As part of his plan to attract ethnic Armenians back to the Soviet Union after World War II and under pressure from both the leadership of the Armenian SSR and from Armenians in the top leadership of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin in December 1947 ordered the forcible deportation of 100,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis from Armenia to Azerbaijan, beginning a process which resulted in the departure of all Azerbaijanis from what had been part of their historical space and the creation of a mono-ethnic state in Armenia, according to Govhar Bakhshaliyeva, a Milli Majlis deputy. Recently, the Day.az ...

The election of Hasan Rowhani as the new president of Iran is part of a much larger process: an effort by the political elite to recapture authority in the population by launching a top-down political transformation lest outside forces provoke one and create a situation which Tehran might find difficult to control. That transformation, one not often remarked upon by outsiders, reflects the fact that Iranian nationalism is today a more important force than is Islam and the country’s imperial ambitions are more important than Muslim brotherhood, however defined.  Those close to the ...

More than 80 percent of the 50 million ethnic Azerbaijanis in the world live beyond the borders of the Republic of Azerbaijan, most because of political divisions imposed on the territory more than a century ago where Azerbaijanis had lived for centuries, but an increasing number because of emigration. This division reflects the fact that the traditional areal of the Azerbaijanis extends from Derbent in the North and Hamadan in the South and from the Caspian Sea in the East to Anatolia in the West for a total area of 410,000 square kilometers.  Of this area, the Republic of Azerbaij...