As I sat down to write this personal reflection on recent tensions on the frontline, I realised that writing about Nagorno Karabakh - not as a journalist, analyst, or someone with experience working in conflict transformation, but as a citizen - is hard. It is emotional, it is painful, and it is infuriating.
When I think of Karabakh, I think of the stories I heard about its beauty from those who lived there, and from those who visited. I think of the time before us. A time when our communities lived together. When our nationalities did not define us. Instead, we were defined by our human values.
I was born some years before the conflict began, but lived with the Nagorno-Karabakh war well into adulthood. We are a generation of war that grew up on stories of friendships we heard from our parents vs the stories of despair, loss, and emptiness of countless of displaced families and refugees.
