The Quintessential Conflict — A Cultural and Historical Analysis of Nagorno-Karabakh

Abstract

The motivations which underlie conflicts have long attracted the attention of analysts, political commentators, journalists and historians. Depending on the epoch, emphasis is laid on economic or social elements, on the control of trade routes, access to water or energy or on religious factors. This emphasis is often a mirror image of the fears of each historic period. As regards more ancient eras whose wars are related in literary form in great epics such as the Iliad, exploration of the economic and political realities behind the poetic fiction has become a much-prized field of study. It is known, for example, that the Trojan War was less motivated by the abduction of fair Helen than by the Greeks’ (and especially the Mycenaeans’) desire to control the trade route of the Dardanelles straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea by capturing the city of Troy. Recent conflicts are not immune to this process of revision, and the way in which such wars are sometimes related leads, at times, to a veritable rewriting of history which almost borders on mythical narrative.¹ History is complicated, or rather, people’s lives are complicated because history is, after all, what people think they know about their past or the way in which they would like to view it. This explains why the reasons for conflicts are almost always multiple and become entangled with economic and political issues, territorial claims, religious, cultural and linguistic antagonisms — not forgetting the inevitable assertion of some bloated egos.