Conflict, Space and Transnationalism: An Ethnography of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War
Hakobyan, Arsen and Mollica, Marcello · 2025
Hakobyan and Mollica present an ethnography of the 2020 war in Artsakh, examining how the conflict reshaped attitudes toward urban space and transnational networks among those who lived through it. The book centers on two cities: Stepanakert, analyzed as the political-institutional capital, and Shushi, treated as the cultural and religious capital, tracing the spatial meanings and symbolic value of urban heritage in each. Chapters follow Artsakh from its origins through its status as an autonomous region under Soviet Azerbaijan, the making of the republic, and the war itself. A chapter on transnationalism and war examines violence moving from Syria to the Artsakh theater, and a chapter on space and war documents cultural cleansing. The authors ground the study in the Armenian anthropological tradition of Artsakh research. The result is a scholarly record of how war, displacement, and heritage destruction transformed Artsakh's urban and social fabric.
Read the publication ↗Citation
Hakobyan, Arsen and Mollica, Marcello 2025. Conflict, Space and Transnationalism: An Ethnography of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2025, ISBN 978-3-031-89206-6 (Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology).
What this offers a reader
An on-the-ground anthropology of the 2020 war that reads Stepanakert and Shushi as living texts of politics, faith, and loss.
An urban-anthropological account of the 2020 Artsakh war combining conflict ethnography with analysis of heritage destruction and transnational violence.
A serious scholarly witness to what Artsakh's cities meant, and what was done to them, so that the record cannot be erased.
What the 2020 war did to the cities and people of Artsakh, told by anthropologists.
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