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The Karabakh conflict and Armenia's failed transition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2019

Arman Grigoryan
Arman Grigoryan*
Affiliation:
International Relations Department, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
*
* Email: arg210@lehigh.edu
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Abstract

Despite its early promise, Armenia's transition to democracy has stalled. The literature on post-Communist transitions ascribes this outcome to the autocratic preferences of its first generation of leaders, and particularly the country's first president Levon Ter-Petrossian. I argue in this article that that literature depicts a profoundly distorted picture of the Armenian politics of the 1990s. The failure of Armenia's transition was primarily due to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the political processes it set in motion.

Keywords

democratic transitionspost-Communist transitionsArmeniaNagorno-KarabakhArmenian-Azerbaijani conflictLevon Ter-PetrossianArmenian National Movement
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 46 , Issue 5: Special Section: Between the wars , September 2018 , pp. 844 - 860
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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