Journal ArticleOpen Access
Zakaryan, Lilit, 2025
Fundamental Armenology, Issue 1(21) 2025, History (National Academy of Sciences of RA / All Armenian Foundation Financing Armenological Studies); ISSN 1829-4618
In July 1990 the newly elected Supreme Council of Armenia opened its state-building work by adopting the Declaration of Independence, and amid the scale of that task the Artsakh question was at times pushed into the background. But the intensifying persecution of Armenians in Azerbaijan, and fresh episodes of mass deportation carried out with the consent and participation of collapsing Soviet power structures, forced the Supreme Council to put it back on the agenda. Zakaryan works through the parliamentary debates on mass deportation and shows how they compelled a forced change in the direction of policy during the state-building period.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Suvaryan, Yuri, 2022
Fundamental Armenology, Issue 2 (16) (National Academy of Sciences of RA, Yerevan)
Surveys the millennia-long history of Armenian statehood in Artsakh and the century-long Karabakh movement, arguing Azerbaijan's claim lacks legal, historical-geographical, and ethno-cultural basis. Grounds the legal argument in the 1990 USSR law on secession, under which Nagorno-Karabakh lawfully separated from the Azerbaijani SSR. Represents the scholarly position of Armenia's National Academy of Sciences.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Hovhannisyan, Gayane S., 2022
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2022), special issue on Artsakh (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0034
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.
