ABSTRACT
The case of Armenia has been largely overlooked in the analytical literature on ‘colour revolutions’. The commonly accepted view that Armenia has never gone through a ‘colour revolution’ can be considered valid in a sense that Armenia has never experienced a change of government through peaceful mass protests. However, events that can be described as ‘attempted colour revolutions’ have taken place in post-Soviet Armenia. Some Armenian political analysts suggested that Armenia was the first post-Soviet country that experienced events that would have been called ‘an attempted colour revolution’ if the term itself existed at the time: a disputed election followed by mass protests and attempted overthrow of government took place in Armenia in September 1996, long before the Georgian ‘Rose Revolution’ (Iskandaryan 2005). An attempt to remove the government through peaceful mass protests took place in Armenia in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Rose Revolution’ in spring 2004. Therefore, we believe that the Armenian case is an important one from the point of view of study of ‘colour revolutions’.
