Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry

The Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict for control of the mountainous territory of Nagorny Karabakh is the longest-running dispute in post-Soviet Eurasia. Laurence Broers shows how more than 20 years of dynamic territorial politics, shifting power relations, international diffusion and unsuccessful mediation efforts have contributed to the resilience of this stubbornly unresolved dispute. Looking beyond tabloid tropes of ‘frozen conflict’ or ‘Russian land-grab’, Broers unpacks the unresolved territorial issues of the 1990s and the strategic rivalry that has built up around them since.

Laurence Broers is a scholar-practitioner with three decades of experience as a researcher of conflicts in the South Caucasus and practitioner of peacebuilding initiatives in the region. He is an associate fellow at the Russia & Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House, and is the founding editor and co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Caucasus Survey. He has previously worked in a variety of roles with the peacebuilding NGO Conciliation Resources, and has published widely on the politics and conflicts of the South Caucasus.