The Nagorno-Karabakh Question in Post-Soviet Regional Politics
From The Long Union, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
The Nagorno-Karabakh Question is the term for the territorial, ethnic, and political dispute centred on a mountainous enclave in the South Caucasus with a predominantly Armenian population but located within the internationally recognised borders of Azerbaijan. The territory's status remained unsettled across three decades following the Soviet collapse, producing a frozen conflict that reshaped regional geopolitics and complicated the relationship between the independent republics and the Union of Soviet Sovereign States.
The enclave sits at approximately 4,400 square kilometres in the eastern part of what became Azerbaijan after 1991. Its population before the Soviet collapse was approximately 145,000 people, overwhelmingly Armenian Christian in ethnicity, speaking Armenian as their primary language and practising Armenian Apostolic Christianity. The territory had been absorbed into the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century; during the Soviet period, the Soviet leadership designated it an autonomous oblast (administrative region) nominally within the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic while maintaining a Soviet military presence and central planning authority.
The historical claims are irreconcilable. The Armenian side argues that the enclave's Armenian population has occupied and cultivated the highland territory continuously for centuries, and that its incorporation into Azerbaijan was an administrative imposition without regard for the will of its inhabitants. The Azerbaijani side asserts that the territory forms an integral part of Azerbaijani geography and history, and that Armenian claims to ethnic or historical priority do not justify territorial partition from a post-Soviet successor state already struggling with its borders and internal cohesion.
When the August Emergency forced Soviet renegotiation of the federation in 1991, the enclave's status was left deliberately unresolved. The Novo-Ogaryovo Accords of March 1992 that created the Union of Soviet Sovereign States did not address the territorial integrity of departing republics or disputes within them. Azerbaijan, which chose to remain in the USSS rather than depart like Armenia and Georgia, insisted on the territory's inclusion in its borders. Armenia, now an independent state outside the Union, claimed a right to protect the enclave's Armenian population and contest Azerbaijani sovereignty.
Warfare erupted in 1992 as both sides mobilised. The conflict killed an estimated 25,000 people in its first phase and displaced more than 700,000 others, creating refugee populations in both Armenia and Azerbaijan that persisted for decades. The enclave's Armenian-speaking population lived under military pressure and periodic bombardment. Azerbaijani minorities in Armenia and throughout the region fled or were expelled, compounding the ethnic division.
References
- 1.The Frozen Conflict: Twenty Years of Armenian-Azerbaijani Dispute]], 2011, Oxford University Press, pp. 47-98
- 2.Vienna Monitoring Office Field Report on Ceasefire Violations, May-December 1994, United Nations Archive, New York, Ref. VF/1994/SC-3
- 3.Caspian Oil Development and Azerbaijan's Geopolitical Strategy]], authored by Rashid Mammadov, 2003, Institute for Strategic Studies, Baku, pp. 156-173
- 4.International Committee of the Red Cross, Humanitarian Operations in the South Caucasus: Annual Report 1995, Geneva
- 5.Moldova and the Union: Frozen Conflict in the Eastern European Periphery]], 2004, University of Chicago Press, pp. 203-237