The Displacement Journey of Armenians from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh): Social Space, Memory, and Experiences of Survival

A growing body of forced-migration scholarship recognizes the journey as a socially consequential phase of displacement, yet less attention has been paid to how mobility, political control, social relations, vulnerability, and memory-making intersect during rapid collective displacement. This article examines the September 2023 displacement of Armenians from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) through the Lachin Corridor as a social, political, affective, and mnemonic space. Drawing on 60 semi-structured interviews conducted across Armenia between March 2024 and March 2026, it analyzes how displaced people experienced and subsequently narrated the journey. The findings show that the route was structured by scarcity, waiting, surveillance, and unequal mobility while also becoming a temporary social world sustained through family coordination and cooperation among strangers. The article develops mobile solidarity to describe temporary relations of reciprocity, care, cooperation, and informal authority generated through forced movement, and compressed traumatic space to describe the concentration of insecurity, loss, and uncertainty within a restricted route and period. It further conceptualizes the Lachin Road as an emergent mnemonic landscape, shaped partly through anticipatory remembering during departure. The article advances the displacement journey as a distinct analytical category linking mobility, power, social relations, vulnerability, and memory.