background knowledge and cognitive mechanisms that filter out discomforting narratives to preserve a dominant view. As the state structures ignorance and as people reproduce it, certain knowledges — the nation’s artificialness and the past presence/ongoing oppression of non-core groups inhabiting the state’s territory — cannot be known, lest people’s cognitive environment and sense of self be disrupted. As structured ignorance becomes entrenched, territorial attachments rigidify. I shed light on the territorializing practices-structured ignorance-rigid attachments mechanism through the case of Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Through discourse analysis and practice tracing, I find that as the Azerbaijani state structured ignorance during the Soviet era about the symbolic significance of Nagorno-Karabakh and the erasure of ethnic Armenians, territorial attachments grew. I then show how the 1988–1994 war over Nagorno-Karabakh and practices leading to the 2020 War entrenched the structure and rigidified attachments. Uncovering the structure of ignorance and the attachments it prescribes reveals new ramifications of nation-building and one of the facets of intractable conflicts.