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Includes all relevant information on national elections and referendums held in Azerbaijan since 1991. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of Azerbaijan's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections and referendums, the electoral participation of political parties, the distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

The 1970s and 1980s were characterized by the long tenure in office of important Communist Party secretaries in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, including Heydar Aliyev and Eduard Shevardnadze. All were involved in building modern and stable Soviet republics after the disruptions of Stalinism, but each also spent a great deal of time battling corruption. Nationalism prompted the three south Caucasus republics to exit the Soviet Union, but it also created serious problems internally, given the secession of territories such as Abkhazia and Nagorno‐Karabakh. Russia's own secessionist struggle with Chechnya defined the north Caucasus in the 1990s.

Can the Caucasus ever be considered part of Europe? This concluding chapter assesses the future directions of politics and society in the Caucasus, both the three independent countries of the south (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia) and the various north Caucasus republics of Russia. The European Union has shown increasing interest in the region since the late 1990s, but the United States and Russia remain the two powers whose interests are most affected by developments there.

This introductory chapter familiarises the reader with the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, and situates the conflict within the wider field of post-Soviet territorial disputes. It introduces the main conceptual tools used in subsequent chapters: critical geopolitical analysis and the enduring rivalry framework. The text also provides a guide to the chapters that follow.

This chapter provides background on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict as it unfolded in 1988-1994. Rather than a chronological narrative, the chapter tells the story of these events through the prism of four categories of explanation (structural vulnerabilities, transitional factors, leadership and culture). This situates the conflict against the backdrop of the Soviet collapse, equips the reader with basic facts, and distils the main findings of the existing literature on the conflict.

This chapter situates today’s reluctance to contemplate territorial compromises in the multiple and contested territorialisations of both republics throughout the twentieth century. Loosely deploying the concept of the ‘geo-body’, meaning the bordered space of the national homeland, it tracks different territorial traditions of ‘Armenia’ and ‘Azerbaijan’ over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how these traditions generated different commitments to borders within each nation’s geopolitical culture. These in turn resulted in overlapping conceptions of homeland that supply the historical, ideological and moral weight behind contemporary territorial claims, and resistance to compromise.

This chapter homes in on the disputed territory of Nagorny Karabakh, and its role in post-Soviet Armenian and Azerbaijani geopolitical cultures. It shows how Nagorny Karabakh has been an unstable territorial referent, with distinct understandings evolving from 1988 to the present. Drawing on field observations, interviews and popular geopolitical culture, the chapter charts the movement of this contested territory from the geographic periphery to the conceptual centre of both Armenian and Azerbaijani geopolitical cultures from the late 1980s to the present day.

This chapter engages with the human consequences of the territorial imaginings examined in the previous chapter: the ethnic cleansing of populations whose presence did not accord with exclusive visions of national space. The chapter provides a broad overview of the population movements that accompanied the violence of 1988-1994, seeking to disaggregate our understanding of ‘population exchange’. The chapter argues for a differentiated understanding of forced displacement, conditioned by different motives and conceptions of space. ‘Communal ethnic cleansing’ is explored as a collective eviction of ethnic others informed by underlying affective dispositions, characterising mass displacements in the 1988-90 period. ‘Strategic ethnic cleansing’ is explored as the forced expulsion of ethnic others in the service of military-strategic goals, characterising mass displacements in the 1991-94 period. The chapter closes by considering the prospects and politics of return and restitution.

This chapter examines the much-debated question of conflict and democratization. It argues that over its first quarter-century the Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry was sustained by the interactions of two hybrid regimes, in which authoritarian leaders were secure enough to secure power but not to enforce unpopular compromise. It then examines the roles of informal power structures and the persistent insecurity generated by prolonged militarised competition. It argues that while the causal relationship between regime type and rivalry is complex, over the long-term insecurity has provided important resources to authoritarian regimes ‘demobilizing’ constituencies for reform and democratic change. The chapter acknowledges revolutionary changes in Armenia in 2018, while highlighting the capacity of enduring rivalries to outlast democratic openings and remain stable across mixed-regime dyads.

This chapter engages with the puzzle presented by the apparent sustainability of an asymmetric rivalry. Across most material parameters Azerbaijan is significantly larger than Armenia, establishing an asymmetric dynamic between a larger challenger and a smaller status quo power. The chapter explains how Armenia ‘truncates’ this asymmetry through local parity, a strategy of deterrence and balancing with Russia. Pushing back against the realist logic permeating much of the policy discourse about Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry, this chapter argues that it is precisely its asymmetric nature that makes this rivalry both enduring and dangerous.

This chapter addresses the international politics of the Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry, arguing that it is a significant exception to the wider pattern of Russian-Western geopolitical competition in Eurasia. While other post-Soviet conflicts feature cross-border linkages reinforcing the axes of conflict, the Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry shows patterns of multi-directional, fragmented and crosscutting linkages with a wide range of external actors. This pattern has diffused leverage potentials of external actors, accounting for the lack of decisive shifts in the direction of either conflict escalation or resolution, or (until 2018) regime renewal. The chapter examines Armenian and Azerbaijani alliance and alignment strategies, and the diffusion of the rivalry across regional and international environments. It then examines Russia’s policy towards the rivalry, arguing that while Russian policy is pluralistic and inconsistent, it is best explained as an example of ‘pivotal deterrence’, where a third party, or ‘pivot’, seeks to prevent two adversaries from going to war.

This chapter examines the trajectory and problems associated with the Minsk Process, the peace process addressing the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It narrates the story of the peace process through a focus on three sets of consecutive problems: multiple and competing mediation efforts in the early 1990s, the structure and sequencing of the negotiation agenda over the following decade, and the growing subversion of the Minsk Process’s framework for a liberal peace by what are here conceptualised as ‘authoritarian conflict strategies,’ pursued by the parties to the conflict. These are identified as strategies of control, communalisation and coercion that undercut the liberal premises of the ‘Basic Principles’ negotiated by the parties since the mid-2000s. Underpinning these strategies is a preoccupation with the preservation of incumbent power to the detriment of other vital components of a comprehensive peace process, such as the problematization of historical narrative and cultural memory, the expansion of political participation, and the revitalisation of concepts of identity and community.

This afterword reflects on the book’s main findings, arguing that the persistence of the Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry needs to be explained by the convergence of international, strategic, domestic and leadership factors. Acknowledging the weight of each of these layers, the afterword argues for the necessity of change within Armenian and Azerbaijani societies for the rivalry to one day be de-escalated and resolved.

This introduction discusses the journey and struggle of the author and his colleagues in Armenia in how they set up their office, and how they conducted and monitored their research, which was focused on four types of population: the survivors of the earthquake in northwestern Armenia in 1988; the refugees from Azerbaijan who fled the cities of Sumgait and Baku because of pogroms; the women, children, and soldiers affected by the war in Nagorno-Karabakh; and the ordinary citizens who survived several winters without heat because of the blockade imposed by Turkey and Azerbaijan. In addition to their research and interviews around Yerevan, capital of Armenia, they also travelled to different places in northwestern Armenia where the earthquake in 1988 had caused massive destruction.

Riots and pogroms ignited in Armenia, both in Sumgait and the capital city, Baku. Due to these kinds of violence, Armenians were forced to leave. Before the Sumgait pogroms, Armenians had lived amicably among Azerbaijan nationals for more than a half century, in spite of the Turkish massacres in 1918. Armenians are a friendly and civilized people, which is why they were shocked when they suddenly became a target of Azerbaijan aggression when they sought independence for Nagorno-Karabakh and Yerevan. However, they ignored the attacks because they had a good relationship with their Azeri neighbors. As violence continued to grow, pogroms started to spread in Baku, and civil disturbances against Armenians continued until 1989. The Armenian cathedral in Baku, which is a symbol of Armenian identity, was burned. Intimidation and hostility towards Armenians intensified because of their claims for independence in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The rugged, mountainous landscapes dividing the Parthian and Roman Empires routinely served as an arena for military campaigns and violent conflict between empires competing for territorial expansion. Local alliances were cyclically forged, broken, and mended, yet these interactions are rarely represented in the archaeological record. How were military campaigns conducted in the Caucasus frontier? How did foreign soldiers interact with local communities? This chapter examines the case study of an unusual first century CE burial that integrates aspects of both Roman and Parthian funerary practice and is associated with large-scale feasting events at the site of Oğlanqala in Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan. By integrating osteological and isotopic analyses with a regional approach to funerary practice, this chapter sheds light on underrepresented local experiences and intersectional identities in response to Roman campaigns.

This postscript discusses the poetry of Mikayil Refili through his collection “The Window” penned in the new Latin alphabet after the Latinization reforms, which severed supranational ties to the Turkic and Persianate world and cemented the creation of an Azerbaijani national canon. This section thus concludes the book by tracing the transformation of poetry in the 1920s, both institutionally through the consolidation of power in Moscow and the creation of the national republics, as well as aesthetically through the ways in which lexical shifts and script reforms shaped the weight of a new materialist conception of the poetic word.