History Textbooks of the South Caucasus States: Instrumentalization of Memory amid Geopolitical Shifts

This study examines contemporary history textbooks in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia published after 2020 as central instruments of state memory politics following the geopolitical transformations of 20202-023. The research evaluates how school history curricula have been recalibrated to reflect post-war realities, state-building imperatives, and evolving national identity frameworks across the South Caucasus.
The analysis examines six core thematic blocks: incorporation into the Russian Empire during the nineteenth century; the first independent republics of 1918–1921; Sovietization; the Second World War; the Soviet period; and the post-1991 era of independence. Utilizing analytical parameters such as multiperspectivity, critical reflection, cartographic representation, and the construction of the "significant Other," the paper systematically compares the epistemological orientations of all three educational systems.
The findings demonstrate that while Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have dismantled Soviet ideological meta-narratives, they have not established dialogical approaches to a shared past. Instead, state educational institutions have institutionalized mutually exclusive, highly securitized matrices of cultural memory: Armenia displays a transition toward "critical patriotism" and state-centric pragmatism under the "Real Armenia" policy framework, balancing self-critical reflection with postcolonial trauma. Azerbaijan enforces a centralized, triumphalist narrative centered on the 2020 victory and territorial "restoration", synthesizing "heroic" state-building with codified historical victimization. Georgia anchors its historical narrative in civilizational integration with Europe, institutional adaptation, and resistance to Russian imperial coercion.
Rather than promoting regional reconciliation, postcolonial memory politics in the South Caucasus continue to deepen regional atomization. Bound to immediate political imperatives, contemporary history textbooks reproduce regional antagonisms and transmit competing boundaries of collective memory to future generations.