IRMO Brief 11/2020, "The End of the Second Karabakh War: Has a Lasting Peace Come to the South Caucasus?"

Introduction

In a year in which the whole world seemed to have frozen its conflicts, uniting its efforts to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, a war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions in Azerbaijan. This was a full-scale armed conflict involving two nations in the South Caucasus, but unlike the first Karabakh war that lasted for more than six years, this war lasted only six weeks. Mainly due to modern warfare and deployment of new sophisticated technology, namely unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by Azerbaijan, a long war of attrition was avoided. Thus, the second war caused a significantly lower destruction of properties and cultural sites in this region of rich history on the crossroads between Asia and Europe, the Caspian and the Black Sea.

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