Exploring anti-Armenian hate speech in Azerbaijani state-aligned news outlets: A post-conflict discourse analysis

Abstract

This research paper studies anti-Armenian hate speech narratives in three Azerbaijani state-aligned news outlets during the early post-2025 TRIPP Peace Treaty period—a critical period for peace-building. Although the TRIPP Peace Treaty officially ended the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijani state-aligned news outlets continue to construct anti-Armenian narratives. Existing research mainly focuses on wartime media discourse, leaving a gap in understanding post-conflict hate speech in the understudied South Caucasus region. Hence, this study attempts to fill the gap by examining three Azerbaijani state-aligned news outlets—Azertac, AZTV, and Azernews—during the early post-TRIPP period. This study incorporates a hybrid framework to assess hate speech intensity and examine linguistic, semantic, syntactic, and rhetorical mechanisms in constructing anti-Armenian hate speech. Quantitative findings reveal a hierarchy of hate speech intensity, with Azertac the highest (M = 0.57) and Azernews the lowest (M = 0.31). Qualitative findings demonstrate all three outlets apply van Dijk’s ideological square framework to construct hostile identities.