I'm willing to make a prediction and bet money on it: there will be no settlement in N-K any time soon. Armenia will never, ever give it up, and Azerbaijan is not going to abandon its claim. Armenia (and the N-K authorities) will never allow more than a token number of Azeris to return, and Azerbaijan will never accept a settlement that leaves most refugees in their camps.

Both sides have had incentives to pretend to negotiate; that's likely to continue. So we'll probably see more hopeful speeches like this one.

A war in the next few years is certainly possible; Azerbaijan has been building up its military for almost a decade now. It has a bigger population than Armenia, and much deeper pockets. The wild card is Russia, which is clearly the protector of Armenia, but which has been very deliberately vague about the nature and extent of that protection. So the main determinant of war and peace is going to be what the Azeri leadership thinks the Russian leadership is likely to do. That's awfully hard to second-guess. But while a war may not happen, it will be utterly unsurprising if it does.


Doug M.

We call it independentism now?

I don't know. I can certainly envisage other reasons than nationalism for groups of people to seek independence, but since all the movements mentioned in the article are nationalist movements, "nationalisms" would seem to be le mot juste in this case.