Mentor: Venelin Ganev, Ph.D.

In late September 2023, following Azerbaijan’s military operation in Nagorno-Karabakh, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians crossed into the Republic of Armenia within the span of days, effectively emptying the region of its Armenian population (ACAPS, 2023; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2023). The speed, scale, and near-totality of this movement distinguish it from many contemporary displacement crises. Rather than a gradual or partial outflow, the exodus constituted a sudden and concentrated demographic transfer equivalent to approximately 3–4 percent of Armenia’s total population in less than two weeks. For a small, resource-constrained state already navigating economic and geopolitical pressures, this moment represented a profound demographic shock.

This paper approaches the 2023 Karabakh exodus not primarily through the lenses of international law, conflict attribution, or humanitarian response, frameworks that have largely structured existing commentary, but as an analytical opportunity to examine how states respond to rapid internal population restructuring. In doing so, it draws on scholarship that conceptualizes displacement as a process shaped by overlapping categories of forced and voluntary movement (Bakewell, 2011), as well as work on state capacity that emphasizes the importance of infrastructural power and administrative reach in moments of crisis (Mann, 2010). The Armenian case, however, complicates several of these frameworks. The displaced population entered a kin-state, minimizing ethnic integration barriers that often dominate refugee studies. At the same time, the speed and totality of displacement challenge conventional distinctions between refugee inflows, internal displacement, and return migration, situating this case at the intersection of multiple analytical categories (Wistrand, 2022; Klonowiecka-Milart & Paylan, 2023).

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