Aghasi Tadevosyan: The 44-day War in The Stories of Participants: English Summary

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This research is an attempt to take an anthropological approach to studying the 44-day war in the Armenian reality. The main aim is to present the war from the perspective of the participants, both military and civilian. While political and intellectual elites tend to play a key role in shaping the perception of war, they generally do not take part in the war in person.

The discourse they shape about the war often diverges from the view of the people who witnessed it firsthand, who 126 had the most at stake, whose bodies experienced the war directly upon themselves. This research is an attempt to study and present the war through the stories of those participants. The study describes the impact of the war on people, and typical phenomena such as perceptions of heroism, patriotism, betrayal, life and death, images of the enemy and the self, the role of victory and defeat in making sense of and redefining identity, new technologies and human helplessness, experiences of fear and horror, the process of transformation caused by the war, and similar issues.

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