CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 103

NAREK SUKIASYAN
socially, economically and politically (negative group rights). Moreover,
these practices helped fuel division throughout the NKAO era and escalated
into a large-scale conflict in the turmoil of the Soviet collapse. Secession
also did not achieve sustainable peace in Nagorno Karabakh. Even though it
was successful in fulfilling one of the sides’ demands, this by no means
ended the territorial strife nor neutralized the mutually hostile perceptions
leading to the binary polarization of the societies (negative peace). From the
perspective of the institutional morality of the right to secede, some events
from the NKAO period, as well as incidents immediately preceding the
large-scale violence also during the war provide the Armenians with grounds
to push for the remedial right to secede. Some elite discourse indicates the
presence of this vision among Armenian political leadership. For further
research on the efficiency or success of conflict management strategies, the
framework proposed by Goertz and Regan that examines the average rate of
rivalry, the frequency of severe militarized conflicts and the variation of
conflict levels can be applied. This framework can be revealing not only for
its methodological usefulness but also for the prominence that the
framework of Enduring Rivalries has gained as an appropriate lens to study
the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. 79
Table 1.0 Demographic picture of Nagorno
Karabakh by %
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
89,1
85
88
84,4
14 10 9,3
1886 1926 1939
13,8
1959
Armenian
80,5
18,1
1970
76,9
75,9
23
1979
21,5
1989
Azerbaijani**
79
Gary Goertz and Patrick M. Regan, “Conflict management in enduring rivalries”,
International Interactions, 22:4, (1997): 321-340, DOI: 0.1080/03050629708434896. For the
study of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict from Enduring Rivalry perspective, see Laurence
Broers “From “frozen conflict” to enduring rivalry: reassessing the Nagorny Karabakh
conflict” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 43:4, (2015): 559-
560, DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2015.1042852.
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