Valdai Club

Coercive bargaining is stifling plans for a newly connected South Caucasus after last year's second Karabakh war. Without a different approach, regional fracture will continue, writes Laurence Broers, South Caucasus Programme Director of Conciliation Resources.

The inability to avoid a minor incident’s slide into a major one is a worrying new trend indicating a growing ‘totalization’ of the conflict beyond contested sovereignty in Nagorny Karabakh itself. July’s clashes thus serve us warning that any issue or setting can become a source of new Armenian-Azerbaijani violence – not necessarily due to deliberate escalation, but due to the domestic costs of de-escalation, writes Laurence Broers, Caucasus Programme Director at London-based peacebuilding organization Conciliation Resources.