By Alix Ramillon
On September 19th 2023, Azerbaijan’s offensive led Nagorno-Karabakh to surrender in under twenty-four hours. The capitulation led to the self-dissolution of the self-proclaimed republic, the arrest of its main leaders and the exodus of most of the Armenian population, ‘with around 100,000 people being welcomed as refugees in Armenia,’ This has led to a grave humanitarian blockade of the region by Azerbaijan, which left residents with very limited access to fuel, food and medicine. By September 28th, the leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh announced the dissolution of the de facto independent territory since 1991, before being arrested by Azerbaijani forces. According to the United Nations, more than 500,000 Azeris have since been directly displaced by the war.
The dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh is not only synonymous to a ‘frozen conflict’ but also testifies of new zones of influence in the region of South Caucasus. This conflict is marked by two incompatible visions of international law. On one side, Azerbaijan perceives it as an inter-state conflict with Armenian support for Nagorno-Karabakh constituting a violation of its territorial integrity. For Armenia, on the other hand, this is an intrastate conflict concerning the people of Nagorno-Karabakh’s right to self-determination.
This recent offensive is the product of an increase in political and military tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia in recent decades over the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Now, Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory. in 1992, however, the region formally declared its independence and autonomy from Azerbaijan at the collapse of the Soviet Union, under the name ‘Artsakh’. This dispute has caused increasing political contention between Azerbaijan and Armenia, as Azerbaijan has used its military, economic, and demographic powers to attempt to reclaim the annexed territory. From 1994 to 2020, Azerbaijan’s military budget has increased from 1.95% of GDP to 5.39%. In total, that represents €2.7 million from Azerbaijan against €620 million from Armenia being spent in 2022 in the defence and security sector. Increased military spending has been paired with increased military action as Azerbaijan won the second ‘Blitzkrieg War’ in 2020, regaining much territory lost in 1992. Now, 10% of the Nagorno-Karabakh territory is occupied by its army. In addition to this, Azerbaijan have gained advantages over Armenia through demographic disparities. Azerbaijan’s population increased from 7.7m in 1995 to 10.2m in 2022, compared to Armenia’s decrease from 3.3m to 2.8m. Therefore, this suggests that the intercrossing over these factors confirm that there has been a shift back towards Azerbaijani dominance over the region.
However, other forces – beyond Azerbaijan and Armenia – still hold considerable influence over the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh and are slowly siding with Azerbaijan’s hegemonic advantages. In the past, Russia has historically played a balancing role in the region. Despite having been at a strategic crossroads of Russian, Persian and Ottoman empires, the partition of Nagorno-Karabakh was, and remains, a Soviet construct, which has never been politically congruent in regards to the diversity of minority groups. Shiism dominates in Azerbaijan and Iran, whereas Armenia and Georgia remain predominantly Christian. Currently, 95% of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh is Armenian and Christian, although they represent a minority within the partition of the region. In 1921, Stalin established the autonomous republic of Nagorno-Karabakh within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), in order to bolster ‘Turkish-speaking support from the Caucasus’. This strategy looked to ‘divide to better regulate’ to safeguard against the emergence of separatist movements. Nowadays, in regards to international law, Moscow is required to intervene militarily to defend its territorial integrity. Armenia is part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) alongside other post-soviet States (namely Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan), formed in 2002 which has its origins in the Soviet Armed Forces. Similar to the Article 5 of NATO, Article 4 of the CSTO establishes that an aggression against one signatory would be perceived as an aggression against all. Nonetheless, Russia has not officially recognized Armenia’s annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh and is increasingly turning towards Azerbaijan, whose status as a commercial partner is increasingly being recognized by international powers.
Indeed, due to the war in Ukraine and to the detriment of Russia’s tense relations with the EU, Azerbaijan has managed to secure a strategic partnership in the energy industry with the EU, signed by the president of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen. Turkey is also an increasing actor in the conflict. Turkey and Azerbaijan mutually consider their relation as a ‘one state, one nation’, which Russia perceives as a threatening alliance for its geopolitical ambitions in the region. In September of last year, President Erdogan expressed a desire to form a land route connecting its enclave of Nakhichevan, through the so-called ‘Zangezur Corridor’, to affirm its Pan-Turkey movement in the region. On the other hand, the Armenians only have support from Iran in the region, as the latter fears of the rapprochement of its Azeri minority and Azerbaijan, that could threaten the political stability of its regime already weakened by current social uprisings.
Nonetheless, the dynamics of the conflict and its potential resolution are also contingent on many neighbouring nations, international alliances and institutions. There has historically been an attempt from Western powers to institutionally resolve the conflict. The Minsk Group, a union created in 1994 through the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) Budapest Summit, aims to provide a framework for peace negotiations in the crisis. It is presided over by France, Russia, and the United States. However, its objectives have been suspended due to the national and foreign affairs interests of its actors. In the aftermath of the 2020 war, the Azerbaijani government officially took the position that the Minsk Group should no longer be dealing with the conflict as ‘it had been resolved’. However, suspicions remain that the Minsk Group was simply unpopular within Azerbaijani government due to the presence of large Armenian diasporas in those three chair countries. If at the time, it envisioned a referendum legitimating Kazarakhs secession, the issue of sovereignty mainly remains now more of a bargaining dynamic between Russia and Azerbaijan rather than an international one, although Russia’s peacekeeping mission has been postponed by the Ukraine war.
It is also essential to note that the OSCE Minsk group has approached the peace process through a liberal lens with an aim of peace through broader ideas such as liberal democracy, rather than by pursuing peacekeeping missions. But this clashes directly with the challenges posed by the “illegal peace” of an authoritarian conflict management that has played an ambiguous role in regional politics. Its policies have faced a double collapse: with the invasion of Ukraine and the consequent multilateral conflict management in Caucasus; and also with the prioritisation of military action over conforming to international humanitarian norms, which could result in new rounds of ethnic purifying and territory conquest. Evidently, this represents a regression to illiberal models of conflict resolution.
Furthermore, in 2018, the Armenian Velvet Revolution marked a significant shift in Armenia’s political landscape, reflecting a move toward a more pro-Western and democratic orientation. Under Prime Minister Pashinian, there was an apparent willingness to align with Western norms and values. However, the geopolitical dynamics have placed Armenia under increasing pressure to conform to a Western model due to Azerbaijan’s recognition by Western powers and its strategic partnerships. This has been shown by its official political discourses. In April 2023, Pashinian said he was ready to fully recognise the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. Whilst all forms of UN interventionism with the Blue Helmets have been blocked, Armenia is currently at the mercy of the EU’s interventionist policies. Indeed, It was only on the 26th of September that the European Commission announced it was releasing €5m in humanitarian aid to people leaving Nagorno-Karabakh, after years of inaction surrounding the crisis.
It is clear that Nagorno-Karabakh is an increasingly complex meta-conflict, involving issues of self-determination, ethnic conflict, the problem of decolonisation and postcolonial nation building by outside actors. It is the product of a fusion of multiple sources: the affected origins in historical hierarchies and therefore of a conflict narrative that is expanding in scope and scale. If Azerbaijan is the current hegemon in the region and has secured its position through strategic regional and international alliances, profiting from Russia’s multilateralist decline with the war in Ukraine, it seems more likely that the future of Nagorno-Karabakh will be influenced by international powers rather than regional ones as these will most likely continue to side with Azerbaijan and refuse to recognize the situation as a ‘second ethnic cleansing’.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own, and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
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