Clash of Histories in the South Caucasus: Redrawing the map of Azerbaijan, Armenia and IranBennet & Bloom, 2012232 pp.It is widely acknowledged that history is often manipulated and revised by authoritarian states. History textbooks have been used as a tool to legitimize government and institutionalize racism and hatred. This is the case of Azerbaijan, where after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Azerbaijani scholars guided by the political leadership tried to shape the national identity of their state.
Rouben Galichian, in his book Clash of Histories in the South Caucasus: Redrawing the map of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Iran, examines the roots and effects of Azerbaijan’s rewriting of history and why it continues to do so, focusing on Armenia and Iran. In addition to detailing the officially-sponsored invention of modern Azerbaijani national identity, the book also looks at the various methodologies employed by Azerbaijani historians and geographers for their falsification of the documented pasts of Eastern Armenia and the northern Iranian province of Azerbaijan.
According to the author, the official Azerbaijani narrative is to prove that the overall strategy adopted by Azerbaijan is to create a Turkic identity for its entire population, constituting the indigenous people of the territory and that the Armenians are newcomers to the South Caucasus. They also claim that all cultural monuments existing in Armenia, Artsakh and Azerbaijan belonged to the ancient...
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