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This book draws on a wealth of publications on Azerbaijan, ranging from news reports and articles in academic and policy journals to books. These sources are cited in the endnotes to the text. In place of simply replicating these references in a bibliography, this short bibliographic note aims to provide the reader with a guide to appropriate sources on Azerbaijan in the English language. The sources available are widely spread out; there are few book-length studies of Azerbaijan, and only a limited number of book chapters and academic articles on the country. Therefore, readers seeking further analysis on a particular subject will often need to consult a variety of sources.
A number of guidebooks are available on Azerbaijan. The best is Mark Elliott’s Azerbaijan with Excursions to Georgia, published by Trailblazer press. The guidebook is richly illustrated with the author’s own hand-drawn maps, provides much detail and useful suggestions for travelers both to Baku and the outlying regions of the country. A fourth edition was published in 2010.
Those seeking news and analysis of current events in Azerbaijan can consult several sources. This author is editor of the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst (www.cacianalyst.org), which publishes biweekly analyses and field reports on the region. The Jamestown Foundation (jamestown.org) publishes the Eurasia Daily Monitor, which features regular updates on Azerbaijan. So does the Open Society Institute’s Eurasianet.org website, as well as a numer of Baku-based news agencies and internet portals including today.az, news.az and Trend.
The best literary introduction to the Caucasus and Azerbaijan is a novel, Ali and Nino, by Kurban Said, originally published in 1938. It is available in many editions and translations. Set in early twentieth century Baku, this geopolitical love story between an Azerbaijani boy and Georgian girl of noble origins captures the essence of the Caucasus in a way unsurpassed by subsequent works, and holds relevance to this day. The mystique and debate surrounding the authorship of the novel only adds interest to the book.
On the history of Azerbaijan, the work of Polish-American historian Tadeusz Swietochowski stands out. The most accomplished scholar writing on Azerbaijan’s history, Swietochowski is the author of numerous articles but especially two books: Russian Azerbaijan 1905–1920: The Shaping of National Identity in a Muslim Community (Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition (Columbia University Press, 1995). He also co-authored, with Brian Collins, the Historical Dictionary of Azerbaijan, published by Scarecrow Press in 1999. In 2011, his Azerbaijan: Legacies of the Past and the Trials of Independence is scheduled to be published by Routledge. To this should be added Audrey Altstadt’s major history of Azerbaijan, The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity Under Russian Rule (Hoover Institution Press, 1992), whose publication coincided with the emergence of independent Azerbaijan, and which provides a detailed overview not least of the Soviet era in Azerbaijan. A valuable study of the emergence of the first Azerbaijani republic in 1918 is Firuz Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia, 1917–21 (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951, reprinted in 2008 by Anglo-Caspian press).
Readers interested in an Azerbaijani perspective of the country’s history can consult several works. The memoirs of Naki Keykurun, an Azerbaijani nationalist forced into exile following the Bolshevik revolution, The Memoirs of the National Liberation Movement in Azerbaijan, were published in 1998 by the Azerbaijan Society of America. Historian Yaqub Mahmudlu’s Azerbaijan: Short History of Statehood has been made available to English-speakers through a translation published in Pakistan (Leaf publiccations, and available on the website of Azerbaijan’s embassy in Pakistan (www.azembassy.com.pk). Two Azerbaijani scholars turned parliamentarians also deserve mention. Nasib Nassibli’s pioneering work on the 1918-20 period has unfortunately not been translated into English. However, English-speakers can now consult Jamil Hasanli’s work, At the Dawn of the Cold War: The Soviet-American Crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan, 1941–1946 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
There are unfortunately few book-length studies of post-Soviet Azerbaijan. A work that stands out is the unique eyewitness document by the American journalist, adventurer and scholar Thomas Goltz, who found himself living through the war-torn emergence of this country. His first-person account was published by this book’s publishers, M.E. Sharpe, in 1998 as Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn Post-Soviet Republic. In 2000, Curzon Press published journalist Charles van der Leeuw’s Azerbaijan: A Quest for Identity. It is an often entertaining overview of Azerbaijan’s recent history, but would have required a more rigorous fact-checking before publication, as it is riddled by factual errors.
On Iranian Azerbaijan, however, there is a growing body of literature, most notably represented by Brenda Shaffer’s Borders and Brethren: Iran and the Challenge of Azerbaijani Identity (MIT Press, 2002).
Several volumes have been published on Azerbaijan’s economy and society. No coverage of Azerbaijan’s economy compares with the long and detailed studies conducted by World Bank experts, and made available at the Bank’s website. Azerbaijan is also prominently featured in The Economics and Politics of Oil in the Caspian Basin: The Redistribution of Oil Revenues in Azerbaijan and Central Asia, edited by Boris Najman, Richard Pomfret, and Gaël Raballand. The energy industry and its impact is the subject of several studies, including The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline: Oil Window to the West, edited by S. Frederick Starr and the present author, and Norwegian scholar Daniel Heradstveit’s Democracy and Oil: The Case of Azerbaijan (Reichert Verlag, 2007) Thanks to Norway’s energy ties with Azerbaijan, some of the best work on the country has been conducted by scholars connected to Norway’s international affairs institute (NUPI), including Heradstveit, Julie Wilhelmsen, Kari Strømmen, Indra Øverland, and Stina Torjesen.
Azerbaijan’s politics and foreign policy have been the subject of numerous short articles, primarily published in policy journals, but few deep analytical studies. Many of these are referenced in the endnotes to the relevant chapters in this volume. Studies of Azerbaijan’s politics tend to be written more from the perspective of identifying and publicizing deficits in democratization than seeking to understand the workings of the political system. In this vein, Freedom House’s Nations in Transit series, which features yearly reports on Azerbaijan, is probably the most useful. As for Azerbaijan’s foreign relations, the bulk of the literature is regional, concerning the geopolitics of the Caucasus, and has a strong tendency to view the small, local states as objects rather than subjects of foreign relations. A few articles have recently been published putting Azerbaijan’s own foreign policy in focus, such as Nazrin Mehdiyeva’s “Azerbaijan and Its Foreign Policy Dilemma” (Asian Affairs, November 2003) and Pınar Ipek’s “Azerbaijan’s Foreign Policy and Challenges for Energy Security” (Middle East Journal, Summer 2009). The prolific writings of young Azerbaijani scholars Fariz Ismailzade, Taleh Ziyadov, Tabib Huseynov and Anar Valiyev also deserve mention in this regard.
Two subjects feature most prominently among scholarly interest in Azerbaijani society: the role of Islam and the position of women. The role of Islam has attracted the interest of many scholars, not least German scholar of religion Raoul Motika, who nevertheless publishes mainly in German. In English, notable works include Arif Yunusov’s Islam in Azerbaijan, published by the Friedrich Ebert foundation in 2004, and Sofie Bedford’s Islamic Activism in Azerbaijan: Repression and Mobilization in a Post-Soviet Context (Stockholm University, 2009). Gender relations in Azerbaijan is the subject of one of few monographs on the country: Ferideh Heyat’s Azeri Women in Transition: Women in Soviet and Post-Soviet Azerbaijan (Routledge, 2002).
Given the outsize impact of the Karabakh conflict on Azerbaijan and the region, the conflict is the subject of a large portion of published literature on the country. Background on the conflict can be found in Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (New York University Press, 2003); and Michael P. Croissant, The Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict: Causes and Implications (Praeger, 1998). Other useful sources include David D. Laitin and Ronald Grigor Suny,“Armenia and Azerbaijan: Thinking a Way out of Karabakh,” Middle East Policy 7, no. 1 (1999): 145–76; and Dov Lynch, Engaging Eurasia’s Separatist States: Unresolved Conflicts and De Facto States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2004). This author’s contributions include The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict (Uppsala University, Department of East European Studies, 1999, available online) and pp. 61-141 in Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus (Curzon Press, 2001).
This bibliographic note does not aspire to be exhaustive, and makes no claim to include all the numerous valuable writings on Azerbaijan that have appeared – for this, the reader is urged to consult the endnotes to this book. Nor does this author necessarily agree with the arguments made in the works cited in this note. Nevertheless, it should serve as a guide for further reading.
