War and Peace in Azerbaijan
THE PROJECT
Nagorno-Karabakh is a hotly disputed region in the South Caucasus. While the region is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, it is mostly governed by a breakaway state with an Armenian ethnic majority (i.e., Artsakh). This ethnic and territorial conflict escalated into a full-scale war from 1988 onwards when the Karabakh Armenians demanded the transfer of Karabakh from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. Between 1998 and 1994, almost 40,000 people lost their lives, and close to a million Azerbaijanis have been displaced from their homes. Ever since the Russian-brokered ceasefire was signed in May 1994, there have been occasional fighting between ethnic Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the disputed region.
On 27 September of this year, violent and bloody clashes again re-erupted. In terms of casualties, the clashes were the worst since the 1994 ceasefire and caused alarm in the international community. As more than 1,000 people have lost their lives, the 2020 conflict was again classified as war according to the renowned Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). On Monday 9 November, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a new Russian-brokered settlement to end the war. The agreement, signed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, and the Armenian Prime MinisterNikol Pashinyan, calls for Armenia’s army to withdraw from the Nagorno-Karabakh region and to be replaced by Russian peacekeepers. The agreement also stipulates that Azerbaijan can keep the areas of Nagorno-Karabakh it has regained over the past six weeks, sparking anger and fierce resistance in Armenia. While three earlier cease-fires have collapsed, the current settlement calls for a more permanent redrawing of the security map of the southern Caucasus. Hence, the expectations and prospects of this settlement are high.
Public support of peace settlements and reconciliation between former enemies is crucial to building sustainable peace in post-conflict societies (Bar-Tal, Rosen, and Nets-Zehngut 2009; Kijezski and Rapp, 2019; Tellez, 2019a, 2019b). Although violence in Nagorno-Karabakh has repeatedly flared up since the end of the Cold War and several peace agreements have failed, we still know surprisingly little about Azerbaijani support for various conflict termination and peacebuilding strategies. Therefore, in this project, we will explore public support for certain peace agreement provisions and examine the relationship between individual war exposure and such support. More specifically, this project aims to answer the following research questions:
RQ1 (Descriptive): How do Azerbaijani citizens think about specific peace agreement provisions?
RQ2 (Inferential): How does past and renewed war exposure impact Azerbaijani citizens' political attitudes, cognitions, and behavior? Here, we will particularly focus on Azerbaijani attitudes towards the nation-state in general (following the rally-around-the-flag literature) and towards the new peace deal in specific (following the peace research and conflict resolution tradition).
THE TEAM
This research project is conducted at the Faculty of Social Science of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). Do you have any questions about this project, please feel free to contact the Principal Investigator (Amélie Godefroidt) via this contact form.