Ethnic Conflict in Nagornyi Karabakh - A Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article provides a historical perspective on the violent conflict in Nagornyi Karabakh. It focuses on three distinctive periods that are important for our understanding of the complexity of the current conflict. The first period considers political and economic relations in Karabakh during the 18th and 19th centuries, when they were evolving in the context of the social change brought about by Russian colonial rule. The way these evolving socio-economic relations shaped the identities of the local populations explains why their relatively peaceful co-existence turned into violent conflict between two communities toward the end of the 19th century. The period of the Russian Civil War is critically important for understanding the political organization of the Caucasus under Soviet rule. It was at this time that the foundations of the future conflict were laid. The Soviet period provides the context for understanding the development of the identities that became instrumental for the outbreak of conflict in the late 1980s.