The Post-Soviet Revolution in Armenia: Victory, Defeat, and Possible Future
Georgi Derluguian () and
Ruben Hovhannisyan ()
Additional contact information
Georgi Derluguian: New York University
Ruben Hovhannisyan: HSE University
A chapter in Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century, 2022, pp 899-922 from Springer
Abstract:
Abstract This chapter analyses the 2018 Revolution in Armenia, which had both features of a liberal color revolution and profound specific national features. The authors consider its historical background, causes, course, and consequences. Derluguian and Hovhannisyan try to answer the question: Why did the post-communist restoration in Armenia end so suddenly and non-violently? The answer to this question operates in both the historical longue durée and the shortest time of political conjuncture. Geopolitics primarily explains the peculiar form of Armenian Christianity which had bounded an ethnic nation long before modern nationalism. The same geopolitics at the fault lines between the major empires of Western Asia led to the destruction of Armenia’s warrior nobility, reducing Armenia’s social structure to the proverbial nation of ‘priests and cobblers’. Above all, the Young Turk genocide unleashed in 1915 fostered extraordinary solidarity within the globally-dispersed Armenian nation preventing the use of state force against fellow Armenians. Coupled with the political ‘missteps’ structurally inherent in the post-Soviet patrimonial presidencies, all this made possible the amazingly swift and sweeping victory of the national protest movement. The authors conclude that the overdetermined defeat in the 2020 Karabagh war crashed the naively liberal revolution. Yet the double-shocks of revolution and lost war may yet produce a developmental state as the sole remaining road to national survival.
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:socchp:978-3-030-86468-2_35
Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030864682
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-86468-2_35
Access Statistics for this chapter
More chapters in Societies and Political Orders in Transition from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().