Despite its early promise, Armenia's transition to democracy has stalled. The literature on post-Communist transitions ascribes this outcome to the autocratic preferences of its first generation of leaders, and particularly the country's first president Levon Ter-Petrossian. I argue in this article that that literature depicts a profoundly distorted picture of the Armenian politics of the 1990s. The failure of Armenia's transition was primarily due to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the political processes it set in motion.
