SUMMARY:

The essay puts the recent culmination of the decades-long territorial dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh into a longer historical perspective including the post–World War II period. The available sources suggest that the conflict was framed not least by the Soviet administrative borders that contradicted the existing spatially arranged economic patterns as well as by the forced resettlements during late Stalinism. Eventually, the dispute acquired its current function of national identity-shaping and mobilization. The fact that the 1915 Armenian genocide has never been properly prosecuted or even admitted to by the Republic of Turkey and its close ally, independent Azerbaijan, has greatly contributed to the conflict’s escalation. In Azerbaijan, the trauma of the defeat in the First Karabakh War in the early 1990s also made the eventual revanche in the form of retaking Nagorno-Karabakh as the ultimate political and cultural priority.