CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 102

TERRITORIAL AUTONOMY AND SECESSION AS STRATEGIES OF CONFLICT …
the civil rights of its ethno-territorial minority citizens on the governmental
level and on racial, national, religious and xenophobia grounds, committing
violence and threatening to eliminate them or deport, the international
community is obliged to secede the territory occupied by that minority from
the state, for the sake of the minority’s survival”. 76 In this vein, PM Nikol
Pashinyan, addressing the UN General Assembly in 2018, made explicit
references to the probabilities of physical extinction, by arguing that “[…] to
be a part of Azerbaijan for Karabakh means to be totally exterminated.
Hence Karabakh must not be a part of Azerbaijan, unless one wants to
trigger a new genocide of Armenian people”. 77 In the same year, he also
referred to the nature of the conflict as a breach of human rights at the Paris
Peace Conference.
Thus, at least from the Armenian perspective, leaving Karabakh under
Azerbaijani jurisdiction would have led to the extinction of Armenians there
as well, especially when such claims have been voiced by high Azerbaijani
authorities. 78 Due to these contradictions in perceptions and mutual fears, the
application of secession as a strategy of managing the conflict has led to
shaky or even explosive management of the conflict rather than providing a
long-term sustainable solution. To summarise, secession as a strategy of
conflict management in Nagorno Karabakh managed to end the
intercommunal and intra-state conflict solely by virtue of physically
separating the two sides (negative peace). However, the cleavage evolved
into an inter-state one, failing to deliver sustainable and peaceful
management of the conflict. Coupled with inherent mutual perceptions,
mistrust, and a sense of incompatibility of political objectives, the conflict
remains a security dilemma up to this day with implications for inter-state
and regional stability.
Conclusion
During the course of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict’s history, a set of
tactics and strategies have been pursued to manage the societal divide. None
of them have yielded propitious results. This article has identified and
examined two of them – territorial integrity and secession. The territorial
autonomy of Nagorno Karabakh within the Azerbaijani SSR as an
institutional design to address group specific peculiarities was (to a large
extent) executed artificially. Instead of enjoying group-specific ethno-
territorial rights, the Armenians of Karabakh were discriminated against
76
“Armenia ex-president: We should make use of remedial secession doctrine in Karabakh
issue”, News.am, May, 6, 2016, https://news.am/eng/news/326010.html.
77
“Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan delivers speech at UN General Assembly”, The Prime
Minister
of
the
Republic
of
Armenia,
September
26,
2018,
http://www.primeminister.am/en/press-release/item/2018/09/26/Nikol-Pashinyan-speech/.
78
Walker ed., Armenia and Karabakh: The Struggle for Unity, 130.
102