Thinking about the September 2023 ethnic cleansing of Armenians of Artsakh, with and through Palestine and the ongoing genocide, reveals direct connections between Patrick Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism as eliminatory and strategies of epistemic violence. These connections are particularly evident in the systematic and deliberate destruction of knowledge sites.

Like Indigenous histories, the field of Armenian history is rife with scholarship that presents its episteme as “a thing” of the Ottoman/Anatolian/Turkish, Azeri, and/or Soviet “pasts.” Though representing different frameworks, this categorization was centrally legitimized through the key “event” of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and what preceded and followed as fragmented ethnic cleansings, forced displacements, and land grabs across multiple imperial projects and their aftermaths. The lack of scholarship situating the inception of trans-imperial fragmentations of Armenians into Eastern and Western subjects^[1]concerning Indigenous studies and histories further obscures how settler colonialism in this case can be considered through non-Western imperial projects, ethnic conflicts, national-socialist ideologies, and capitalist-military expansion of nation-building. Yet, what appears as a shared logic of violence is that each removal of Armenians from their lands was intentionally accompanied by destroying, looting, and confiscating Armenian homes, cultural institutions, and religious sites; delegitimizing, renaming, and appropriating their creative labor, such as folk art; and erasing community records or distorting official archives.

On September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive that in a few days ethnically cleansed around 100,000–120,000 Indigenous Armenians of Artsakh (also known as the de facto Republic of Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh). It began with a new turn in the Azerbaijan-initiated Second Nagorno Karabakh War in 2020, resulting in deaths, followed by a nine-month blockade and controlled corridor leading to population starvation. Neoimperial collaborations and planning between Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Russia enabled this war and ensuing control over Artsakh, with Israel supplying nearly 70 percent of Azerbaijan’s military purchases. Azerbaijani authorities reframed the 2023 total removal of the Armenian population as a “voluntary exodus.” All this was accompanied by a new hybrid warfare of advanced technologies and weaponization of media. When one considers the patterns of displacement and territorial control, one can see visible parallels between Palestine and Artsakh: as Armenian genocide scholar and social historian Elyse Semerdjian argues, the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh manifested a “Gazafication” and genocide by attrition.

While swift military actions are not new, contemporary velocity in the case of Artsakh and Gaza operates uniquely across physical and epistemic domains, as attempts to collapse the space between displacement, erasure, and its legitimation. Armenians of Artsakh were left with no possibility to make plans, let alone negotiate for the relocation of personal objects, vital records, historical/cultural artifacts, and protection of their knowledge sites. Satellite image documentation of Artsakh now shows selective destruction of tangible heritage, such as old and new churches, cross-stones, monuments, and cemeteries, as well as the looting of museums, terraforming or destroying villages, and contemporary civic buildings. Moreover, renaming and claiming Armenian cultural production as “Caucasian Albanian” or land as “Western Azerbaijani” by Azerbaijan’s official institutions today echoes the Zionist logic of reconfiguring Palestinian geography and histories. What gives all this added weight is a well-documented total erasure of another geopoliticized Armenian fragment, Nakhichevan-Jugha. As investigative scholar Simon Maghakyan has shown, between 1997 and 2006, Azerbaijan silently undertook the total destruction of Armenian cultural and historical sites, 5,849 cross-stones, 22,000 tombstones, and 89 medieval churches in Jugha, after the systematic removal of all Armenian population there.

I write this response at a time when Palestinians are documenting the calculated erasure of their lives and knowledge sites in real time—destruction so unprecedented it required the newly-articulated terms “digital apartheid” and “scholasticide.” Thinking about Artsakh with and through Palestine, it is apparent how the velocity of the eliminatory project has itself become a strategic tool. The tension between rapid destruction, immediate (self)-documentation, and the desire to archive surviving traces suggests that contemporary forms of settler colonial projects must be understood not only through their spatial logic of replacement but also through a new temporal politics of accelerated dispossession with the intent on erasing history and preemptively foreclosing futures.

This condition of the loss and aftermath brings forth the urgent need to reconceptualize the meaning of “the archive.” In other words, what might be considered archivable in “the present” and “the future”—as evidence, witness, records, heritage, or data—is embedded not only in the essence of the violence, its duration, and strategies of erasure but in the intensification of elimination itself. As such, there are lessons to be drawn from the decolonial practices of Indigenous peoples and nations that are reclaiming the role of traditional knowledge, guided through future-generational thinking, resistance, self-determination, and (data)-sovereignty, in archives. These perspectives situated with the new ideas of displaced archives, refugee records, and carceral archives further open a space that prioritizes imaginaries and epistemic productions entangled with human experience and life. If, as Palestinian poet Fady Joudah reminds us, survival is now a choice between being erased from the civil record or scattering to remain traceable, then the task of the archive is no longer just to document loss, but to become a framework of endurance—one that resists the velocity of disappearance by asserting the primacy of presence, futurity, and the refusal to be made unarchivable or “just past.”

Notes

[1] While “Western Armenians” are usually associated with Anatolia/Ottoman Empire, present-day Turkey, other countries of the Middle East, and importantly, with the generations of Genocide survivors, “Eastern Armenians” are related to the Iranian Empire, Russian Empire, the Armenian SSR, the Republic of Armenia, and the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh.