Rethinking Nationhood: Post-Independence Discourse on National Identity in Armenia

The collapse of the Soviet Union became a major social process, decentring the ethno-political structure of a huge system, disrupting discourses, and creating a lack at the level of identity. Nevertheless, the collapse stimulated new discourses on national identity and statehood and became marked by increasing salience of national(ist) projects. For Armenians, deprived of statehood for the last seven hundred years, the necessity to re-imagine the idea of nation as to bring it in accordance with state-building became particularly new and challenging. The present article deals with the contemporary political discourse on national identity in Armenia, and shows that while incorporating different meanings of 'nation' and 'state,' it avoids conceptualising the idea of nation-state in any of its projects. The analysis also uncovers the important role of political agents entering the discourse with own political projects and striving to hegemonise them through different articulatory techniques of ideology and identity politics.