Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Based on oral histories, this paper examines how the 2022–2023 Artsakh / Nagorno-Karabakh blockade reshaped food practices, care, and moral obligation, showing how scarcity and enforced immobility reorganized kinship, gendered labor, and everyday moral economies.

Paper long abstract

Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), historically inhabited by Armenians and incorporated into Soviet Azerbaijan in the early 1920s, remained a contested territory with unresolved political status after the collapse of the USSR. Following renewed warfare in 2020 and the deployment of Russian peacekeepers, the region was subjected to a nine-month blockade (December 2022–September 2023), whose inaction failed to prevent severe shortages of food, energy, and medicine. The blockade ended with a military offensive and the total forced displacement of the Armenian population in autumn 2023.

This paper examines how families navigated care, kinship, and moral obligation under conditions of prolonged siege. Based on approximately 150 oral histories with displaced families, it analyzes how households reorganized everyday life amid infrastructural collapse and extreme scarcity. Many families were physically separated across an impermeable border—members stranded outside Artsakh for work, education, or medical care—yet continued to experience the blockade affectively and practically through what we term distanced siege: synchronized hunger, time-bound digital communication, and shared regimes of deprivation across space.

Drawing on analyses of infrastructural breakdown under siege, the paper shows how food and energy shortages reactivated embodied practices rooted in memories of the 1990s blockades. Food substitution, preserving, soap-making, and rationing stabilized diets while reasserting moral economies of care. Decisions over who eats first reveal gendered negotiations of provision, sacrifice, solidarity, and vulnerability under immobility. Provisioning became a moral practice through which families negotiated endurance, legitimacy, and care.