Decolonising Conflict Transformation: Agency, Ideology and Power in the Karabakh Conflict

Project in the Inequalities, Conflict and Peace theme within the Politics of Inequality research programme

Since the first Karabakh war ended in 1994, there have been civil society level efforts at peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and conflict transformation. These Track II efforts stood alongside official Track I negotiations and even when the latter stalled, they continued to work. Following the 44-day war in 2020, we began this research project which involved interviews with a range of actors involved in the Karabakh conflict transformation process and discourse analysis of relevant publications and social media posts, to examine the evolution of Track II civil society efforts. Adopting a sociological perspective, we seek to extend the analysis of civil society actors in conflict transformation beyond the usual normative, functionalist analyses to critically consider the agency of actors, the role of ideas and discourses, and the factors which shape how ‘actually existing civil societies’ engage in conflict transformation.