The activation of “citizen diplomacy” between Armenia and Azerbaijan following the trilateral meeting in Washington on August 8 of this year, where three documents were signed, drawing a line under the acute phase of the confrontation between Baku and Yerevan, suggests the necessity of looking into the history of bilateral non-governmental contacts. A recent study by the Yerevan Press Club, “Citizen (Track 2) Diplomacy between Armenia and Azerbaijan: Historical Overview and Future Prospects” helps set the perspective for such an examination.
The responses from representatives of Armenian civil society who participated in the study indicate that, up to 2025, a general decline in the effectiveness of “Track 2” diplomacy was observed. Many cite the period immediately following the end of the Karabakh war in 1992–1994 as the most favorable, when the conflicting parties had a chance for a settlement. According to a common view, the leadership of both the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan were relatively independent geopolitical actors. Armenia was the victorious side, while Azerbaijan saw prospects for entering the world oil market, and both countries had grounds to firmly defend their national interests, while rejecting maximalist approaches for the sake of development in peaceful conditions. Both Yerevan and Baku expected that the international community represented by the Minsk Group, would help find a solution that more or less met the expectations of the parties, despite the obvious unpreparedness of their societies to concede Nagorno-Karabakh to the adversary. Consequently, both capitals looked with curiosity at such a new phenomenon for the early post-Soviet period as civil society organizations and independent journalists, who claimed to become the standard-bearers of the peace-building process. Certain hopes were placed on them as a source of “added value” for official negotiations.
It was quite common to link the prospects for a settlement to the personalities of Levon Ter-Petrosyan and Heydar Aliyev, who, even with the benefit of today’s knowledge of past realities, were more inclined towards compromises than their successors. At the turn of the millennium, the distortion of history had not yet become total, and the propaganda machine did not cover such a mass audience. In particular, the last years of the presidency of both the first leader of the third Armenian republic and Aliyev the father were called promising from the point of view of a settlement. However, it was precisely during that period, as many in Armenia believe, that a new generation began to replace the generation in Azerbaijan that did not yet hate everything Armenian, perceiving their neighbors as nothing other than enemies. Similar tendencies manifested to a certain extent in Armenia. And while Ter-Petrosyan’s readiness not to postpone the settlement resulted in a “palace coup”, Heydar Aliyev, most probably, abandoned the formula of mutual compromises for the sake of transferring power to his son.
A significant role in maintaining a favorable situation, which left prospects for the conflict’s settlement even later, was the sincere interest of the mediators in discussing various compromise options. Negotiations proceeded quite intensively up to 2010–2011, and in parallel, international organizations supported numerous Track 2 programmes, which ensured contacts not only between civil society activists and journalists but also experts, ordinary people, and youth. Women’s organizations also interacted intensively. Until 2013, relative freedoms were maintained in Azerbaijan, and in Armenia, the attitude towards the “liberated territories” as areas subject to return had not yet changed.
An alternative opinion is quite common among representatives of the expert community, suggesting that the best conditions for the normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations formed immediately after the “Velvet revolution” in Armenia in 2018. For the first time since 1991, the authorities of the Republic of Armenia had a large reserve of public trust, enjoyed a benevolent attitude from the West, were perceived without obvious negativity by Moscow at the official level for some time, and were even considered a promising negotiating partner in Azerbaijan for a certain period. At the same time, there is no univocal answer to the question of how not only the general public but also Armenian experts and civil society activists themselves would have reacted then to the compromises from Yerevan that were inevitable for the successful outcome of the 2018–2019 negotiation process? In any case, this process stalled, providing no basis for any assumptions about the matter.
According to the mentioned study by the Yerevan Press Club, some direct participants in “citizen diplomacy” saw a possibility for a settlement in the first years after the outbreak of the conflict (1988–1991). Supporters of this version cite the fact that the animosity between the societies had not yet deepened so much, and human ties were still fresh, which created conditions for applying one or another model for determining the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. In the highest political circles of the USSR, a belief might have been forming that preserving the “Soviet empire” by maintaining hostility between neighboring peoples on the periphery (the well-known imperial principle of “divide and rule”) was ceasing to be a viable method. Saving the state from disintegration required the pacification of the conflicting parties. At the same time, this does not negate the presence of centrifugal tendencies in the upper echelons of power, where a number of influential figures saw personal and group benefits from the collapse of the USSR.
It is quite likely (at least this opinion is held by one of those surveyed in the YPC study) that one of the proponents of the earliest possible settlement of the Karabakh conflict as a measure to stabilize the socio-political situation in the country was Arkady Volsky, who headed the Special Administration Committee in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, his compromise proposals were rejected, according to unverified information, at the official level, primarily by the local Armenian elite in Stepanakert. And the positions of civil society during that period differed from the approaches of the ruling circles, it was more in a radical direction. It would not be a major mistake to view the opposition national movements that formed in the late 1980s as representatives of civil society, who were objectively not interested in a settlement while the Soviet system was preserved.
Another time frame that was evaluated by a part of the study participants as promising for the conflict’s settlement, although disputed by opponents, was the year and a half—from the beginning of 2022 to the middle of 2023. The international community, including influential officials from the EU, leading European countries, and the United States, actively joined the process. Russia primarily focused on the war in Ukraine and could not, as before, negatively influence the peace-making efforts of its geopolitical opponents in the West. By and large, the agreement that Baku and Yerevan eventually initialed in August 2025 could have been mutually acceptable even then and would have allowed them to avoid the tragic developments of September 2022 and 2023. However, it seems the parties were not “mature” enough for peace at that moment, and a formula for resolving the actual problem of Nagorno-Karabakh was not visible. The involvement of the international community created favorable conditions for intensive connection to the “citizen diplomacy” process; at least certain signals of readiness for this were coming from the Azerbaijani side. They were not “heard” by Armenian civil society because the majority of its representatives considered the position of potential partners unacceptable, particularly on the issue of prisoners of war and other persons detained by Baku.
There is also a viewpoint within civil society and among experts that a negotiated settlement of the conflict was unrealistic in principle. Firstly, the Minsk Group was unable to solve this problem for a number of reasons. For a long time, its activity was based on the false notion that all conflicts in the South Caucasus should be resolved according to the same logic. At certain stages, it seemed that the mediators from the MG stopped seriously searching for ways to settle the conflict. Secondly, the conflicting parties generally aimed not so much to reach an agreement as to stall for time until conditions were exclusively better for themselves. This was obvious, given the constantly rising degree of internal hostile propaganda, which indicated that Baku and Yerevan were not so much preparing societies for peace as fueling the conflict. In this sense, only after many losses and severe trauma on the Armenian side in 2020 and 2023 was the ground created for pragmatic negotiation approaches. Therefore, despite the bravado and the threats or categorical demands renewed from time to time by Azerbaijan, the probability of a renewal of the war in a new phase has significantly decreased, though it has not disappeared entirely.
The lessons and experience of previous “Track 2” efforts, as well as an analysis of the socio-political conditions under which they were undertaken, can be very useful for the dialogue that has recently gained momentum.
To be continued