The diplomatic initiative that sought to address the ongoing disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which took place in Brussels at the end of August 2022, offered a strong promise of progress. However, by mid-September, the optimism was quickly crushed as the military crisis recommenced with Azerbaijan’s attack on Armenia. The attack was reportedly the most severe one since the war in 2020 over Nagorno Karabakh.
Since the Second Karabakh War in 2020, a final peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan has remained elusive. A series of mediators – Russia, the European Union and, now, the United States – have attempted to build on the ceasefire signed under Moscow’s patronage in November 2020.
After Azerbaijan’s 2020 military victory over Armenia, in which it reclaimed most of the territory it lost in a prior conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh more than two decades earlier, key decision-makers thought the country should return to the concept of 'strategic patience'.[i] This policy of waiting for the right moment to maximise its interests has guided Baku’s approach to conflict with Armenia for the past 25 years and helped Azerbaijan to beco
Azerbaijan’s geopolitics entail a multi-vectorial approach to foreign policy, says Hikmet Hajiyev, Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of Azerbaijan. How has Baku's foreign policy changed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
When Russian peacekeepers arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh as part of a ceasefire deal between Azerbaijan and Armenian, they found it empty, blanketed in a thick November fog. After 44 days of brutal war, most had fled, not believing the fighting was over. A year later, the region’s main city of Stepanakert is no longer a ghost town. Most of its residents have returned, followed by thousands of Armenians displaced from territories won over by Azerbaijani forces in the conflict.
The strengthening of the Russian hold over the Karabakh issue – and more generally over Southern Caucasus politics – was arguably the biggest diplomatic price Baku had to pay for the military victory in the “44 Days War” and for reconquering the territories surrounding the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave previously under Armenian occupation.
Il Nagorno-Karabakh è al centro di una annosa contesa territoriale tra Armenia e Azerbaigian che si trascina da circa 30 anni.
Lo scontro tra Armenia e Azerbaijan per il Nagorno Karabakh rischia di aprire un nuovo fronte tra Erdogan e Putin?
A series of direct contacts between Azerbaijan and Armenia have brought hope to the two countries’ decades-long impasse over Nagorno-Karabakh, a conflict that began as the Soviet Union collapsed. But while these meetings, on the heels of a change in power in the Armenian capital, bring new dynamism, much has to be done before true progress is possible.
These are interesting times for post-soviet politics watchers. Over the past months, we have witnessed several important political transitions in the region.
Abstract
The Caucasus has been defined as a “broken region” by both practitioners and scholars. Although the regional “protracted” conflicts clearly represent a stumbling block to the development of inclusive cooperation schemes, nevertheless the “broken region” interpretation seems to hide a Western prejudice – i.e. a tendency to label as inefficient or ruinous any political relations regulated by values and interests different from the Western ones.