Nature of War: The Political Ecology of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has had profound consequences for both the political and physical geography of the South Caucasus region. Since the fighting of the 1990s there has been a relative status quo, with a militarised line of contact separating the two sides. This changed on September 27 2020, when intense fighting erupted along the whole of the front, and especially in the south-east. After a month and a half, fighting concluded on 10 November 2020 which saw the implementation of a ceasefire which ceded large portions of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) Republic to Azerbaijan. There has yet to be an investigation on the kinds of changes to human and natural systems that the most recent conflict (2020) engendered. In response to this research lacuna, this paper asked whether the effects of the 2020 armed conflict had a significant effect on the region’s agricultural systems. This paper approached the question by examining per-pixel NDVI metrics - derived from Landsat 8 composites from April through June - before and after the conflict. These per-pixel metrics were correlated with conflict data from ACLED. This approach aims to test the hypothesis that areas which witnessed the most intense fighting saw significant drops in NDVI, indicating land fallowness and abandonment. The results from this study indicate that conflict intensity has a significant effect on vegetation health (p-value < 2.2e-16), and supports the hypothesis that conflict leads to a decrease in NDVI, however conflict intensity on its own does not have strong explanatory power for estimating changes in NDVI (R2 0.09667) and future work ought to segment the study area in order to obtain a non-obfuscated regression coefficient (coefficient -0.0057322).

纳戈尔诺-卡拉巴赫（Nagorno-Karabakh）冲突对南高加索地区的政治地理与自然地理均产生了深远影响。自20世纪90年代的武装冲突以来，该地区长期维持相对稳定的对峙状态，双方由一条军事化接触线分隔开来。2020年9月27日，局势发生逆转：全线爆发激烈战斗，东南部地区战况尤为惨烈。历经一个半月的战事，双方于2020年11月10日签署停火协议，纳戈尔诺-卡拉巴赫（阿尔察赫，Artsakh）共和国的大片领土被割让予阿塞拜疆。目前尚无针对2020年这场最新冲突所引发的人类与自然系统变化的相关研究。针对这一研究空白，本文探讨了2020年武装冲突是否对该地区农业系统产生了显著影响。本文通过分析冲突前后的逐像素归一化植被指数（Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, NDVI）指标展开研究，该指标源自4月至6月的陆地卫星8号（Landsat 8）合成影像。本文将这些逐像素指标与武装冲突地点与事件数据项目（Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, ACLED）的冲突数据进行关联分析。本研究旨在验证如下假说：战斗最为激烈的区域，其NDVI值会出现显著下降，这意味着耕地被撂荒与弃置。本研究结果显示，冲突烈度对植被健康状况具有显著影响（p值 < 2.2e-16），验证了冲突会导致NDVI值下降的假说；但仅靠冲突烈度无法很好地解释NDVI的变化（决定系数R²=0.09667），未来研究应对研究区域进行分区，以获得无混淆的回归系数（回归系数为-0.0057322）。