A clash of nostalgias

Political scientist Laurence Broers explains how the principles of territorial integrity and self-determination collided in Nagorno-Karabakh

Azerbaijan’s abrupt two-day military strike on Nagorno-Karabakh forced the dissolution of the Republic of Artsakh, proclaimed in the region two decades ago by its predominantly Armenian population. As a condition of the ceasefire agreement reached with Baku, the breakaway state of Artsakh and its government in Stepanakert must be dismantled no later than January 1, 2024, and undivided control of the region returned to Azerbaijan. Karabakh Armenians took this as a cue to evacuate immediately from a region threatened with mass persecutions for its separatism. Meduza’s special correspondent Margarita Liutova spoke about the situation and the ongoing refugee crisis with the British political scientist Laurence Broers, a member of the British policy institute Chatham House and author of a book on the Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict, “Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry.” Here’s what he thinks about the region’s prospects under Baku. (The speaker’s remarks have been edited lightly for length and clarity.)

An end to independent aspirations

There’s little doubt that we have seen the end of Nagorno-Karabakh as we knew it. We’ve seen the end of Armenian aspirations of self-rule in the territory, and the question now is whether there will be any Armenian presence left in the territory at all.

There has been a mass exodus of people through the Lachin Corridor to southern Armenia, which represents most of the Karabakh Armenian population, and this may continue until there are none left. I think there are very few people who after nine months of this blockade and now this war (to say nothing of the longer history) can see themselves as living safely under Azerbaijani rule, regrettably.

And so, while we are seeing the end of secessionism in Nagorno-Karabakh, we won’t necessarily see the end of the conflict, because we may see the emergence of an internal diaspora of Karabakh Armenians inside Armenia, who may turn into broken people, as has happened to the previous generations of displaced Armenians (and Azerbaijanis for that matter), broken by their experience in the first generation. Then, in two or three generations, they may mobilize and become a new community — a kind of “mnemonic” community of remembrance around these very traumatic events.

The Azerbaijani official line is that the rights that would be extended to Karabakh Armenians would be the same as the rights for other minorities in Azerbaijan. This amounts to a commitment to things like native language use in education, freedom of religion, the right to be elected to local municipalities, and so on. But I think there would also be a distinction drawn between Armenians born in Karabakh and those who moved to the territory over the last 25 years or so: each of these categories would have a different sort of regime of entry and exit.

Azerbaijan emphasizes that it is a multicultural civic nation that has cordial relations with different ethnic and religious minorities. But I think it’s a stretch to imagine that Karabakh Armenians could feel safe. There is a very distinct and specific history the Karabakh Armenians have been through. And that’s why we have this discussion about security guarantees.

Now, the only outside actor that I think could be seen or would be accepted by Azerbaijan in this role would be the Russians. But I think there’s two key problems here. First of all, Russia itself has lost its credibility as a security guarantor for Armenians. That’s a long-term trajectory going back at least to the four-day war in 2016. But the other issue is what you might call “Azerbaijan’s 2025 problem.”

In 2025, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as per the terms of the November 2020 ceasefire agreement, have to give their consent or otherwise for the renewal of the Russian peacekeeping presence in the next five years. And this is not something that Azerbaijan wants. In 2020, the deployment of Russian peacekeepers was basically the price that Azerbaijan had to pay in order to consolidate its gains in the 44-day war. It is a matter of political correctness in Azerbaijan to refer to the temporarily deployed Russian peacekeeping mission in Karabakh.

And so, in May 2025, when this decision has to be made, Azerbaijan’s best-case scenario would be a polite refusal and a goodbye to the Russian peacekeepers. The second-best scenario would be a dramatic downsizing of the Russian mission — perhaps, for example, to a kind of a small-scale monitoring mission to monitor integration if any Armenians do remain. This might be enough for Russia to save face, but it calls for a certain presence of Karabakh Armenians. But to come back to the main point, I don’t see Russia as still being perceived by Karabakh Armenians as a credible security guarantor.

Russia’s leverage and E.U. diplomacy

In November 2020, Russia tried to impose its hegemony in the region. It brokered the ceasefire, signed the only meaningful document that’s been signed by Armenia and Azerbaijan in respect to the conflict for years, and got Russian boots on the ground in Karabakh.

But already from May 2021, we see that Azerbaijan has been challenging Russian hegemony consistently, and the Ukraine war only accelerated this. So Russia, in a sense, took itself out of the picture with the Ukraine invasion – materially (in terms of the quality and experience of the personnel being stationed in the peacekeeping mission in Karabakh), but much more importantly, in terms of reputation.

Azerbaijan, meanwhile, has been revising the ceasefire agreement piecemeal, in a way that amounts to a methodical deconstruction. In the context of the Ukraine war, Azerbaijan’s relationship with Russia has become much more important to Russia’s broader horizons. Azerbaijan is a key link in post-Ukraine-war connectivity. It’s a key ally to Turkey. Turkey is playing a key role in the Ukraine conflict. And so, Russia simply doesn’t have the space to irritate Azerbaijan. The shoe is on the other foot now.

Azerbaijan can now leverage different issue packages to get what it really wants, which is absolute, uncontested sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh.

It’s very hard to know whether there would be a sort of active violence against civilians. What I think more likely is the creation of an extremely unpleasant environment where it would be simply unviable for people to want to stay. That’s exactly what we’ve seen over the past nine months: securitizing and containing a population to the point that it doesn’t want to stay there anymore. Its relocation, meanwhile, can be framed as wholly voluntary.

A large-scale exodus of an indigenous population from its homeland is always a catastrophic failure for diplomats all round. This conflict is also multi-scalar, playing out on different scales. What we have seen now is the collapse of this intrastate level of the conflict. But we’ve also seen a lot of dynamism at the interstate-level negotiations between Yerevan and Baku over the last three years. This is the same level where we also see the rival Russian mediation track and the Euro-Atlantic track.

For the European Union, the current outcome can only be described as very ambiguous. The European Union staked some political capital on setting up a negotiations track. Early commentary on that was quite positive. I remember an Azerbaijani official saying to me that what the Minsk Group couldn’t do in 25 years the European Union has done in six months. So I think the European Union was quite effective, in terms of setting up a structured agenda for the talks.

But the missing piece has been the intrastate level, between Baku and Stepanakert (or Khankendi, as it’s called by the Azeris), because this level of dialog was consistently rejected by Azerbaijan, which said: This is our internal affair and we will not tolerate anyone else’s participation.

In terms of the wider international failure, it’s been almost comic, with the statements that get made, expressions of concern — of deep concern — of alarm, and so on, by international actors, by multilateral organizations that have a normative ethos. But the entire trajectory of events has exposed the fact that the European Union in particular doesn’t have a clear theory about itself in this context – about what its role is, what its expectations are, how the different wings of policy – energy policy, for example – might interact with the E.U. mediation policy, or else cancel each other out.

What is the South Caucasus to the European Union? The outcomes we’re seeing are posing that question in really black-and-white ways. The E.U. has a fair amount of leverage, particularly in the economic domain, and there’s been a lot of criticism as to why it hasn’t used it. But the EU is, of course, a collective actor. Different member states have very different relationships with Armenia and Azerbaijan.

There’s also a sense that the E.U. doesn’t see itself as a hard-power actor. It sees itself as a soft-power actor. It’s all about positive incentives to commit to peace — and this has come up against a very hard-power kind of context in the South Caucasus, which is quite different from the situation in, say, Ukraine or Moldova, where you have a European commitment to membership. That’s never been the case for Armenia and Azerbaijan, and so that sense of conditionality creating leverage just isn’t there.

What you have instead is a sort of a normative superpower that’s actually at the very limits of its power. And arguably, Russia is also at the limits of its power in the South Caucasus, albeit in a different way. So are Turkey and Iran. And this is what creates this hyper-fractured environment in which stabilization is so difficult to achieve.

The role of Azerbaijani gas in meeting post-Ukraine-war E.U. gas needs is typically exaggerated. I’m not an energy expert, but I recall that it’s around 10 percent of the deficit created, in terms of E.U. gas demand, by sanctions on Russia. But there’s also the wider trade relationship with Azerbaijan (which has oil in addition to gas), its role in East–West connectivity, the TAP and TANAP pipelines — all that constitutes Azerbaijan’s broader energy profile, particularly in Southeastern Europe. There is also a strong perception of Azerbaijan as a kind of rampart, a local ally in the context of Iranian–Western relations. This, too, makes it important.

Territorial integrity versus self-determination

In the context of the Ukraine war, Azerbaijan’s basic position in the conflict gets quite a bit of sympathy, since territorial integrity has absolutely become the primary principle. And self-determination, which was so much more important in the 1990s (in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was seen as a legitimate principle) has not been considered legitimate in the case of the Karabakh Armenians.

In the context of imperial collapse, self-determination claims have a huge legitimacy. Secession is recognized as a legitimate outcome in cases of decolonization. In the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fact that the different union republics were able to self-determine was seen as a fundamentally legitimate thing. But that stopped at the level of union republics, and there’s a legal principle, uti possidetis: What you have will remain to you, meaning that the internal administrative boundaries would be observed. This is what left many smaller groups like Karabakh Armenians, Abkhazians, South Ossetians, and so on, incorporated into states that they didn’t want to be part of.

I don’t think there was ever an abandonment of the territorial integrity principle. I think it always kind of won out because that’s the bias of the international state system – states look after their own. But there was, I think, much more flexibility, more bandwidth in terms of imagining different ways to engage with unrecognized territories.

With the annexation of Crimea, and even more so with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, territorial integrity has become a much more absolute value. Self-determination claims with respect to the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics are manifestly less real. There’s no long-term history of mobilization, separation, or indigenous capacity.

Many people look at the situation of the Karabakh Armenians through that Ukrainian lens, exclusively in terms of Armenian irredentism. But annexation of Karabakh by Armenia was never an option — and we are where we are.

A darker kind of mobilization

What’s really interesting about Armenia and Azerbaijan is that for a long time, both states were authoritarian. We had a consolidated authoritarian regime in Azerbaijan, and a very subtle unconsolidated one in Armenia.

In 2018, with the Velvet Revolution, this turned into a democracy facing off against an authoritarian regime. But even authoritarian states need to rely on international law when it comes to things like territorial integrity.

The difficulty here, though, is that there is a certain level of elite-led and elite-inspired discourse of hatred with regard to Armenians in Azerbaijan. That’s not to say that no similar discourse in present Armenia, but it tends to be at the grassroots level. Certainly under Nikol Pashinyan, there’s been an effort to change the elite discourse about Azerbaijan.

One of the big tragedies and the big questions that needs to be explained is why, in the context of an overwhelming military victory in 2020, has the discourse about Armenians not changed in Azerbaijan? Why is this piece still missing from the multiculturalist paradigm of inclusive Azerbaijani citizenship?

To answer that question, you have to go into the nature of the regime. I’ve written about something that I call “demobilization.” It is about demobilizing populations to mobilize them around new issues: for instance, demobilizing them from issues of participation, human rights, democracy, and so on, to re-mobilize or keep them mobilized around the axis of the conflict. This, unfortunately, has been the tendency since 2020.

The relationship between post-Soviet Russia and post-Soviet Armenia has been founded on a kind of transaction that Armenia will be a loyal Russian client if Russia provides security and underwrites Armenian control of Nagorno-Karabakh. That was the deal, and it isn’t in place any longer. Armenia lost control over Nagorno-Karabakh, and Russia has failed to provide for the Armenians’ security.

In 2020, Russia made legalistic arguments that it was under no legal obligation since it wasn’t Armenia’s territory that was under threat. That has since changed, with all the border incidents and Azerbaijani incursions since May 2021. More recently, Russia stood back as though it’s unwilling to act as a peacekeeper, hence the headline-grabbing developments around the Eagle Partner military exercises with American counterparts in Armenia, the failure to renew the representative to the CSTO for Armenia, and the prime minister’s spouse delivering aid to Ukraine.

But these are all, I would argue, just tactical experiments with alternative partnerships and alternative vectors in foreign policy. The fact remains that in numerous key structural, strategically significant sectors of the Armenian economy, Russia is far more deeply embedded than any other actor. We’re talking about energy supply and ownership of key objects like the rail grid or one of the key thermal plants, Hrazdan-5, and other assets. There’s simply no scope for a deep structural shift. So this is all a kind of tactical experimentation.

Weaponizing connectivity

Turkey’s transformation from a moral supporter of Azerbaijan to an actual military, logistical supporter — to the point of reportedly running the operation in 2020, or at least part of it — is a hugely significant factor. This is what enabled Azerbaijan to face down Russia’s demands.

Turkey is also a stakeholder in the transit route crossing southern Armenia — the so-called Zangezur corridor. We don’t really know what’s involved in that, but Turkey is a stakeholder in this broader connectivity debate.

Since 2020, we’ve seen an explosion in visions of a connected Caucasus and the centrality of the Caucasus to these different North–South, East–West middle corridors. But the flip side of that is the continuing weaponization of connectivity through blockades, closed borders and so on, that make this sort of vision of connectivity rather empty. This draws attention to the real strategic ambiguity to connectivity discussions. Connectivity is not being imagined as a benefit for all, but in terms of special relationships and securitized others.

Paradoxically for Turkey, its very strong support for Azerbaijan comes with the inability to have a regional policy, because Azerbaijan has its preconditions for a normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia. And until that happens, Turkey can’t really have a regional policy. It can have a partial policy for the region. In that sense, Turkey definitely has the potential among outside powers to benefit most from connectivity. It has a wider spectrum, including trade and other soft power aspects that Russia doesn’t necessarily have. Russia would be sort of the security broker of these arrangements, but Turkey’s got a broader bandwidth. But for now, that potential remains locked down in a very securitized approach to connectivity.

Will warfare spread to Armenia?

One of the very interesting subplots of the past three years is what I’d call a return of Azerbaijani irredentism. At the time of the national revival in Azerbaijan in the early 1990s, irredentism was very much part of that revival under the Popular Front, at least in terms of the symbolism and the imagining of the Azerbaijani nation.

Heydar Aliyev introduced (or reintroduced) a paradigm of irredentist nostalgia that had been dominant right up till 2020. Azerbaijan, of course, has its own population of refugees: approximately 205,000 ethnic Azeris and some other ethnicities were displaced from Armenia during the coerced population exchange when 360,000 Armenians were displaced from Azerbaijan in the other direction. This Azeri population is now framed as the Western Azerbaijani community that is articulating a right of return.

The president of Azerbaijan has talked about this return to Armenia as the next objective — a claim that gets combined with border incidents and occupation of pockets of territory in the Republic of Armenia. This is creating a lot of anxiety and has been a key factor in terms of how Armenians imagine the signing of a peace agreement. There’s lots of doubt as to whether signing an agreement would really mean the end of Azerbaijan’s irredentist claims on Armenia.

What’s ironic here is that a state that for decades was championing the principle of territorial integrity, depicting itself as a victim of territorial injustice, has now turned the tables and is making expansive claims to a much wider homeland involving other states.

What is significant is that escalations in Karabakh itself have rarely involved any real costs for Azerbaijan. But the escalation in September 2022, with large-scale cross-border strikes on targets in the Republic of Armenia, resulted in a much sharper, more consolidated international reaction, leading directly to the deployment of the E.U. monitoring mission in Armenia, an outcome Azerbaijan didn’t want. This is where we see how the international state system sort of looks after its own. But national minorities have far fewer recourses for protection — though I would argue they have more protection than unrecognized republics.

Interview by Margarita Liutova. Adapted for Meduza in English by Anna Razumnaya.