Joshua Kucera

An Armenian Tragedy - Slate

I have a new dispatch on Slate from Armenia:

I had come to Armenia at one of the most difficult times in the nation’s history, and it was about to get worse. On Sept. 27, Azerbaijan had launched a full-scale offensive in order to recapture Karabakh, an enclave within its territory that it lost to Armenians nearly three decades earlier.

By the time I got there, about a month into the war, Armenia was losing. The individual human cost was visible here at the refugee center, in the stories of people who had had to flee their homes ahead of the advancing Azerbaijani forces. If Azerbaijanis managed to take all of Karabakh, the territory’s entire population of 150,000 residents—virtually all ethnic Armenians —would likely become refugees.

But the loss was also being experienced at a different level among Armenians, at a national and existential scale. For Armenians, Karabakh is an integral part of their national identity. One common formulation has it that the nation is a “trinity,” consisting of the country of Armenia, Karabakh, and the large global Armenian diaspora.

Armenia had won control of Karabakh in a previous war with Azerbaijan, in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. That war had ended in a cease-fire but not a peace treaty, and Karabakh is still internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory. Armenians didn’t see it that way, though. “There is no Armenia without Karabakh,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in one wartime address to the nation.

Read the whole thing here.

Letter from Chernobyl - Los Angeles Review of Books

I have a new dispatch from Chernobyl on "dark tourism" in the post-Soviet space. 

Chernobyl is becoming a fixture on the emerging global Grand Tour of crazy places, often grouped under rubrics like “dark tourism” or “disaster tourism.” Dark tourism, according to a recent academic volume on the subject, “has existed in practice, though not in name, for as long as people have travelled.” Historian Daniel Boorstin claimed that the first-ever guided tour in England, in 1838, was an organized train trip to see a public execution.

Nevertheless, dark tourism is having a bit of a moment. 2018 saw the release of the 768-page Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, the definitive reference text for this emerging academic field. And a newly released Netflix series, Dark Tourist, brings the phenomenon to armchair travelers. In the series’s introductory episode, the host defines dark tourism as “a global phenomenon where people avoid the ordinary and instead head for holidays in war zones, disaster sites, and other offbeat destinations.” It seems to be a good fit for these “everything is terrible” times.

Read the whole thing here. 

 

The End of Europe - Slate/Roads & Kingdoms

I have a new project that's just been published, a series of dispatches from along the border between Europe and Asia, exploring how the border got to be where it is and the ongoing debates about what and where Europe and Asia really are.

It's published in four installments, jointly on Slate and Roads & Kingdoms, and covers Turkey; the Black Sea and Georgia; Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, and Kazakhstan; and Russia. And it was sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. This, roughly, is what I was exploring: The border between Europe and Asia, unlike the other continental boundaries, has no scientific basis. There are no tectonic plates that meet around the Bosphorus or the Black Sea or anywhere else on this imagined line. By the time the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it in the fifth century B.C., the origins of the continental borders were already obscure and struck him as arbitrary. “I cannot conceive why three names [Asia, Europe, and Africa], and women’s names especially, should ever have been given to a tract which is in reality one,” he wrote, “nor can I even say who gave the three tracts their names, or whence they took the epithets.” And yet the border defined by the ancient Greeks—from the Bosphorus across the Black Sea, along the Caucasus isthmus and up through Russia to the Arctic Ocean—remains pretty close to the line we use today. For the ancient Greeks, the distinction between Europe and Asia had no political or cultural significance; they meant nothing more by it than “to this side of Greece” and “to that side of Greece.” In the intervening millennia, however, the division between Europe and Asia has accrued layers upon layers of meanings and stereotypes. In the Middle Ages, it became the difference between Christians and heathens. The Enlightenment brought the idea of reason, which was supposed to be the unique property of Europe, as well as notions of enlightened versus despotic rule, which were thought to be European and Asian attributes, respectively. In the 19th century, this distinction became a racial one, with the idea that the Western world, via European colonization, was fated to rule over the benighted East. This transitioned into the geopolitical divide of the Cold War, when the “West” came to mean democracy and the “East” communism and tyranny, connotations that persist today in the promotion of human rights—that is, “Western values”—around the world. As this global history of us-vs.-them progressed, something strange happened to the Europe-Asia border. The borders of a political, cultural “Europe” or “West” shifted to coincide more and more precisely with the Greeks’ arbitrary geographic border between Europe and Asia. In the Middle Ages, Christianity and a European identity spread through formerly pagan territories of Scandinavia and the Baltics. Christian forces reconquered Muslim Spain and Sicily and the Ottoman Empire gradually lost its European possessions in the Balkans. Various Muslim peoples settled around the Ural Mountains, and were then conquered by Russians. The post-WWI population transfers between Turkey and Greece made the Aegean Sea and the Bosphorus a much harder “East-West” boundary than it had ever been before.

And there's much more. You can find the whole series on Slate here, and the four individual dispatches on Roads & Kingdoms from Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan/Kazakhstan, and Russia.

Where exactly does East meet West? - PRI's The World

I spoke with PRI's The World about my project for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on the border between Europe and Asia:

Herodotus wrote about the border but said he didn't even know why the continents divided this territory — a territory that was obviously one unitary land mass, and to the ancient Greeks, there really wasn't any meaning to Europe and Asia. They were just purely geographical terms.

Of course today, that's no longer the case. When you say Europe, all sorts of cultural, political, and geopolitical associations come along with that — even more so when you talk about the West, which people often use interchangeably with Europe.

Associations with "the West" include things like civilization, enlightenment, democracy, individualism, and materialism — while "Asia" or "the East" has been associated with the opposite of all those things.

The thing that's most interesting to me is that these countries along this artificial, geographical border are exactly those where you have some of the most profound and serious debates about national identity: Where do we fit? Are we European? Are we Western? Are we Eastern?

Plenty more to come...