Armenia after 2018

About This Book

This book is a collection of seven chapters, which fall generally into two main sections: an analysis of life in Armenia since the revolution (2018) and life after the Second Karabakh War (2020). The first chapter by the editors sets the stage by inviting the reader to explore further the different realities (including the worst, but also the hopes for progress) of Armenian citizens. The introductory chapter explains the reasons for and the imperative behind developing this book. It discusses the political, social and security shocks that Armenia, a member of the EU’s Eastern Partnership, has experienced over a period of three years. It offers a discussion of basic concepts, followed by some necessary background for understanding Armenia’s context in the present. This chapter presents the trifecta of challenges that the country is facing today, which might be considered a combination of reasons for placing Armenia on the research and attention radar of the international community of scholars and policy experts. Firstly, the three chapters discuss Armenia’s Velvet Revolution and democratisation efforts, secondly the three chapters that follow offer analyses of the post-war realities in Armenia.

Nerses Kopalyan’s contribution addresses Armenia’s transition and democratisation processes, by providing a multi-tiered understanding of how the country consolidated the democratisation process after the democratic breakthrough in 2018. Kopalyan examines a rigid security and democracy dichotomy in the country, relevant to developments in Armenia especially in the post-war period or after the security shock, as the editors frame it in the introduction. Kopalyan also reflects on the uniqueness of Armenia’s experience of a security crisis during the democratic transition, reflecting on the relationship between war, security and democratic consolidation. An important subject of inquiry for post-war Armenia has been the “democracy-versus-security” discourse, a dichotomous framework that has eroded democracy in countries where a cultural understanding of democracy has been highly instrumentalised. Kopalyan’s chapter fills a gap in the literature on the relationship between democracy and security, demonstrating that authoritarian reversals, based on promises of security, fail in the face of extensive empirical evidence. More so, democratising societies such as Armenia value democracy equally with security, and further qualify the enhancement of their security environment with the enhancement of their democratic safeguards.

As a different point of view, the next contribution is by Khatchik Der Ghougassian, who proposes a critical assessment of Armenia’s Velvet Revolution by taking sides in the debate about the ‘Velvet’ phenomenon from a leftist critical perspective. Der Ghougassian’s essay is a somewhat general inquiry into whether Armenia’s Velvet Revolution has contributed to democratisation or otherwise; according to his analysis, it revealed a somewhat ideological cast of neoliberalism, that has limited the democratisation pretensions that are raised as a legitimisation flag by the revolutionary regime. Der Ghougassian places Armenia’s Velvet Revolution in the wider context of the popular mobilisations in the aftermath of the post-Cold War transition at the end of the 1990s, taking a critical path that questions the assumption of democratisation per se, and focuses on the ideological drive that lies behind it. The author makes assumptions, including that democratisation is closely linked to economic inclusion, that populist uprisings are not ideologically impartial, and that extreme wealth concentration disables any structural reforms aimed at deepening democracy. The author’s main argument is that whereas social protest at the beginning of the twenty-first century in Latin America targeted neoliberalism and aimed at the deepening of democracy through a fairer redistribution of wealth, Armenia’s Velvet phenomenon followed closely the script of the “democratic revolutions” in its abstention from any criticism of the dominant assumption of free market economics with respect to the question of wealth redistribution.

The chapter by Hrayr Manukyan attaches importance to viewing the country’s performance solely on the basis of international indicators, which makes it a clear and practical contribution to approaching Armenia’s democratisation. Manukyan argues that Armenia has substantially democratised since the revolution, and that this democratisation is partially due to the Velvet phenomenon itself, viewed in his analysis as a case of civil disobedience. The author also responds to some vocal opinions that downgrade or reject the significance of Armenia’s democratic transition after 2018. This contribution demonstrates that Armenia was a semi-authoritarian country before 2018, and became a democracy (though not a consolidated one) after 2018, despite the challenges from other shocks (discussed in the introduction), the pressure from outside authoritarian regimes and internal authoritarian tendencies. Manukyan’s chapter indirectly acknowledges the value of the empirical potential of research methodologies and measurements of democracy. By concentrating on the case of Armenia, the author’s contribution highlights the importance of international standards and indicators offered by institutions tracking the performance of countries worldwide.

The next three chapters concentrate on realities in Armenia following the Artsakh 44-Day War or the Second Karabakh War (2020). The first chapter in this section offers an analysis by Alen Shadunts, who reflects on the moment of identity dislocation or crisis for Armenians. The author argues that the war has challenged some of the most sedimented narratives regarding self-identification in Armenian society, articulated around the notions of revival and victory. Shadunts discusses the polarising environment in Armenia, the limited thinking and the lack of self-reflective practices on the part of oppositional forces, as well as the different mechanisms used for coping with this situation so as to navigate a self-certainty through different articulations of subjectivity. By reflecting on the existing fierce political competition to define what the war was and how it should fit into the broader discursive structures of national identity, Shadunts proposes a thinking about the shaping of the national “self”, the use and popularity of narratives, and their influence as means of ontological security. Methodologically, the author offers a discourse analysis of contrasting narratives, discussing their attempts to provide answers and to mitigate the disorienting effects of the war.

The next chapter by Aghasi Tadevosyan raises an extremely important issue, which seems to have attracted less attention than it deserves in the post-war period, due to a multiplicity of everyday societal problems. Tadevosyan’s contribution reflects on social transformation, in particular the issue of the different traumas experienced by the forcibly displaced population as a result of the war. This chapter points to indifference as the biggest societal problem, also building on the imperative for policymaking that would prioritise the issues that have clearly impacted the forcibly displaced population. This chapter focuses on the need to “rehabilitate lives” amid the new security and other challenges in the country. By uncovering the losses and traumas suffered by the displaced population, Tadevosyan raises priorities that demand the attention of the policymaking community, namely, to focus on issues related to the displaced population: their integration into society, rebuilding lives anew, and providing material and other assistance on their way to becoming full members of Armenian society.