SUMMARY:

This essay gives a historical perspective to the conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis that has recently attracted international media attention. The article focuses on imperial actions and inactions, national identities and insecurities, and the continuities of a rivalry that has outlived all tsars, shahs, and sultans. The author argues that it is important to understand how empires throughout the centuries have shaped the region’s social and political dynamics and to acknowledge that it is the legacy of foreign hegemony as well as local multiethnic governance, cohabitation, and competition that continues to keep peace at bay and nationalists at work. A special accent is placed on the tendency of competing narrators to revert to primordialist arguments, where a fixed, deep-seated ethnonational identity, usually grounded in religion or language and always tied to a territorialized homeland, is retroactively uncovered.