The Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict: Closure or Continuation? MECACS Presents Dr Laurence Broers South Caucasus Programme Director - Conciliation Resources

Eurasia's original ‘frozen conflict', the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict has eluded resolution for more than 30 years. Military victory for the Armenian side in the mid-1990s left only a drifting and increasingly unstable stalemate. In 2020 the tables turned as Azerbaijan won a crushing military victory in a second, six-week war and declared the conflict over. Yet two years later, despite some faltering steps towards institutionalising new negotiation tracks, violence continues. This talk will explore the situation nearly two years on from the 9 November 2020 ceasefire. Drawing on insights from the speaker's work as a practitioner engaged in peacebuilding programming, the talk will discuss military, political, diplomatic and geopolitical developments since 2020 and discuss the prospects for the resolution or prolongation of the conflict.

Laurence Broers has more than 20 years' experience as a scholar of conflicts in the South Caucasus and practitioner of efforts directed at their peaceful resolution. He currently works as the South Caucasus Programme Director at peacebuilding NGO Conciliation Resources. He is the author of Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Armenia's Velvet Revolution: Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World (I.B. Tauris, 2020, with Anna Ohanyan) and the Routledge Handbook of the Caucasus (Routledge, 2020, wikth Galina Yemelianova). Laurence is also the founding editor and co-editor-in-chief of the first dedicated scholarly journal dedicated to the Caucasus, Caucasus Survey, and serves as associate fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House.