Thin peace, strong hands: The politics of elite bargaining in the South Caucasus

2026-03-24 - 16:22

The Armenian-Azerbaijani peace process has reached a paradoxical juncture, marked by parallel yet contradictory dynamics. On one hand, measurable, incremental progress toward normalization is undeniable. The final months of 2025 saw the first commercial goods transit Armenia via Azerbaijan in three decades, alongside direct purchases of Azerbaijani energy. Cross-border expert visits resumed after a 20-year hiatus. Most significantly, the sharp decline in violence — with no frontline incidents for nearly two years — has produced a foundational stability that would have seemed implausible when scenarios of a wider Azerbaijani invasion of Armenia were still being actively discussed. This progress is codified in a normalization treaty, published in August 2025. It was negotiated primarily by the parties themselves — a marked departure from earlier, externally mediated formats. Border delimitation talks, once dominated by outside actors, now proceed with reduced foreign arbitration. Yet paradoxically, the process continues to court external involvement, epitomized by President Donald Trump convening the leaders in Washington to cement the southern transit corridor, subsequently dubbed the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). This duality — internal negotiation alongside strategic external patronage — defines the current moment. Furthermore, a notable, if inconsistent, discursive alignment has emerged between Baku and Yerevan. To proclaim the advent of a new regional order, however, would be profoundly premature. The moment remains transitional and fragile. The treaty is signed, with its ratification entangled in Azerbaijan’s demand for Armenian constitutional revisions — a process dependent on an unpredictable referendum. Perhaps the most striking feature of this evolving situation is the acute dissonance between elite accord across the divide and escalating elite-society tensions within each state. Peace has coincided with — and is inseparable from — intensifying domestic political strains, which manifest differently according to each regime’s character. The connectivity paradigm and the domestic dilemma The easing of interstate conflict inevitably shifts attention to domestic politics, given the decadeslong instrumentalization of the conflict to discipline citizens and the heightened expectations that peace generates. These expectations resonate unevenly. For Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, whose political brand rests on change, legitimacy is now inextricably linked to delivering a tangible peace dividend. A landlocked nation blockaded for 30 years stands to gain enormously from reopened trade routes. Yerevan’s official commitment to advancing the treaty is evident, though ambivalence persists among some social groups, particularly Karabakh Armenian refugees, who perceive terms that appear to foreclose justice for war crimes. In Azerbaijan, widespread societal fatigue with war contrasts sharply with elite circles, where exhortations to vigilance and militarized rhetoric endure. This is epitomised by the lingering discourse of “Western Azerbaijan,” an irredentist concept projecting territorial claims onto Armenia itself. In a context where Azerbaijan has overwhelmingly restored its territorial integrity, the narrative functions less as a strategic claim than as a reflexive mechanism: sustaining familiar, controllable political routines derived from the conflict. It diverts attention from a deeper regime dilemma: in an authoritarian setting, how does one “popularize” peace, making it broadly welcomed and tangible, without inadvertently opening the space for political contestation? The prevailing answer from negotiating elites is connectivity. Yet this vision is strikingly narrow, focused on pipelines, railways and corridors such as the TRIPP. It is rarely articulated as networked interaction among social actors. The result is strategic ambiguity. An elite-managed process fostering functional interactions, narrated through commerce and trade hubs. Meanwhile, the conflict’s legacy continues to empower elite authority: in Armenia, allowing Pashinyan to cast opponents as architects of past catastrophe; in Azerbaijan, legitimizing the discipline of dissent under the guise of vigilance. The long-term risk is a “thin” peace: state-mediated exchanges and trade unsupported by a “thicker” peace rooted in cross-societal ties. Such a peace is vulnerable to domestic crises on either side, as historical precedent shows, and remains perilously dependent on the elites who negotiated it. Should those elites fall, the peace itself risks collapse, unmoored from broader societal networks. Geopolitical realignment and the architecture of dependence This internal strategic ambiguity is reflected in a profound geopolitical realignment centered on the TRIPP corridor. The Washington-facilitated agreement, while framed as a historic closure, functions fundamentally as a geopolitical conduit. Its core design is to connect Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan and Türkiye via Armenian territory under a developmental framework led by external consortiums. This represents a marked departure from the region’s traditional security and economic architectures. The agreement’s substantive shortcomings are stark. It lacks an agreed map, postpones critical border delimitation and contains clauses that asymmetrically constrain Armenia’s defensive options while leaving Azerbaijan’s strategic partnerships largely unaffected. Vague terminology risks legitimizing future political claims and obliges the withdrawal of all international legal cases, effectively depriving one party of judicial recourse. Baku’s demand that Armenia revise its constitution amounts to clear interference, contradicting the very principle of noninterference enshrined in the agreement. The clear beneficiaries of this emerging architecture are the external powers underwriting the connectivity vision, alongside Baku, which achieves its primary ambition of a direct link to Türkiye. Armenia, in contrast, is reduced to a vulnerable conduit, trading sovereign control over infrastructure for economic survival and a precarious security guarantee. Its traditional security architecture has weakened, with its former guarantor visibly distracted and disengaged, leaving Yerevan dependent on the fragile assurances of a new, transactional patron. The precarious architecture The current moment in the South Caucasus is thus defined by a precarious duality. A tangible, if thin, interstate peace process advances, creating facts on the ground through trade and connectivity projects. Yet this process is simultaneously instrumentalized for domestic political control and serves as a vehicle for a sweeping geopolitical realignment that consolidates the influence of extra-regional actors. The TRIPP is emblematic of this dichotomy; a grandly branded infrastructure of peace that may deepen regional dependencies. For a lasting stability to emerge, the process must evolve beyond elite compartmentalization and geopolitical exclusivity. The strategic ambiguity that currently serves ruling elites and external patrons must give way to genuine societal engagement and inclusive regional frameworks that address, rather than bypass, the profound issues of justice, security and mutual recognition. Until then, peace in the South Caucasus will remain fragile, vulnerable to the internal and external pressures it is meant to manage.