azerbaijan

How much has the 2020 war in Nagorno Karabakh been in the news? A comparison with August 2008 war in South Ossetia

On Sunday, 27 September 2020, a new war started in Nagorno Karabakh. It immediately appeared that this was a wide-scale military operation, as it involved the whole line of contact. It did not take long to understand that this was going to be worse than the deadly clashes in April 2016, and thus the largest escalation in more than two decades. Within the first ten days, there where tens of thousands civilians displaced by war, many hundreds of military casualties, thousands of injured, dozens of civilian casualties… this was, by any understanding of the term, a war.

Victims of double standards: double victimhood and changing narratives in Azerbaijan’s public rhetoric

Here is a brief summary of key points in the form of a Twitter thread: On my way back from ASIAC's latest conference in Gorizia, where I presented a joint work co-authored with @sofiebedford: "Victims of double standards: double victimhood and changing narratives in Azerbaijan’s public rhetoric" pic.twitter.com/9amsIIdMfp — Giorgio Comai (@giocomai) December 7, 2018

Aliyev: more and more ‘double standards’

At the latest ASN conference in New York I have been talking with Sofie Bedford about the rhetoric of ‘double standards’ in Azerbaijan and elsewhere. The conversation prompted a vary basic research question: “is it true that Azerbaijan’s president has been using more and more the rhetoric of ‘double standards’?” Since it is exactly the kind of straightforward question that can be easily approached with a tool I have been working on recently that simplifies quantitative content analysis of textual materials available online, I gave it a spin… and here are the results.