Having solved its issues with Armenia, and with the Armenians of Mountainous Karabakh, by force, Azerbaijan is keen to burnish its peace credentials by framing COP29 as a ‘peace COP’. Hype around an imminent agreement is best avoided, but joint environmental action can nudge confidence-building forward.
From war to peace?
There is little doubt that Azerbaijan’s securing of the COP29 presidency, just three months after a campaign in Mountainous Karabakh widely characterized as ethnic cleansing, was a diplomatic coup for the government. Following Azerbaijan’s victory in the Second Karabakh War in late 2020, three years of coercive diplomacy had culminated in a September 2023 military strike that finally extinguished the 35-year-long attempt by local Armenians, supported by Armenia, to separate from the country. The successful Azerbaijani military operation resulted in the mass flight of the territory’s entire Armenian population, already weakened by a nine-month blockade. Baku continues to hold prisoner numerous figures from the Karabakh Armenian civil and military leadership: slated for trial in Azerbaijan, they are seen as hostages in Armenia. In COP29, Baku saw an opportunity to burnish its international bona fides as a peace actor, promoting the conference as a ‘peace COP’ and enjoining other nations to observe a global ‘COP truce’, akin to an Olympic truce, in all conflicts.
COP29 consequently coincides with a remarkable moment in Azerbaijan’s history as an independent state, as the government has defeated the secessionist movement in Mountainous Karabakh and has resolved what was long seen domestically as Azerbaijan’s greatest burden: the occupation of 14 per cent of its territory, with the internal displacement of some 600,000 people. Negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan on a framework peace agreement resumed in 2024, and Azerbaijani diplomats are keen to promote a positive assessment of progress in the relations between the two states.
Notwithstanding caveats about the manner in which Azerbaijan has reached this point, this assessment has some basis in fact. Front lines were quieter in 2024 than at any time since before the 2020 Second Karabakh War. Armenian and Azerbaijani border commissions have met with increasing frequency, resulting in widely disseminated photos of the first border posts erected between the two countries. Both sides affirm their interest in connectivity and a long-awaited regional opening, and Armenian and Azerbaijani officials concur that most of the articles of a framework agreement have been signed off.
The positive gloss to the current stage of talks also reflects the fact that from Azerbaijan’s perspective, the vital interests that were in play from the onset of the conflict in the 1980s until 2023 are no longer at stake.
Yet, as mediators like to say, ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’. The positive gloss to the current stage of talks also reflects the fact that from Azerbaijan’s perspective, the vital interests that were in play from the onset of the conflict in the 1980s until 2023 are no longer at stake. What is being discussed today is a range of secondary issues or new issues emanating from the Second Karabakh War and its aftermath.
Moreover, the most sensitive remaining issue, connectivity and transit, has by agreement been taken out of the text currently being negotiated. The risk is that this results in a hollowed-out agreement which merely postpones efforts to resolve outstanding problems between the two states. Azerbaijani diplomats have also flagged a wide range of issues that they frame as preconditions, or possible preconditions, for signature of a framework agreement on normalization. These issues include but are not limited to revision of Armenia’s constitution and Armenian cooperation in the formal dissolution of the institutions of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that were set up to mediate the conflict in the 1990s. The negotiating parameters for an agreement are therefore not yet set, and more preconditions can be expected. Messaging remains distinctly mixed: while Azerbaijani diplomats talk up the possibilities of peace, President Aliyev continues to emphasize military build-up as a national priority. Beyond these dynamics, however, as with the transition to green energy, the transition to peace requires forms of social and political agency that have long been restricted in Azerbaijan.
The limits of top-down transitions
While totally different in their content and scale, the challenges presented by post-oil and post-war horizons share some similarities. Both challenges require divestment from habitual sources of power and leverage – resource rents and a national cause, respectively – that have sustained Azerbaijan’s political model for decades. And in the same way that responding effectively to climate change requires new kinds of knowledge, power and agency that a petrostate has hitherto not needed, the kinds of agency, strategy and practice needed for peace to take hold are radically different from those needed by a state mobilizing for and waging war.
While estimates differ on the lifespan of Azerbaijan’s natural resource rents, all agree on their finite nature (see Chapter 3, Box 4). New pillars of a decarbonized Azerbaijani economy will inevitably depend on new forms of connectivity that in turn will depend on sustained peace and stability in the region. Peace and the green transition are thus inextricably linked, since a stable peace aligns with, enables and would presumably be indispensable to a post-oil Azerbaijan.
Yet for as long as resource rents continue to provide for Azerbaijani structural autonomy in the global economy, as well as military superiority over Armenia, there are few costs to the postponement of a sustainable peace with Yerevan, even though new regional connectivity schemes and a deepening of economic relations would depend on just such a peace. President Aliyev has argued that Azerbaijan’s hydrocarbon resources are ‘a gift from God’ that Azerbaijan intends to continue exploiting, in addition to investing in green energy.
Meanwhile, a wave of arrests and detentions in the months leading up to COP29 have indicated a concomitant reluctance on the part of the authorities to relinquish use of accusations around the ‘Armenian trace’ as a tried and tested method of silencing domestic dissent. Young scholars and social media posters have been detained – and in one case, that of Bahruz Samadov, charged with treason – on account of contacts with Armenians. Echoing the violent dispersal in June 2023 of villagers protesting about pollution from a gold mine at Söyüdlü in Azerbaijan’s Gadabay region, the state is not ready to accept autonomous civic agency capable of either raising environmental concerns or brokering new relations across the Armenian-Azerbaijani divide (see also Chapter 4).
International actors should therefore not expect decisiveness in Azerbaijan’s policies vis-à-vis either conflict resolution or climate change. External actors need instead to anticipate and prepare for the frictions associated with hybrid policies that simultaneously assert a change narrative – and the state’s pre-eminent role within that change – while continuing to extract economic rents from hydrocarbons and to leverage nationalist legitimacy from unresolved issues in the relationship with Armenia. Real change implies the government adopting a long-term horizon in which the structural needs of a post-oil Azerbaijani economy eventually intersect with new kinds of relations made possible by sustained peace.
Expectations of breakthrough signatures of a peace agreement consequently need to be tempered. Instead, the COP29 opportunity should be used by Azerbaijan and Armenia to agree a new basket of bilateral confidence-building measures addressing some of the many environmental issues, such as conservation, pollution and water resource management, that by nature are beyond unilateral solutions. Embedding the incremental nature of such confidence-building packages into the process can gradually widen the field of Armenian-Azerbaijani strategic interactions beyond their antagonistic militarized dimensions, and build a basis for eventual agreement on other substantive issues that remain contentious.