Remembering the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War through the Life Stories of Young Veterans

Abstract

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is known for its intractable nature that over the previous three decades has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, forced migration, economic deprivation, and collective traumatic experiences among the Armenian and Azerbaijani populations. Since the end of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, the situation on the ground, despite sporadic occurrences of violence, was widely described as a frozen conflict. In September 2020, after three decades of failed negotiations and inability to reach a comprehensive peace treaty, the sides ended up in yet another cycle of violence, which claimed thousands of lives and intensified antagonisms. Memory, as in other cases of protracted conflicts, has often been used to contribute to the creation and maintenance of collective narratives. To contribute to discussions on memory of war and reverse the trend of casting shadow over individual memories, this thesis looks at the micro-remembering of collectively shared experiences through the life stories of young veterans. This thesis reveals the associations between individual and collective memories and reverses the trends of exploring the two as mutually exclusive phenomena. Mainly based on the theories of Halbwachs on Collective Memory (1925), the Social Psychology of Experience (Middleton and Brown, 2005), past presencing (Macdonald and Tyler, 2013), culture of violence (Bar-Tal, 2010), and remembering forwards (Brewer, 2020), the research explores the broader social frameworks that inspire individual remembering and forgetting of collectively experienced traumatic events. The empirical data consists of eight biographical interviews which were conducted with veterans of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war from Armenia in September - October 2022. A mix of reflexive thematic and narrative analysis methods has been applied for the analysis of the empirical data in search of repeating patterns and narratives throughout the dataset. The data shows the co-dependencies of war memories, where veterans bring others into their recollections to complete their stories. It argues that recollections, even in most intimate settings, are dependent on the social frameworks that the veterans came to be part of before, during, and after their military service. Moreover, it reveals the conflicts between individual and collective narratives exploring layers of grievances that require societal engagement for reconciliation and remembering forwards. The memory work of young veterans shows active attempts of past presencing to make the past serve meaning making of the present. They mentioned attempting to forget the bad memories associated with the war. Simultaneously, they try to remember the rarely good occurrences during wartime and search for meaning in their civilian lives to move on and rebuild life. Even those who spoke of inability to forget the horrors of war reflected on them with humor in order to continue living as humans. Towards the end, the thesis explores the societal grievances in post-war settings and suggests that to recover from the haunting memories of the past, the wider public must work together with those most affected by the war to remember forwards collectively.