Turkey and 'Turks' in Postwar Armenia: Anxieties, Meanings, and Politics After the 2020 Karabakh War

Traditionally perceived as a historical enemy, Turkey was 'rediscovered' in Armenia after it actively supported Azerbaijan in the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war over Nagorno-Karabakh. This article traces some of the cultural-ideational reverberations of Turkey's 'return' within Armenian society. It argues that the war was a (re-)formative moment since it simultaneously resulted in the emergence of new meanings and the revival of traditional ones. It brought the 'distant' neighbour into Armenians' geographical/geopolitical imaginations, reshaping the meaning of Turkey and of the larger region for them. But it also reinforced long-established complex semantics of the ethnonym 'Turk', setting the stage for its instrumentalisation in internal politics.