In thinking about the prompt for this forum—on the ways in which Armenia and Armenians sit within Middle East studies and the ways in which they are often occluded from the sights of Middle East studies—what comes to mind is the critical necessity for internationalism and solidarity. This might at first seem only tangentially or indirectly relevant to the object of investigation here; after all, we are talking about geography, history, and facts. However, I think that it is relevant to how (as in with what sense, orientation, and from what perspective) we approach the question of scholarly regional belonging. Like any topic of intellectual inquiry, how we imagine and define regions has implications on what we find in those regions: the sites of importance and focus; the connections between different groups, persons, and events; and the scope of investigations. Internationalism and solidarity as frameworks for understanding Armenia and Armenians as a part of the Middle East orient us to the region by way of connections to the various peoples of that region with a political and ideological commitment to the well-being of all peoples there and everywhere. Many of the commentaries in this forum focus on the marginalization of particular minorities in Middle East Studies (Armenians, Copts, and Assyrians in this forum, and we also could think about the marginalization of Kurds and other minoritized populations in the region).Footnote ¹ This in itself is a critical and necessary point of departure. I would like to approach the question from another angle, however. How might we think about this problem from the other side? How does Armenian studies see itself in connection with Middle East studies? Here, although I recognize that Armenian studies is a changing field and is not monolithic, with various differences between the field as it developed in Europe and the United States and that which developed in the Republic of Armenia, there are a few continuities that I would like to problematize and imagine differently. What might the future of Armenian studies be if it were made through politically committed questions, articulations, and collaborations? How might this produce a (different) sense of belonging to Middle East studies?

Internationalism and solidarity demand that we, as Armenian studies scholars, home in on the conceptual and ideological commitments on which to base our relation to the Middle East. This is a particular kind of relation, or source of common ground. It differs markedly from the area studies approach to Middle East studies, which comes from the Cold War era division of geographical “areas” with the aim of discipline and imperialist intervention, tying the university's aim to that of the US state.Footnote ² The ways in which Armenian studies is or is not a part of Middle East studies, I think, should be dependent on ideological commitments to other scholars, activists, people, and life in the region we continue to call the Middle East rather than by way of an area studies approach. This would require thinking about Armenia's relation as a nation, a people, and a nation–state to other nations, peoples, and nation–states, not through geographical regions (which brings with it notions of “spheres of influence,” also tied to imperialist visions) but rather through ideological commitment.Footnote ³ The transnational and diasporic nature of Armenia as a nation (which is not and has not always been a state) gives Armenian studies a peculiar advantage in this internationalist orientation that is built on solidarity. Here, I am reminded of the words of Peter Balakian's aunt, Nona Balakian, in Black Dog of Fate, who tearfully (with pain as well as joy) reflects on her love of William Saroyan's utopianism through the sentiment that “we have a dream instead of a country. Because territory has eluded us, we have a freedom to invent that most people don't. The more our geography shrinks, the more our imaginations expand, the more we're like owls flying in the dark.”Footnote ⁴ We, Armenians and those invested in studying Armenia(s), can be inventive with how we imagine our belonging in the world and to worlds.

Solidarity, critically, is established not on national affiliation or some kind of regional/national/cultural/linguistic “likeness,” but rather on ideological commitment. This requires thinking beyond the division of the world into nation–states, with people grouped into national collectives represented and attached to a state. Indeed, many of the struggles in the Middle East and beyond are waged against states as well as hegemonic and nationalist forms of beliefs, fears, and anxieties that continue to propel attachment to those states. States are not necessarily the best representation of the people.Footnote ⁵ Nations, also, are sites of contestation and fragmentation, divided by interests based on class, gender, sexuality, religion, rural or urban location, political affiliation, and sometimes ethnicity and race.Footnote ⁶ To be in solidarity with the “people” of the Middle East requires an internationalist alignment: centering people and not states. It requires remaining critical of states, including the Republic of Armenia. And, as internationalists, it requires that we stand firmly against wars with an understanding that the only “winners” in war are those who make profit on organized violence.

Internationalist alignment, importantly, also remains critical of nations and nationalism. Sebouh Aslanian has argued that Armenian studies, even when it has set out to deconstruct nationalist discourse, has often borne resemblance to those very same narratives, charting a telos of the formation of the Armenian national subject in history, mourning Armenia's cohabitations with non-Armenians or times of nonautonomous sovereignty as lachrymose or stagnating pasts, and producing a vertical continuity between ancient pasts and the contemporary state- and nation-based world.Footnote ⁷ Nationalism in Armenia (or anywhere) is not an innocent project. Although the Republican Party (RP) in Armenia (the ruling party for many years) is “postnationalist,” meaning that “elites are preoccupied with issues of power and economic gain and the main issues in the political sphere relate to socioeconomic policies and day-to-day concerns,” historian Gayane Ayvazyan has shown how the role of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (allowed reentry into Armenian politics after a decade of being banned) had been to create and manufacture a sense of nationalism, acting as the justification for the RP's exploitation and violence.Footnote ⁸ Importantly, Ayvazyan further points out that this nationalist fabrication of an Armenia within “Armenology,” which has been so central to understandings of Armenia within the nation–state and which is the basis of Armenian studies in Armenia and perhaps to a certain degree in the West as well, also separates Armenia from the rest of the region we might call the Middle East.Footnote ⁹ Aslanian has made a similar point. Although these reviews of the field—of “Armenology” in Armenia as well as a moral international “Armenian studies”—are clearly not all-encompassing and are changing (this forum itself being a testament to those changes), this genealogy of thought is still a necessary site of reflection and critique.Footnote ¹⁰

Solidarity and internationalism as frameworks through which to think about the act of study require us to think seriously about remaking worlds, transforming the conditions of nationalist division, borders, and economic, social, and political exploitation. Whereas insisting on geographical belonging (shared locations, histories, cultures, languages, and practices) is past-oriented and looks toward the past as a model, internationalism and solidarity are necessarily future-oriented. An internationalist perspective that takes solidarity as its form of approach takes history seriously as a critical site of understanding (rather than as a model of national essence and ontology). In other words, history becomes a project not of mythologizing, ontologizing, and essentializing the past, but rather a project of finding possibilities that through these very myths, ontologies, and essences have been lost in time. It is through historicization of the contemporary that we can learn how to imagine and make new worlds.

Another critical facet of an internationalist and solidarity–based approach to Armenian studies is through grounding in political economy, geopolitics, and geopolitical economy.Footnote ¹¹ This would mean approaching the question of Armenia's (or Armenias’) “regionality” through its connections and ties (whether those be productive or exploitative) to other political and economic entities, or the material grounding of Armenia within the world. The realities and conditions of the 2020 war in Karabakh highlighted some of these connections. The forty-four-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan involved Turkey as Azerbaijan's supplier of drones, mercenary fighters from Syria, and possibly of F16s (likely manufactured in the United States).Footnote ¹² Turkey's role has been linked to Recep Tayyip Erdogan's “neo-Ottomanism,” a philosophy and orientation toward foreign policy that sees the goal of Turkey as expansion to the Russian borders and sees Armenia as well as an Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh in the way.Footnote ¹³ Turkey's role, of course, as a NATO country, needs to be put in larger perspective as it involves an alliance with some of the world's largest militaries. The war also involved Israel, which supplied Azerbaijan $825 million in weapons between 2006 and 2019, including drones, loitering munitions, anti-tank missiles, and a surface-to-air missile system.Footnote ¹⁴ Although the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and the contestation of the land may be framed by Armenians (as well as by Azerbaijanis) as about self-determination, it is of vital importance to also see it as a political economic event. Although it does involve symbolic land claims, affects of belonging, “my land” or “your land” border and boundary issues, it also is very much about natural gas, water, pipelines, and international trade.Footnote ¹⁵ These are questions of power, property, and exploitation that involve land but also transnational corporations and infrastructures of free markets, the legal and illegal arms trade, surveillance and information warfare, etc. To think about Armenia's regional place, role, and belonging, these geopolitical economic ties must be prioritized. These are real connections, associations, sites of conflict as well as opportunities of solidarity with the larger region(s) of the Middle East. How, for instance, might Armenian scholars build connections of solidarity with Palestinian scholars working and writing against Israeli militarization or with Kurdish scholars against Turkey's incursions? To be clear, by these forms of scholarly internationalist solidarities, I do not just mean scholars (as individuals or as organizations) signing on to statements or issuing their own statements of solidarity. This is necessary certainly. However, it remains within an activist mode that separates theory from practice. A scholarship informed by internationalist solidarity would require the reconsideration of questions asked, the consideration of critical collaborations (copublishing, co-researching), and the transformation of citational practices that expand and rethink the literatures that “belong” to the field of Armenian studies as just a few possible directions.

Solidarity is a complicated matter. We need to consistently ask ourselves with whom we are in solidarity. Geopolitical location, class, citizenship, and other political economic factors matter a great deal. Here, I think we need to turn to transnational feminist theory to think seriously about positionality and situatedness, as well as complicity. Many of us who are writing in this forum or reading it may be from the region of the “Middle East,” the “Near East,” the Caucasus, etc., but our current lives may not be tied up materially in those regions. For these reasons, there may be massive discrepancies between what we want for a future Armenia or a future Artsakh and what people whose lives are actually lived in these spaces may want or need. Militarization, a protracted war, and the occupation of local governance by an elite in Nagorno-Karabakh, for instance, have had massively disparate repercussions for those who live in the region, those who live in Armenia, and those who live elsewhere. To figure out this question of with whom and for what will require intensely democratic practices. And, thinking about this question of solidarity vis-à-vis people rather than nations or states may involve the inclusion of some Azerbaijanis as well as others in these democratic practices, as lands that Armenians today claim as Armenian territory have not historically been monoethnic.

At times we mistake solidarity with attachment. We may be attached to some things around which we have feelings: “strong” states, economies, militaries. We may desire these for our own nation. We may want our nation to win a war, to come out on top. For me, however, solidarity demands putting all of this into question, decolonizing our approach to the land, territory, and political economy. If we are to think about a decolonial approach to the question of the Middle East, Armenia, or the South Caucasus, then we have to ask what is the material return and to whom is it being returned? Material return might mean a radical defamiliarizing of our understanding of how the world should be, and rethinking borders and questions of sovereignty, economic distribution, and social structures such as gender, kinship, nation, state, as examples.Footnote ¹⁶ Here it also might be important to think about the ways in which the Armenian military and police occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh (prior to the occupation of the same territory by Russian “peacekeepers”) has had negative consequences on Armenians who have been living there as well. Material return also might mean a return of that land to the people from their militarized oligarchic government. This is true for both the Republic of Armenia as well as the Republic of Artsakh. A Fanonian decolonial approach, would, in other words, demand the consideration of the Armenian elite occupying the governments of both Armenia and Artsakh as colonial entities.Footnote ¹⁷ If we are thinking seriously about solidarity then we need to maintain solidarity with life and the living, and sometimes need to challenge our own priorities. Although heritage, monuments, churches, and other symbolic markers are critical, these cannot be the primary cause of struggles when life and living are in question. Prioritizing monuments and heritage when discussing questions of sovereignty ethnicizes land, abstracting it from material, political economic, geopolitical, and geopolitical economic questions. We might, instead, think about the question of heritage through internationalism and solidarity. Among others, Simon Maghakyan reflects on the multicultural dimensions of heritage in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh: connecting various peoples, languages, ethnicities, nations, histories, and religions, all of which also speak to the long history of cohabitation and multiplicity of the larger Middle East.Footnote ¹⁸

I will end with a question and a provocation: what is the objective of study, as in Armenian studies, Middle East studies? In a tradition of area studies, the objective was to inform state policy. There is, however, another critical tradition on which we can draw for insight on how to be reflexive and thoughtful about knowledge production. This is the tradition of “studies” that came out of popular social movements in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in the emergence of university spaces like women's studies, Chicana studies, ethnic studies, and Africana studies. Unlike area studies, these newly emergent fields were invested in critique of empire rather than honing academic skills for empire. I propose that Armenian studies’ approach to Middle East studies find a home within this latter framework: as a site of critical engagement and collaboration committed to remaking worlds: to bring about the elsewhere and the otherwise.Footnote ¹⁹ As an anthropologist, I believe that my task is not to come up with policy recommendations, “pragmatic solutions,” or to produce knowledge that aids in these endeavors, not in Armenia(s) nor in the larger Middle East.Footnote ²⁰ As an anthropologist and an internationalist, I see my task as actively imagining new worlds and new sets of social relations—through probing, questioning, and shifting hegemonic paradigms—through and toward internationalist solidarity with Armenians, with peoples of the Middle East, and with people all over the world.