Pax in the Caucasus

• Commentary Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia
  by Shujaat Ahmadzada
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There is a dull silence in the serpentine militarized trenches that form most of the Armenia-Azerbaijan border. The memory of violence is not distant. Until a few months ago, ceasefire violations were a daily occurrence, not to mention major escalations and wars. This silence is a result of work conducted in diplomatic lobbies. On this end, a major breakthrough came in early August, when the leaders of the two countries convened at President Trump's residence to sign a joint declaration on the Armenian-Azerbaijani connectivity dispute and the interstate peace agreement. This has raised hopes among many: is the violent rivalry between Armenia and Azerbaijan coming to a final end?

Armenia-Azerbaijan relations: A consolidated Architecture of Enmnity

For this question to be answered, there needs to be a realization of the magnitude of this rivalry first. For many, the conflict that Armenia and Azerbaijan have lived through has a linear political dimension, with the status of mountainous Karabakh at its core; the solution to which was essentially a matter of time, a bit of mastery, a bit of willingness, and a bit of creativity. This reductionist level of understanding led to many wrong assessments and often unproductive, sometimes even counter-productive, interventions both locally and internationally. Behind - more precisely, underneath - the reduced frame, there have always existed cross-national structures - from economies to education systems, from identity fabrics to foreign-policy systems - that formed the colonnade of what I call Architecture of Enmity, keeping Armenia and Azerbaijan in timeless and violent rivalry.

If there is an Architecture of Enmity, then the Pax of Armenia and Azerbaijan needs to be the one that replaces it, relocating Armenian-Azerbaijani relations into a post-conflict phase. On the official track, there has been considerable progress. There have been intensive high- and mid-level contacts ever since the Washington Summit of early August. The biggest development is Azerbaijan lifting the formal ban on international freight destined for Armenia from transiting through Azerbaijan. Kazakh wheat suppliers are now using Azerbaijani territory to reach Georgia and then Armenia, for the first time since the very conflict erupted. There is also work, mostly at the technical level, underway on both border demarcation and connectivity structures to implement and support the agreed political arrangements.

The role of Geopolitics

This diplomatic progress is not happening in a vacuum. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have further strained geopolitical fault lines; "Iron Curtain 2.0," "Cold War 2.0," or "Spheres of Influence" are all terms used nowadays to describe the increased great-power rivalry. These rivalries do not only take place on the battlefield. They also hijack, for instance, negotiations between political rivals. Just to make it clear: when Armenia and Azerbaijan negotiate in front of mediator X, it doesn't work in a way where the mediator simply stays neutral. They both end up also negotiating bilaterally - and sometimes even jointly - with the mediator to accommodate the mediator's own "red lines" - which are often shaped by the mediator's need to outmaneuver other geopolitical rivals - so that the process can move forward. During the OSCE Minsk Group period of the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, there were plenty of such instances. The Armenian-Azerbaijani momentum - even if rare - was often derailed by differences among the mediators themselves. And this happened at a time when great power rivalry was far less palpable than it is now.

For that matter, the geopoliticization of the peace process carries huge risks for the very recent momentum achieved between Baku and Yerevan. For the time being, there now exist no institutionalized multilateral mediation tracks with third-party involvement. Yet some may still wish to subsume progress in the peace process under the would-be material benefits offered by certain third parties. But it would be a short-sighted calculation with far more devastating outcomes. Progress in peace should not be tied to some utopian concept of a Marshall Plan-like grandiose international financial and political backing. For one simple reason: there will be no Marshall Plans for Armenia and Azerbaijan. Even if progress brings certain investment funds, their scale is likely to be minimal and would not help these two countries in any meaningful way.

Keeping bargaining space open for possible foreign intervention is not a cause but a symptom of a chronic problem embedded in a cross-institutional plethora of dependencies: Armenia and Azerbaijan, two small states by any metrics of power in the international system, have to play off various regional and great powers to survive. Making a critical turn or strict alignment is too risky to handle. It is this habit that dominates the whole architecture of foreign policy-making. And it is this habit that also reverberates through the peace process. In 2022-2023, both were involved in very intensive, what some would call, "forum-shopping" diplomacy in which, to speak simply and practically, what was achieved with Brussels was used in Moscow to gain more, and vice versa - between the largely triaxial Brussels, Moscow, and Washington forums.

But now "forum shopping" could very well backfire. From now on, there are only two forums where "shopping" must be done: one in Baku, the other in Yerevan. This does not mean the Armenia-Azerbaijan process should be vacuumized and isolated. That is not even possible. But the process should be fully owned across all dimensions. More institutionalized and increased bilateralism between Baku and Yerevan is the only recipe to safeguard against the malign impact of geopoliticization. Friendly foreign help and investments are always welcome, but not ownership. Between MFAs, communications are semi-institutionalized; this is also true for border commissions. Yet a set of new structures that would oversee not only major themes such as connectivity but also micro-level issues concerning the environment and economy has yet to emerge.

Delivering Tangible Benefits to Communities affected by Disputes

Keeping peace defined in small diplomatic lobbies and felt by only a few would not help but undermine the diplomatic efforts. The dividends of peace need to be felt by wider segments of society, especially those who lost and suffered the most from the enduring rivalry - displaced communities, those living on the borders, among many others. The problem is that nowadays many concepts, such as connectivity and border demarcation, are envisioned in extra-securitized environments where the priority is freight control and the installation of sophisticated border-control systems. Whereas these are better than having no connectivity or maintaining highly militarized borders, they still make little sense to the wider public, as their benefits and engagement would be next to zero. For example, in the far northern Gazakh and Ijevan areas - in Azerbaijan and Armenia, respectively - everyday prosperity depends heavily on cross-border interactions, and their absence for three decades has surely worsened the lives of communities there. From pastoral areas to shared water resources, from cattle control to coping with environmental problems, this area is one of many where a rich biosystem necessitates cross-communal and cross-border communication on a very micro level.

The two aforementioned meta-points - (1) increased bilateralism and (2) tangible benefits of peace - can be realized only if the legacies of the rivalry are addressed so that the Architecture of Enmity mentioned at the very beginning can collapse once and for all. The task here is not necessarily cross-border, nor fully separate; it is more of a blend depending on the context. Armenia-Azerbaijan cooperation in several thematic areas is a must for wider reconciliation. For example, in both countries a large - perhaps more than a million combined - demographic group has been displaced, among them some even three or four times in a row, because of this conflict. Not to mention also a considerably large group of those who lost a family member to violence. Families of missing persons, their number being close to 4,000, could benefit from increased cooperation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, especially on this social matter.

A culture of peace through societal engagement and regionalism

This does not encompass only those who lost in the conflict, but also those who have lived with it as part of their daily lives. What kept the Architecture intact were the identity systems of the two societies, built around the exclusion and antagonism of the other, rendering everyday peace-making an "anomaly" or even an "anti-national treacherous" act. To reverse it, in other words, to make normalization "normal" for wider societies, there needs to be a multifaceted transformation of attitudes and identities; a type of work that, by its scale, cannot be done by any single actor. From pedagogues to media journalists, from civil-society organizations to businesspeople, normalization has to occur on a multi-scalar level. Everyday practices of enmity need to be replaced by everyday practices of peace.

Finally, the Pax in the Caucasusshould be embedded in wider regional structures, as bilateral normalization alone cannot suffice; there also exists a regional dimension involving Türkiye and Georgia. The Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization is expected to have multiplying effects across the region, as Armenia will complement it with Türkiye normalization, the economic benefits of which for local communities are immense. More institutionalized Baku-Yerevan-Ankara ties could form the baseline for a new order-making framework that would also include Georgia.