Transitional Justice and Its Queer Discontents in Armenia: Notes on War, Peace and Care

ABSTRACT∞ In these notes from the field, we reflect on the place of LGBTQ+ rights discourses in the processes of negotiating transitional justice in Armenia and on our experiences of doing research on this topic in the country against the backdrop of the Karabakh wars and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We offer methodological reflections on doing research in Armenia as outsiders-insiders – neither Armenians nor speakers of the language, yet researchers coming from what is broadly defined as the ‘post-Soviet’ space and sharing multiple cultural codes with our interlocutors. We focus on our strategies of building trust and establishing networks of care in the complex context of multiple overlapping military conflicts, where the politics of positionality – the language, in particular – becomes extremely important. We argue that Armenian queer-feminist actors do not merely seek inclusion in transitional justice but dissidently reimagine it, grounding its meaning in care, vulnerability and collective resistance.