ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to reveal a few trends in the interaction between religious, national, and ethnic identities as these trends can be applied to an understanding of current developments in the South Caucasus. It describes scholarship on identities that has undergone, in reaction to a profound restructuring of both Western societies and Western epistemologies, a deep shift towards, basically, a postmodern washing-out of old-style solid concepts such as ethnicity, nationality, and religion. The chapter distinguishes between three co-related foci: societal transformations; identity-formation as a response to these transformations; and academic/scholarly perceptions. The de-essentialization has affected nation, ethnicity, and religion. The rise of religious ethno-nationalism in the era of global mixtures and relativity came as a surprise and it was something that went against the dominant academic preconceptions. The one single and most crucial factor that was cardinal to the explosion of religious and ethno-national identities in the South Caucasus was the ambiguous legacy of the Soviet Union.
