Authors

Discussion

 Conflict studies and relevant policy discussion have been long dominated by the theory of democratic peace, stipulating that democracies don’t fight with each other, and hence concomitant regime transformation is usually enough to achieve peace between bitter enemies. This approach has been consistently applied to the post-Soviet conflicts, including the Armenian-Azerbaijani war over Karabakh, predicting that the quagmire cannot be resolved by the existing governments.

However, this approach has failed in the Karabakh case. Popular pressures in both Armenia and Azerbaijan have always been mostly on hawkish side and greatly reduced space for negotiation and compromise. While British researcher Laurence Broers mentions this paradox in his latest work “History of a rivalry”, there have been few academic attempts to fundamentally analyse it and challenge the concept of democratic peace as applied to the post-Soviet conflicts.

Hence, I’m investigating the failures of the peace process between Azerbaijan and Armenia, trying to focus on the reasons why popular opinion and democratic policies has worked against it, on the both sides. I am specifically focusing on the connection between the “Velvet Revolution” in Armenia with the rise of tensions that ended with the tragic 44-day war of 2020. Based on this research, I argue that the weakness of democratic peace concept is its excessive reliance on the unique experience of post-1945 transformation in the West. I am also making a point that the existing research dramatically overlooks the significance of the 200 years of Russian colonization as well as the lasting legacies of the World War I and Russian revolution for the current Azerbaijani and Armenian statehoods and identities, and hence the dynamics of the mutual perceptions and relations between the two rival nations. I conclude by arguing that the road to sustainable peace in the South Caucasus, as well as with other conflicts of a similar nature, lies through stable, predictable and genuinely independent governments capable of overcoming the huge post-Russian inertia and building an infrastructure of peace with vested international interests.