Discursive-technical landscaping and policing the body (politic) in Azerbaijan: a case study of Talysh activists

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Azerbaijan, there exists a common practice of ‘policing the body’ to better police the discursive-technical landscape. Activists in Azerbaijan are frequently forcibly and opaquely detained, incarcerated, surveilled within public as well as private spaces, and are commonly made to suffer bodily harm whilst in custody. Policing the individual body in this way allows for officials in Azerbaijan to better control the narratives offered up for public consumption both within and outside of the country’s political borders. Policing the individual body, then, effectively allows for the policing and/or sanitising of the territorialized body politic and its symbolic representations ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’. Inspired by Anssi Paasi and Michel Foucault, the author develops and examines the utility of the concept of ‘discursive-technical landscaping’, using the lesser-known, lesser-studied case of the policing of Talysh minority activists’ bodies in Azerbaijan as an illustrative example. Discussion of the bodily policing of Talysh activists helps to illustrate the far-reaching, multi-scalar, power-laden, and elite-driven nature of discursive-technical landscapes across space and time.