Armenia and Azerbaijan: theorizing rivalry in the Eurasian borderlands

Monumental Armenian sculpture of two heads on a hillside

Armenia and Azerbaijan: theorizing rivalry in the Eurasian borderlands

Monday, 2 December 2019 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm
Venue: 
Nissan Lecture Theatre
Speaker(s): 
Dr Laurence Broers (SOAS, Conciliation Resources)
Convenor: 
Professor Roy Allison (St Antony's) & Dr Alexander Morrison (New College)
Series: 
Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Monday Seminar

Laurence Broers is the Caucasus Programme Director at London-based peacebuilding organization Conciliation Resources. He is also a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and associate fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. He co-founded and co-edits Caucasus Survey, the first dedicated scholarly journal for the Caucasus region, published since January 2015 by Taylor & Francis. He is the author of Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of the Caucasus (Routledge 2020) and Armenia’s Velvet Revolution: Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World (I.B. Tauris, 2020).

The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is the longest-running dispute in Eurasia. In a new book, Laurence Broers looks beyond tabloid tropes of “frozen conflict” or “Russian land-grab”, to unpack both unresolved territorial issues left over from the 1990s and the strategic rivalry that has built up around them since then. Drawing on perspectives from critical geopolitics, regime studies and international relations, in addition to many years' experience as a peacebuilding practitioner, Broers will discuss how more than two decades of dynamic territorial politics, shifting power relations and international diffusion have contributed to the resilience of this stubbornly unresolved dispute – one of the most intractable of our times.