Reports have emerged in recent weeks that a grave humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested region in present-day Azerbaijan that contains a large majority of Armenian residents. A prominent international lawyer, Luis Moreno Ocampo, in fact, maintains that “a Genocide is being committed” by Azerbaijani forces against Armenian residents. This episode of “Then & Now” features UCLA historian Sebouh Aslanian, who offers a rich account of the history of the region and the century-long conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. He situates the tension against the backdrop of the rise and fall of empire—and analyzes the two wars that have engulfed the contested region since 1988 and that have led to the current dire crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Sebouh Aslanian is professor of history and holds the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair of Modern Armenian History at the UCLA History Department, and is the inaugural director of the Armenian Studies Center at the Promise Armenian Institute. He is an acknowledged expert in world history, Armenian history, Indian Ocean history, and early modern social and economic history. He is the author of the award-winning From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), and has published widely on early modern world and Armenian history, including his most recent book, Early Modernity and Mobility Port Cities and Printers across the Armenian Diaspora, 1512-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).