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| | | Trying to read the news about Karabakh will leave you more confused. Right now, Azerbaijan claims that the agents it has stationed to starve Armenians are “eco-activists” protesting illegal mining activities—they’ve changed the narrative a few times. Now that Azerbaijan said it, the news media has to report it. Azerbaijan benefits from obfuscating the news because it is more powerful than Armenia. And what does the news media really know, anyway? Most of them do not have a presence on the ground. Not in Nagorno-Karabakh, where Russia and Azerbaijan prevent foreign journalists’ access. Especially not where 18 year-old conscripts are getting killed. The media can tell you that the United States condemns the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh. That's it. The epistemological problem here runs deep. But more fundamentally, for most people—through no fault of their own—this entire conflict is an abstraction. Too many syllables and too far away. | |
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< | There is excellent material on the Armenian resistance in the local languages of the region—Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Russian—and a ton of garbage. To date, nobody who speaks all three languages fluently has written a comprehensive history of the conflict. The premier book, littering syllabi across the world, is written by a British journalist who speaks Russian. It is not terrible—the man knows things, he spoke to real people on the ground—but it shouldn’t even be twentieth on our lists. There is one by an Armenian journalist who speaks at least two and a half of the languages fluently. He is excellent, but when was the last time he was allowed to be in Azerbaijan, how good of a historian is he, and when is he going to stop denying the Khojaly massacre? The epistemological problem here runs deep. It would be a massive undertaking to get all the important sources from all the sides. Kind of impossible, actually: who is going to get access to the archives of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia? | >
> | There is excellent material on the Armenian resistance in the local languages of the region—Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Russian—and a ton of garbage. To date, nobody who speaks all three languages fluently has written a comprehensive history of the conflict. The premier book, littering syllabi across the world, is written by a British journalist who speaks Russian. It is not terrible—the man knows things, he spoke to real people on the ground—but it shouldn’t even be twentieth on our lists. There is one by an Armenian journalist who speaks at least two and a half of the languages fluently. He is excellent, but when was the last time he was allowed to be in Azerbaijan, how good of a historian is he, and when is he going to stop denying the Khojaly massacre? | | | | |
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Why are you describing sources of value without references? What is the point of complaining about the writers?
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> | The epistemological problem here runs deep. It would be a massive undertaking to get all the important sources from all the sides. Kind of impossible, actually: who is going to get access to the archives of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia?
The key to improvement here, I think, is to articulate the reason you are writing the essay. The idea expressed by this draft is that this small conflict is intense, and that it is little covered and indeed hard to investigate. Also, the Armenians are good and the Azeris are bad.
But if the point is to bring context to readers only peripherally aware of the situation, then the hyperlocality of the conflict should not result in hyperlocal analysis. The real point is that Armenian interests have been under the protection of Russian imperial power since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Russian power is destroying itself in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians are displaced, cities are destroyed, thousands of innocent civilians have been murdered, tortured, and maimed. In Ankara and Baku, Russia's self-destructive war of aggression offers an opportunity to harm Armenian interests and Armenian people. It will be taken. Thousands of people will be displaced. Villages and towns will be destroyed. Hundreds of innocent civilians will be burned out, raped, and murdered. In Nakhchivan, on the other hand...
You can condense the factual recitation substantially, linking to standard reference works and the more useful coverage. That will give room for showing the larger surrounding context, as well as telling the reader what—beyond our continuing savagery to people we think are other than ourselves—this story means.
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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