This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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A year on from the Second Karabakh War, Armenians are uncertain of the future

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

It has been a year since the Second Karabakh War – a 44-day conflict that started with Azerbaijani missile strikes rising up over Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, and ceased only when Russia brokered a ceasefire in November 2020.

This caused public panic to rise in Armenia, with delayed official announcements about new border demarcations and demilitarisation activities, and an attempted coup. Azerbaijani troops are now stationed deep in the heart of what was once Armenian Karabakh, as well as the ‘buffer zone’ (the territories surrounding it) and are visible on Armenia’s official borders.

In the aftermath of this existential defeat for the country, public support appeared to waver for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who came to power on the back of Armenia’s 2018 revolution. However, in June, he was resoundingly re-elected during snap elections and received, what he calls, a popular mandate to bring “an era of peace in the region”.

Pashinyan has since called on the Armenian public to have “strong nerves”' and persist with an agenda of peace, despite armed incursions by Azerbaijani forces along the country’s border. For those grieving loved ones or recovering from the trauma of the conflict, strong nerves are not easy to come by. Fears are still palpable that the war with Azerbaijan could resume, with military planes flying low over towns, military exercises growing larger, and warnings in the media growing more alarming.

One of the solutions appears to lie in a new transport infrastructure that would make Armenia – whose borders to the east and west are cut off due to conflict – a new regional hub for transporting goods, and perhaps people. Yet the fate of these new efforts lies not only in ongoing and secretive diplomatic negotiations, but in Armenian citizens’ willingness to go ahead with this potentially radical transformation mere months after a conflict that killed thousands.

To gain an insight into the public’s thoughts, I travelled to two towns likely to be affected by the potential changes, one in northern Armenia, and the other in the south.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/a-year-on-from-the-second-karabakh-war-armenians-are-uncertain-of-the-future/
[2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

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