Until very recently, foreign scholars have dominated the discussion of the national identity of Azerbaijanis. Now, Azerbaijani scholars are taking the lead. One of them, Chingiz Mammadov, currently a research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, shared his views on the process of nation-building in Azerbaijan with Azerbaijan in the World...

The end of the Soviet system has allowed Azerbaijanis ever more confidently to turn to their own history and collective memory, both of which were seriously distorted by the communist authorities, and thus to continue the process of the recovery of their own past that began during the period of glasnost and perestroika, a time of enormous growth in the interest of people to their own history, a rethinking of well-known events and new attention to almost unknown and largely forgotten events which one might call "the blank spots" of history.  A similar process has been ...

In addition to the Armenians in the occupied territories, Azerbaijan has numerous other ethnic minorities, some of whom play important political and even geopolitical roles even though taken together they amount to less than 10 percent of the population.  Most details about these communities, however, including even their exact numbers, remain matters of dispute. [1] And with rare exceptions, almost all the coverage they do receive has been tendentious, ranging from accusations, not in every case unfounded, of being tool of one or another foreign power to claims, not in every case t...

The Congress of Azerbaijanis in Israel was established on August 27, 2007 in the Rishon Le Zion in order to present in a professional and dignified way the national interests of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis to the people of Israel.  Given the absence of an Azerbaijani diplomatic mission, the Congress has the challenge of doing more than many diaspora organizations, and its members believe that it can play a growing role in the rapidly expanding ties between our two countries.   After only nine months in operation, the Congress of Azerbaijanis of Israel is already pla...

The idea of a federation of Caucasus states arose even before several of them achieved a brief period of independence following the collapse of the Russian Empire.  It continued to be discussed during that period, and it was the focus of particular attention by political figures in the various emigrations after Soviet forces occupied the region and extinguished for 80 years the aspirations for independence among the peoples there.            One of the leading advocates of a Caucasus Federation in all three periods was Ali Mardan bek Topchibas...