From Empire to Nation-State: Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh in Transition, 19th to the 21st centuries

This talk aims to explain from a historical perspective the conflict between the contemporary Republic of Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh/Artsakh that erupted into two major wars in the 1990s and then again in 2020. To better understand the roots of this conflict this talk will look at 19th-century Imperial Russian and 20th-century Soviet policies regarding ethnicity and territorial boundaries in the region of the South Caucasus. We will also examine how nationalism contributed to the creation of the republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan between 1918 and 1920, and led to the rise and persistence of conflict over the territory of Artsakh, which the Soviet policies kept under control but did not solve, until it eventually turned into “the Karabakh Movement” in the late 1980s contributing to Armenian resistance against Soviet rule.

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Dzovinar Derderian is currently Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also serves as the Executive Director of the Armenian Studies Program. Her interest lies in peoples at the margins of empires, and their roles in imperial processes of modernization. Her work examines discursive and social practices of provincial Armenians to understand how they navigated their multi-ethnic and multi-religious milieus, and as such how they maintained and transformed orders of power in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. As part of an effort to understand and situate nineteenth-century Armenians in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious context, with Tolga Yaşar Cora and Ali Sipahi, she co-edited a book The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics published by I.B. Tauris in 2016. Her work has also been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Review of Middle East Studies, and Toplumsal Tarih Akademi