CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 90

TERRITORIAL AUTONOMY AND SECESSION AS STRATEGIES OF CONFLICT …
NAREK SUKIASYAN
TERRITORIAL AUTONOMY AND SECESSION AS
STRATEGIES OF CONFLICT MANAGEMENT: CASE OF
NAGORNO KARABAKH
Abstract: The article identifies and examines territorial autonomy and
secession as conflict management strategies applied in Nagorno
Karabakh. It demonstrates that neither of these strategies provided
sustainable peace and indicates some of the underlying causes of this
failure. Through the case of the NKAO, the article challenges the role
of institutional autonomies as an encouraging factor of secession per se.
In our case, the autonomous period indeed prepared the groundwork for
mobilization, albeit for the opposite reason – it did not guarantee the
ethno-territorial rights of the minority. In fact, it caused an increase in
cultural, economic and political discrimination against the local
Armenians. Secession put an end to intercommunal violence, but failed
to establish peace. The secession of Karabakh and the factors leading up
to it provide grounds for qualifying it as a resort to the remedial right,
which has been instrumentalised by present and previous leaders of
Armenia.
Keywords: Nagorno Karabakh, peace and conflict, territorial
autonomy, secession, conflict management
Introduction
The region of South Caucasus has been a place of wars, confrontations
and ethnic struggles for most of its known history. Even in modern history,
the region did not manage to avoid armed conflicts, with every country in
the region witnessing intra- or inter-state wars. The article sheds light on one
of those conflicts, namely the war over Nagorno Karabakh, particularly
examining the results of two conflict management strategies applied therein
– territorial autonomy and secession. First, the article will briefly revisit
those aspects of the conflict’s historical origins that are immediately relevant
to our objective. In the following sections, the article will discuss how
territorial autonomy and secession have been applied to the Nagorno
Karabakh conflict and to what extent these applications were successful in
terms of managing the political cleavages of the Azerbaijani and Armenian
people residing in Karabakh.
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