The Azerbaijani government’s embrace of pseudohistory is a direct threat to the peace process with Armenia.

In recent weeks, Azerbaijani officials hosted foreign diplomats, academics, and international guests on a carefully choreographed tour of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). Along the way, visitors were shown ancient churches, monasteries, and cultural landmarks long recognized as Armenian, and were told that these sites were not Armenian at all, but rather “Caucasian Albanian.”

To many attendees, the exercise may have seemed little more than an academic presentation on regional history. It was anything but.

The campaign to redefine Armenian cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh is not a scholarly debate. It is a state-sponsored political project with profound implications for peace, reconciliation, and long-term stability in the South Caucasus. At a moment when much of the international community is celebrating diplomatic progress toward a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, this systematic revisionism deserves far more scrutiny than it is receiving.

In September 2023, the Azerbaijani government effectively expelled more than 120,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, in what many observers described as ethnic cleansing. The exodus ended a centuries-long Armenian presence in the area virtually overnight and followed an intense blockade and military offensive. While the immediate humanitarian implications of that forced displacement were widely covered, far less attention has been paid to Azerbaijan’s accelerating effort to rewrite the identity of Nagorno-Karabakh’s monuments long associated with Armenian heritage.

These efforts to rewrite history do not stop at Nagorno-Karabakh’s borders. In public addresses and official state media, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly referred to the sovereign Republic of Armenia itself as “Western Azerbaijan,” claiming that much of present-day Armenia was built on historically Azerbaijani land. This irredentist rhetoric signals that Baku is laying the ideological groundwork for territorial expansion. When a state claims that its neighbor’s history is a myth and its territory is rightfully theirs, it signals that it does not want peace with Armenia—it wants Armenia.

As the grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors, I understand the power of memory and the destructive consequences of its denial. History teaches us that peace is not built merely through temporary ceasefires, treaties, or staged diplomatic declarations. It is built through recognition of reality, including the history, culture, and humanity of neighboring peoples. When states seek to erase those realities, they destroy the very foundation on which lasting peace depends.

Supporters of normalization between Armenia and Azerbaijan often focus on border delimitation, transit corridors, security guarantees, and economic integration. Those issues are undeniably vital to regional stability. But a fundamental question remains unaddressed: How can two nations reconcile if one side is actively working to erase the other’s historical presence?

For centuries, sacred monasteries such as Gandzasar and Dadivank have been central to Armenian religious, artistic, and cultural life. Today, coordinated efforts are underway to strip these sites of their heritage and reassign them to a state-approved historical narrative.

Historical revisionism is rarely just about the past. It shapes current claims about who belongs, who has legitimate roots in a region, and who possesses the right to return. When the historical identity of a people’s holy sites is recast or wiped away, it creates a dangerous framework through which their very connection to the land, and their status as human beings, can be questioned and dismissed.

For displaced Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, this matters profoundly. If the physical history of a people is erased from a landscape, it becomes infinitely easier to argue that their connection to that place never existed in the first place.

True normalization requires more than the temporary absence of active combat.  It requires mutual recognition. The most successful peace processes around the world have never depended on one side abandoning its identity or capitulating to historical fiction. Rather, they have required difficult acknowledgments of competing narratives, painful memories, and inconvenient truths. Reconciliation is not achieved by demanding historical surrender. It is achieved by creating space for coexistence.

The international community also has a crucial responsibility. Western governments and international institutions frequently express support for peace efforts in the region, but diplomatic engagement must not come at the expense of cultural truth.

A durable peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan remains possible, but peace requires honesty. It requires acknowledging that Armenians lived in Nagorno-Karabakh, built churches there, worshipped there, and developed deep cultural connections to the land over generations.

History cannot be negotiated away. As someone whose family history was shaped by the consequences of denial and erasure, I know that memory matters, not because the past should imprison us, but because understanding it is the only way to move forward together. The South Caucasus faces a choice between a future built on recognition and one built on erasure. Only one of those paths leads to lasting stability.

About the Author: Stephan Pechdimaldji

Stephan Pechdimaldji is a communications strategist and writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a first-generation Armenian American and grandson of survivors of the Armenian genocide. You can follow him on X at @spechdimaldji.

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