There are few illusions about the group contributing to a broader peace between the two sides; users instead describe it as therapeutic for them personally. Sergey Harutyunyan, a 55-year-old living in Yerevan, said the group allows him “to maintain a grain of optimism – outside this group is so hateful that it wears down any decent person.”

Another new initiative, Bright Garden Voices, also was launched in January and also is run by a mixed group of volunteers. They have put on a series of Zoom discussions, also broadcast on YouTube, featuring young scholars and activists from each side of the conflict. While the topics are serious, the organizers strive to orient them more to “regular citizens” than the usual think tank events that have proliferated since the war.

Those events “were interesting to watch for those who wanted to learn more about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, but at some point we noticed that it was always academics, many times the same people, talking about the same stuff with a very political focus, and also, mostly men,” the organizers said in a joint response to written questions from Eurasianet. “What about the regular citizens? What about other aspects of the conflict other than the war, Putin, Erdogan, and whoever? What about women?”

The three main organizers – an Argentinian, an Armenian-American, and an Azerbaijani – first “met” one another on Twitter. (Twitter, too, has seen the emergence of a handful of new accounts amplifying cross-cultural understanding, including Karabakh Voices and Armeno-Azerbaijani Transformation.)

But for the most part, they said, “the conversations [on Twitter] would quickly be taken over by fanatics and one wrong word would derail the whole discussion. We figured that it was necessary to create a safe space for discussion where alternative voices could be heard.”

The series started gently, with an English teacher from Baku and an Armenian graduate student simply talking about how it is to be non-nationalist in their respective societies. But it has since taken on more sensitive issues, like national identity, the status of women in the Caucasus, and the fates of those displaced from their homes in the first conflict 30 years ago.

“We’re not really trying to start debates but rather creating the atmosphere for everyone to really listen to what the other has to say and to try to understand their positions and opinions,” the moderators said. “Bright Garden is intended as a platform for regular people to re-engage with and listen to each other.”

The grassroots origin of these new projects stands in contrast to the countless NGO-run peacebuilding projects that brought together Armenians and Azerbaijanis before the war in an attempt to reduce distrust between the two societies. Those efforts have become a common punching bag since the war broke out, as many former participants’ ostensible interest in peace was quickly revealed to be superficial and insincere.

“The liberal NGO model is not flexible enough for bringing together voices in a constructive way,” said Leon Aslanov, a UK-based scholar and activist who works on the Caucasus. “It’s a bureaucratic process and it doesn’t yield any results. People met at workshops once in a while [and then] during the war 95 percent of them went back to the nationalist discourse of their respective society.”

Aslanov is a founder of another new initiative, Caucasus Talks, which was created shortly before war broke out last year, in June. It was originally intended as a sort of Caucasus annex of a left-wing European movement, DiEM25, and not to specifically deal with the conflict. “But we were forced into it because of the events,” Aslanov told Eurasianet.

During the war Caucasus Talks organized a petition calling for peace that became the source of controversy, especially in Azerbaijan. Since then it has produced an eclectic range of output including podcasts, YouTube discussions and a series of interviews with anonymous people on both sides about their personal encounters with the other. “We’re trying to make this a more organic, open space for discussion,” Aslanov said.

That grassroots theme is one emphasized by all the new initiatives. “Don’t forget, we aren’t politicians or historians. We are people who want peаce,” the mission statement of Kavkazskiy Perekrestok explains. “So, leave history to the historians and politics to the politicians. We are just going to talk like normal people.”