From civic mobilization to armed struggle: Tracing the roots of the Karabakh movement

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Prior to the outbreak of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1991, the South Caucasus region had been seeing a gradually amplifying mass mobilization of ethnic Armenians, turning into a civil uprising known as the Karabakh movement. This paper examines the dynamics through which the civic movement evolved into a violent armed conflict, consequently nailing down the groundwork of what is now known to be one of the most intractable conflicts in the post-Soviet region. To trace the processes that translated cross-ethnic relations into mass mobilization, the study builds upon qualitative primary data, coupled with an extensive examination of secondary evidence. The study identifies motivating factors such as economic, political, and socio-cultural horizontal inequalities across ethnic lines as the core drivers of collective grievances. Repressive state measures as well as the Soviet glasnost and perestroika policies are observed as enabling factors further boosting the legitimization of the civic movement claims. This paper subscribes to a context-bound approach of studying intractable conflicts, and by addressing the theoretical gap between data on objective inequality and data on perceived inequality, marries local knowledge of rather marginalized conflicts with the wider academic discourse.