Authors

Discussion

The emergence and transformation of national identities are entangled and complicated process in which state-backed dominant narratives play a significant role. The cases of Armenia and Azerbaijan are no exception. The rhetoric used by the political leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan – Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev – is the main “fuel” of the process. In this paper, I compare Aliyev’s and Pashinyan’s vocabularies of self-image and enemy-image during three phases - pre-war, during the 2020 War and post-war – to examine how xenophobia is formed and expressed and how the identities shape in that context.

Based on the official speeches by Aliyev and Pashinyan, my preliminary argument is that the leader of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev has been keeping his militarized rhetoric and othering of Armenians during these three periods. Unlike this, the pre-war and post-war rhetoric of Nikol Pashinyan significantly differs from his rhetoric during the 2020 War. While Aliyev was creating a valiant self-image as opposed to the image of the enemy, the leader of Armenia has been creating this heroic self-image independent to the image of the enemy․ Only during the 2020 War the dichotomy showed itself but vanished after the end of the ceasefire agreement.