Armenian-Azerbaijani Pax: What is the Vision?
The first war over Karabakh ended with the ethno-linguistic mosaic of Armenia and Azerbaijan being completely re-assembled. For Azerbaijan, this was more than a territorial loss: Azerbaijan’s Armenian minority had become a thing of the past. Just before the conflict emerged in 1988, the Soviet Azerbaijani Republic had around half a million Armenians, making it almost the second homeland for Armenians outside of Armenia.
Armenia had also become “free” of its Azerbaijani minority. The territorial expansion of the novel Armenian quasi-state over both the mountainous and lowland areas of Karabakh was accompanied by the mass exodus of 600,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis.
Armenia’s Azerbaijani mosaic was reduced to ghostly whispers and stories of the good old days, a few dozen ethnic Azerbaijanis, and abandoned villages left in ruins. In Azerbaijan, Armenian means a few hundred individuals sporadically spread across the country, remnants of Soviet-era mixed marriages, and some cemeteries. And also the church of Surp Grigor in the center of Baku, though functions as a library.
The violent population exchange had oddly been normalized and legitimized as soon as multinational diplomatic efforts began to settle the rivalry between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In 1994, the OSCE’s Minsk Group became the only framework under which Armenian-Azerbaijani peace could emerge. The Group’s neoliberal vision for making peace offered a rather oxymoronic peace: Armenia and Azerbaijan “free” of the Other could be acceptable as long as mountainous Karabakh was reserved as a micro-space for peaceful coexistence between the two communities.
There was a degree of antagonism within the Minsk Group troika, which accelerated ever since the Russian-Western geopolitical confrontation emerged after 2014. There was also antagonism between settlement models proposed by various mediators. But all of them — without exception — relied on the premise that Armenia and Azerbaijan would cooperate as two independent states, while Karabakh would become a mini-space for coexistence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
It is hard to argue that this neoliberal model went beyond closed doors to appeal to larger populations. In Armenia, and more specifically in Armenian-controlled Karabakh, the possible return of Azerbaijanis to mountainous Karabakh, and thus a potential coexistence, largely remained a taboo. While the return to Fuzuli and Aghdam was somewhat digestible, there was an almost explicit red line drawn against the Azerbaijani return to Shusha and Stepanakert. This increasingly became a point of no-discussion after the April 2016 war.
Coexistence became a buzzword for Azerbaijani rhetoric since most peace plans advocated for the return of Karabakh back to Azerbaijani control; surrounding regions surely, mountainous parts more ambiguously though. While there was a “YES” for coexistence, it is hard to believe that consociation — intra-state reconciliation and power-sharing, which are two prerequisites for coexistence — was appealing .
Coexistence was for façade. Consociation, however, was seen as an ominous and ill-intentioned meta-design imposed on a defeated and humiliated Azerbaijan by the war results. Its “unfairness” for Azerbaijani nationalists laid in the premise that Azerbaijan was the only party asked to convince its own would-be minority and grant a high array of rights just because the war results dictated so.
For almost three decades, local nationalist rebellions to this vision have been regarded as myopic and rudimentary due to their incapacity to understand how neoliberal peace could take Armenians and Azerbaijanis out of the cycle of perpetual violence. Those who sided with nationalist rebels were doomed as masses that need to be prepared and educated for eventual coexistence through a grand scheme of identity transformation among many other things.
On the eve of the second war, it became abundantly visible that the neoliberal vision for peace was diametrically opposed to illiberal conflict management strategies on the ground. This was akin to having half your body stuck in a swamp — any diversion could be harmful, but you realize that not diverting would not prevent you from being fully absorbed.
The 2020 war was a cold shower for proponents of the neoliberal vision. Yet, the war ended in such a way that coexistence was still desired as an outcome. The Aland Islands had been shelved as an obscure model and Croatian Serbs re-entered the discourse, yet the vision of Armenians and Azerbaijanis living together in Karabakh was preserved until the 2023 mass exodus of Karabakhi Armenians upended the conceptual nucleus of the more than three-decade-old neoliberal peacebuilding vision.
It was practically shown that nation-states and their national spaces, where the Other is not allowed to exist, wield a draconian level of hegemony that could not be challenged by neoliberal visions for peace-making. Almost century-old Armenian-Azerbaijani territorial rivalry since 1918 has brought only “territorial nationalization” — implying a myriad of coercive tools and tactics to re-design the demographic space for national goals through forced expulsions.
This is where Armenian-Azerbaijani peacebuilding stands today. On the one hand, the disagreements between the two capitals have reached a historical minimum level. On the other hand, the gap between the two societies has reached a historical maximum level. Talking of coexistence is ridiculed by many nowadays. The chronic problem of today is that, unlike in the past (pre-2023), there is no similar vision looming over Armenia and Azerbaijan. The neoliberal vision was marginal, yet it was there; now there is not even a vision to be marginal. And on such endings, the fundamental question is, then what?
Instead of a couple of paragraphs, maybe one or two questions could be good enough to see if we could find a new vision:
- The neoliberal vision for peace was built upon a desire to reverse the first war’s forced expulsions so Karabakh could become a safe space for poly-ethnic life. This never materialized. If this vision is a thing of the past, then what should be the new vision? If there is to be a new vision, what should it seek to reverse? Is there a possibility of reversing-maybe on a very, very, very small scale-the legacy of forced expulsions so either state could have a minority of the Other?
- The neoliberal vision for peace was criticized for being too marginal and never resonating with larger societies. This could very well be true, but the question is — is there a way to have a transformation engulfing both societies with all their spectra represented? What are the structural barriers to such engagement? And how are the barriers in Armenia different from those in Azerbaijan, and vice versa?
