An Alternative to the Dissident Paradigm and Intersecting Civil Protests in Soviet Armenia: Equal but Different?

Abstract

The article analyzes alternative dimensions of dissidence and civil protests in Soviet Armenia, which covers the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, from the Khrushchev Thaw to Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Comparative study of the dissident paradigm has political and civilizational significance. The dissident paradigm is precisely associated with the entire human rights movement, and human rights activists were those who were called dissidents. Thanks to them, ideas of an alternative development of Soviet society and public authorities emerged.
 At the present stage, the democratic rights of citizens, for which the intelligentsia and human rights activists fought in the 1960s-1980s, are proclaimed and enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia. But this does not mean that the issue of human rights has been resolved in reality, since in reality human rights are often violated, first of all, by the public authorities themselves. The experience of the first generation of human rights defenders continues to be of interest to numerous committees and commissions advocating respect for the constitutional and legal rights of citizens.
 The relevance of the research topic is due to the fact that the processes of formation of a democratic society and the rule of law in modern Armenia put forward the task of effectively protecting human rights and freedoms. Given the fact that the recognition of human rights as a basic value was the result of a long evolution of society, it is important to see that their prerequisite was the struggle of the most socially active people for the possibility of civilizational development.

From Conflict to Peace? Stateness Assessment of the South Caucasus countries at the crossroads of political processes from 2017 to 2022

“…This article is not only representing a coprehensive and compound topic, reviewing a complex notion of "stateness", but is also the 'closing chapter' of the large-scale research project of 10 years. Having reviewed the core features and conditions of statebuilding (Petrosyan 2016a) and stateness (Petrosyan 2016b;Manukyan 2018a)including post-conflict contexts, segregated field and integral stateness assessment models (Manukyan 2020a), as well as the difficulties pertaining to the assessment of stateness of not only recognized, but also non-recognized states (Petrosyan 2016c; Manukyan 2020a; Manukyan 2020b), it was not only possible to come up with a comprehensive definition of stateness, but also to use it as an axis for the developed index, enabling the synchronous assessment of recognized and non-recognized states. But before jumping into the developed definition and index, it should be noted that though the concepts and models of assessment of stateness have started to develop since the 60s of the past century, they are still in the stage of elaboration and improvement.…”

“…Can we assess stateness? : Yes, and in political science there exist two methods of stateness assessment (Manukyan 2020a):…”

“…Within the "Peace Index" a precise methodology has been developed, which would allow to carry out as objective evaluation as possible for each state. As the index assesses stateness level of both recognized and non-recognized states, there was a need to develop a methodology, which could have been implemented for the both, which was indeed a real challenge (Manukyan 2020a, Manukyan 2020b. The Peace Index assessment is a three-level system for assessing and processing the results: 1) case-study; 2) cluster analysesaccording to the regions (with both recognized and non-recognized states within the region), as well as separate cluster analyses only for the non-recognized states; 3) global comparison (see Table 1).…”