Monday, January 25, 2021: The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan

There has been little or no coverage in the US about the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over this disputed region. The territory is inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians and the seven surrounding districts were inhabited mostly by Azerbaijanis. The present conflict began in back in 1988, when the Karabakh Armenians demanded that Karabakh be transferred from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. That conflict escalated into a full-scale war in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After a period of relative stability, the situation deteriorated into several periods of outright war. On September 27, 2020,  Armenia was attacked jointly by Azerbaijan and Turkey, deploying Turkish armament. Turkish partnership in the current war is set against the backdrop of the genocide of the Armenian people by Turkey and the rise and collapse of the Soviet Union and the so-called Cold War.

Click on the link below for the recorded interview with Professor Gohar Shahnazaryan speaking to us from Armenia discussing the current situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the history of Turkish genocide of Armenian people, the role of Stalin and the Soviet Union in the region, and the central military and ideological instigation by current Turkish regime of President Recip Erdogan. She also describes the work of women and feminists on the ground. They are holding the communities and families together during the crisis. The feminists are also practicing feminist diplomacy as happened between women in Kosova and Serbia during the war in the Balkans.

Dr Gohar Shahnazaryan is the Co-Founder and Director of Women’s Fund Armenia. She is also the Director of the Center for Gender and Leadership Studies at Yerevan State University. She holds PhD in Sociology from Yerevan State University. Professor Shahnazaryan was a visiting scholar at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University and at the Institute of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies at UC.

For the past ten years Professor Shahnazaryan coordinated a number of large-scale projects on women and gender issues (such as projects on women’s leadership, development of referral mechanisms for the survivors of gender-based violence, educational projects on women’s rights, women and peacebuilding, development of feminist movement in Armenia, etc), and participated at various international, regional and local conferences, trainings and workshops on women’s rights and gender equality. She is an author of more than twenty publications on gender issues in Armenia.

Click here to listen to today's show. 32:39 min