More than a year after the Azerbaijani military offensive of September 2023 drove virtually the entire ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh from their ancestral lands, approximately 100,000 displaced persons remain in a condition of suspended belonging — formally present in Armenia, but without stable housing, without adequate employment, and without the institutional support required to rebuild lives shattered by one of the largest displacements in the post-Soviet Caucasus.
The Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner has issued a report calling on Yerevan to accelerate the integration of Karabakh Armenians, noting that while the Armenian government has taken initial steps — including registration procedures and limited financial assistance — the pace and scope of support fall short of what the situation demands. The Commissioner acknowledged progress in areas of non-discrimination and combating violence against women, but identified the Karabakh integration question as the most urgent unresolved challenge on Armenia's human rights agenda.
For those living through it, the statistics carry human weight that institutional language rarely captures. Families who had lived for generations in the towns and villages of Karabakh — in Stepanakert, in Hadrut, in Martuni — arrived in Armenia proper with whatever they could carry in the hours before the exodus. Many settled in Yerevan, straining a housing market already under pressure from the influx of Russian migrants that followed the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Others dispersed to smaller cities and rural areas ill-equipped to absorb them.
Integration Gaps
The challenges are structural. Many Karabakh Armenians held property and employment within the enclave's Soviet-era administrative system, which no longer exists in any form. Property claims cannot be enforced. Pension entitlements from the former Karabakh state are inconsistently recognized. Children who attended schools in Karabakh face credential recognition difficulties. The Armenian state, itself under fiscal pressure and managing a complex geopolitical transition, has struggled to design and fund integration programs at the scale required.
The Council of Europe's intervention is significant because it arrives from an institution that Armenia actively courts. Yerevan's EU approximation ambitions depend on maintaining credible compliance with Council of Europe standards, lending the Commissioner's recommendations a political weight that purely humanitarian appeals often lack.
The 100,000 displaced Karabakh Armenians represent more than a domestic policy challenge. They are the human remainder of a conflict whose formal conclusion Baku has declared but whose wounds remain far from healed — a living argument for why the peace treaty negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan cannot be reduced to border demarcation alone.
In the Caucasus, as across mountainous borderlands, ancient identities and modern geopolitics create intricate patterns of conflict and cooperation. The integration of those 100,000 lives is the measure by which history will judge whether the region's post-war order amounts to peace or merely the administration of defeat.
