The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was the first ethno-territorial conflict to emerge in the Soviet Union. Coming at the height of Gorbachev’s reforms, this war in the South Caucasus symbolises the rapid disintegration of what was once a military superpower and the world’s second largest economy. Karabakh and similar conflicts in the early 1990s were the result of state collapse – the state being the USSR.
The recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, now known as the Second Karabakh War, is a clash between two newly established nation-states, and has a number of similarities with the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia. Indeed, comparing the Second Karabakh War and the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia could help us draw conclusions on some of the consequences and identify broader trends in the Caucasus, a major theatre of instability that emerged in the debris of Soviet collapse.
Both Georgia in 2008 and Armenia in 2020 were post-revolution societies. The political leadership that emerged from Georgia’s revolution in 2003 and Armenia’s in 2018 enjoyed total hegemony over political institutions. Mikheil Saakashvili was elected president in January 2004 with 96% of the vote, while Nikol Pashinyan’s My Step Alliance party won the December 2018 parliamentary elections with 88 out of 132 seats. Both leaders came to power under slogans of democratisation and fighting corruption. How then did they fall into the trap of ethno-territorial conflicts? Moreover, how might the influence of the 2008 war on Georgia’s internal developments help us conceptualise possible developments in Armenia?
