Karabakh §

Mountain, lowland, and the danger of averaged numbers

Karabakh is not the same object at every scale. The khanate and later broad regional usage included both Armenian-majority mountain districts and Muslim-majority lowlands. Bournoutian's work on the early Russian inventories is useful precisely because it separates these layers: the Karabakh khanate as a whole was Muslim-majority in the early nineteenth century, while Mountain Karabakh was overwhelmingly Armenian Bournoutian. A single regional percentage can therefore mislead if it silently mixes mountain and plain. editorial

That ambiguity became politically explosive in the Soviet period. The 1921 Caucasian Bureau reversal and the 1923 NKAO formation carved an autonomous Armenian-majority mountain unit inside Soviet Azerbaijan, but did not include all Armenian-populated connections to Soviet Armenia. The resulting map gave Azerbaijan a constitutional title and Armenians an internal demographic majority without a direct land link. Both facts are real. Their combination is the mechanism of the modern dispute. editorial

The term Karabakh widened again during war. In 1992–94 Armenian forces took the former NKAO plus surrounding Azerbaijani districts, including Agdam, Kelbajar and Lachin. In 2020 Azerbaijan retook the surrounding districts and Shusha, and in September 2023 it retook the remaining Armenian-run territory, followed by the exodus of over 100,000 Armenians documented by UNHCR UNHCR. The word "Karabakh" can therefore mean a historical region, an autonomous oblast, a de facto republic, a war zone, or a memory claim. Reading the map requires asking which one is meant.