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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

Research on forced migration has extensively examined the causes of displacement, refugee protection, legal status, settlement, integration, and the reconstruction of lives after arrival. A growing body of scholarship, however, has demonstrated that the journey between departure and arrival constitutes an important dimension of displacement in its own right. BenEzer and Zetter conceptualize refugee journeys as formative and transformative experiences, while subsequent studies have challenged linear origin–destination models by emphasizing fragmented trajectories, periods of waiting and immobility, and the changing meanings of transit and the “in-between” [1,2,3,4]. Ethnographic research has further shown that migration routes may become spaces not only of violence and vulnerability but also of care, intimacy, cooperation, and solidarity [5].

Despite this growing literature, important dimensions of displacement journeys remain less developed. Much existing research concerns prolonged, irregular, or multi-stage migration, particularly trajectories involving multiple transit locations and movement toward Europe or North America. Comparatively less attention has been given to rapid collective displacement from conflict zones into neighboring states, particularly where a large proportion of a population is forced to move through a highly restricted route. Moreover, mobility and immobility, political control, humanitarian infrastructures, social relations, and journey narratives have often been examined as distinct dimensions of displacement. Less attention has been paid to how these processes intersect within a single route and to how the route itself may simultaneously become a space of political control, temporary social organization, embodied vulnerability, and subsequent collective memory.

This article addresses this gap by approaching the displacement journey as a socially produced space in which political regulation, material conditions, social relations, survival practices, and meaning-making intersect. Rather than treating movement as a simple transition between origin and destination, it examines what happens during forced passage: how mobility is constrained and organized; how waiting and involuntary immobility become constitutive elements of the journey; how displaced people respond to scarcity and uncertainty; how temporary forms of cooperation and informal organization emerge; and how the journey itself becomes incorporated into narratives of loss, survival, and belonging.

The September 2023 mass displacement of Armenians from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) provides a critical case through which to examine these dynamics. Following approximately nine months of severe restrictions on movement through the Lachin Corridor, shortages of essential goods, and growing insecurity, Azerbaijan’s military offensive of 19 September 2023 precipitated the departure of almost the entire Armenian population of the territory. Within days, more than 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh had crossed into the Republic of Armenia [6]. The Lachin Road became a temporary social environment marked by extreme congestion, hunger, exhaustion, surveillance, uncertainty, and fear, but also by family coordination, mutual assistance, care, and improvised practices of survival.

Throughout the article, Artsakh and Nagorno-Karabakh are used alongside one another but not as fully interchangeable terms. Nagorno-Karabakh is the formal administrative and geopolitical designation associated with the territory, whereas Artsakh has deeper historical usage among Armenians and carries cultural meanings connected to collective identity, territorial belonging, and social memory. Using both terms acknowledges the relationship between geographical designation and the population’s own language of belonging.

The article draws on 60 semi-structured interviews conducted with forcibly displaced Armenians across Armenia between March 2024 and March 2026. Through thematic and discourse analysis, it examines retrospective narratives of the journey and the meanings participants attach to mobility and immobility, waiting, border control, social relations, material loss, survival, and memory. Comparisons with displacement experiences in Abkhazia and Ukraine are used to clarify how different configurations of political authority, security control, humanitarian infrastructure, and territorial division shape displacement routes. These comparisons are analytical rather than equivalence-based: the historical, political, and institutional contexts of the three cases differ substantially.

The study addresses three research questions:

• How was the Lachin journey socially and politically produced through forced mobility, border control, scarcity, and unequal vulnerability?
• How did displaced people reorganize social relations and survival practices on the road, and what forms of temporary solidarity emerged?
• How is the journey narrated after displacement in relation to liminality, trauma, and collective memory?

Building on scholarship that treats migration journeys as socially consequential phases of displacement, the article advances the displacement journey as a distinct analytical category through which mobility, power, social relations, and memory can be examined together. It develops three connected analytical contributions. Mobile solidarity describes temporary relations of reciprocity, care, practical cooperation, and informal authority generated through shared forced movement. Compressed traumatic space describes the spatial and temporal concentration of preceding insecurity, immediate danger, forced movement, material loss, and anticipated separation within a restricted route. Finally, the article conceptualizes the displacement route as an emergent mnemonic landscape, examining how places, objects, experiences, and narratives associated with the journey acquire lasting significance in post-displacement memory. Within this process, anticipatory remembering refers to the conscious preservation or production of memories while separation from home is still occurring or understood to be imminent.

Together, these concepts show how the political organization of mobility becomes intertwined with lived experience, temporary social organization, vulnerability, survival, and memory. The article therefore extends existing scholarship on migration journeys by examining how these processes converge within a compressed episode of near-total collective displacement through a highly restricted route.

2. Theoretical Framework

This article conceptualizes the forced-displacement journey as a social space rather than a neutral interval between departure and arrival. Its framework combines scholarship on the social production of space, mobilities, liminality, social capital, trauma, and collective memory. Together, these perspectives connect the political regulation of movement with displaced people’s lived experiences, temporary social relations, and subsequent practices of narration and remembrance.

2.1. The Social Production of Space and Forced Mobility

Building on scholarship that treats refugee and migrant journeys as socially consequential experiences rather than merely geographical transitions [1,2,3,4], this article develops a spatial and relational approach to forced movement. It brings journey scholarship into dialogue with theories of socially produced space, mobility and immobility, liminality, social capital, trauma, and memory in order to examine how a displacement route can simultaneously become a space of political control, social reorganization, embodied vulnerability, and remembering.

Henri Lefebvre’s account of space as socially produced provides the framework’s starting point. Space is constituted through social relations, practices, and structures of power rather than functioning as an empty container. His triad of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces broadly distinguishes the perceived, conceived, and lived dimensions of social space [7].

Applied to forced displacement, this approach directs attention to how roads and corridors are produced through interactions among displaced people, states, military actors, borders, and infrastructures. Routes are therefore not merely geographical connections between origin and destination. Their accessibility, pace, direction, and conditions reflect unequal relations of power.

Sheller and Urry’s new mobilities paradigm similarly places movement and the systems that enable or restrict it at the center of social analysis [8]. The relevant questions concern not only where people move, but how, under whose authority, through which infrastructures, and with what meanings. Mobility is unevenly distributed: some actors organize, monitor, facilitate, or restrict movement, while others must negotiate the conditions imposed upon them.

Forced journeys are constituted not only through movement but also through waiting, interruption, containment, and involuntary immobility [2,3]. Mobility and immobility are therefore relational: the ability of some actors to regulate, delay, or interrupt movement forms part of the power structure through which the journey is experienced.

Forced displacement makes these inequalities particularly visible because movement occurs under conditions in which choice is constrained by insecurity, coercion, resource scarcity, or political pressure. The capacity of some actors to regulate passage consequently shapes both the vulnerability and agency of those compelled to move. Combining Lefebvre with the mobilities perspective therefore makes it possible to analyze the displacement route simultaneously as material infrastructure, politically regulated space, and lived social environment.

2.2. Liminality, Social Capital, and Mobile Solidarity

Victor Turner’s concept of liminality illuminates the displacement journey as a transitional condition. Liminal subjects have left an established social position without yet entering a stable new one [9] (pp. 94–130). Forced migrants in transit similarly occupy an uncertain position between a social world they have left and one in which they have not yet become established.

Liminality may temporarily weaken familiar roles and hierarchies while generating new forms of interaction. Turner’s concept of communitas describes intensified togetherness arising through shared transitional experience [9] (pp. 132–140). This offers one foundation for mobile solidarity, but shared vulnerability does not necessarily create egalitarian relations: resources, physical capacity, social networks, gender, age, and exposure to risk remain unevenly distributed.

Robert Putnam’s distinction between bonding and bridging social capital provides a complementary account of the relational mechanisms involved. Bonding capital reinforces reciprocity within close groups, whereas bridging capital connects individuals across social networks [10] (pp. 22–24). During forced migration, established family, kinship, friendship, and community networks may facilitate movement and survival, while shared insecurity, scarcity, and waiting may also give rise to practical cooperation among travelers without prior ties. The distinction helps explain both the activation of existing relationships and the provisional extension of assistance beyond them.

Ethnographic research demonstrates that precarious migration routes can generate relations of care, intimacy, and solidarity alongside violence and vulnerability [5]. Importantly, such cooperation is shaped by the material demands and political constraints of movement and need not develop into enduring or equal social relations.

Bringing these perspectives together, this article develops mobile solidarity to describe temporary relations of reciprocity, care, coordination, and informal authority activated or generated through shared forced movement. Its theoretical foundations are threefold: liminality helps explain the provisional reconfiguration of social roles; bonding and bridging social capital clarify the activation and extension of support networks; and journey ethnography situates practical cooperation within precarious conditions of mobility. Mobile solidarity is therefore more specific than generosity during transit: it captures how scarcity, waiting, interrupted movement, and shared practical problems produce situational obligations and capacities, sometimes among strangers. These relations remain contingent and uneven, and cooperation can coexist with competition and unequal vulnerability.

2.3. Compressed Traumatic Space

Trauma scholarship helps explain the interrelation of disturbing events, temporality, and later narration. Cathy Caruth highlights how traumatic experiences may be re-encountered through memory and narrative rather than being fully assimilated at the time they occur [11]. Kai Erikson’s sociological account further draws attention to how catastrophe can disrupt communal relationships and shared social life [12]. Together, these perspectives make it possible to examine both remembered experiences of insecurity and the disruption of social worlds without treating trauma solely as an individual clinical condition.

In dialogue with the spatial and mobilities approaches outlined above, this article proposes compressed traumatic space as a socio-spatial analytical concept for situations in which multiple interconnected destabilizing experiences become concentrated within a restricted spatial and temporal environment. Experiences associated with different stages—preceding insecurity, immediate danger, forced movement, material loss, and anticipated separation—may converge within a single journey and later be narrated through recurring images of fear, exhaustion, uncertainty, loss, and irreversible departure. In the Artsakh case, the prolonged blockade and insecurity preceded a journey that combined forced departure, congestion, scarcity, checkpoint surveillance, and uncertainty about return.

The concept does not designate a clinical category, measure psychological trauma, or presume that all displaced people experienced events identically. Its distinct contribution lies in connecting the social disruption and temporal recurrence emphasized by trauma scholarship to the spatial restrictions and compressed duration of forced passage. It complements approaches that divide displacement into departure, transit, and arrival by examining how these experiences become interconnected within the journey itself.

2.4. From Route to Mnemonic Landscape

Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, or “sites of memory,” provides a final perspective on the relationship between displacement routes and collective memory. Sites of memory emerge when collective memory becomes attached to material, symbolic, or functional reference points [13] (pp. 7–24). Roads, checkpoints, bridges, border crossings, objects, and landscapes may therefore retain social significance through personal testimony, family transmission, public representation, and commemoration.

This study extends this perspective by approaching the displacement route as an emergent mnemonic landscape. Because the displacement examined here is recent, the meanings attached to the journey should not be understood as fixed or fully consolidated. They may change through family storytelling, political developments, public debate, commemoration, and changing expectations of return. The concept of an emergent mnemonic landscape therefore draws attention both to recurring spatial motifs in displacement narratives and to the continuing process through which their collective meanings are constructed.

A related process examined in the article is anticipatory remembering: practices through which people begin preserving, selecting, or interpreting memories while separation from a place is still occurring or anticipated. This perspective complicates a simple temporal distinction between experience and subsequent remembrance by allowing memory-making to be examined as part of displacement itself.

Taken together, these perspectives conceptualize the forced-displacement journey as a multilayered social, political, affective, and mnemonic space. The framework connects the regulation of mobility, temporary reorganization of social relations, concentration of destabilizing experiences, and formation of memory without assuming that these dimensions operate independently. It thereby provides the analytical basis for examining the road as part of the displacement process itself.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Research Design, Sampling, and Data Collection

This study adopts a qualitative, interpretivist design to examine the forced-displacement journey as a lived social and symbolic space. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore how participants experienced, interpreted, and subsequently narrated forced movement, while thematic and discourse analysis provided complementary approaches to identifying recurring patterns and examining the meanings through which those experiences were reconstructed [14].

The empirical material comprises 60 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with people forcibly displaced from Artsakh in September 2023. Interviews were conducted across Armenia between March 2024 and March 2026 and generally lasted 40–60 min. Twenty-three interviews took place in Yerevan and 37 elsewhere in Armenia, covering 13 urban and 15 rural settlements. Purposive sampling sought variation in gender, age, education, and place of residence to capture diverse experiences rather than achieve statistical representativeness. The sample comprised 30 men and 30 women. Twenty-one participants were aged 18–34 (10 men and 11 women), 22 were aged 35–64 (11 men and 11 women), and 17 were aged 65 or over (9 men and 8 women). In Yerevan, 12 interviewees were men and 11 were women; in the regions, 18 were men and 19 were women. This variation was pertinent to interpreting differentiated experiences of caregiving, mobility, security encounters, and access to resources, without permitting estimates of their prevalence across demographic groups. Local social-service staff, displaced people’s relatives and friends, and civil society organizations facilitated initial contact and fieldwork logistics; their role was limited to these practical arrangements.

The interviews addressed participants’ physical and emotional experiences of the journey, conditions of movement and waiting, interactions and relationships formed or altered on the road, encounters with border and security controls, material loss, survival practices, the meanings subsequently attributed to displacement, and the incorporation of the journey into narratives of memory and belonging. Interviews were conducted in Armenian and transcribed verbatim. Quotations selected for publication were translated into English, with attention to preserving their meaning, tone, and narrative character. This structure allowed participants to recount the journey in their own terms while ensuring that the interviews addressed the study’s central analytical concerns.

3.2. Data Analysis

The analysis combined thematic and discourse-oriented approaches. Following Braun and Clarke, thematic analysis involved familiarization with the material, systematic coding, theme development, review, and interpretation in relation to the research questions [15]. Particular attention was given to recurring patterns concerning mobility and immobility, scarcity and waiting, family and community networks, assistance among strangers, encounters with authority, material loss, border crossing, and memory.

Discourse analysis complemented this thematic approach by examining how participants constructed and communicated the meaning of the journey. Attention was given to recurring metaphors and oppositions—including representations of the road through images of suffering, survival, danger, and salvation—as well as narrative constructions of power, responsibility, belonging, and boundaries between “us” and “them.” The analysis therefore treated interview accounts not simply as transparent records of past events but also as retrospective narratives through which displacement was interpreted and given social meaning.

Coding was conducted on the Armenian-language transcripts. Initial codes were developed iteratively through repeated reading of the interviews and were subsequently organized in relation to the research questions and emerging themes. Coding and interpretive decisions were discussed among all authors in order to refine thematic categories and maintain consistency in interpretation.

Because interviews were conducted after displacement, retrospective reconstruction is central to the methodological approach rather than merely a source of potential error. The study distinguishes between claims about events that can be corroborated through documentary sources and participants’ accounts of how those events were experienced, remembered, and interpreted. This distinction is particularly important for descriptions of checkpoint practices, rumors, perceived threats, and other circumstances that the interviews alone cannot establish as standardized practices.

Ukraine and Abkhazia are used as focused contextual comparisons based on documentary sources rather than as cases within a systematic comparative research design; their purpose is to illuminate variation in the institutional organization of displacement routes.

3.3. Ethical Considerations and Limitations

The research was reviewed and approved by the authors’ institutional ethics review body (institution and approval details withheld for double-anonymized peer review). Because the study concerns potentially traumatic experiences of forced displacement, its ethical procedures were also informed by the Refugee Studies Centre’s guidelines for good research practice [16] and Christina Clark-Kazak’s framework for research with people in situations of forced migration [17].

Participation was voluntary. Before each interview, participants received information about the purpose and procedures of the study, were informed that they could decline to answer any question or withdraw without consequence, and provided oral informed consent. Explicit permission was obtained for audio recording. Anonymity and confidentiality were maintained throughout the research and publication process, and identifying information is not included in the presentation of interview material.

The researchers clarified that they did not represent governmental or humanitarian organizations and could not provide administrative, financial, or other assistance. This distinction was intended to reduce the possibility that participation might be influenced by expectations of material or institutional support. Questions and interview procedures were designed to minimize distress and the possibility of retraumatization, and participants could pause or terminate an interview at any point.

The study has three principal limitations. First, interviews conducted between March 2024 and March 2026 reconstructed a journey that occurred in September 2023, meaning that the temporal distance between displacement and interview varied among participants. Accounts may therefore reflect selective emphasis, reinterpretation, and subsequent experience. Because the study examines narrativization and memory, however, such retrospective reconstruction is also part of the phenomenon under investigation.

Second, the emotional and psychological strain associated with forced displacement may have influenced what participants were willing to recount and how particular experiences were narrated. The study therefore does not treat interview testimony as an unmediated reproduction of events but examines it as situated testimony shaped by experience, memory, and the circumstances of narration.

Third, purposive sampling and the qualitative design do not support statistical generalization to the entire population displaced from Artsakh. Although the sample includes equal numbers of men and women and participants from three age categories, demographic balance does not eliminate selection biases or imply representativeness. Recruitment through local contacts and organizations, interview locations, and differences in health, family circumstances, and material resources may have shaped which experiences were documented. This is particularly relevant to gendered and age-related vulnerability: the study identifies situated experiences and mechanisms rather than estimating their frequency or making systematic population-level comparisons between groups. Its findings provide interpretive insight into experiences of forced movement, social relations, survival, authority, and remembering.

4. Historical Context: From Blockade to Mass Displacement

The conflict’s institutional origins lie in early Soviet territorial decisions. In July 1921, after competing decisions and negotiations over the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Party ultimately left Mountainous Karabakh within Soviet Azerbaijan on the condition that it receive autonomous status. The Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) was formally established within the Azerbaijan SSR in 1923 [18]. Armenians remained a substantial majority of the autonomous region throughout the Soviet period. According to official Soviet census data, Armenians constituted 89.1 percent of the population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast in 1926 [19] (p. 5) and 76.9 percent in 1989 [20] (p. 18).

In February 1988, the NKAO regional Soviet requested the region’s transfer from the Azerbaijan SSR to the Armenian SSR, and the dispute escalated as the Soviet Union dissolved. The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic declared independence in September 1991. Mass violence against Armenians in Sumgait in 1988 and Baku in 1990, alongside violence, intimidation, and forced population movements affecting Azerbaijanis, contributed to the progressive ethnic unmixing of Armenia and Azerbaijan and to large-scale armed conflict [21]. Approximately 360,000 refugees came to Armenia from Azerbaijan during the conflict period, while roughly 160,000 Azerbaijanis who had lived in Armenia left for Azerbaijan [22]. This history provides the context of recurrent territorial insecurity and forced mobility within which the 2023 exodus occurred.

The immediate context of that exodus began with the disruption of movement through the Lachin Corridor in December 2022. The restrictions increasingly isolated the population and severely disrupted movement of people and access to essential goods. In February 2023, the International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to take all measures at its disposal to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles, and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions [23]. Azerbaijan’s military offensive of 19 September 2023 sharply intensified insecurity and precipitated mass departure.

Within days, more than 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh crossed into the Republic of Armenia, amounting to the displacement of almost the entire Armenian population of the territory. By 3 October 2023, the Government of Armenia reported 100,625 forcibly displaced persons from Nagorno-Karabakh [6]; by 20 October, 101,848 people had been registered and identified [24]. The scale and speed of this movement made the Lachin Corridor the principal route through which territorial loss became an immediate lived experience.

Those leaving Artsakh therefore did not begin their journey under ordinary conditions of mobility. They entered the road after prolonged scarcity, restrictions, uncertainty, and deteriorating security, followed by abrupt military escalation. The passage to Armenia was both the culmination of an extended process of insecurity and the beginning of a new condition of displacement. This context explains why the road became a concentrated social space of waiting, exhaustion, fear, mutual dependence, and survival rather than merely a route between two territories.

5. Results

5.1. “We Barely Escaped”: Displacement and Material Loss

Interviewees described the September 2023 displacement as a sudden and largely unplanned flight in which decisions were often made within hours or minutes. Immediate physical safety took precedence over possessions and other material resources.

“They told us that the village had to be evacuated by eleven o’clock. We had a small car, so each of us took just one change of clothes. Everything else we had—everything we had accumulated over all those years—we left behind, and we left.”

(Male, 60, secondary education, Armavir Province)

Another participant similarly recalled:

“My son called and said, ‘Mom, get ready quickly and get out.’ We rushed around trying to leave, with a small child, and my daughter is ill too [points to her middle-aged daughter]. We barely escaped with our lives. We couldn’t take anything with us.”

(Female, 83, secondary education, Ararat Province)

The recurring expression “we barely escaped with our lives” (mazapurts pakhank) captures how participants understood departure primarily as an act of survival rather than as a planned migration strategy. Leaving with minimal clothing and belongings was repeatedly contrasted with everything that remained behind: homes, household goods, documents, photographs, and possessions accumulated over many years.

“Our family documents, the photographs—all the pictures from when the children were young—we left everything behind. Everything stayed there. We couldn’t bring anything with us.”

(Male, 60, secondary education, Aragatsotn Province)

Such losses were not understood solely in economic terms. Photographs, documents, household objects, and homes were embedded in personal and family histories. Their abandonment therefore joined material dispossession to the disruption of biographical and familial continuity, a connection that becomes especially important in participants’ later narratives of home and memory.

Accounts of military violence further demonstrate the conditions under which decisions about departure were made. Participants described explosions, drone strikes, hiding in basements, deaths, disrupted communications, and efforts to move children, older people, and relatives with disabilities to safety. One participant recalled:

“Everyone was shouting very loudly, ‘Get into the basement!’ We went down immediately, and my mother ran to the school to get my sister. We have a disabled person at home—my grandmother. We helped her downstairs to the basement. My brother left; he was in the military. We stayed in the basement for two days. On the night of my birthday, the explosions sounded much louder. There was no communication at all; we couldn’t contact the other members of our family.”

(Female, 20, higher education, Ararat Province)

These accounts also show the immediate importance of family and kinship networks. Relatives coordinated departure, transportation, the movement of children, older people, and family members with disabilities, and temporary accommodation after arrival. Pre-existing social ties therefore operated as practical infrastructures of survival before and during movement.

Material dispossession, then, was not simply a post-arrival consequence of displacement. It was produced through the conditions of departure itself. The abandonment of homes, possessions, documents, photographs, and familiar surroundings occurred while people were being compelled to move, making material loss an integral part of the displacement journey rather than an outcome that became significant only after arrival in Armenia.

5.2. The Lachin Road as a Social and Affective Space: Waiting and Practices of Survival

The journey from Artsakh to Armenia transformed a relatively short geographical distance into a prolonged passage marked by congestion, waiting, scarcity, and uncertainty. A route of less than 300 km took many participants two or three days to complete. Interviewees repeatedly described kilometers-long traffic queues and extended periods in which vehicles moved only a few meters before stopping again.

One elderly participant recalled:

“The journey took two days. A little more, actually. We would move ten centimeters and then stop. There was nowhere to use a toilet along the road, no place to buy even a little food. We ran out of bread, and the children were hungry.”

(Female, 83, secondary education, Ararat Province)

Waiting was inseparable from material deprivation. Many families entered the journey after approximately nine months of blockade and already faced shortages of food, fuel, medicine, and other necessities. Vehicles were frequently overcrowded, while limited food and water were often prioritized for children and older people.

“There were many problems on the road during the displacement. Food was a problem too. For nine months, the whole population had been hungry, living under blockade. It took us about two days to reach Goris. We had one Honda, and there were twelve of us inside.”

(Male, 55, secondary education, Gegharkunik Province)

The journey therefore extended rather than replaced conditions experienced during the preceding blockade. Scarcity, restricted mobility, and uncertainty carried over into departure, concentrating preceding insecurity and the immediate demands of forced movement within the same journey.

Most participants traveled within family and kinship groups. Relatives coordinated vehicles, departure times, supplies, information, and the care of children, older people, and other vulnerable family members. One participant explained:

“My son arrived on the evening of September 24. On September 25 we got ready, and on the 26th we left as a family—my wife, my son, and me. We had also arranged for my eldest daughter to come with us. My middle daughter had already returned to the village with her children. We agreed that all of us would leave together in three cars. That’s how we left—with pain, with sorrow, but also with the hope that we wouldn’t be gone for long, that we would return.”

(Male, 69, higher education, Yerevan)

Maintaining family unity provided both practical support and emotional continuity during forced movement. The account also illustrates the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of departure itself. Leaving Artsakh did not necessarily entail immediate recognition of permanent displacement. Some participants initially understood their movement as a temporary evacuation and continued to anticipate return.

Transportation constraints sometimes separated families, but participants generally emphasized efforts to remain together or coordinate their movement. Family and kinship networks consequently operated as practical infrastructures of mobility: they helped organize transportation, distribute limited resources, circulate information, and care for those requiring assistance within circumstances over which travelers otherwise exercised little control.

The Lachin Road thus combined severely constrained mobility with everyday practices of survival. Travelers could not determine the political conditions of departure, the congestion, the availability of resources, or the pace of movement. Yet they were not simply passive within these constraints. They coordinated movement, allocated scarce resources, exchanged information, cared for vulnerable relatives, and attempted to preserve social ties.

These accounts also reveal the temporal compression that characterized the journey. Experiences connected to months of blockade, immediate military insecurity, the abandonment of home, physical exhaustion, prolonged waiting, scarcity, and uncertainty about the future converged within a restricted route over only several days. In this sense, the road materialized the compressed traumatic space of displacement: preceding insecurity and loss were carried into the journey and experienced alongside the immediate physical and social demands of forced movement.

5.3. The Lachin Road as a Space of Control, Surveillance, and Unequal Mobility

Participants described the Lachin Corridor, and especially the Hakari checkpoint, as a space in which forced movement was regulated through surveillance, inspection, uncertainty, and unequal authority. Fear intensified as travelers approached the checkpoint, where Azerbaijani personnel controlled passage and inspected people and possessions.

Reports circulated concerning the detention of men, lists of former combatants, and the confiscation of knives, jewelry, military objects, and Armenian symbols. Participants distinguished between incidents they had witnessed and information received from others, but even unverified reports shaped behavior before travelers reached the checkpoint. Some described discarding possessions they feared might attract additional scrutiny, including objects carrying familial, religious, or collective meanings.

“All along the road there were crosses [necklaces] lying around, military clothes, knives. People who had already crossed the Hakari Bridge kept calling us and saying, ‘Take the children’s earrings off. If you have a knife in the car, whatever you have, throw everything away.’”

(Female, 38, secondary education, Kotayk Province)

Objects that had survived the abandonment of home could therefore become perceived liabilities as travelers approached the checkpoint. Their disposal extended the material losses already produced through departure and demonstrates how circulating information about border control influenced conduct before direct encounters with authorities occurred.

Searches were also narrated as experiences of humiliation and compelled compliance. One participant described an encounter in which an apparent humanitarian gesture was experienced as coercive:

“At the checkpoint on the Hakari Bridge, they searched our car. An Azerbaijani serviceman approached us, looked inside the car and at the people sitting in the back. Then, in Russian, he offered me biscuits and water. I said, ‘Thank you, we have some.’ He was holding up his phone so that he could film the moment when I took them. He offered again, and I refused again. Then he leaned his head toward me and quietly said, ‘If you don’t want problems, take it. Otherwise, it will be bad.’ I had to take it. I was thinking about my family. He filmed it. Then he ordered me to get out of the car and open the trunk. He inspected it, and only then did he let us go.”

(Male, 27, secondary education, Yerevan)

The interview material cannot establish whether encounters of this kind constituted standardized practice or individual actions. Their analytical significance lies in how participants experienced and subsequently narrated them: as moments in which armed authority, surveillance, uncertainty, and compelled compliance converged.

5.3.1. Gendered Surveillance and Bodily Vulnerability

Checkpoint insecurity was experienced unevenly. Participants frequently recalled adult men, particularly those of military age or suspected of previous military service, being separated from family members, required to leave vehicles, photographed, or subjected to additional identity checks. Families often did not know how long these procedures would last or whether those stopped would be permitted to continue.

“They made the men get out and told them they had to walk a certain distance because there were cameras there and they had to pass underneath those cameras. We kept wondering what would happen—whether they would stop them, whether they would keep them there.”

(Male, 48, secondary education, Yerevan)

Other accounts referred to intrusive searches or requirements to remove clothing. Women’s narratives also described vulnerabilities associated with pregnancy, traveling with children, caring for older relatives, and fearing the possible detention of male family members. These accounts suggest that gender and family responsibilities shaped how particular participants experienced surveillance, bodily vulnerability, and uncertainty. Although the sample includes equal numbers of men and women, the qualitative design does not establish the prevalence of specific forms of vulnerability among gender groups. The findings therefore identify differently situated experiences rather than systematic population-level differences between men and women.

Circulating information was itself consequential. Reports that participants could not personally verify nevertheless transmitted fear, informed assessments of risk, influenced the disposal of possessions, and shaped behavior before travelers arrived at the checkpoint. The social effects of such information were therefore part of the experience of the journey even when the underlying incidents could not be independently established through the interviews.

5.3.2. Language, Symbolic Power, and the Hakari Bridge

Control was also experienced through language. One participant recalled that naming her home city became a point of confrontation:

“They asked where we were from. We said, ‘We are from Stepanakert.’ They said, ‘It’s not Stepanakert, it’s Khankendi.’ He slammed the door and walked away, but they stopped my husband and my son and kept them there for several hours. They would not let them cross the bridge.”

(Female, 47, secondary education, Syunik Province)

In this account, territorial naming became inseparable from the authority exercised at the checkpoint. “Stepanakert” and “Khankendi” invoked competing political and historical claims to the same place, making the correction of the place name especially significant at a moment when the participant’s family depended on those controlling passage.

Across the interviews, the Hakari Bridge emerged as both a physical threshold and an emotionally charged border. Crossing it meant movement toward relative safety while simultaneously making separation from Artsakh more tangible. The bridge thus marked both the final stage of departure and entry into a new condition of displacement.

5.3.3. Comparative Border Control and Humanitarian Infrastructures

Experiences from Ukraine and Abkhazia provide comparative contexts for understanding how political authority and humanitarian infrastructure can differently structure displacement routes. The cases are not treated as historically or politically equivalent.

Human Rights Watch documented compulsory “filtration” procedures affecting Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied territories, including identity screening, interrogation, biometric data collection, and searches of bodies, personal belongings, and mobile phones [25]. A first-person account by Margarita, who was pregnant when she left Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine with her family, described a thirteen-hour wait without access to water or a toilet, being photographed with an identification board, and the separation of her husband and brother for questioning, tattoo checks, and inspection of their phones [26]. These accounts provide a comparative example of how security screening can become incorporated into the experience of displacement itself.

Abkhazia presents a different configuration. During renewed fighting in the Gali district in May 1998, approximately 40,000 people were displaced, many of whom had previously returned to the area. United Nations reporting described displacement across the Inguri River toward Zugdidi while renewed insecurity simultaneously disrupted humanitarian operations and access to civilians [27,28]. The crossing was consequently embedded in a broader relationship among displacement, territorial insecurity, return, and humanitarian access.

The Artsakh case combined different conditions: prolonged deprivation before departure, extreme congestion on the Lachin Road, political control at the Hakari checkpoint, and limited formal assistance during much of the journey. Organized reception became more visible after displaced people entered Armenia, including at Kornidzor and Goris, where governmental and humanitarian actors provided emergency assistance [29]. During much of the journey itself, participants’ accounts instead emphasize reliance on family networks, information exchange, and informal assistance.

Taken together, these cases illustrate different institutional configurations of displacement routes. In the Artsakh narratives examined here, the Lachin Road—and especially the Hakari checkpoint—was experienced and remembered primarily through uncertainty, surveillance, unequal control over movement, and the need to negotiate passage under conditions travelers did not determine.

5.4. The Lachin Road as a Space of Transformation of Social Relations

Participants’ accounts show that the Lachin Road was not only a space of fear, scarcity, and forced movement but also one in which social relations were temporarily reorganized. Alongside reliance on relatives and established community networks, displaced people described receiving and providing assistance to strangers. Food, fuel, information, mechanical assistance, and care circulated among travelers even when resources were severely limited.

One participant recalled:

“We were probably on the road for seventeen or eighteen hours. The whole time, there was practically nothing to eat. My children were six, seven, and ten years old. People were asking one another for bread, and others were giving bread from their cars—that was the situation. I don’t even want to remember those days; it was terrible. Someone would run out of petrol and be stuck on the road; someone else’s car would break down. People helped, pushed the cars, towed them, gave them fuel. Somehow, we managed to get out.”

(Male, 43, higher education, Kotayk Province)

Such assistance frequently extended beyond pre-existing social ties. Strangers shared already scarce resources, helped repair or move vehicles, exchanged information, and responded to immediate problems affecting other travelers. These relations were often temporary and situational, but they acquired practical importance because the ability of one household to continue moving could depend on assistance from people with whom its members had no previous relationship.

Accounts of the journey also described care extending beyond household and kinship boundaries. Participants recounted assistance to families with infants, children, older people, and those who were ill, as well as reports of women assisting another traveler during childbirth.

“There was a shortage of food. When you are on the road for three days, even the bread you brought with you runs out. There were seven of us in the car. When we stopped, they said that a woman was giving birth somewhere along the road and that other women were helping her. The children were crying. One child was on formula. People helped us heat some water so that we could prepare the baby formula.”

(Female, 61, higher education, Kotayk Province)

Under these conditions, needs that would ordinarily have been managed within households or established social networks could become matters of temporary collective responsibility. The significance of such practices was heightened by the limited availability of formal assistance along much of the route.

The practical demands of the journey also temporarily altered the relevance of established social distinctions. Professional status, educational qualifications, and occupational position were often less immediately consequential than the capacity to address urgent problems. Knowledge of road conditions, mechanical ability, access to information, linguistic competence, caregiving skills, and the ability to coordinate movement could acquire situational importance.

One participant described an attempt by several travelers to regulate traffic:

“The journey took about twenty-eight hours. We would drive for ten minutes and then stand still for an hour. It wasn’t easy. And that wasn’t the only problem—you should have seen what was happening. The cars wouldn’t give way to one another; everyone was trying to get ahead, and it became impossible to move. A few of us stood there and said, ‘At least let’s organize the traffic so that the cars can move properly in a single line.’”

(Male, 39, higher education, Yerevan)

This episode illustrates the emergence of informal coordination in response to an immediate collective problem. Situational authority could therefore arise during the journey without corresponding directly to pre-displacement social position: it depended on practical competence, initiative, and the capacity to coordinate others under changing conditions.

This temporary reorganization should not, however, be interpreted as the disappearance of inequality or conflict. Access to functioning vehicles, fuel, food, information, physical capacity, linguistic knowledge, and support networks remained uneven. Age, gender, health, and responsibility for dependent family members also shaped vulnerability. As the traffic account itself indicates, cooperation could coexist with competition for movement and scarce resources.

Taken together, the interviews reveal more than isolated acts of generosity. Forced movement temporarily activated existing family and community ties while generating situational relations of reciprocity, care, practical cooperation, and informal authority among people without prior connections. These practices responded to immediate demands of movement, including scarcity, prolonged waiting, transportation difficulties, and unequal access to resources. Although such relations did not necessarily survive the journey or remove inequalities among travelers, they created temporary social capacities through which displaced people managed constrained mobility. These empirical patterns provide the foundation for the concept of mobile solidarity developed in the Discussion.

5.5. Narrativizing the Lachin Road

In retrospective accounts, the Lachin Road was narrated through recurring motifs of hunger, exhaustion, fear, waiting, breakdown, uncertainty, and survival. Participants condensed the experience into expressions such as “we were hungry, there was no bread,” “the children were crying and asking for food and water,” “the car broke down,” “we ran out of fuel,” and “we ran out of water.” One participant described it simply as “a road through hell.”

Although these accounts emerged from individual experiences, the recurrence of similar images and expressions produced recognizable narrative patterns. Hunger, immobilized vehicles, crying children, darkness, waiting, and fear became recurring reference points through which participants communicated the experience of the journey. The road was thus reconstructed not simply as a sequence of events but through a shared vocabulary of deprivation, uncertainty, and survival.

The moment of crossing the Hakari checkpoint and bridge occupied a particularly prominent place in these narratives. One participant expressed the ambivalence of reaching relative safety:

“No, what dying? There was no more dying once we crossed the checkpoint. From that moment, on the one hand you feel relieved, but on the other hand you understand that there is no road back anymore.”

The account brings survival and loss into the same moment. Crossing meant leaving immediate danger behind, yet it could also intensify recognition that departure from Artsakh might be irreversible. The same ambivalence appears in other descriptions of the bridge:

“Once people crossed that bridge, it was as if they had entered another world.”

“After we crossed the bridge, the feeling of relief was simply indescribable—just in terms of finally feeling safe.”

Yet safety was accompanied by awareness of what had been left behind:

“Every stone, every bush, every mountain in Artsakh is dear to me. And now we have left all of that behind without even knowing where we are going.”

These accounts position the bridge as more than a geographical crossing. In retrospective narration, it becomes a threshold between danger and relative safety, home and displacement, and a familiar social world and an uncertain future. Its meaning is therefore fundamentally ambivalent: the same crossing that signified survival also made territorial separation more tangible.

Narratives of the road also preserved memories of mutual assistance. Participants recalled strangers sharing food, fuel, medicine, clothing, information, and mechanical help. Such recollections placed care and reciprocal responsibility alongside fear, scarcity, and exhaustion. The road was therefore remembered not only through what people lost or endured but also through what they did for one another while attempting to survive the journey.

These recurring narratives begin to transform the Lachin Road from a route through which displacement occurred into a memory-bearing landscape. Particular places, especially the Hakari checkpoint and bridge, acquire significance through repeated associations with danger, survival, relief, and irreversible separation. The following section examines this process more directly by considering how places, objects, photographs, homes, and landscapes became incorporated into the memory of displacement.

5.6. The Road as an Emerging Mnemonic Landscape

Participants’ accounts indicate that memory-making could begin during departure itself. Homes, villages, graves, churches, mountains, and familiar landscapes repeatedly appeared in descriptions of the journey. Some participants said they did not want to remember those days, while others described particular scenes as remaining vividly “before their eyes.” Remembering and attempts not to remember therefore coexisted within retrospective accounts of the road.

Several interviewees recalled being conscious during departure that they might be seeing their homeland for the last time:

“On the Lachin Road we were trying to capture every moment, taking photographs and thinking that it really might be possible that we would never see all this again—this nature, this land.”

Another participant recalled:

“We left knowing that we might never return, but we did not dare take things from our own house. It felt as though we were looting our own home.”

A third described preparing the house immediately before leaving:

“I was cleaning my house for the last time so that I could leave it tidy and remember it that way—my home clean, arranged, and in order.”

These practices illustrate what this article terms anticipatory remembering: the preservation, selection, or production of memories while separation is still occurring or understood to be imminent. Photographing landscapes, preserving a particular image of the home, and deciding what could or could not be removed from it show how the possibility of permanent separation altered the meaning of ordinary actions before departure was complete.

The description of taking possessions as “looting” one’s own home is particularly revealing. Departure did not necessarily transform the home immediately into a former residence whose contents could simply be removed. For some participants, it remained morally and emotionally constituted as home and as a place to which return could still be imagined, even as physical access was being lost. The refusal to remove possessions could therefore express continuing attachment to the social and moral integrity of the home at the moment of forced separation.

Memory extended beyond the domestic dwelling. Participants referred to cemeteries and ancestral graves, churches, villages, and landscapes associated with family histories and belonging. Graves were especially significant because practices of visiting, caring for, and commemorating deceased relatives connected family continuity to particular places. Loss of access therefore disrupted not only residence but also spatial practices through which relationships between living and deceased family members had been maintained.

The Lachin Road occupies a distinctive position within these narratives because it was the route through which separation from these places became physically experienced. Home, road, checkpoint, bridge, and arrival recur as spatial reference points connecting departure, survival, and territorial loss. The route consequently links memories of the places left behind with memories of the process through which access to them was lost.

Through repeated testimony, photographs, remembered objects and landscapes, and family narratives, the Lachin Road is acquiring meanings beyond its function as a transport route. Rather than constituting a fixed or fully consolidated site of collective memory, it can be understood as an emergent mnemonic landscape whose meanings continue to develop after displacement. Within this landscape, memories of final departure, danger, survival, mutual assistance, and separation from home become attached to particular places and moments along the journey.

6. Discussion

The findings demonstrate that the displacement journey should be treated as a distinct analytical phase of forced migration rather than as a secondary interval between departure and arrival. In the Artsakh case, the Lachin Road was simultaneously structured by political constraint and constituted through the practices of those compelled to move along it. Congestion, scarcity, surveillance, checkpoint control, and prolonged waiting shaped the conditions of mobility, while family coordination, care, information exchange, and informal organization enabled displaced people to negotiate those conditions. The journey therefore emerged through the unequal interaction between structures regulating movement and the practices through which displaced people attempted to survive them.

6.1. The Displacement Journey as a Socially Produced Space

The findings extend Lefebvre’s understanding of socially produced space and the mobilities perspective of Sheller and Urry to the analysis of forced-migration journeys. The Lachin Road was geographically fixed, but the conditions under which it could be traversed—its pace, accessibility, risks, and meanings—were socially and politically produced [7,8]. This shifts analytical attention from the route as physical infrastructure to the relations of power and social practices through which movement along it became possible, delayed, constrained, or interrupted.

Forced mobility was political not only because insecurity created the necessity to leave but also because displaced people exercised unequal control over the conditions of movement. They had limited capacity to determine when departure became necessary, how rapidly they could travel, what they could carry, or what forms of inspection and delay they might encounter. At the same time, access to vehicles, fuel, food, information, linguistic knowledge, and family assistance differentiated travelers’ capacities to negotiate the journey. Forced mobility was therefore simultaneously constrained by political authority and differentiated by unequal access to material and social resources.

The Hakari checkpoint makes this relationship particularly visible. For participants, it functioned simultaneously as infrastructure of passage, a site of surveillance, and a symbolic threshold. The capacity to inspect, record, delay, or permit movement demonstrated that mobility and coercion were not opposites. Movement could be necessary for survival while remaining politically regulated and unequally experienced.

The temporal experience of the journey reinforces this interpretation. A geographically short route was transformed through congestion, shortages, uncertainty, and checkpoint procedures into a passage lasting two or three days for many participants. Waiting was therefore not simply an interruption of mobility but one of the forms through which forced mobility was experienced. The journey became a social and political environment in its own right.

6.2. From Communitas and Social Capital to Mobile Solidarity

The second contribution concerns the reorganization of social relations during displacement. Turner’s concept of liminality is useful because travelers occupied an intermediate condition: they had left their homes without yet reaching security or establishing themselves elsewhere [9] (pp. 94–130). The journey temporarily changed which forms of knowledge, resources, and competence mattered. Capacities such as repairing vehicles, providing care, circulating information, and coordinating movement could become more immediately consequential than occupational or educational status.

The findings, however, complicate a straightforward interpretation through communitas. Shared vulnerability generated cooperation but did not produce an egalitarian social environment. Access to vehicles, fuel, food, information, physical capacity, and social networks remained unequal, while cooperation could coexist with competition over scarce resources and movement. Liminality therefore reorganized social relations without eliminating inequality.

Putnam’s distinction between bonding and bridging social capital explains another part of this process [10] (pp. 22–24). Family, kinship, friendship, and community networks provided essential resources for organizing departure and caring for vulnerable relatives. Yet the interviews also reveal forms of cooperation that developed among people without previous social ties. These temporary relations were produced through the practical demands of moving together under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty.

The concept of mobile solidarity captures this process more specifically. It refers to temporary relations of reciprocity, care, practical cooperation, and informal authority generated or reorganized through shared forced movement. It differs from bonding social capital because it is not confined to established networks, and it extends communitas by emphasizing the practical roles through which temporary social capacities emerge. The concept thus brings together liminal reorganization, the activation and extension of networks, and cooperation prompted by constrained movement. Mobility is not merely the setting in which solidarity occurs; its practical demands can generate new situational relations and obligations.

This concept should not be romanticized. Mobile solidarity did not remove structural inequality, scarcity, competition, or coercion, nor did it give displaced people control over the circumstances producing their displacement. It identifies instead a constrained form of agency: the capacity to generate temporary social resources that partially mitigate the immediate consequences of conditions that travelers themselves cannot determine.

6.3. Compressed Traumatic Space: Connecting Mobility, Loss, and Trauma

A third contribution concerns the concentration of experiences of insecurity and loss within the journey. Drawing on trauma scholarship concerning temporality, remembrance, and disruption of communal life, compressed traumatic space describes a socio-spatial condition in which destabilizing experiences from different periods become interconnected within a restricted route and a relatively short time. In the Artsakh case, prolonged insecurity, military escalation, material dispossession, forced movement, and anticipated separation converged during the Lachin journey. The concept is interpretive rather than clinical: it does not presume that participants experienced psychological trauma in identical ways but examines how insecurity and loss became concentrated and subsequently narrated.

This was particularly visible in the relationship between the preceding blockade and the September 2023 journey. Scarcity, restricted mobility, and uncertainty did not end when departure began; they were carried into the road alongside military insecurity, abandonment of homes and possessions, physical exhaustion, surveillance, and uncertainty about return. The journey therefore did not constitute a clean temporal break between conditions before displacement and those experienced in transit.

This temporal compression also helps explain the heightened significance of ordinary material objects and spatial settings. Food, water, fuel, vehicles, photographs, documents, household possessions, checkpoints, and bridges acquired meanings associated with survival, loss, vulnerability, and separation. Material dispossession was consequently not simply a socioeconomic outcome encountered after arrival. It became part of the lived process through which displacement occurred.

Waiting is particularly important in this respect. Participants described periods of intense uncertainty during which little physical movement occurred. They could not readily predict when traffic would move, whether supplies would last, whether families would remain together, or what would occur at the checkpoint. Waiting therefore combined immobility with continuing insecurity, demonstrating why movement and immobility should not be treated as analytically opposed conditions within forced migration.

The value of compressed traumatic space lies ultimately in connecting processes often divided analytically into pre-departure, transit, and post-departure stages. In participants’ narratives, blockade, military escalation, abandonment of home, forced passage, checkpoint encounters, and territorial separation were experienced as interconnected processes. The road became the environment in which these temporalities of insecurity and loss converged.

6.4. From Displacement Route to Emergent Mnemonic Landscape

The findings also demonstrate that the mnemonic significance of displacement can begin developing before movement has ended. Memory is frequently examined retrospectively, once displaced populations have reached a new location. The Artsakh material shows that awareness of possible permanent separation can generate memory-making practices during departure itself.

This process is captured by anticipatory remembering. Participants photographed landscapes they feared they might never see again, attempted to preserve particular final images of their homes, and made decisions about possessions in relation to an imagined future in which return might be impossible. Anticipatory remembering therefore refers not simply to remembering before departure but to acting in the present with consciousness of how a place may need to be remembered in the future. Experience and memory-making can, in this sense, occur simultaneously.

This finding complicates a simple chronological distinction between displacement and subsequent remembrance. The transformation of home into an object of memory does not necessarily begin after physical separation. The anticipation of loss can change the meaning of familiar places, objects, and ordinary actions while departure is still taking place.

Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire helps explain how places acquire mnemonic significance [13] (pp. 7–24), but the Lachin Road is better understood at this stage as an emergent mnemonic landscape rather than as a consolidated site of collective memory. Its meanings remain recent and potentially changeable. The interview material does not establish the existence of a consolidated collective memory; rather, it identifies recurring mnemonic motifs through which such a socially shared memory landscape may be beginning to develop. Nevertheless, recurring spatial and narrative motifs are already visible: the abandoned home, the congested road, discarded possessions, mutual assistance, checkpoint surveillance, familiar landscapes seen for what participants feared might be the final time, and the crossing of the Hakari Bridge.

The bridge is especially significant because its spatial and narrative meanings converge. Crossing represented movement toward relative physical safety while simultaneously materializing separation from Artsakh. Survival and loss could therefore become attached to the same spatial moment. This ambivalence helps explain why the road occupies such a prominent position in retrospective narratives: it connects remembered places of home and belonging to the moment when continued access to them became uncertain or impossible.

The concept of an emergent mnemonic landscape also emphasizes that these meanings are not fixed. They may be transformed through family storytelling, photographs, public commemoration, political developments, and changing expectations of return. The road should therefore be understood not simply as a historical location of displacement but as a developing field through which the meaning of that displacement may continue to be narrated and negotiated.

6.5. Comparative Implications: The Institutional Production of Displacement Journeys

Comparison with Ukraine and Abkhazia reinforces the argument that displacement routes are institutionally produced rather than possessing a single social form. The cases are not equivalent in their historical origins, political contexts, or institutional configurations. Their comparative value lies in showing how different combinations of authority, infrastructure, insecurity, and humanitarian intervention shape the experience of movement.

The Ukrainian case demonstrates how formalized security screening and surveillance can become embedded within displacement routes, producing differentiated vulnerability through procedures of inspection, interrogation, and waiting [24,25]. Abkhazia illustrates a different configuration in which recurrent displacement, territorial division, return movements, insecurity, and humanitarian access became intertwined with particular crossings [26,27]. The Artsakh case combined prolonged deprivation before departure, extreme congestion along a restricted route, political control at the Hakari checkpoint, and limited formal assistance during much of the journey.

These differences indicate that displacement routes can assume different institutional and social configurations. Depending on who controls movement, what infrastructures are available, and how resources are distributed, routes may become spaces of coercion and surveillance, humanitarian intervention, informal cooperation, or several of these simultaneously. Comparison therefore shifts attention away from searching for a universal refugee-journey experience and toward examining the specific institutional arrangements through which forced mobility is produced.

The Artsakh case is especially revealing because these dimensions converged within a compressed episode of near-total collective displacement. The same journey involved scarcity and mutual assistance, surveillance and survival, immobility and forced movement, territorial separation and the beginning of memory-making. Treating the displacement journey as a distinct analytical category makes it possible to examine these processes together rather than distributing them across separate analyses of causes, transit, humanitarian response, integration, and memory.

The broader contribution is therefore not simply that journeys matter. Existing scholarship has already established their social and transformative significance. Rather, this study demonstrates the analytical value of examining the displacement journey as the point at which mobility, political authority, social reorganization, vulnerability, and memory-making converge. The concepts of mobile solidarity, compressed traumatic space, and the emergent mnemonic landscape, together with the supporting process of anticipatory remembering, identify different dimensions of that convergence.

7. Conclusions

This article has argued that the displacement journey should be treated as a distinct analytical phase of forced migration rather than as a secondary interval between departure and arrival. The September 2023 displacement of Armenians from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) demonstrates how a journey can become a social, political, affective, and mnemonic environment in which mobility is regulated, vulnerability is differentiated, social relations are reorganized, and experiences of loss and survival acquire meaning. The Lachin Road was therefore not simply the geographical route through which displacement occurred; it formed part of the displacement process itself.

The findings show, first, that the journey was socially and politically produced through the interaction of constrained mobility, scarcity, waiting, checkpoint control, unequal access to resources, and displaced people’s own practices of survival. Second, forced movement temporarily reorganized social relations. Family and kinship networks remained crucial, but assistance also extended beyond established ties through resource sharing, caregiving, information exchange, practical cooperation, and informal coordination. Third, the journey became incorporated into narratives of displacement through recurring places, objects, experiences, and spatial thresholds, particularly the Hakari checkpoint and bridge. Survival and territorial loss could consequently become attached to the same moment of crossing.

The article develops three concepts from these findings. Mobile solidarity describes temporary relations of reciprocity, care, cooperation, and informal authority generated or reorganized through shared forced movement. Compressed traumatic space identifies the socio-spatial concentration of preceding insecurity, immediate danger, forced movement, material loss, and anticipated separation within a restricted route and period. Finally, the Lachin Road is conceptualized as an emergent mnemonic landscape whose meanings continue to develop through testimony, photographs, remembered objects and landscapes, and family narratives. Within this process, anticipatory remembering draws attention to memory-making that begins while separation is still occurring, when people act in the present with an awareness that places being left behind may later be accessible primarily through memory.

These concepts are not intended to describe all displacement journeys in the same way. Comparison with Ukraine and Abkhazia instead demonstrates the importance of examining the specific institutional configuration of each route. Political authority, security practices, humanitarian infrastructures, material resources, and social networks shape different relationships among coercion, mobility, assistance, and informal survival. The comparative implication is therefore not that displacement journeys constitute a uniform experience, but that the journey itself provides an analytical scale at which these relationships can be examined together.

The study is necessarily limited by its qualitative and purposive design and by the retrospective character of interviews conducted between March 2024 and March 2026 about displacement in September 2023. The findings cannot be statistically generalized to the entire displaced population, and participants’ accounts reflect memory, interpretation, and subsequent experience as well as the events they describe. At the same time, retrospective reconstruction is central to understanding how journeys acquire meaning after displacement. Future longitudinal research could examine whether relations formed during forced movement persist after arrival and how journey experiences shape settlement, trust, perceptions of security, expectations of return, and processes of public and intergenerational remembrance.

The broader contribution of the article is therefore not simply to demonstrate that refugee journeys matter, but to show what becomes visible when the journey is treated as an analytical category in its own right. The space between home and refuge is not analytically empty. It can become a temporary social world in which political authority is encountered, mobility and immobility are produced, vulnerability is unequally distributed, social relations are reorganized, survival is negotiated, territorial loss becomes tangible, and memories of displacement begin to take form. Incorporating the journey into forced-migration analysis allows displacement to be understood not only through why people leave or what happens after arrival, but also through what occurs while displacement is taking place.