Nona Shahnazaryan lecturing at Artsakh State University in 2013.
Photo by Albert Voskanyan, Caucasus Knot.

Etnografia, a journal of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, published a paper by Nona Shakhnazaryan and Denis Ermolin “Neighbors in rescue stories in comparative perspectives: Karabakh and Kosovo conflicts” (in Russian). Ermolin is affiliated with Kunstkamera and Shakhnazaryan with the St. Petersburg-based Center for Independent Sociological Research and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of Armenia’s National Academy of Sciences.

Shakhnazaryan has published a number of ground-breaking academic works on the social impact of the Karabakh war and broader Armenian-Azerbaijani violence. An earlier iteration of the Etnografia paper appeared in the Stepanakert-based Analyticon and looked at the motivations of Turks and Kurds who helped Armenians during the Ottoman genocide.

The paper that Shakhnazaryan co-authored with Ermolin uses the works of Samvel Shakhmuradyan, Hranush Kharatyan and Grisha Oganezov and Irina Mosesova, who collected eyewitness reports from the pogroms in Sumgait (1988), Kirovabad (1988-89) and Baku (1990), respectively, as well as newly-conducted personal interviews, to identify rescue cases and the role of neighbors, in particular.

In a recent interview, Shahnazaryan also shared her own family’s stories of warm relations with Azerbaijani neighbors in the town of Mingechaur, before and during the 1988 crisis.