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A comprehensive, long-term approach is needed when forced displacement occurs.

Resilience thrives on maintaining identity continuity amid forced displacement challenges.

Meaningful work boosts displaced individuals' resilience through contribution and recognition.

This post is the final installment in a four-part series based on a 2023 qualitative study conducted by The Fund for Armenians Relief’s (FAR) Child Protection Center (CPC) to explore the psychological and social dynamics of forced displacement, using Armenia's integration of over 115,000 displaced persons from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) as a contemporary case study.

Continuity as Psychological Protection

At the cultural level, resilience depends on the continuity of identity. For many Artsakh Armenians, maintaining symbolic ties to their homeland is not resistance to change but protection against erasure.

“Why should we give up passports and lose the last connection to our homeland?” one participant asked .Nadav Shelef1 might call this "ethnoterritorial identity continuity" — an aspiration to maintain a territorial connection even in the case of its physical loss:

"Since homelands are a nationalist form of territoriality, their physical contours have to be clearly articulated and continually demarcated. As a result, nationalists exert tremendous energy to maintain, if sometimes banally, the territorial boundaries of the homeland."

"Since homelands are a nationalist form of territoriality, their physical contours have to be clearly articulated and continually demarcated. As a result, nationalists exert tremendous energy to maintain, if sometimes banally, the territorial boundaries of the homeland."

For many participants, protesting against the change to their passports is a form of resistance to the injustice committed against them. A passport is........

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