| Summary/Abstract |
This paper discusses the place-renaming policies in the recent two decades in Armenia. By elaborating on the legal and administrative framework for place-renaming in the country and through the analysis of more than 27,000 geographical names and their renaming practices, the paper focuses on the politics of space/place in Armenia in the context of a nation-state-building. By considering discourses, actors and institutions involved in place-renaming, the paper puts its results into the wider context of nationalism and nation-state-building. With a focus on the notion of raison d'état as a practice of governmentality, the abstract space of the nation-state conceived by experts and nationalist discourse on autochthony, the paper elaborates on the production of nation-state-space in Armenia. The contradictory aspects of place-renaming policies and the relations of exclusion and domination (re)produced in the process of conceiving of the nation-state-space in this country are discussed as well.
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