This article asks what opportunities are available to start untying the persistent deadlock in the Nagorny Karabakh (NK) conflict when we take into account not only the positions of the conflict parties but also the fact that Russia’s strategic interests define its stance on the negotiation process and promote certain conditions for settlement. These conditions recognize Russia’s existing military presence in the region as well as the political and economic influence embedded in its Eurasian integration projects. The article does not advocate any parties’ interests, and it does not claim to present conditions which are acceptable to any of the parties. Instead, it examines how Russia’s interests in the wider region, which includes Turkey and Iran, relate to the basic elements of settlement which have been identified in the Minsk Process as the elaboration of the “Basic Principles”. We argue that understanding how these two action frames are interconnected in the Russian policy argumentation is the key to understanding its approach to conflict settlement in NK. Our main analytical point of departure is to unfold strategic perspectives by examining immediate and strategic goals in the policy argumentation. Empirically, the article concentrates on analysing the policy discourse connected with the major incidents of ceasefire violations in July–August 2014 and April 2016.
Protracted conflicts like those in the South Caucasus and Moldova stand as examples of the limits of international peace-building practices in addressing conflict transformation in various ethnic-marked conflicts, and in promoting reconciliation across the deep divides that these long-standing conflicts have generated within and among societies. A major challenge to supporting the transformation of protracted conflicts is that the conflict settings have been solidified as a new normality, and the polarised division between neighbours and within societies has been institutionalised. To address these challenges, we conceptualise cross-regional dialogue as a third-party facilitated process that brings together actors from various protracted conflict settings thus ensuring a greater diversity of opinions and societal standings. Cross-regional formats of dialogue, in our view, provide a space for suspending the dominant mutual antagonisms and for creative thinking about new horizons for the shared future. They enable participants and organisers to break away from the problem-solving paradigm as well as from the bilateral format of dialogues concentrated on one conflict, and thus they can be seen to provide safe spaces for dialogue in the midst of protracted conflicts.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.