Gender and the Making of “Standard” Knowledge in the Karabakh Conflict Studies

Abstract

Research on the Karabakh conflict has mainly focused on military dynamics, territorial  negotiations, and regional power competition. Within this dominant literature, the social and gendered  dimensions of war, such as displacement, household adaptation, and women’s roles in community survival  have received comparatively limited systematic attention, despite their relevance to how the conflict has  shaped everyday life since the early 1990s and after the 2020 war. This article examines gender inequality  in how knowledge about the Karabakh conflict is produced and recognized. It argues that (1) research on  gender is often treated as a secondary topic in conflict studies, and (2) even when such research exists,  frequently written by women, it is less likely to become widely visible, cited, or used as a standard reference  in the main literature on the conflict. To assess this, the study traces the development of gender-focused  research over time and conducts a structured comparison of indexed publications using OpenAlex, showing  how publication formats, indexing systems, and citation practices shape which studies become most  discoverable and reusable. The findings indicate that the apparent scarcity of gender analysis in Karabakh  scholarship is partly produced by academic visibility structures that privilege strategic analyses over  research on displacement, social recovery, and everyday wartime adaptation.