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Abstract
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is an intractable conflict that has been the agenda of the international community for over two decades, has gone through sporadic outbreaks of violence, as well as multiple and failed peace mediation attempts. Hence, despite the resolution efforts, the conflict persists, sustaining the parties' main grievances and entailing victimization, long-lasting trauma, and disruption. This paper aims at exploring how the image of the enemy is reflected in the official discourse of the Armenian leaders about Azerbaijanis during 2004-2016, and how trauma and victimization shape this type of image. For the present paper, I have selected 10 speeches belonging to the Armenian Presidents and Foreign Ministers in office and held at various national meetings and international forums which I collected from governmental and non-governmental websites.
Keywords
enemy images; intractable conflicts; trauma; victimization; the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
1.Introduction
Intractable conflicts are broadly defined as being protracted, opposing multifarious mediation attempts and presenting occasional violent episodes fluctuating in intensity.1 They often involve identity differences, high-stakes resources or struggles for power and self-determination and lead to widespread mortality, grievances, trauma, injustice, and victimization for the societies involved.2 The long-lasting conflicts between Israel and Palestine, Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus, Tamils and Singhalese in Sri Lanka or India and Pakistan over Kashmir region are just a few examples.
In addition to the above-mentioned aspects, intractable conflicts entail a large share of psychosocial factors which accompany their internal, less visible sides, and ensure their uniqueness.3 The images that the conflicting parties hold of each other and themselves, and of the conflict as such, are cases in point. The concept of images, defined as representations of a social object in a person's cognitive system, comprising of an affective and behavioural component, has been used in the context of intractable conflicts to capture the mutual perception of enemy and self.4 In this type of protracted and destructive conflicts, the enemy is portrayed as the perpetrator of unjust harm and solely responsible for the suffering and failure of individual tracts. Also, commonly encountered, he is dehumanized and represented as evil, aggressive, immoral, conspiratorial, opportunistic or predisposed to violence. Dehumanization is a mechanism through which the enemy is described as possessing inhuman traits and...