Authors

Anita Khachaturova ¹ UNIVERSITÉ LIBRE DE BRUXELLES, Belgium

Discussion

The outcomes of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) war have been as unanticipated as traumatizing for Armenians who, over the past thirty years have evolved in a discursive context dominated by the trope of the victorious nation. In NK, the populaton has developed into a society isolated politically and geographically from the external world. In the specific cultural context of the Karabakhi society, the loss in the war, in particular with regards to the new generation of combatants who have grown listening to stories about the "glorious" war of the nineties, has represented a destructuring effect of the main beliefs about Armenian identity, Karabakh "state" and masculinist, militarist values governing societal structures. By focusing on the emotional and affective dimensions of the immediate post-war context, I aim to map the micro-structures of a society undergoing a period of deep instability, characterized by shattered meaning systems. How do emotional expressions and affects manifest themselves in the aftermath of war? Do they at times challenge the affective structure prevailing in the society? In this paper, I aim to show that while emotions play an important role in the continuation of a conflict, they also constantly defy the normative and meaning making systems on which the conflict relies, as the creation of an unrecognized state is a forever unfinished business that requires imagination in those who defend it, offering an ecology of possibilities.