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Armenia in Crisis: How Did We Get Here and What’s Next

I first started working on this article on September 17. I was supposed to turn in a draft article about the high risk of Azerbaijan launching an offensive at Nagorno-Karabakh and next invading Armenia within a week. I told my editor we needed to publish the article as soon as possible because war could break […]

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“The road of life”: how the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh live under the blockade

LeftEast Editors’ Note: These are days of heightened possibility for another war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or more accurately, the latter attacking the former to capitalize on its victory in the 2020 war. There are reports of military build-ups along the border and some frantic diplomatic efforts. Zhanna Ohanesian’s article, originally published in the Ukrainian leftist […]

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Interviews

Labor and the Left in Azerbaijan: An Interview with the Worker’s Voice Collective

LeftEast editors met our Azerbaijani comrades at LevFem’s / Transnational Social Strike’s conference in September 2022 in Sofia. As we knew almost nothing of the left in that country, we asked them for an interview, and they generously obliged. LE: Could you introduce yourselves: who are you and what are you fighting for? We are […]

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Small protests in Azerbaijan mirror larger social tensions

LeftEast would like to gratefully acknowledge OpenDemocracy for allowing it to reprint this article by Najmin Kamilsoy. In an online survey conducted in Azerbaijan last year, shortly after the 2020 Karabakh War, the majority of respondents, 79%, expressed optimism about the future of the country. This dominant public attitude mirrored the ruling elite’s triumphant post-war rhetoric, […]

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Armenian leftists: We consciously choose peace

Note from the editors: Three weeks ago LeftEast published an anti-war statement of the Azerbaijani left. Now we are proud to publish the response of the anti-war Armenian leftists. In the meantime, the war has continued despite two ceasefires. The numbers of killed are hard to estimate, but are in the thousands by now, military […]

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“No piece of land is worth it”: Moscow’s Armenians and Azerbaijanis on the Karabakh conflict

Note from LeftEast editors: At LeftEast we are trying to source locally-grounded analyses on who profits from the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh: what is the national and international balance of power among the political and economic elites; and what a leftist strategy could be? Meanwhile, we are very happy to publish this article by Aleksey Sahnin, […]

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Anti-war Statement of Azerbaijani Leftist Youth

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been with us since 1988, ever since the largely ethnic Armenian population of this province of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic demanded a union with Armenia. The ensuing war ended in 1994 with Nagorno-Karabakh and some neighboring Azerbaijani territories under Armenian control and nearly a million people as refugees. Ever since […]