Read on Twitter
My thought on why most Azerbaijanis support the war, a thread:
1/ Unsurprisingly, the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict is often reduced to "Karabakh voted for independence, Azerbaijan attacked", erasing its complex history and nuances. This enables for the simplistic imagination
1/ Unsurprisingly, the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict is often reduced to "Karabakh voted for independence, Azerbaijan attacked", erasing its complex history and nuances. This enables for the simplistic imagination
2/ of the conflict sides as "the aggressor" (AZE) and "the victim" (ARM). Thinking in such dichotomies, however, allows for the effective villainization of the Azerbaijani society. It is easy to blame the many war-wanting Azerbaijanis without looking into the reason for such
3/ desire of war first. Ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis from Karabakh, years of suffering and pain, lack of sympathy by the international community, paired with the government's aggressive exploitation of this grief by offering hope of return to the
4/ homeland successfully militarized the Azerbaijani society on a mental level. On the other hand, failure of the Armenian authorities to acknowledge these crimes and the Armenian claims of indigenousness to the area as the leading narrative intensified this war desire.
5/ Thus, formulating the dominant sentiments within the societies as "Armenians want peace, Azerbaijanis want war", however factual, is incorrect in the way that "peace" in this context means status-quo for Armenians, while "war" symbolizes return home for Azerbaijanis.
6/ Eventually, however, both Azerbaijanis and Armenians want peace, it is just that the notion of "peace" is subjective and signifies different understandings for each side. And for Azerbaijanis, in the absence of a diplomatic solution, achieving peace is impossible without war.
