Turkey and ‘Turks’ in Postwar Armenia: Anxieties, Meanings, and Politics After the 2020 Karabakh War

Abstract

Traditionally perceived as a historical enemy, Turkey was ‘rediscovered’ in Armenia after it actively supported Azerbaijan in the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war over Nagorno-Karabakh. This article traces some of the cultural-ideational reverberations of Turkey’s ‘return’ within Armenian society. It argues that the war was a (re-)formative moment since it simultaneously resulted in the emergence of new meanings and the revival of traditional ones. It brought the ‘distant’ neighbour into Armenians’ geographical/geopolitical imaginations, reshaping the meaning of Turkey and of the larger region for them. But it also reinforced long-established complex semantics of the ethnonym ‘Turk’, setting the stage for its instrumentalisation in internal politics.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Esra Özyürek and Kevork Oskanian for providing feedback at different stages of this work, Lori Allen for her editorial assistance, and Rik Adriaans for his comments on the initial research proposal.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pseudonyms are used for interlocutors.

2 Turkey and Azerbaijan denied the deployment of mercenaries (Butler, 2020).

3 Although Turkey sided with Azerbaijan during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war as well, its support then was largely limited to the diplomatic and economic spheres and its involvement was far from comparable to what it was in 2020 (Broers, 2021; Ter-Matevosyan, 2021; de Waal, 2021).

4 For a discussion of their experiences see Nikoghosyan (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the Foundation.