The year 2018 marked the 20th anniversary of the joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies, a collaboration more parsimoniously known as Project ArAGATS. The project was originally conceived as an effort to define long-term processes of social, economic, and political change in the South Caucasus across the Bronze and Iron Ages at a regional scale. In addition to introducing methods of intensive systematic survey to the region, the work of the project has unfolded in an integrated series of excavations conducted across multiple sites and bolstered by a wide range of analytical techniques. The result has been not only new data on the ancient South Caucasus but also a new model for the practice of international collaborative research in archaeology.
The contemporary democratic states consider the concept of political rights, especially the right to vote as a fundamental pillar above all other rights. The political rights are dominant only due to their implementation: people have an opportunity to exercise their power on the one hand, and transfer their power without any political upheavals on the other.
In this regard, it is worth highlighting that the political rights are one of the corner-stone rights for modern democratic rule of law. According to this thesis, we can persist that the problems of the realization of political rights are decisive and highly important even for the declared and transitional democratic states.
In this respect, the Republic of Armenia is no exception as the problems of the implementation of political rights are definitely the electoral rights. These rights are among the most acute social problems that young Armenian democracy has faced after the independence.
The issues in implementation of the political rights are steadily coupled with the problems of imposing punishments for crimes directed against political rights. As the experience of the Republic of Armenia has shown, the number of crimes directed against political rights has increased over the years. The tendency of the growth of the above-mentioned crimes has objective and subjective reasons. Among the objective reasons, we can note the transitional character of Armenian democracy. As for justice, it should be noted that such problems are inherent in almost all transitional states and especially, for modern countries. It is easier to understand, when we observe the experience of communities, which try to pass from the totalitarian rails of state governance to democratic ones. From the other side, the social and economic reasons of the state, poverty of the population can be considered as an objective reason. In terms of subjective reasons, firstly, the disproportionate punishment for crimes directed against political rights should be pointed out, which are the central obstacles for the implementation of political rights.
The quality of opposition and penetration possibilities are also altering in the rapidly changing world. In parallel with the technical and technological development, it seems that in pre-war, wartime and post-war proceedings, the informative and psychological components, if are not pushed to the forefront, do not concede to the military actions with their significance of influencing the opponent.
The second war of Artsakh, which lasted from September 27 to November 9 in 2020 and the military crimes carried out by the Turk-Azerbaijani tandem during the war, shows that the policy towards Armenians implemented by both Turks and Azerbaijani has not been changed over a century. That is, since 1918, all the tools with the military, informational, and psychological components used by Azerbaijan are initially targeted not only at the azerbaijanization of the territories but also against the statehood of Artsakh and human rights.
In this regard, it is imperative for the Armenian side to clearly and objectively convey the available information of inhuman policy against Armenians to the international community.
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