{"id":1078,"date":"2011-10-04T13:56:06","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T09:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/?p=1078"},"modified":"2011-11-04T22:59:47","modified_gmt":"2011-11-04T18:59:47","slug":"peace-for-our-time-or-peace-on-our-terms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/%d0%bd%d0%be%d0%b2%d0%be%d1%81%d1%82%d0%b8-en\/peace-for-our-time-or-peace-on-our-terms\/","title":{"rendered":"Peace for Our Time, or Peace on Our Terms?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"By Laurence BROERS
\n<\/strong>Conciliation Resources,Caucasus Programme<\/a>\u00a0Projects Manager
\nLondon<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018Missed opportunities\u2019, and their opposite, \u2018windows of opportunity\u2019 are a mediator\u2019s mantra. In different contexts, especially when peace talks have failed or violence has resumed, one hears about \u2018missed opportunities\u2019. The South Caucasus has seen many missed opportunities, whether these date from the \u2018last chance opportunities\u2019 in the early 1990s to prevent the South Caucasus wars, to \u2018near miss opportunities\u2019 when agreement was allegedly close, to a more general sense that opportunities to engage in cross-conflict initiatives were never seriously taken up. At the same time we are often told that because of electoral cycles or some big player\u2019s input, we have a \u2018window of opportunity\u2019.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But why are these opportunities \u2018missed\u2019? What is it about these opportunities making them invisible at the moment when they were still \u2018available\u2019 opportunities? I will try very briefly to reflect on these questions with reference to the Karabakh conflict.<\/p>\n

To understand why an opportunity has been missed, one needs to understand the decision-making process of the person who has, supposedly, \u201cmissed\u201d it. At one level, this would lead us into the minds and the decision-making processes of leading politicians. Key politicians engaged in the Karabakh peace process over the last 17 years have not, on the whole, been legitimated by broad democratic mandates. Even if they would most probably have won elections democratically, to varying extents they have not risked this option. They therefore have limited room for maneuvre on the most emotive and probably only consensus issue in Armenian and Azerbaijani societies: Karabakh.<\/p>\n

The resulting vulnerability does not sit well with the disruptive potential of the Karabakh conflict. In the 1990s Karabakh repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to decide elite turnover in Armenia and Azerbaijan. It is therefore unsurprising that the prism through which elites regard the conflict and peace process is risk. This reflects the fact that while the status quo does carry significant long-term risk, in the short to medium-term the status quo is predictable and more or less manageable. \u2018Windows of opportunity\u2019 are dangerous because they threaten this comfort zone of manageable risk. For Armenian and Azerbaijani leaderships the key underlying dilemma is that converting \u201cwindows of opportunity\u201d by engaging in controversial, unpredictable and risky moves on Karabakh only becomes attractive when the risk of not<\/em> doing so is greater.<\/p>\n

Viewed through the paradigm of risk, then, \u2018missed opportunities\u2019 are in fact \u201copportunities not risked\u201d. This calculus will only change when there have been game-changing developments elsewhere in the conflict context, and because of these developments (for example, decisive military superiority or the emergence of broad-based peace movements making compromise possible), the risk of inaction<\/em> becomes greater than the risk of action<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What about public opinion? Why is there apparently no mass consciousness of opportunities needing to be taken, or sense of urgency around resolution of the conflict? There are many layers to a full answer to this question, which should include difficulties in ascertaining what public opinion really is, as well as assumptions about the likely and necessary degree of public participation in a peace process. I will focus on just one layer, however, which is the popular myth in Armenian and Azerbaijani societies that \u2018time is on our side\u2019.<\/p>\n

On one side, Armenians look to what they see as a parade of new sovereignties across the world, from Kosovo, to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, to South Sudan. The world in their view is moving on from a rigid preference for territorial integrity to acknowledgement that new states can, and should be allowed, to emerge under specific circumstances. There is also a simple empirical reality: the longer a certain entity and identity exists, the more real and natural it seems. On the other side, Azerbaijanis also have reasons to believe that time is on their side, although the psychology is different. Rather than seeing stasis as being in their interests, Azeris look to their country\u2019s currently very high levels of growth and assume that it is just a matter of time before Azerbaijan can buy the necessary military hardware to compensate for strategic disadvantages on the ground. The assumption is that as Armenia suffers economically from regional isolation it will, over time, be increasingly less able to compete with Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n

Like their presidents the status quo hurts public opinion, especially in Azerbaijan, but not enough to motivate serious investment in the psychology of \u201cpeace for our time\u201d in the present, over the psychology of \u201cpeace on our terms\u201d in the future.\u00a0 But the latter approach also carries risks. Unpopular though this is as an observation for Armenian readers, there is significant risk in the growing sense of ownership over the territories surrounding the former. The more time goes by, the more the psychological bond with the concept of \u201c42,000 square kilometers\u201d grows, yet sovereignty over them has never been part of Armenian claims since the inception of the Karabakh conflict. Azerbaijani confidence that wealth converted into military capacity will tip the balance is also risky. There is no simple equation between military investment and battlefield outcomes, as Georgia\u2019s experience shows. Armed conflict is also inevitably a high-risk strategy easily capable of sweeping away governments that fail to achieve success on the battlefield. Azerbaijan\u2019s own experience in the early 1990s provides ample examples of this trend. For as long as central government, and the resources it controls, is the glittering prize of Azerbaijani politics, it is difficult to imagine why power-holders would risk this prize for an uncertain outcome in Karabakh.<\/p>\n

What emerges, then, is a situation where risk-averse elites prefer to manage a less volatile status quo, and societies are lulled into believing that the risks implied in taking opportunities are not worth it, or at least, not worth taking now. Is there an alternative to the cyclical reiteration of \u201cwindows of opportunity\u201d and \u201cmissed opportunities\u201d? One possible alternative is to replace the highs and lows implicit in the \u201cwindows of opportunities\u201d approach with a gradualist, incremental approach towards restoring confidence that assumes a constant rather than cyclical time-frame. The aim of this approach is to alter the parameters for understanding where and when an opportunity exists. What needs to change is the perception that where there is an opportunity for the peace process, there is a risk for elites. This equation needs to change so that opportunities for the process peace are also seen as opportunities for elites \u2013 the elusive \u2018win-win\u2019 scenario. But for this to happen, elites need to bring their societies along with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Laurence BROERS Conciliation Resources,Caucasus Programme\u00a0Projects Manager London \u2018Missed opportunities\u2019, and their opposite, \u2018windows of opportunity\u2019 are a mediator\u2019s mantra. In different contexts, especially when peace talks have failed or violence has resumed, one hears about \u2018missed opportunities\u2019. The South Caucasus has seen many missed opportunities, whether these date from the \u2018last chance opportunities\u2019 in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[360,3],"tags":[121,27],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1078"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1083,"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions\/1083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theanalyticon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}