ABSTRACT
Gender in contemporary Armenia and Azerbaijan is shaped not just by the post-Soviet transition but also by the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. The violence of war has resulted in loss of life for the predominantly male combatants and gendered insecurity for men, women, and children left behind or forcibly displaced. Prior to a fresh outbreak of war in 2020, the conflict was widely considered to be frozen. Women’s grassroots response to the long-term impact of conflict and displacement has given rise to several NGOs that are using United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security to leverage more support for their activities. Nevertheless, women’s organizations remain mostly locked out of the elite-led negotiations and are subject to the same anti-gender politics that are visible across Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEE&E). While feminist scholarship has so far mostly focused on individual countries and communities, there is a need to bring this case into conversation with other postsocialist contexts specifically affected by conflict and to ask what it can teach us about the gendered politics of nationalism, authoritarianism, and militarism in the CEE&E region.
