Suchergebnisse

Analyses the 30-year conflict for control over the contested territory of Nagorny KarabakhProvides a complete overview of historical, territorial, domestic, strategic, international and mediation perspectivesMoves beyond chronological narrative and comparative analysis of post-Soviet conflicts Draws on the author's experience of over a decade as a practitioner of Armenian–Azerbaijani peace-building effortsInformed by fieldwork conducted in 2014–16 across the conflict and interviews with political and societal actorsUses theoretical frameworks to draw comparisons with other international, long-term rivalries, such as India–Pakistan and Arab states–IsraelThe Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict for control of the mountainous territory of Nagorny Karabakh is the longest-running dispute in post-Soviet Eurasia. Laurence Broers shows how decades of dynamic territorial politics, shifting power relations, international diffusion and unsuccessful mediation efforts have contributed to the resilience of this stubbornly unresolved dispute. Looking beyond tabloid tropes of 'frozen conflict' or 'Russian land-grab', Broers unpacks the unresolved territorial issues of the 1990s and the strategic rivalry that has built up around them since

This article considers the connectivity debate in the South Caucasus, which was catalysed by the prospective opening of borders and transit routes after Azerbaijan's victory in 2020's Second Karabakh War and further foregrounded by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The article discusses how this debate has to date been flawed by simplistic, securitised and conservative thinking about connectivity. Rather than generating new interdependencies conducive to peace, securitised connectivity risks the exclusion of actors and spaces beyond the state, the weaponisation of trade corridors and continuing regional fracture to the benefit of external actors and detriment of regional resilience.

The Minsk Group, led by the United States, France, and Russia, has brokered the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict since the mid-1990s after Armenia-backed secessionists in the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic won the first Karabakh war of 1992–94. That mediation embodied the ideals of the mid-1990s unipolar moment, which assumed that liberalized markets and democratic transitions would converge internally to resolve legacy conflicts in postsocialist states while bringing them into convergence externally with Euro-Atlantic nations. Those assumptions withered away over the next quarter-century. Neither Azerbaijan nor Armenia transitioned to liberal democracy. Backed by an increasingly assertive Turkey, Azerbaijan prevailed in a bloody war in 2020. This time, the regional authoritarian powers, Russia and Turkey, are overseeing what could be a test case for a new form of "illiberal peace."

This article draws on international relations theory to attempt a reframing of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorny Karabakh as an enduring rivalry (ER): a particular kind of interstate conflict known for its longevity and stability. The article begins by identifying a number of conceptual deficits circulating around this conflict, notably the notion that it is a "frozen conflict," before introducing the ER framework and its analytical dividends for this case. Different layers of the ER between Armenia and Azerbaijan are then explored at systemic, interstate, domestic, decision-maker, and temporal levels, with a view more toward identifying directions for future research than conclusive findings. Among the article's tentative conclusions are the primacy of endogenous over exogenous factors in explaining the durability of the rivalry between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the impacts of the passage of time on the human and physical geography of the territory under dispute, and the convergence of conflict dynamics across disparate levels.