Paper abstract:

In July 2022 I visited Terter region of Azerbaijan to examine the changes that happened in the perception of the local population towards the neighboring Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh after the military clash between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the fall of 2020. According to the officials, Terter was a region that severely suffered during the continuous Armenian artillery shelling. I was sure that people whose relatives were killed and injured, whose houses were destroyed or damaged due to this shelling wouldn’t be able to express any positive attitudes towards the Armenian nation. However, my expectations were not approved; and people who agreed to share their ideas concerning the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and Armenian-Azerbaijani relations expressed only positive attitudes toward the Armenian nation. Nearly two months after this visit, on September 12-13th another escalation erupted along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. This time I was able to hear the university students' opinions concerning the same questions. The generation that has never met any single member of the Armenian community, in contrast to the old generation has completely negative attitudes toward the neighboring nation. My goal is not a comparative analysis of the perceptions of the older and younger generations of modern Azerbaijani society towards Armenia and Armenians. Furthermore, my goal is to understand the role of the different sources, written and spoken, in the construction of the personal narratives of pain that help to support anti-Armenian sentiments alive. To study what is the relationship between written/official and oral/individual narratives of nationalism liked we first analyzed two written sources of nationalistic attitudes and blind patriotism - national historiography and media outlets. Then, a survey was conducted to explore the content of the individual narratives of pain. Mixed methods, a combination of descriptive qualitative and quantitative methods, were used for this research.