Suspending the antagonism: situated agonistic peace in a border bazaar

This article aims to understand how local communities affected by protracted conflicts could maintain a capacity for agonistic interactions in their everyday encounters on the margins of the hegemonic control of conflict-inducing narratives. The article analyses the Sadakhlo bazaar on the border between Georgia and Armenia as a possible example of such interactions. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was the setting for daily encounters of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, whose ethnonational identity narratives have been polarised and heavily securitised due to the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict. The authors suggest that the bazaar in this case appeared as a concrete space of embodied practices of thin recognition of the otherwise antagonised other where the antagonism was not contested but suspended. The article conceptualises the bazaar as a local site of situated agonistic peace by undertaking a critical assessment of theoretical calls concerning the ‘ontological security dilemma’ and ‘transformative power’ of mundane experiences.