Achieving Durable Peace in Nagorno Karabakh: Why did it fail so far?
Mane Harutyunyan
A year has passed since the fragile ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan was agreed upon on November 9th, 2020. While to Azerbaijan, the ceasefire put an end to the long and complicated Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, to Armenia, it did not bring closure or lasting conflict resolution. After a painful defeat, Armenia was not economically and politically prepared to resettle around 90000 displaced people from Artsakh whose citizenship status, rights, and social and economic welfare were at risk.
The peace negotiations between the two countries focused on establishing trade relations and drawing new borders with one another. However, the status of people living in the disputed areas and dangerous borderlines is still undetermined. Both the Armenian government and international organizations failed to provide effective social protection for them.
The Nagorno-Karabakh region has been a source of violence and hatred between Armenia and Azerbaijan since they attained independence after the fall of the Soviet Union. While international media tends to view the conflict as a territorial dispute, the conflict is moreso a clash between ethnic identities and historical proclamations to the region. That being said, peace negotiations have prioritized resolving the former issue over the latter.
This is not the first time that peace negotiations have failed to address the root of the issue within the region. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict led to a large-scale war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory from 1992–1994. The fragile Russian mediated ceasefire in 1994 and the following peace negotiations did not lead to substantial results. Both sides’ historical claims to Nagorno-Karabakh were based on ethnic-nationalist terms which made the resolution process complicated and nearly unachievable.
The ultimate goal for both sides of the conflict was to achieve “sustainable peace”, but Armenia and Azerbaijan had polarizing perceptions of how to achieve this ideal. The political discourse from Baku was that achieving a long-lasting peace would require hard power implementation. On the other hand, Armenian authorities were inconsistent in their political rhetoric. Some were declaring “new war for new territories,” “preparing for war,” and generally making provocative statements that internally contradicted Armenian foreign policy principles of achieving peace in Artsakh without direct violence. The Nagorno Karabakh second war (2020 September 27- November 9) was the substantial result of these contradictions.
Armenian prime minister Pashinian’s government neither adequately handled the situation during the war nor effectively managed the post-war Armenian crisis whose political, economic, and psychological impacts have been felt by at least two generations. In fact, during and after the war, current Armenian authorities were more concerned about keeping their political power rather than creating grounds for conflict resolution. Indeed, the government outlawed information from the front line about possible victory. After the defeat people felt that they were cheated and betrayed by their own government. Armenian people are now mostly indifferent and tired of politics, some just accept the trade-off between “security vs democracy” as a normal phenomenon and just continue to hope for peace which is far from being achieved. As Pashinyan’s democracy is heavily shaken, there is no hope of relying on the current Armenian government. In this case, there is no powerful political actor to take care of local forgotten people on the ground whose voices are barely heard in the geopolitical picture of the conflict.
The November 9th ceasefire provided hope for ended violence and a fragile restoration of negative peace in Artsakh but since then, the situation of people living in the conflict region has not become better. After a year, the economic impacts of war on the local and marginalized communities are immense. Their emotionally loaded stories are unheard as their hope for lasting peace continues to be unrealized.
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