As claimed many times in the pages of The Funambulist, architecture and urban design are essential means of materialization of settler colonialism. In this text and through the maps she created, Melsida Babayan describes the various processes of weaponization of the built environment in the context of Artsakh, three years after the Azeri invasion, as well as the Armenian resistance to it.
The destructive capacities of war and its targeting of architecture are a fairly obvious reality. However, architecture and construction too have the potential to embody a destructive force. In this text, I discuss how the reconstruction of new settlements, urbanism, technology, and infrastructure were used as weapons of war and colonization in the Republic of Artsakh (the Nagorno Karabakh Republic), both throughout and after the war. Artsakh is a disputed, unrecognized de facto republic in the South Caucasus inhabited by mainly Armenians—a place that has been for centuries a center of conflict between Armenians and Azeris.
Artsakh, like Armenia and Azerbaijan, was a part of the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1991. It has suffered from various low- and high-intensity clashes during and after the collapse of the Union—the consequence of imperialist political regimes in the region and their colonizing ambitions. The last clash occurred on September 27, 2020, and ended with the trilateral cease-fire agreement between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia on November 9 of the same year. A bloody forty-four day war that took thousands of people’s lives from both sides, and turned the region into a territorial prison. After the war, Azerbaijan got hold of the so-called seven regions of Artsakh, occupying most of the territory and leaving only a small part of the territory free, landlocked inside Azerbaijan and disconnected from Armenia due to the Lachin Corridor being blocked.
After the cease-fire agreement, the Azeri state started using architecture and restoration projects as weapons to alter and claim the landscape of Artsakh.
The Republic of Artsakh is known for its natural resources, especially in the seven regions that hold approximately 246,700 hectares of forested areas. The territory also includes two hydropower plants and three mining areas. Accessing these power plants allows Azerbaijan to diversify its energy sources, including alternative energy, which is the main economic narrative the government of Azerbaijan pushes nowadays. This narrative becomes more prominent with the Azeri government’s decision to implement a new administrative division of the whole country. This includes the creation of two economic regions, Zangezur and Karabakh, which overlap the entire territory of Artsakh. The government already allotted 2.2 billion manats (about 1.3 billion US dollars) in 2021 for restoration works in these regions. As described by them, they are planning to implement projects based on “new modern standards,” also announcing these regions as green energy zones. Different foreign organizations are already involved in projects aiming to consolidate the economic gains of the invasion, in addition to its ethnic and nationalist dimensions. Many projects intend to execute large-scale decarbonization of these two regions, enforce new renewable energy projects, green buildings, waste management, clean industry, natural climate solutions, integrated and decarbonized energy, and mobility systems. During a press conference with foreign reporters on February 26, 2021, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev publicized some of the reconstruction and restoration projects, insisting that several projects have already been launched in the newly taken territory: three new airports, roads, and tunnels. The strategic distribution of airports near important cities, in terms of location, consolidates the military occupation and is developed as a perilous tactic towards Artsakh.
Until now, the conditions around the Lachin Corridor—as the only piece of land linking Artsakh with Armenia—remains uncertain. Based on the cease-fire agreement, it had to be protected for five years by Russian so-called peacekeepers, before a new road would be constructed within the same corridor, since Azerbaijan had to guarantee free movement in both directions. However, the Azeri government did not comply with the cease-fire agreement, instead starting and finishing construction of the new road immediately after the war. This bypassed the initial five-kilometer-wide boundary of the corridor, forcing people from three villages and the city of Berdzor (Lachin) inside it to flee their homes. It also created a mountainous and dangerous road by artificially altering the existing landscape. This corridor is essential not only because the existing road provides much needed humanitarian aid, but also because all the crucial infrastructure linking Artsakh with Armenia runs through this section, supplying Artsakh with electricity, gas, telephone, and internet. Following this, on December 12, 2022, Azeri so-called environmentalists blocked the corridor near the city of Shushi. They were demonstrating against Armenians’ so-called “eco-terrorism” in their management of natural resources in the seven regions. Meanwhile, the Azeri government was blaming the same Armenians for a so-called “humanitarian crisis.”
Yet it is this very government who has created such a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe. Despite the International Court of Justice’s decision to open the road immediately, during this year’s trial between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the road is not only closed to this day but also blocked by a connecting line of the Armenian border near Hakari bridge, where Azerbaijan has established strictly-controlled checkpoints. The blockade of the existing road, happening in parallel to the construction of the new road, as well as the blockade of this new road, showcases the settler colonial ambitions of the Azeri government. From here, the importance of infrastructure and its role in people’s lives is evident. As an architectural-urban typology, visible and hidden infrastructure is usually among the first things destroyed during the war. Besides the more immediate war crimes against people themselves, the targeting of infrastructure is another technique used by the military to torment people and control cities. Undoubtedly, infrastructure also continues to play a huge role after the war. It is rare that a state decides to repair or rebuild a territory’s infrastructure, after consciously destroying it.
In the case of Artsakh, the Azeri government is using the construction of its new infrastructure to continue claiming desirable lands.
Currently, so-called “smart villages” and agro-industrial parks are planned to be built all around the seven conquered regions. While looking at the first prototype of such a village, it is evident that implementing this concept of “smart villages” while referencing past and old Azeri architectural styles is an act of deception that tries to hide the military nature of such settler colonial projects. The Azeri government publicizes this concept of “smartness” among its citizens by linking it to national values, creating the delusion of redevelopment with the newest technologies and concepts. This is a way of showing their willingness to allocate thousands of manats for their restoration works, as part of constructing the so-called “Big Return,” and as a way of manifesting military endeavors of monitoring and control over the territory entirely.
This array of methods, whether truly “smart” or “green,” is being used for the Azeri military industrial complex here, and is clearly employed for claiming Armenian territory. In my work, I question news and media-produced maps as a manifestation of politics, which describes the territorial conflict in Artsakh in what they think is an objective vision. I propose another way of seeing and using cartography here. We all know that maps constitute an essential tool for architects. However, the types of maps architects create in contrast to what maps are used in political discourse, are consistently different. So, when these two contexts are brought together, it becomes the obligation of architects to portray territories through a different lens than we would see in the media. Hence, what could be another way of making maps in the context of war? Within this map series, I use cartography as a method to claim the rights of populations oppressed by state violence. One of the produced two-sided maps, “The Resistance,” brings to surface the context of this contested region and highlights local voices. The red thread sewn on the map symbolizes the resistance of Armenians and their deep connection with the land. At the same time, this thread indicates the importance of the corridor connecting Armenia, as a mark of contact with the outside world. The use of paper for sewing instead of fabric corresponds to the vulnerability of the territory.
The other two-sided map, “Technological Urbanism as a Military Weapon,” shows how war and post-war spatial processes affect Artsakh, creating a humanitarian and environmental disaster that turns the region into a sort of prison or laboratory, at the scale of an entire territory. This map is a combination of significant events and spatial colonial processes in the territory, throughout and after the war, combined into one piece. These maps voice the rights of the people suffering from ongoing consequences of war, and illustrate my solidarity with them. The process of mapping helped me reveal architectural patterns used by the Azeri government in this territory to consolidate the occupation. It became a way to distinguish genuine efforts at revitalization, from spatial architectural tools used to colonize territories. These maps also intend to show the responsibility of architects in colonization, and how renovation and construction in post-war contexts cannot be undertaken by architects as assumed apolitical projects. ■