The Sumgait Massacres: Characteristics and Definitions

Hovhannisyan, Gayane S. · 2022

This article analyzes the February 1988 massacres of Armenians in Sumgait, Azerbaijan, focusing on how the violence was characterized and defined by different actors at the time and since. Hovhannisyan works from specialist literature, archival materials, witness statements, and the contemporary periodical press, applying comparative analysis across these source bases. She finds that Armenian assessments linked the massacres to the historical experience of genocide, while the Soviet leadership deliberately framed the events as mass unrest and hooliganism. Azerbaijani narratives, she shows, relied on euphemistic language that minimized the organized character of the violence, and international observers foregrounded an ethnic-conflict frame. The article argues that these competing definitions carried real legal and political consequences for how the pogroms were prosecuted and remembered. Published in the IJAGS special issue on Artsakh, it grounds the modern Artsakh struggle in the foundational trauma of 1988.

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