Gender norms amid multidimensional security crisis in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh: from resistance to opportunity

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is today's most comprehensive normative framework for gender issues in global peace and security matters. While there is emerging research on WPS in the post-Soviet space, this region remains unknown and understudied within WPS literature (Santoire 2022). This paper is part of a larger research project which explores the emergence of WPS norms and National Action Plans in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. Informed by the Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) crisis in the background (after the 2020 war and before NK’s total dissolution in 2023), it seeks to answer the following research questions: how are ‘peace’ and ‘security’ understood in the context of existential threats like war and territorial invasion? How is the WPS agenda perceived, understood and implemented while several security, institutional and social crises are happening simultaneously? This research paper draws on the findings from fieldwork conducted in Armenia between 2022 and 2023, where I interviewed 20 women: WPS experts, peacebuilding activists, and representatives of local civil society, international NGOs, and UN agencies. Each woman had a varying relation with NK, ranging from family ties to being displaced themselves or originating from bordering provinces to Azerbaijan. Using feminist security studies and norms literature in International Relations as theoretical grounding, this paper will show that while the WPS agenda’s content is undoubtedly relevant to the Armenian context, its full potential remains limited due to the NK crisis and its resulting collective grief and trauma. I will elaborate on three arguments. First, the gendered anxieties and existential fear that this conflict represents for Armenian women are shaping and (re)orienting WPS implementation efforts toward crisis management and humanitarian assistance. Second, the feeling of being abandoned and invisible to the Western world has led to disillusionment and mistrust of international UN norms such as the WPS agenda. Thirdly, the WPS agenda represents a valuable tool for political elites to “prove” their democracy and compliance with liberal gender norms as part of the shift of Armenian foreign policy towards the West.