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Hakobyan, Arsen · Mollica, Marcello, 2025
Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2025, ISBN 978-3-031-89206-6 (Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology)
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.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Maranci, Christina, 2025
Études arméniennes contemporaines, No. 16 (2025), 'Objects of Thought', pp. 73–97 (Bibliothèque Nubar / AGBU); DOI 10.4000/15gme
Maranci, a leading scholar of Armenian art and architecture, offers a close formal reading of Vardges Sureniants' painting 'Trampled Sanctuary' (1890s), a near-contemporary depiction of the Hamidian Massacres. She argues the work should be read not merely as documentation of destroyed artifacts but as a totalizing scene of wreckage that gathers up nearly the whole repertoire of Armenian art. Sureniants' impressionistic handling, she contends, both invites and obstructs close inspection of the ruined objects, producing a tension between recording artifacts and re-creating them — a meditation on loss and on the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Parsamyan, Seda A., 2023
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 5–34 (AGMI, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0043
Parsamyan argues that the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in the Ottoman Empire began with the conquest of Western Armenia and has continued to the present, with Armenian culture repeatedly destroyed outright or 'neutralised' by successive Turkish regimes. The first part reviews how genocide theorists have defined and redefined 'cultural genocide,' including attempts to revise or rename the concept. The second sets out a chronology of the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage. She then gives a detailed account of the demolition policy pursued during the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, assessing whether it is best characterized as vandalism or as cultural genocide.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Martirosyan, Hayastan A., 2022
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0035
Documents the methods by which Azerbaijani officials have pursued the forced appropriation of Armenian cultural monuments in Artsakh since the 2020 war. The article traces the 'Albanisation' thesis in Azerbaijani SSR historiography from the 1950s onward, showing how it was constructed to make all peoples of the South Caucasus appear equally indigenous. Dadivank, in the Karvachar area, serves as the case study: after passing under Azerbaijani control in November 2020 it was recast internationally as Caucasian Albanian heritage. The author sets out the 'scientific bases' advanced by Soviet and post-Soviet historians and the concrete channels through which the rebranding is promoted to international audiences.
