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Recently, Cambridge Review of International Affairs published the article, 'The Azerbaijani resilient society: explaining the multifaceted aspects of people’s social solidarity' co-authored by Assistant Professor Azar Babayev and Associate Professor Kavus Abushov.

By investigating social identity and resilience in Azerbaijan, this article addresses both a conceptual and empirical gap in research.
Based on unique first-hand focus group data (FGD), it discusses Azerbaijani society and its resilience-building with a focus on its temporal dimension—the past, present and future, while the present here is to be considered as a nexus thereof—especially in terms of the idea of ‘here and now that matters’.

In Azerbaijan, a distinctive duality of people’s identification is conspicuous: divergence of identification at macro/national and at micro/local levels. At macro level, Azerbaijani identity ‘has historically been fed by diverse cultural wellsprings: Turkic nomadic epics and language; Shia Islam from Persia; Sunni Islam originating with the Arabs and taken up by the Ottomans; administrative culture and industrialisation from Russia; and Western values from Europe’ (ICG (International Crisis Group) 2004, 8).