Brian Li
International Relations
Easter Term, 2024
Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, 5(1), pp. 30-51

Introduction

During the late 1980s, there was an array of drastic changes in the global political landscape as the Soviet Union faltered under the weight of political reforms and economic stagnation. Amidst the political instability, a host of competing nationalist groups arose to take advantage of the power vacuum left by weakening centralised governments (Kaplan 1994). One of the most significant ethnic conflicts during this time occurred in Karabakh, a land-locked region straddling Armenia and Azerbaijan.The conflict escalated into large-scale warfare on multiple occasions over three decades, each time bringing about mass displacement and significant loss of life.

The final chapter of the conflict (the 19th and 20th of September 2023) resulted in the complete restoration of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and the exodus of the entire Karabakh Armenian population from their historic homeland (Reevell 2023). The fighting has since subsided, but the permanent displacement of Armenians will undoubtedly stoke deep resentment for generations to come. In the wake of the Armenian exodus, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has promised the speedy reconstruction and repopulation of his newly conquered land to definitively solidify Azerbaijani dominion (Smith 2024). The opposition in Armenia has taken advantage of the opportunity to blame Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan for the dissolution of Artsakh, pulling the strings of the protests even though they held power until the 2018 Armenian Revolution (Mourenza 2023). Having overseen a long period of institutional decay, the former governments share a large part of the blame for the recurring military defeats. Their strategic use of the Karabakh issue threatens to polarise Armenian politics and is indicative of the historical trend of leveraging ethnic grievances to surpass domestic political adversaries.

While the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict featured the mobilisation of ethnic grievances, this essay asserts that the political elites of both countries primarily perpetuated the conflict by pursuing rational self-interest, which, at times, involved articulating nationalist grievances as a moral tool to mobilise ethnic bases. By analysing the Karabakh conflict, we illustrate how ethnic entrepreneurs can exploit popular grievances to consolidate support and how this strategy can easily lead to intractable communal conflicts as relative war gains and hateful rhetoric cyclically reinforce ethnic tensions. The essay proceeds as follows. The first part will include a literature review on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, examining scholarly sources from multiple fields. The main body will demonstrate the validity of the thesis by explaining how political self-preservation frames the decisions of Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders. This body section will be subdivided into three chronologically ordered segments that each focus on a significant turning point of the conflict: the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994), the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), and the final Azerbaijani offensive of September 2023.

Literature Review

The proliferation of ethnic wars in the aftermath of the Cold War has sparked extensive academic debate, with scholars pointing to various factors. Some scholars have emphasised the role played by cultural differences in regional conflict. Huntington (1994) argues that the fundamental source of conflict after the Cold War was primarily cultural rather than ideological or economic. According to this perspective, people aligned themselves with enduring common elements, such as customs, language, religion, and history, which have survived the global conflict between capitalism and socialism (Huntington 1993, 23). Huntington attributes the cause of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War to religious disparities between Orthodox Armenians and Muslim Azeris on the northern border of Islam (1993, 33). Echoing Huntington, Kaplan (1994) contends that the weakening of state institutions in many parts of the world has contributed to tribal and ethnic conflict, furthering the spread of political instability. In the absence of a stable government, people sought protection from their sub-state communities that competed for power and resources. Kaplan provides an alternative perspective to Huntington’s analysis on the Karabakh conflict, suggesting that the principal fault line was centred on ethnic divisions between Armenians and Azerbaijanis rather than religious demarcations between Islam and Christianity (Huntington 1993, 33). Both Huntington and Kaplan stress the significance of identity-based tensions in conflicts following the end of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, other scholars like Posen (2008) frame the post-Soviet conflicts in neo-realist terms. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, which served as the collective guarantor of security for the constituent republics, left resurgent sodalities vulnerable in a precarious regional context. Confronted with prevailing insecurity, sub-state communities proactively enhanced their war-making capacity to ensure their survival (Posen 2008, 27). However, the endeavour to achieve greater security triggered a security dilemma, prompting neighbouring states to engage in self-armament and resulting in a cycle of escalating tensions (Posen 2008, 28). To assess the threat potential of other groups,  groups resorted to historical record: how did the other groups behave before the sovereign subjugated them? A historical record mired in violent rivalry motivated preemptive attacks and genocide (Posen 2008; Bowen 1996). The lack of a credible third-party enforcer gave rise to commitment issues, ultimately precluding cooperation and leading the young states to conflict. While lacking a comprehensive explanation for the war outbreak in Karabakh, the concepts employed by Posen help elucidate how the collapse of the previous political order facilitated the rise of a new class of ethnic entrepreneurs.

Contrary to the cultural realists, constructivist scholars start with the assumption that ethnic identity is not fixed, but instead, it is socially constructed and in flux. They draw attention to the significance of discourse and symbols in shaping interactions among diverse groups. Bowen’s research holds that ethnicity is a product of modern politics rather than an immutable, primordial feature of human society. He asserts deeper underlying issues, notably colonial legacies, the unequal distribution of power, and the socio-economic marginalisation of communities drive ethnic conflicts (Bowen 1996, 4). In the Balkan example, which parallels the Karabakh conflict in terms of manipulation by elites, politicians like Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman exploited nationalist sentiments to mobilise political support during the breakup of Yugoslavia, using grievances as a rallying cry to galvanise the masses (Bowen 1996, 5). This political strategy made ethnic identities more rigid and established negative relationships between ethnic groups. Kösen and Erdoğan adopted a constructivist approach by delving into how President Aliyev of Azerbaijan instrumentalised emotions in the run-up to the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War to evoke national shame in preparation for the 2020 offensive. Following the victory, this shame was replaced by national pride in Aliyev’s discourse bolstered the regime’s legitimacy (Kösen & Erdoğan 2022, 583). The concept of weaponising emotions, as discussed by Kösen & Erdoğan, aligns with Kalyvas’ (2009, 111) observation that leaders consciously formulated conflicts regarding national divisions as a tool for popular mobilisation. 

Although realism and constructivism offer valuable insights into the causes of ethnic war, the Karabakh conflict cannot be fully understood by either paradigm alone. Cultural realism and neo-realist theories often paint ethnic conflicts with broad strokes, failing to account for regions like the Russian Far East and the Turkic republics of Central Asia. These diverse areas have undergone drastic political transformations after the Cold War without experiencing ethnic conflict on the same scale or intensity as Karabakh. Another relevant counterpoint to the cultural realist perspective is the country of Georgia, which borders Armenia and Azerbaijan to the north. Despite its Orthodox Christian heritage and a long record of conflicts with various Turkic powers, Georgia currently maintains cordial relations with Muslim Azerbaijan and Turkey. This paper makes an original contribution by arguing that the Karabakh conflict was primarily due to the rational self-interest of political leaders, who are the primary actors in shaping the relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Elites from both camps strategically drew on a repertoire of historical trauma and national aspirations and, in doing so, exacerbated ethnic tensions. In constructing the  argument, this study draws upon realist concepts like the security dilemma while also incorporating the constructivist perspective of ethnic conflict into the argument. Additionally, this work seeks to extend the existing literature by studying the entire breadth of the Karabakh conflict, from the anarchy of the 1980s to the minimally explored 2023 offensive.

The Argument

Ethnic unity held great significance within the framework of Soviet ideology, functioning as the central tenet that unified the constituent republics of the Soviet Union in their collective pursuit of communism. The downfall of the Soviet Union went hand in hand with the annihilation of this collective ordering system. The post-Soviet republics veered away from a unitary socialist ideology, with their leaders prominently displaying national symbols and fostering nationalism within their borders. Without an ideology to unify the diverse peoples of the crumbling Soviet Union, national symbols provided a political anchor for various communities.  The force of attraction exerted by nationalist ideas within late Soviet society can be explained by increasing disillusionment with Marxism-Leninism amidst rapidly deteriorating living standards (Beissinger 2009, 336). Additionally, the glasnost policy, initiated by Gorbachev, contributed to a general malaise vis à vis the Soviet canon and motivated a search for historical truth among the population (Beissinger 2009, 336). Many radical politicians seized on this public unease to question official narratives, advocate for alternate systems of governance, and empower nationalist sentiments. Nationalism, then, served as an important tool of delegitimization and contestation for emerging leaders against the elites of the Soviet ancien régime (Caspersen 2012, 133).  

The fundamental premise of the paper is that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the product of self-interested, rational agents instrumentalising ethnic imagery to secure political power within their domestic arena rather than the result of primordial ethnic rivalry or the perceived incompatibilities between Armenians and Azeris. In Azerbaijan, the individual rational agent is embodied most recently by President Ilham Aliyev, who instrumentalised ethnic grievances inherited from the first war to shore up his security regime and legitimise war-making against neighbouring states. Aliyev carefully positioned himself as the superior political leader by assigning responsibility for the national trauma to his domestic adversaries and employing his national speeches not as genuine expressions of personal animosity but rather as a component of his broader strategy to maximise public compliance by playing on his citizens’ grievances (Erdogan & Kosen 2022, 584). On the opposing side, the radical Armenian group that emerged toward the end of the Cold War instrumentalised the national anxiety of the masses by evoking memories of the Armenian genocide and images of a ‘Greater Armenia’ (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 41). The adoption of progressively radical rhetoric not only aimed to marginalise the Armenian branch of the Communist Party (Caspersen 2012, 133), but also functioned as a means of inter-elite competition for popular support. Each individual elite vied for support and legitimacy in Armenia and amongst Karabakh Armenians. Rather than acting as a cohesive group with a single set of principles, as one might assume from a cultural realist perspective (Huntington 1993), the inter-elite ‘outbidding’ to attract popular appeal led individual politicians like President Robert Kocharian to engage in a race to the bottom in terms of inflammatory actions and provocative ethnicised discourse (Caspersen 2012, 136; Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 37). The vitriol of politicians from one side of the conflict would spread fear amongst the targeted population and inadvertently strengthen the legitimacy of opposing nationalist elites, thereby creating a self-reinforcing cycle of ethnic animosity.  The self-interested calculus of Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders to capture domestic political support progressively heightened regional insecurity by cyclically amplifying ethnic tensions.

The extensive nationalist propaganda disseminated by Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders worked to strengthen grievances and instil a zero-sum mentality in the national consciousness of their respective nations, effectively prolonging the conflict beyond the original 1994 ceasefire. In this imagined dyadic relationship, relative gains by one nation necessarily translate into a net loss for the opposing nation. Politicians strategically framed military successes and failures in ways that serve their interests (Erdogan & Kosen 2022, 571). Their approach centred on managing the narrative surrounding the conflict to sustain popular support and perpetuate the cycle of violence whenever it benefits them politically. Drawing inspiration from Powell’s work on game theory (1991, 1317), this paper further contends that two structural conditions that made cooperation difficult between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, indirectly expediting the rise of radical politicians. The first factor was the anarchy brought on by the dissolution of the common government (i.e. the Soviet Union). The absence of a common governing body created a favourable setting for ethnic entrepreneurs to thrive, worsening  insecurity and encouraging subsequent rallying around national identities. The second factor, which played a preponderant role in sparking the 2020 war and the 2023 offensive, was the opportunity afforded to the stronger state, Azerbaijan, to leverage the relative gains that have compounded over time to the disadvantage of Armenia and Artsakh in a calculated manoeuvre. The emerging disparity in military strength allowed  Aliyev to engage in repeated military confrontations that allowed for further accumulation of land and political prestige at home rather than pursuing diplomatic negotiations.

  The following sections  elaborate on the paper’s fundamental arguments using specific historical examples. The conflict will be broken down into three chronologically ordered episodes: the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and the 2023 Azerbaijani offensive. These key milestones were influenced by the rational, self-interested decisions of political elites who pursued policies to maximise their political security in their domestic arena even as the methods worsened inter-ethnic relations.

First Nagorno Karabakh War: Political gains for the Armenian elite

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was rooted in the disintegration of the USSR. A multi-ethnic federation was tentatively established from the ashes of the Russian Caucasus, bringing together Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Hille 2010, 167). However, conflicting territorial claims between Armenia and Azerbaijan soon resulted in the dissolution of the federation and the eruption of an armed conflict in 1918 against the backdrop of the wider Russian Civil War (Hille 2010, 168). Hostilities ended when both countries were absorbed into the ascendant Soviet Union in 1920, though underlying grievances remained (Hille 2010, 168). The Soviet Bureau for the Caucasus left Nagorno-Karabakh with the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), a move that was motivated by the desire for rapprochement with Azerbaijan given the country’s vast oil wealth according to Armenian historians Mikaelian and Khurshudian (Hille 2010, 169). As a result, the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) was created within Azerbaijan SSR in 1923, although this settlement failed to fully satisfy either the Armenian or the Azerbaijani communities.  Despite forming part of Azerbaijan SSR, the demographic composition of Nagorno-Karabakh throughout the Soviet Era consistently reflected an Armenian majority (Melander 2009, 63). Soviet authority, acting as the upholder of collective security, kept the peace in the Caucasus by quelling ethnic nationalism (Bowen 1996, 12). In tandem with repressive measures, the Soviets encouraged ‘friendship amongst peoples’ through affirmative policies and the promotion of the future-oriented narrative that emphasised a unified Soviet nation, which narrowed the gap between Armenians and Azeris (Leupold 2020 194). 

As the Soviet Union experienced a decline in the 1980s, a new wave of Armenian political entrepreneurs emerged, employing ethnic identity as a basis for popular mobilisation in order to pull political power from the old Soviet Armenian elites (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 35). Artsakh politician Robert Kocharian, who later served as the president of Armenia, claimed that Armenians were incompatible with Azeris because of the history of g the 1915 Armenian genocide (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 37). As Posen mentions, groups would assess the capabilities of other groups in the context of incomplete information by referring to historical records (Posen 2008, 30). However, Yavuz and  Gunter point out that Azeris did not participate in the Armenian genocide and that equating Azeris with Ottoman Turks was a form of historical manipulation to discredit political moderates and support their image as national defenders (2023, 37). This dynamic of manipulating historical memories for self-serving political purposes caused a vicious cycle where the hostile rhetoric from one group would confirm the other’s fears in what Bowen aptly terms ‘a battle of nationalisms’ (1996, 10). Over time, the memory of relatively harmonious cohabitation was overshadowed by nationalistic discourses and accounts of mass ethnic violence (Leupold 2020 194). On top of the toxic rhetoric espoused by emotive nationalist leaders, the late 1980s and early 1990s were characterised by the slow collapse of the Soviet system. The unanticipated failure of the Soviet Army to resolve the NKAO crisis through military means during Operation Ring in 1991 underscored the erosion of Soviet sovereign power in maintaining order among the republics (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 108). The intra-Soviet political situation can be compared to the state of anarchy in international relations, a condition characterised by the uncertainty that makes security the primary concern of groups. The problem of security leads to the security dilemma: any action to enhance security was perceived as a threat by the other party, which, in this case, was made worse by the antagonistic relations between Armenians and the Azeris (Posen 2008, 28). Being surrounded by Azeri-majority territory, the Armenian militias in NKAO were incentivised to go on the offensive and capitalise on the element of surprise. The power vacuum left by the recession of Soviet authority in the Caucasus and the political benefits of supporting Karabakh secession gave Armenian elites a perfect political opportunity to wage warfare. Communal violence spread throughout NKAO starting in 1987, inflamed by nationalist rhetoric from both Azerbaijani and Armenian elites. Although the traditional nomenklatura in Nagorno-Karabakh attempted to compromise with the Azerbaijani authorities until 1991, their influence steadily diminished, eclipsed by a louder, more radical group that claimed unilateral secession was the only path to avoid the ethnic cleansing of Armenians (Melander 2009, 71). A self-interested motive for pursuing full secession was that many of these militant politicians had already taken up arms, and a peaceful settlement that keeps NKAO in Azerbaijan would have led to their legal prosecution in Soviet court (Melander 2009, 71). The militant-dominated NKAO government decided to unite Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia in February 1988, and Armenian militias started attacking Azerbaijani institutions, to which Azeris responded by massacring Armenians in Sumgait (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 46). The Sumgait incident caused the spread of fear in border areas and mass deportations from both sides, but the bloodiest stage of the war took place after the abortive Soviet coup attempt in Moscow and the proclamation of the Republic of Artsakh in 1991. Far better trained than their counterparts and motivated by a national imagination that Azeris hitherto lacked (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 41), Armenian and Artsakh units swept through the Azerbaijani front. By 1994, the forces of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, with full support from the Armenian military, had emerged victorious in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War by successfully securing Karabakh and connecting the self-proclaimed Artsakh to Armenia proper. This military success was largely due to the extensive military background of numerous Armenians in the Soviet Red Army, an establishment from which the Azeris were largely excluded (Uzer 2012, 248). The defeat was a defining moment for Azerbaijan as hundreds of thousands of Azeris were displaced from their ancestral homes in NKAO and the surrounding regions, solidifying bottom-up ethnic grievances amongst the broader Azerbaijani population (Melander 2009, 65).  This resentment served as a tool of political mobilisation for the Aliyev regime in the succeeding decades.

Second Nagorno Karabakh War: Political gains for the Aliyev regime

The 1994 ceasefire  failed to mature into a full-fledged peace. If calculations include the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, Armenian forces occupied  twenty per cent of internationally recognised Azerbaijani territory (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 163). The Armenian units failed to withdraw from the Azerbaijani districts adjacent to Karabakh because it formed a security belt around Artsakh that enhanced protection for the Armenian-inhabited region and gave Armenia a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Azerbaijan (Amirkhanyan 2022). The combined Armenian victory cultivated a hubristic attitude amongst the Armenian political elite, which translated to complacency toward the resentful Azerbaijani public. To illustrate this military complacency, Armenian military expenditure averaged 3.65 per cent of the national GDP from 2000 to 2019, comparable to the Azerbaijani average of 3.44 per cent (Amirkhanyan 2022). It is crucial to note that Azerbaijan has a population several times that of Armenia, and the Azerbaijani GDP per capita is much higher thanks to its vast oil extraction economy that it has built up since the end of the Cold War (Ibrahimov & Oztarsu 2022, 599). Simultaneously, Armenia and the breakaway region faced an economic blockade from Azerbaijan and its Turkish ally, severely hampering economic growth and, by extension, military upkeep (Ibrahimov & Oztarsu 2022, 603). The real power gap was therefore much more pronounced between Armenia and Azerbaijan than it first appears on paper. While Armenia and Artsakh used their budget to maintain their ageing Soviet-era arsenal, Azerbaijan acquired newly developed weapons systems such as attack drones from Turkey and Israel, compounding the power differential over the last quarter-century (Amirkhanyan 2022). Azerbaijan also had international legality by its side with a number of UN Security Council Resolutions, such as UNSC 822, 853, 884, calling for Armenian forces to withdraw from internationally recognised Azerbaijani territory (Uzer 2012, 247). 

As Armenia underwent partial democratisation in the  twenty-first century, the political discourse of the local elites became more tempered. Politics gradually turned toward domestic matters that were more pressing to the electorate. Across the border, President Aliyev continued to embrace revanchism as the Karabakh issue provided his regime with an ideological raison d’être in the absence of meaningful democratic institutions. The Aliyev regime, originally installed in 1993, is a repressive authority maintained by oil rentierism, electoral fraud, and a security apparatus inherited from the Soviet era (Radnitz 2012, 63). In 2003, Heydar Aliyev transferred power to his son, Ilham Aliyev, in a trumped-up presidential election (Radnitz 2012, 66). Younger Aliyev faced considerable challenges in maintaining power, given his regime’s illiberal and fragile nature. Both his father and he faced a succession of coup attempts (Radnitz 2012, 62, 66), and the concentration of power in the hands of the ruling elite marginalised a section of business elites that did not support the regime (Radnitz 2012, 70). Faced with the difficult challenge of consolidating political legitimacy, Ilham Aliyev identified the Karabakh question as a defining national issue to garner domestic support – particularly from the security apparatus and descendants of Azerbaijani refugees who fled Armenian-held territory – and shifted attention away from domestic injustices committed by the regime. 

In the run-up to the 2020 war, Aliyev ramped up his nationalistic rhetoric to edify a historical narrative that gives his regime not only the international legal right to take back Karabakh but also portray the status quo as a dire, untenable injustice against Azerbaijan. In creating a historical basis as a justification for war, Aliyev deceptively framed Armenians as settlers and proxies to the Russian Tsars of old, who were charged with changing the religious composition of Karabakh (Kösen & Erdoğan 2022, 576). By securing a military victory and liberating Azerbaijani territory lost since the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Aliyev effectively cemented his legacy as the protector of the Azerbaijani people and justified his rule over the country. He presented the injustice as a source of national shame but shifted the blame to certain politicians in Azerbaijan by labelling them as ‘internal enemies’ who, according to the president, are responsible for losing Karabakh to ‘Armenian invaders’ (Kösen & Erdoğan 2022, 577). Aliyev positioned himself in opposition to the populist metaphor of the ‘enemy within’, emphasising his unique skills and qualifications that set him apart as a qualified and skilled leader for Azerbaijan. One such qualification that Aliyev referenced in his speeches is his military-economic administration: ‘We were getting stronger without getting tired, despite the pressures on us. Economic power – this would not have been possible without economic power. Today, Azerbaijan is not behind any country . . . This allowed us to build our country and, at the same time, strengthen our army’ (Aliyev 2020 as cited by Erdogan & Kosen 2022, 579). This pattern of emotive speech aimed at every Azeri was meant to instil national pride and confidence in the leadership. Possessing popular backing and the massive power differential between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Aliyev laid the groundwork for a surprise military offensive in the autumn of 2020. There was much to gain politically in the war that the Azerbaijani regime was confident it could win. 

The frozen ethnic conflict broke out once again into a large-scale conventional war on 27th September 2020, when Azerbaijani armoured columns, supported by drones and jets, rolled deep into Armenian-controlled territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh (Mirovalev 2020). In just forty-four days, the Azerbaijani military defeated the unprepared forces of Artsakh and Armenia. Armenian decision-makers had clung to outdated dogmas of static, attritional warfare and had armed its troops with old Soviet-made weapons, while Azerbaijan had embraced innovative tactics based on manoeuvre warfare and new weapon technologies, such as the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drone and Israeli-made Orbiter loitering munition that decimated the embattled Armenian units (Mirovalev 2020). The lopsided war culminated in the decisive capture of the strategic town of Shushi, which convinced the Armenian leadership that it was time to sue for peace (Amirkhanyan 2022). A hastily signed truce let Azerbaijan keep the territory it had recaptured, and Armenia pledged to withdraw its forces from the territory it still occupied within the Azerbaijani districts surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh (Al-Jazeera 2020), effectively turning Artsakh back into an ethnic island. The war was a tremendous public relations victory for Ilham Aliyev. Euphoric crowds in the capital city of Baku celebrated what was perceived as the Armenian capitulation, in essence reversing the national shame of 1994 (Al-Jazeera 2020). The president capitalised on his military victory by intensifying inter-ethnic hatred, referring to Armenians as a ‘wild tribe’ and as ‘murderers’ in his national celebration speeches (Kösen & Erdoğan 2022, 80). The dehumanising portrayal of the Armenian people aimed to justify the moral superiority of Azeris and paint the 2020 war as a just operation by the Azerbaijani regime to punish transgressions against the nation.

2023 Azerbaijani Offensive: Artsakh capitulation and flight of Armenians

The 2020 war resulted in Armenia losing the bargaining chip territory surrounding Artsakh that it had acquired during the first war. Additionally, the military of the Republic of Armenia withdrew from Artsakh under the conditions of the ceasefire (‘Is the Nagorno Karabakh War Really Over?’ 2020), leaving only the local militia to assure the security of the vulnerable polity that was entirely cut off by Azeri forces. Russia, positioned itself as a credible third party, and took on the role of ensuring ceasefire compliance during the handover process. Putin brokered negotiations between the warring parties and deployed nearly two thousand peacekeepers along the line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh and along the Lachin corridor (‘Is the Nagorno Karabakh War Really Over?’ 2020), which is the mountain pass linking Artsakh to Armenia proper. The territorial changes turned Nagorno Karabakh back into an ‘ethnic island’ surrounded by the Azerbaijani military. Posen argues that isolated groups can produce incentives for a preventive war due to the vulnerability of the territorially concentrated group to siege and blockade (Posen 2008, 32). Any pre-emption in this case, however, was impossible due to the massive power disparity accentuated by the 2020 war. The conservation of Nagorno-Karabakh as an Armenian polity therefore depended on Azerbaijan’s adherence to the ceasefire and the credibility of the Russian Federation as the peacekeeper.

The status quo could not be maintained because neither condition was met. First, the continued existence of Armenian autonomy in Karabakh runs counter to Azerbaijan’s aspirations, which have been steadily reinforced in the past decades by Aliyev’s nationalistic rhetoric portraying the politicians of the self-ruled region as criminals. The ceasefire was simply a preliminary step to secure a favourable ceasefire that would see Azerbaijan regain sovereignty over the entirety of Karabakh while minimising combat losses (Bagirova & Light 2022). Second, Moscow’s attention was diverted by their full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine beginning in February 2022 which undercut their ability to enforce the ceasefire as a credible third party. The small peacekeeper contingent sent by Russia now held little sway along the line of contact. Without this ‘central authority’ to ensure cooperation, the stronger state can exploit the relative gains to its advantage through military conflict (Powell 1991, 1315). At the beginning of 2023, Azerbaijan imposed a total blockade of the Lachin Corridor, sealing Karabakh from the rest of the world to put pressure on Armenian authorities for a favourable peace treaty (Powell 1991, 1315). The blockade directly contravened the 2020 ceasefire agreement and disproportionately impacted the civilian population (Prime Minister of Armenia 2020), yet the Russian peacekeepers were powerless to stop the siege of Karabakh. Armenian authorities were also unable to lift the blockade, having already been humiliated in the 2020 war and possessing no significant armed presence in Karabakh. The conditions were sufficient for a renewed Azerbaijani campaign against the Armenians of Karabakh.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a ‘counterterrorism’ offensive, which, within a single day, compelled the surrender of Artsakh forces (Roth 2023).  The capitulation was a difficult reality to accept for the Armenians, given the deeply entrenched ethnic grievances and the high emotional costs. Nichol Pashinyan, the Armenian Prime Minister, lamented that Armenians were enduring ‘untold physical and psychological suffering’ (Faulconbridge & Light 2023) in the light that they were losing control over Karabakh, considered in Armenian historiography as an inseparable part of ‘Greater Armenia’ or Miats’eal Hayastan (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 41). Furthermore, the Armenians of Artsakh expressed concerns about potential ethnic cleansing carried out by Azerbaijani forces despite reassurances from Aliyev of a smooth transition (Faulconbridge & Light 2023). These fears stem from the association of Azerbaijan with the historical genocidaires of the Armenians and the Turks (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 42), ostensibly confirmed by Aliyev’s chauvinistic rhetoric and the documented war crimes committed by the Azerbaijani military during the 2020 war, which include the beheading of captured Armenian civilians (Roth 2020).

What accounts for the quick surrender when there are heavy emotional costs and genuine fears of genocide? The capitulation was ultimately a calculated decision by the Artsakh leadership premised on two reasons that superseded the high emotional costs. The first reason was the absolute power imbalance between Artsakh and Azerbaijan that gave the Artsakh little hope of surviving, let alone winning, a renewed war. The Republic of Armenia had withdrawn its military from Azerbaijani territory and Artsakh after the 2020 war and did not provide any significant military support to the Artsakh militias. Russian peacekeepers, at the same time, did not have an adequate deterrent effect in the face of the overwhelming Azerbaijani military presence (Faulconbridge & Light 2023). The Artsakh leadership, therefore, only conceded in the hopes of minimising human suffering. The second reason arose from the close proximity of Artsakh to Armenia, the larger ethnic brethren country. This proximity allowed for the possibility of Armenians from Karabakh to evacuate to Armenia proper through the Lachin Corridor. The flight of Armenians was a response to the credible threat of genocide posed by the Azerbaijani military, as Armenian politicians and the Aliyev regime have engaged in hateful discourses that reduced their ethnic enemies to objects of contempt. Ilham Aliyev had depicted Armenians as rapists and occupiers in his national speeches (Erdogan & Kosen 2022, 580), while Armenian elites have tied Azeris to the genocidal Ottoman Turks in their historical narrative (Yavuz & Gunter 2023, 37). The genuine fear felt by Armenian refugees illustrates how elite political discourses can worsen ethnic grievances over time, with the potential of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. A few days after the new ceasefire was signed, Azerbaijan lifted the blockade on the Lachin Corridor to allow Karabakh Armenians to evacuate to Armenia proper (Roth 2023). By exercising strategic restraint and providing an exit, the Azerbaijani government gave ethnic Armenians a choice between population displacement to nearby Armenia or an uncertain life in an Azerbaijani-controlled Karabakh. More than a hundred fifty thousand Armenians have left Karabakh, emptying the enclave and turning cities like Stepanakert into ghost towns (Reevell 2023). The exodus of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and the de facto capitulation of the Republic of Artsakh marked the culmination of the decades-long conflict and cemented the political legacy of Ilham Aliyev, amongst the Azeris, as the liberator of Karabakh.

Conclusion

The Karabakh conflict was not primarily fuelled by primordial ethnic rivalry or cultural disparities between the Christian Armenians and the Muslim Azeris. Instead, the onset of the post-Soviet conflict can be traced back to individual political entrepreneurs manipulating ethnic grievances in a rational, self-interested way. Calculated and self-interested actions carried out by the leaders of both states to secure domestic support reinforced bottom-up ethnic grievances over time, feeding the cycle of violence and giving the illusion of an age-old ethnic conflict. During the waning days of the Soviet Union, ethnic entrepreneurs emerged in Armenia and Karabakh and engaged in nationalist rhetoric to displace the old Soviet-Armenian elites. Concurrent with the rise of Armenian nationalism, the ebbing Soviet sovereignty over the Caucasus left a growing power vacuum and encouraged subnational groups to pre-emptively arm themselves for self-preservation. The security dilemma, coupled with nationalist rhetoric from both Azerbaijan and Armenians, ignited the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The war became a source of national embarrassment for Azerbaijan, inflaming ethnic grievances between Armenians and Azeris.

President Ilham Aliyev took advantage of this ethnic grievance to unify the Azerbaijani population and establish the legitimacy of his illiberal regime. He did so by employing an emotive discourse to frame the status quo as unbearable while shifting blame to his political rivals. Over the course of several decades, from the late 1990s up until the 2020s, the power disparity between Azerbaijan and Armenia gradually increased in favour of the former. This shift can be largely attributed to the exploitation of oil reserves by Azerbaijan, which allowed Aliyev to fund the modernisation of his military at full tilt while the Armenian military suffered from institutional decay. At the same time, Aliyev had the backing of international law and Turkey, an important regional power and ally. Driven by the potential political advantages, Aliyev launched a surprise offensive in 2020 that saw the recapture of lands that were previously occupied by the Armenian military after the first war. The 2020 offensive isolated Karabakh from Armenia proper, leaving it as an ethnic island that was both vulnerable and unable to mount an effective defence against the more powerful Azerbaijan. 

In view of the power imbalance, the leaders of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh made the calculated decision to surrender shortly after Azerbaijan launched a renewed military operation in 2023; this capitulation led to the flight of ethnic Armenians from Karabakh to escape the threat of ethnic cleansing, perceived as credible given the deeply hostile discourses articulated between Armenian politicians and the Aliyev regime. The Karabakh conflict offers a compelling case study of how ethnic grievances can be generated top-down by ethnic entrepreneurs for self-interested political gain and how these grievances are cyclically reinforced over time by war gains and evolving political narratives. The way in which politicians frame conflicts holds substantial sway over public perception and plays a pivotal role in determining whether a path to enduring peace can be readily pursued.