Political Geography 80 (2020) 102177 Available online 7 March 2020 0962-6298/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. The arc of autonomy in Georgia’s Ajara Edward C. Holland a, * , Carl T. Dahlman b , Michael Browne c a Department of Geosciences, University of Arkansas, 340 N. Campus Drive, 216 Gearhart Hall, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, USA b Miami University, USA c Independent Scholar, USA A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Autonomy Ajara Georgia Territory Spatial fx ABSTRACT Drawing on the case study of Georgia’s Ajara region, this paper makes the argument for foregrounding autonomy as a strategy used by states for managing diverse territories. Particularly salient to the concept of autonomy is its fexibility as a spatial fx, one which can be variously deployed depending on the form of political relations between center and periphery. Empirically, we draw from a set of 22 interviews conducted in Tbilisi and Ajara’s capital of Batumi to trace the arc of autonomy in the republic through its Soviet and post-Soviet history. Established on cultural grounds, the form of Ajara’s autonomy has subsequently been institutional, instrumental, and nominal. The republic today maintains its autonomous status, though its competences are delimited from Tbilisi; rather, this status serves as a model for the future—albeit unlikely—reincorporation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia into the Georgian state. In conclusion, the paper endorses greater engagement with autonomies that fall short of confict and separatism but nonetheless provide valuable insights into the suite of strategies that states employ in the management of territory. Autonomies are possibly entering a new, more unstable period of centralizing pressures that will challenge their original purpose and perhaps also regional peace and stability. 1. Introduction This paper investigates the remarkable persistence of autonomy for Georgia’s Ajara region. 1 Transferred from the Ottoman Empire to Russian control after the Russo-Ottoman war, the region’s autonomous status was initiated after World War I, survived the Soviet and post- Soviet periods, and remains part of the current structure of the Geor- gian state ushered in after the 2003 Rose Revolution. We argue that this longevity is not the function of some fundamental antagonism between Ajara and Georgia but instead represents a long arc of how states in the international system manage regional differences through the negotia- tion of autonomy. Our goals are three-fold: (1) to provide a compact and updated historical account of the various iterations of Ajara’s autonomy; (2) to analyze why Georgia today maintains Ajara’s autonomy as a nominal expression of regional self-determination, particularly in light of the continued unresolved status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; and (3) to consider whether Ajara’s present condition refects a moment of broader geopolitical importance as states seek to exert greater central authority over the twentieth century’s many autonomous regions, including Crimea, Hong Kong, Catalu~ nya, Iraqi Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, and Greenland inter alia. The function of Ajara’s autonomy for the central state has varied since its establishment; in the region itself, autonomy as a territorial construct has iteratively shaped identity, refecting the broader complex of sociospatial rearticulations in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. First granted by the Soviet Union in 1921 to accommodate the Turkish state in the Treaty of Kars, Ajaran autonomy was extended on the basis of cultural distinctiveness, with Islam as the primary religion of practice in the region. Under the Soviets, autonomy was institutionalized not only in Ajara but elsewhere in the Union’s territorial hierarchy (Gorenburg, 2003). Post-Soviet strongman Aslan Abashidze’s use of Ajara’s autono- mous status after independence was instrumental, to prop up his fefdom and maintain political and economic control. Since 2003–2004, the central state has curtailed Ajara’s autonomy to prevent the rise of a renascent challenge to Georgia’s unity and to serve as an example for the potential future reintegration of the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; autonomy in post-Rose Revolution Ajara extends few capacities to the region and is merely nominal. Ajara’s arc of autonomy—from cultural to institutional to instru- mental to nominal—underscores the fexibility of autonomy as a * Corresponding author. E-mail address: echollan@uark.edu (E.C. Holland). 1 Ajara is also transliterated Ajaria, Adjara, Adjaria, Adzhara, and Achara, inter alia. We use Ajara throughout, unless spelled otherwise in a direct quote. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102177 Received 12 March 2019; Received in revised form 19 February 2020; Accepted 21 February 2020