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The Research Repository

  1. 2026

    Justice for the Victims of the Nagorno–Karabakh Conflict: Ongoing Accountability Efforts and the Path to the International Criminal Court

    Paylan, Sheila and Ashraph, Sareta

    Examines the September 2023 mass exodus of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and the legal implications of Armenia's ratification of the Rome Statute of the ICC. Analyzes potential ICC intervention focused on the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution, drawing on the Court's Rohingya territorial-jurisdiction approach. Assesses complementary accountability avenues before the ECtHR and ICJ and the obstacles Armenia faces. The corresponding author is based in Yerevan.

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    2026Journal ArticleOpen Access
  2. 2026

    The Conversion of Christian Armenians to Islam in Iran in the Early Modern Period

    Kostikyan, Kristine

    From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, much of the Armenian population of the Armenian Highland and the South Caucasus lived under the Safavids, Afsharids and Qajars, whose rulers repeatedly encouraged conversion to Shi'i Islam. Beyond outright coercion, Kostikyan identifies a set of structural pressures, focusing on the Shi'i inheritance law applied to Armenians from the 1620s onward, which became a major driver of conversion. Drawing on contemporary documents, she reconstructs the consequences of that law and the legal strategies Armenians used to protect property from the claims of relatives who had converted. She also documents the efforts of Armenian Church leaders to limit its damage and to obtain royal decrees against it.

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    2026Journal ArticleOpen Access
  3. 2026

    Աշխարհի առասպելաբանաստեղծական պատկերը Ավետիք Իսահակյանի պոեզիայում (The Mythopoetic Image of the World in the Poetry of Avetik Isahakyan)

    Vardanyan, Nvard

    Vardanyan treats the mythopoetic image of the world as a secondary elaboration of reality through sign systems anchored in archaic structures and archetypes. Because poetic speech is metaphorical, writers often draw unwittingly on the universal sign systems of folk thought and generate new ones from them. Isahakyan's lyric poetry has been analysed repeatedly for its ideological and thematic layers, but this study starts elsewhere: it traces symbolic representations in Isahakyan's picture of the world back to their mythic origins, working through his treatments of man and the cosmos, space and time, sound and silence.

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    2026Journal ArticleOpen Access
  4. 2026

    Արևմտահայ և արևելահայ տաղաչափության մի քանի սկզբունքային տարբերությունների մասին (On Some Fundamental Differences between Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian Metrics)

    Jrbashyan, Ashkhen

    Jrbashyan examines principled differences between Eastern and Western Armenian versification that surfaced from the mid-nineteenth century, when the vernacular was being made into a literary medium and the phonetic and accentual divergence of the two branches began shaping poetic form. Syllabic verse formed in the tenth to twelfth centuries had bequeathed rules later codified in Mekhitarist theory. The central question was the rhythm-forming role of stable stress in the poetic line: the Mekhitarists required stress to mark the caesura, while late nineteenth-century Eastern Armenian poetry abandoned that requirement in favour of syllabic equality. She concludes that Western Armenian syllabic verse is an intermediate form combining stress and syllabic principles.

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    2026Journal ArticleOpen Access
  5. 2026

    Reasons for the Exclusion of Women from the Nagorno-Karabakh Peace Process in Armenia

    Vassileva, Julia

    Situates the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process against a transformed regional security landscape following the 44-day war and the September 2023 offensive that ended Armenian control of Artsakh, and against Armenia's reorientation away from its traditional alliance with Russia toward closer ties with the West. The article examines the role of women in Armenia in this peace process and their postwar opportunities for agency. It finds women's substantive inclusion remains limited due to elite-dominated hard-power negotiation structures and militarized discourses, societal and economic factors, and self-exclusion. Despite this, it identifies openings for women to assert agency in Armenia's new security environment.

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    2026Journal ArticleOpen Access
  6. 2025

    Academic Activism and Armenian Genocide Recognition in Australia

    O'Brien, Melanie

    Drawing on her own experience lobbying the Australian federal government, O'Brien traces the history of Armenian Genocide recognition in Australia and the obstacles to it. She analyzes the geopolitical and historical barriers: above all Australia's relationship with Turkey dating to the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, and the weight of Gallipoli in Australian military memory and national identity. She then examines the Joint Justice Initiative, the Armenian-Assyrian-Greek coalition through which she works to overcome those barriers. The article situates scholarship inside advocacy, arguing that academia is an active participant in the fight for political change rather than a bystander to it.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  7. 2025

    An Examination of the Muški Tribe: A Multidisciplinary Approach Including Paleogenomics

    Palyan, Aram and Peltekian, Seb

    Re-examines the Mushki, one of the most obscure ethnocultural groups of the northern regions of West Asia, combining textual, linguistic and, for the first time, genetic evidence. Because eighth-century BCE Assyrian scribes used 'Mushki' for Phrygia, scholarship long inferred a Balkan origin for the group; the authors find those connections groundless. Their evaluation supports a Mushki connection to Armenians but rejects a Balkan origin for both, proposing instead a migration from the Late Proto-Indo-European homeland through the Caucasus, with the Mushki settling in the Upper Euphrates region. A link to the Kaska is judged equally plausible, while a Mushki-Georgian connection is deemed unlikely.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  8. 2025

    Armen Garo's Undertaking within the Framework of the Civil Mission of the Republic of Armenia to the USA at the End of 1919

    Ghambaryan, Armenuhi

    From the proclamation of the First Republic, independent Armenia faced foreign-policy pressures that made relations with the European Powers and the United States urgent. In October 1919 Garegin Pasdermadjian (Armen Garo): member of the Armenian delegation in Paris and deputy chairman of the Western Armenian National Delegation, was dispatched to Washington as Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Representative of the Republic, arriving in New York with the official delegation headed by Hovhannes Kachaznuni. Ghambaryan traces his political, diplomatic and economic work through that autumn and winter, and his effort to unify the divided Armenian community in the United States, arguing this contributed to the modest but real successes the Republic's representatives achieved.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  9. 2025

    Armenian Toponyms Based on Plant-Names in the Province of Syunik

    Martirosyan, Hrach and Aramyan, Anna

    The authors take a linguistic route into the question of Armenian continuity in Syunik and Artsakh, arguing from dialect evidence rather than political claim. Their material is toponyms formed from plant designations, drawn chiefly from the tax list of the twelve regions of Syunik in Stepanos Orbelean's History of Syunik. Many preserve phonological developments and lexical items specific to the Syunik-Artsakh dialect region, which the authors read as evidence of long-term continuity of Armenian there. They frame the study against Classical Armenian sources, the seventh-century Ashkharhatsoyts, khachkars, inscriptions and colophons, and read the plant-derived names as showing a close tie between communities and the landscape they inhabited.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  10. 2025

    Daniel Ohanian's Database of Armenian Orphans and Maids in Canada, 1923–1930

    Ohanian, Daniel

    An open database listing approximately 130 boys and 40 girls and women who came to Canada as humanitarian refugees between 1923 and 1930: the groups known variously as the Georgetown Boys, Georgetown Girls, Fegan's Boys, Salvation Army Boys and Newham Boys. Each entry includes leads pointing to where further information about the individual can be found. It is the prosopographical companion to his Genocide Studies International article on the same migration.

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    2025Institute PublicationOpen Access
  11. 2025

    Denying the Hamidian Massacres: Ottoman Narratives, Armenian Activism, and the Struggle over the Memory in the United States, 1890s

    Vardanyan, Gevorg and Hakobyan, Narine

    Examines Ottoman denial of the Hamidian massacres (1894–1896) inside the United States, centered on Ottoman Minister Alexander Mavroyeni Bey and his collaborators. The Ottoman legation in Washington reframed reports of anti-Armenian violence as justified responses to 'sedition,' and the authors argue this was not merely exported internal propaganda but a distinct transnational strategy built for American audiences. Mavroyeni Bey drew analogies to US treatment of Native Americans, appealed to American sovereignty, and worked with the American Muslim convert Alexander Russell Webb to delegitimize Armenian-American activism and discredit missionaries. Armenian-Americans were the campaign's primary target because of their grassroots organizing and their influence on humanitarian mobilization. The study pushes the history of denial back from 1915 into the Hamidian era.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  12. 2025

    Encyclicals, Circulars, and Appeals of Patriarch Zaven of Constantinople (1913-1922)

    Malhasyan, Silvart

    Patriarch Zaven twice occupied the Armenian Patriarchal throne of Constantinople, and both terms fell in the worst years the Western Armenians ever faced. Malhasyan studies his encyclicals, circulars and public appeals as instruments of national leadership: convening assemblies, encouraging benevolent institutions, and directing the work needed to defend the nation's interests and repair the damage done to the people. The study spans 1913 to 1922, covering the Genocide years and the post-Mudros period of attempted recovery.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  13. 2025

    General Vladimir Poltavtsev's Unpublished Memoirs about the Participation of Armenians in the Caucasian Campaign of World War I

    Sahakyan, Ruben

    Sahakyan introduces and publishes the previously unknown memoir of Vladimir Poltavtsev (1875–1937), a Russian General Staff officer who served on the Caucasus front and later emigrated. Poltavtsev served as Chief of Staff of the Atropatene detachment and the Caucasian 2nd Rifle Brigade, was promoted to major general in 1917, and died in Belgrade. His manuscripts survive in the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University and in the State Archives of the Russian Federation. The memoir bears on the Armenian volunteer movement, particularly the 1st Druzhina, and on Armenian participation in the Caucasian campaign, supplementing the existing corpus of studies and document collections. Sahakyan supplies the biographical framing and archival provenance.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  14. 2025

    Observing South Caucasus' Historical Landscape: An Open Photo Archive. Tools, Activities, and Purposes of the OSCOP Project

    Riccioni, Stefano et al.

    Presents the OSCOP project, which collects, digitises and catalogues a photographic archive documenting the cultural heritage of the South Caucasus, held by the Centro di Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena in Venice. The collection derives from the research missions led by Adriano Alpago Novello from 1967 onward and comprises roughly 10,000 items. Preservation work targets three layers: the photographic object itself, the intangible historical layers (site ownership, historical stratification and toponymy), and the architectural and natural heritage of historical Armenia and Georgia. The authors devote substantial attention to cataloguing method, arguing for transliteration over translation of Armenian names in order to resist toponymic erasure and appropriation of contested heritage.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  15. 2025

    Principles of Parliamentarism in the Context of Western Armenian Constitutional Culture

    Sarvazyan, Lilit

    The Western Armenian constitutional movement was a singular attempt in the East to modernize a national administrative system on parliamentary principles. Against the political realities of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, foreign authors tried to gauge the Armenian nation's constitutional and legal consciousness, its capacity for self-government, and its absorption of European culture; within Armenian circles constitutionalism was studied from several angles, often with an eye to forecasting the nation's political prospects. Sarvazyan sets out the goals and patterns of the movement, the philosophical and ideological foundations of the 'National Constitution', and assesses the possibility and the outcomes of parliamentary governance in Western Armenia.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  16. 2025

    Rasulain and the Arada Steppe During the Armenian Genocide, July 1915 – April 1916

    Kaiser, Hilmar

    Building on Raymond Kévorkian's work on the Syrian and Mesopotamian 'destination areas,' Kaiser reconstructs the deportation zone around Rasulain and the Arada Steppe. Officially the Ottoman government claimed it meant to resettle Armenian deportees in the Zor district; in practice deportees were starved, abandoned in the desert, or massacred. Drawing on official Ottoman documentation alongside rare first-hand evidence from the Chechen community of Rasulain, Kaiser shows that district governor Ali Suad Bey began limited relief and settlement projects which central authorities then undid. Local Chechens opposed Armenian settlement on economic grounds, denounced deportees as alleged revolutionaries, and ultimately took a leading part in the massacres.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  17. 2025

    Slow-Burn Destruction: Reading "Conditions of Life" into Twenty-First Century Genocide

    Chakhmakhchyan, Svetah and Meyroyan, Edgar

    Targets a gap in genocide law: the under-use of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention: 'deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction', against strategies of deprivation that kill a group slowly. Blockades, sieges, and enforced isolation produce attrition that escapes timely legal recognition because the harm unfolds gradually and specific intent is harder to prove, so such acts get downgraded to humanitarian crises or war crimes. The authors clarify the doctrinal scope of Article II(c), synthesize the jurisprudence on actus reus and genocidal intent without a body-count threshold, and turn it into an early-warning and charging framework with objective triggers such as sustained supply shortfalls, health-system collapse, and repeated obstruction of humanitarian access. A proof-of-concept applies the framework to the blockade of the Berdzor Corridor.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  18. 2025

    The Activity of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Dashnaktsutyun in Greece (from the 1890s to 1924)

    Stepanyan, Khachatur and Hovhannisyan, Edgar

    Presents the ARF's activity in Greece from the mid-1890s, when party organizations formed in southern Greece, through 1924. Greek attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire and Greece's geography created favorable conditions for ARF work on behalf of the Armenian national liberation movement, and the party quickly became a significant organization there. Revolutionary figures persecuted in Constantinople took refuge in Greece, which also served as a base for maintaining links with Cilicia. ARF activity expanded further after the Genocide and the massacres of Greeks in Asia Minor, and the Greek branch organized substantial relief for Armenian refugees; after the fall of the First Republic in 1920 the ARF was central to the Armenian community's reorganization in Greece.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  19. 2025

    The Past and Present Languages of the People of Azerbaijan

    Galichian, Rouben

    Galichian addresses the claim, promoted by state-aligned historians in the Republic of Azerbaijan, that shared language proves the population of the republic and that of the Iranian province of Azerbaijan are one people with one origin. He argues that language cannot serve as the sole basis for reconstructing the descent of a society, offering the counter-examples of Spanish-speaking Latin America and of African states speaking the languages of former colonizers. The article reviews the comparatively recent Turkic-language layer in the region, arriving with the Seljuks, and sets it against the earlier Iranian and Caucasian Albanian linguistic history of the territory.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  20. 2025

    The Preparatory Stage of the Activity of the Basel Missionaries in Shushi (1820-1824)

    Edilyan, Hayk

    Using Armenian and German-language sources, Edilyan reconstructs how the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society established itself in Shushi between 1820 and 1824. He traces the society's entry into the Russian Empire, the 1821 mission of Dittrich and von Zaremba to St Petersburg, their petition for a Christian colony, and Yermolov's refusal of colony status while permitting a school and printing house. The missionaries reached Shushi in October 1823, toured the surrounding regions, met Armenian clergy including Nerses Ashtaraketsi, and settled there in January 1824. He argues the missionaries planned from the outset to work among Armenians first (through schools, Armenian Bibles and a press) and that this period laid the foundation for the celebrated Shushi printing and school enterprise.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  21. 2025

    The Refugee Issue in the Supreme Council of the Republic of Armenia in the Context of State Building in 1990-1991

    Zakaryan, Lilit

    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.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  22. 2025

    When Armenians Take to the Streets: The 1979 March from Lyon and the Struggle for Genocide Recognition in France

    Toulajian, Sophie-Zoé

    This article reconstructs the 1979 march from Lyon organized by Armenian activists in France demanding acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide. Toulajian argues that street protest had a performative impact, consistently inserting the genocide question into the French public sphere through a transnational repertoire of activism. She shows how the marchers embodied overlapping identities at once, French, Armenian, diasporic, and global, and how the mobilization responded to both local French circumstances and international developments. The study situates Armenian activism within the broader landscape of 1970s protest movements rather than treating it in isolation. Methodologically, it makes a case for connected histories and multiple timelines as tools for understanding diasporic political engagement. The article appears in a special issue on law, activism, and the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide edited by Julien Zarifian and Edita Gzoyan.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  23. 2025

    Լեռնային Ղարաբաղի հիմնախնդիրը 1921-1923 թթ.: Ադրբեջանական պատմագիտության խեղաթյուրումները (The Artsakh Question in 1921–1923: Distortions in Azerbaijani Historiography)

    Khachatryan, Armine

    Khachatryan reconstructs the two years between the July 1921 decision placing Artsakh under Soviet Azerbaijan and the July 1923 decision granting autonomy. Her premise is that the historical-political literature has never adequately studied the situation produced by the 1921 decision, and that treatments of it are frequently one-sided. She argues that the actual consequences of these decisions require fresh clarification, and that the reaction of the population directly affected, the Armenians of Artsakh, has been given almost no attention. Armenian and Azerbaijani historiographies hold sharply opposed positions and leave real gaps; her aim is to establish the sequence of events and ask how far the settlement reflected the free will of the national majority.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  24. 2025

    Հայերի ջարդը Ագուլիսում 1919 թվականին (The Massacre of Armenians in Agulis in 1919 and the Role of Nakhijevan's Azerbaijani-Turkish Authorities)

    Hakobyan, Elen

    Armenian-language study documenting the December 1919 massacre of the Armenians of Agulis, the historic Armenian town in Nakhichevan, and the role of local Azerbaijani-Turkish authorities in organizing it. Situates Agulis within the continuum of anti-Armenian violence that extended beyond 1915, contributing to scholarship on the total de-Armenization of Nakhichevan.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access

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