Why the OSCE Keeps Failing to Make Peace in Nagorno-Karabakh

Azad Garibov

Security, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh

The Minsk Group's co-chairs could put Azerbaijan and Armenia on the road to resolution.

The unprecedented escalation of hostilities on the frontline between the armed forces of Azerbaijan and Armenia on April 2–5, 2016, brought the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict back onto the international community’s agenda. Four days’ fighting once more reminded the world about the urgency of resolving this very complex, yet at the same time very dangerous conflict in the center of Eurasia.

The conflict started at the end of the 1980s, when violent separatism aided by Armenia erupted in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of Azerbaijan (NKAO), seizing the opportunity created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The conflict gradually evolved into a full-scale interstate war between Armenia and Azerbaijan as they gained independence in 1991, resulting in about thirty thousand deaths and creating over a million Azerbaijani IDPs and refugees. The active phase of the bloodiest of the post-Soviet conflicts ended with a ceasefire agreement of 1994. The agreement left Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions, roughly 20 percent of the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan, under Armenian occupation.

The OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)’s Minsk Group was created in 1992, and the co-chairmanship institution (with Russia, France, and the United States co-chairing) was introduced in 1994 in order to carry out mediation between Armenia and Azerbaijan to find peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. However, despite more than two decades of negotiations, OSCE mediation has failed to deliver peace to the region. Similar to other conflicts in the post-Soviet space, such as in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, where the OSCE has also deployed peacemaking and peacekeeping missions, the Armenian-Azeri peace process appears to be a failure. Of course the OSCE is making certain efforts towards reaching a peaceful settlement; however, there are clear shortcomings in these mediation efforts, which prevent galvanizing this complex peace process.