What the record shows §

The most powerful quantitative line in the atlas is the population graph. Across two centuries, the South Caucasus saw three large compressions of Armenian presence and one very large compression of Azerbaijani presence. The first was the 1915 destruction of the Armenian population of Anatolia, including the Van vilayet, Kars and the wider eastern provinces. The second was Stalin-era: the 1948–1953 Council of Ministers resettlement moved roughly 100,000 Azerbaijanis out of Armenian SSR. The third was the 1988–94 mutual expulsions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which cleared each republic of the other's titular community. The fourth was the 2023 evacuation of Karabakh's Armenian population, the final compression documented in this atlas. The series below shows 20 curated localities where multiple sourced points exist; the atlas tracks 53 series in total, the rest reachable on the place pages.

Plotting events with recorded casualties over the timeline gives a picture less of continuous warfare than of compressed peaks: Hamidian (1894–96), the 1915 destruction, the 1990 Baku pogrom and the 1992–94 wartime years ending with the Khojaly massacre, then the 2020 war and the 2023 operation. The dots below sit at the midpoint of each event's recorded casualty range; atrocities are marked. Hover for the underlying range and the link to the event entity.

Recognition of the 1915 destruction as genocide is a political act with concrete legal weight: the 1948 Genocide Convention, ratified by 153 states by 2026, names genocide as an international crime that signatories are obligated to prevent and punish. Whether 1915 is a genocide under that Convention is the question recognising bodies have answered yes to, one at a time, over four decades. The opposing position — held by the Turkish state, the Azerbaijani state, Israel, the United Kingdom, and several others — is not that the killings did not happen but that their characterisation as genocide is contested, premature, or politically motivated. This is the dispute the recognition record cuts through.

The atlas tracks 25 formal recognition acts as legal-ruling entities. The map below places each on a stylised world layout, coloured by region. Architecturally the sequence reads: Uruguay first in 1965, the post-Soviet European wave through the 1990s and 2000s (France 2001, Italy 2000, Greece 1996, Poland 2005), the late legislative move in the United States (Congress 2019) and executive recognition (Biden 2021), and scattered Latin American and Middle Eastern recognitions on the same arc. Conspicuously absent: the United Kingdom, Israel, and most of Asia and Africa.

Cultural-heritage loss is the slowest and most cumulative measure in the dossier. The atlas tracks 101 sites; 59 are recorded as destroyed, damaged, altered, reattributed, or looted. Bars below are split by community of origin: who built the site, not who destroyed it. The rough mapping is that Armenian-built churches, monasteries and khachkars in Karabakh, Nakhichevan and adjacent regions were almost entirely lost to Azerbaijani-side actions (Soviet-era reattribution, the 1998–2005 Julfa destruction, post-2020 site-by-site overwriting), while Azerbaijani-built mosques, cemeteries and civic structures in the Armenian SSR and post-1991 Armenia were lost to Armenian-side actions (the 1988–91 expulsions and the post-1990s clearance of vacated villages). The "other" bucket is mostly Russian Imperial, Soviet civic, and Caucasian-Albanian or Persian sites whose attribution the atlas leaves open.

Of 52 legal rulings the atlas tracks, 19 are binding in the strict sense (Chapter VII UNSC, ICJ judgments, ECHR final judgments, ratified treaties), 28 are non-binding (Chapter VI resolutions, EP / PACE / UNGA resolutions, recognition acts), and 4 are ICJ provisional measures with binding effect pending final judgment. Of those with a recorded compliance outcome, 7 were complied with, 7 partially, and 10 ignored. The headline story is the asymmetry of the last column: binding rulings against Azerbaijan in 2023 (three ICJ provisional-measures orders) were ignored without enforcement consequence, while binding rulings against Armenia in the 1990s (UNSC 822 and successors, non-binding under Chapter VI) were nonetheless eventually displaced by the 2020 war.

A short, curated set of the architecturally significant rulings is shown below. The full chronology — every treaty, resolution, court order and ceasefire the atlas tracks — lives on the legal rulings page.