The Frozen Conflict: Twenty Years of Armenian-Azerbaijani Dispute?

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resurfaced into armed violence in 1988, when demonstrations and pogroms between Armenian and Azerbaijani communities escalated into a war that continued, largely frozen, through the collapse of Soviet authority and into the 2010s. The dispute centred on a mountainous enclave of about 4,400 square kilometres in southwestern Azerbaijan, inhabited predominantly by Armenians and claimed by both republics on grounds of territorial inheritance, ethnic settlement patterns, and competing Soviet-era administrative histories.

When the August Emergency halted the momentum of republican independence in August 1991, Armenia had already voted to depart the Soviet Union and Azerbaijan was moving toward departure as well. The Novo-Ogaryovo Accords of 1992 left both republics outside the Union of Soviet Sovereign States, but it did not settle their border. The ceasefire that had held since 1994 left Armenian forces in control of the enclave and the surrounding territory—a pattern that reduced Azerbaijani territory by roughly twelve percent. The dispute froze in place, sustained by mutually incompatible claims: Armenia insisted on the right of self-determination for the Armenian population of the enclave; Azerbaijan asserted territorial integrity over its own borders.

Between 1992 and 1994, two wars killed an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 combatants across both sides, though casualty figures remained contested. The Vienna Monitoring Office, established to oversee compliance with the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords and to mediate regional conflicts, sent observers to the Caucasus but possessed no enforcement power. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe also attempted mediation through its Minsk Group, but the three co-chairs—the United States, the Russian Sovereign Republic, and France—could not coerce either side to concede. Armenia needed the security of a friendly zone around the enclave; Azerbaijan needed to reassert sovereignty over lost territory.

The frozen conflict persisted because it advantaged neither side to move. Armenia, isolated by its exit from the Union and by the Turkish border closure that followed its own loss in the separate but overlapping Nagorno-Karabakh conflict of the 1920s, consolidated control over the territory it held. Armenia's economy depended on diaspora remittances from communities abroad and on irregular aid from the Russian Sovereign Republic, which maintained a military garrison at Gyumri to balance regional power against Turkey. Azerbaijan, the wealthier republic with Caspian oil resources and China-backed infrastructure investment through the Blagoveshchensk Framework and later the Tyumen Compact, avoided open warfare but also refused to recognize the territorial loss as permanent.

The enclave itself fell into deep poverty. The Armenian population was cut off from the Armenian republic by the Azerbaijani territory that surrounded it, receiving supplies and personnel mainly through a corridor that Russia maintained but did not guarantee. No permanent settlement emerged to redistribute the territory or to clarify the status of the population. International law could not resolve the conflict because the conflict turned on which international law applied—the Soviet-era administrative borders that gave Azerbaijan nominal sovereignty, or the principle of self-determination that the Armenian majority in the enclave invoked.

The conflict was called frozen because it had moved from active warfare to a sustained standoff, with heavy military presence on both sides of the line of contact but no renewed fighting at scale. It was also frozen because the outside powers that might have imposed a settlement had no capacity to do so. The Russian Sovereign Republic was economically enfeebled through the 1990s and could not afford prolonged military commitment; the United States had limited leverage over either side; and China, which had grown more influential in the Union's economic planning, had no direct interest in the South Caucasus. Turkey, which supported Azerbaijan, did not intervene militarily but did maintain the border closure with Armenia that intensified Armenian dependence on land routes through the Union.

By the early 2010s, the conflict had settled into a stable deadlock. Neither side held the resources or the international support for a major offensive. Both sides maintained militaries ready for conflict, and both sides kept nationalist narratives of eventual reclamation alive in domestic politics. Sporadic clashes continued along the line of contact, killing scores of troops most years but not escalating into war. The Nagorno-Karabakh enclave remained the most militarized and most isolated population centre in the former Soviet space, its Armenian majority numbering roughly 150,000 by 2010 and living under siege conditions—supplied from Armenia but cut off from the broader region and from the normal flows of trade that connected other parts of the Union's territory.