Armenia and Azerbaijan: Dialogue or Performance?

This story by Arzu Geybullayeva originally appeared on Global Voices on December 10, 2025.

In October 2025, a meeting in Yerevan brought together Armenian and Azerbaijani civil society representatives — or at least those presented as such — in what was described as an effort to advance the peace agenda between the two countries. The following month, a group of Armenian civil society representatives visited Baku.

Had this meeting taken place outside the decades-long propaganda narrative that berated cross-border initiatives and labeled their participants as traitors, sellouts, or Armenian agents, it would be natural to welcome it as progress. Yet, that has not been the case.

Recent traffic between Yerevan and Baku

Since the August 2025 meeting in Washington, the pace of both official and semi-official exchanges has increased. In September, a delegation led by Andranik Simonyan, head of Armenia’s National Security Service, attended a security forum in Baku. This was followed by Murad Muradov, deputy director of the Topchubashov Center, visiting Yerevan for the NATO summit. In November, another Azerbaijani delegation participated in the Orbeli Forum in Yerevan.

What stands out most about these encounters is the openness — and even praise — they received in Azerbaijan. Public social media posts by the participants stand in stark contrast to earlier years, when such interactions were often kept secret to avoid public backlash. State and pro-government media have hailed these meetings as representative of unprecedented progress.

For example, Kamala Mammadova, a journalist and editor of the online outlet 1news.az, wrote on social media after the October meeting in which she took part, “Many wonder: such meetings have been held before, but they did not yield tangible results. The difference in the current format is that the meeting was held for the first time in a completely bilateral format, without intermediaries or external influence. And it was felt. There was a feeling of genuine interest of both parties in the dialogue, a willingness to listen and be heard.”

See Also: Mamdani’s Win and the Price of Urban Life: Why City Voters Are Seeking Change

The failure of previous meetings, however, stemmed from the authorities’ refusal to support genuine peace initiatives — a factor that Mammadova overlooked. There were also other obstacles: the marginalization of peace promoters, the dominance of ethno-nationalist narratives, the use of propaganda, the absence of educational reform, and the lack of conflict-sensitive reporting by state and non-state media.

As a result, according to scholars Nazrin Gadimova and Anush Petrosyan, “the conversations held by those who advocated peace in these circumstances remained within a closed circle, unable to address the general public and gradually becoming sidelined by nationalist rhetoric.”

The scholars have also argued that in the 1990s, the early years of independence, there was a brief opening: intellectual exchanges, grassroots diplomacy, and cross-border meetings among cultural figures offered glimpses of dialogue. Over time, authoritarian restrictions in Azerbaijan and the slow development of civil society in Armenia stifled these initiatives, pushing peacebuilding efforts to the margins.

Contrary to Mammadova’s observations, genuine interest was always there, except that it failed to make its way into state policies beyond those meeting rooms and dialogue engagements. As a result, peace discourse remained distant from ordinary citizens, confined to a narrow circle of NGO workers and activists, rather than fostering a broader social conversation about reconciliation.

The missing agenda

After the second Karabakh war, talk of rebuilding ties continued to ring hollow. For starters, there was little to rebuild. The enmity between Armenians and Azerbaijanis remains deep-seated to this day, and the generation that remembers living side by side is aging and largely absent from decision-making processes and negotiations.

In his 2019 analysis, Azerbaijani expert Zaur Shiriyev wrote, “Preparation of the public for peace implies preparation for long negotiations and the potential for compromise. This includes both public debate and more transparency about what is happening at the negotiating table. More engagement of Azerbaijani and Armenian civil society groups alongside official negotiations could also be valuable to underscore the simple proposition that peace is possible with the other side.”

Speaking at the Orbeli Forum in November, Shiriyev reiterated the need for “a change in mindset,” urging both sides to drop “maximalist positions.”

Despite the rhetoric, however, there is still no public debate, no transparency, and little trace of an independent civil society capable of shaping or even monitoring the peace process. As conflict resolution experts Philip Gamaghelyan and Sevin Huseynova noted in the context of the first Karabakh war and post-war dialogue, “With time, realist voices and others calling for pragmatism and compromise were sidelined in favor of revanchist sentiments rooted in ethnonationalist discourse.”

That discourse left little room for peace, and as far as the current dialogue goes, it remains a thorn.

The case of Bahruz Samadov

A case in point is Bahruz Samadov, a young political scholar and researcher pursuing a PhD at Charles University in Prague. Samadov was against the second Karabakh war and the country’s 2023 military intervention. He had written about reconciliation with Armenia and was known for his critical stance toward the government. He was arrested over the summer in 2024 on treason charges while visiting his grandmother in Azerbaijan.

Authorities accused Samadov of “communicating with Armenians” and “sharing state secrets,” though the prosecution provided no evidence beyond his correspondence with Armenian academics. In June 2025, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Samadov is not the first Azerbaijani to face treason charges in the last 30 years. Journalists Rauf Mirkadirov, Leyla and Arif Yunus faced similar accusations of espionage and treason. Over the years, civil society representatives engaged in cross-border initiatives have been targeted in other government-sponsored forms of persecution on a range of charges.

See Also: Beyond Recognition: The Challenges of Creating a New Palestinian State Are So Formidable, Is It Even Possible?

The arrest and the sentence handed to Samadov proved the final nail in the coffin of any non-government-sponsored engagements with Armenia, which raises the question: If the government continues to jail its peace advocates, who represents civil society in these new dialogues, and who ensures accountability in the so-called post-Washington peace process?

What needs to happen

Azerbaijan’s authoritarian political environment has long obstructed genuine civil society initiatives, particularly those linked to reconciliation. Five years after the second Karabakh war, the Lachin blockade, the exodus of ethnic Armenians who lived in Karabakh, and the 24-hour war in 2023, granting Azerbaijan complete control over the territories that Armenia formerly held could have created an opportunity for inclusive peacebuilding, though this would have required the participation of independent voices, not just government-aligned figures.

Veteran journalist Rauf Mirkadirov, who spent time in jail on treason charges and then left the country, argues that while government-sponsored meetings may have value, parallel independent discussions must also take place — but how does this kind of parallel dialogue emerge in a context where independent groups are banned, in exile, or behind bars? Even the Azerbaijani diaspora remains fragmented, divided along political and ideological lines, with some political émigrés defecting back to Azerbaijan after years in exile, and few willing to invest time in reconciliation work.

After the October meeting, Farhad Mammadov, a member of the Azerbaijani delegation, wrote an op-ed for the state news agency APA, emphasising the “great responsibility in building trust between the parties.” While he acknowledged the generational trauma of conflict and described peacebuilding as “a long and difficult process,” he omitted any mention of earlier grassroots initiatives that had tried to do precisely that.

Token dialogue or real change?

Can a hand-picked group of government-aligned participants, most with no experience in conflict resolution, be genuinely involved in a civil society dialogue? And how much can such tightly managed encounters shift perceptions in a country where independent voices remain criminalized?

In the end, as long as the same government that calls for dialogue also decides who gets to speak, gestures of openness should be viewed with cautious skepticism.

[VP]

Suggested Reading: