Western Azerbaijan: The Next Stage After Artsakh

In 2023, the Armenians of Artsakh were forced from their homes under blockade, bombardment, and a carefully constructed language of “restoring territorial integrity.” That operation is now being treated not as an isolated conflict, but as a precedent. Under the banner of “Western Azerbaijan,” Baku has elevated a previously marginal slogan into a formal doctrine that recasts the Republic of Armenia itself as Azerbaijani land—temporarily occupied, awaiting “return,” and open to future pressure.

Western Azerbaijan: The Next Stage After Artsakh is a legal and historical analysis of how that doctrine works. Ara Khachig Manoogian approaches “Western Azerbaijan” not as a rhetorical irritant, but as an integrated project of territorial expansion, narrative construction, and legal inversion. Drawing on declassified material, Soviet and post-Soviet archival sources, international legal instruments, and decades of first-hand experience in Artsakh, he traces the path by which a slogan becomes policy, policy becomes pressure, and pressure becomes altered reality on the ground.

The book begins by situating “Western Azerbaijan” in the longer history of Armenian presence in the region and the imperial structures that once governed it. It examines how Tsarist and Soviet border engineering, census practices, and administrative language laid the groundwork for later claims, and how the post-Soviet struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh created a laboratory in which new doctrines could be tested. From there, Manoogian follows the story through the 1990s and 2000s—through MEGA Oil and the early post-Soviet arms and logistics networks, through the gradual militarization of Azerbaijan’s position, and through the ways energy politics and external strategic interests helped insulate Baku from meaningful accountability.

At the core of the book is a detailed reading of how narrative is weaponized. Manoogian dissects schoolbooks, museum displays, public speeches, and official reports that systematically recast Armenian presence as temporary, fabricated, or criminal. He analyzes the 2016 Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs report on “illegal economic and other activities” in the “occupied territories” as a key example of how legal language, maps, and economic data were combined to portray Armenian life in Artsakh as a web of offenses to be undone. He shows how the language of “settlers,” “plunder,” and “demographic engineering” was used to prepare a wider public to accept blockade, war, and forced displacement as acts of “correction.”

From there, Western Azerbaijan turns to the 2020 war, the blockade of the Lachin Corridor, and the 2023 depopulation of Artsakh as a single sequence rather than three separate events. The book demonstrates how dehumanizing rhetoric, selective use of international resolutions, and the cultivated ambiguity of “peace initiatives” enabled the step-by-step destruction of an Armenian polity under the eyes of institutions that had long claimed to protect vulnerable populations. It documents how international courts issued binding measures that went unenforced, how human rights bodies issued warnings that were effectively ignored, and how the absence of consequence became its own kind of signal.

Crucially, the study argues that the doctrine of “Western Azerbaijan” now extends this method beyond Artsakh. Manoogian shows how the same narrative architecture—historic inversion, weaponized “right of return,” erasure and relabeling of cultural heritage, and the rebranding of pressure as “connectivity” or “normalization”—is being applied to Armenia itself. He examines corridor projects, transit frameworks, and “peace routes” that slice through Armenian territory while advancing strategic goals long articulated by Azerbaijan and Turkey. He situates recent diplomatic developments in a broader pattern: what is first imposed through blockade and war can later be consolidated through agreements presented as pragmatic steps toward peace.

Alongside this structural analysis, the book is also a personal record. Manoogian writes as someone who lived and worked in Artsakh for years, who documented corruption and abuse when it was inconvenient for both Armenian and Azerbaijani authorities, and whose investigations became part of the informational battlefield around the conflict. His vantage point allows him to connect high-level legal and geopolitical developments with lived experience in towns, villages, and institutions that no longer exist in their previous form.

The result is neither a simple chronicle nor a detached legal brief. Western Azerbaijan is a warning, a case study, and an evidentiary record. It offers:

– A rigorous account of how “Western Azerbaijan” emerged from Soviet-era engineering and post-Soviet narrative construction.

– A detailed examination of the MEGA Oil story, arms pipelines, and external complicity in shifting the regional balance of power.

– An analysis of how international law was selectively invoked, inverted, or ignored to legitimize pressure on Armenians in Artsakh and beyond.

– A mapping of the mechanisms of cultural erasure and relabeling now underway in occupied territories.

– A framework for understanding how the precedent of Artsakh shapes the risks facing Armenian sovereignty today.

For policymakers, lawyers, scholars, journalists, and members of the Armenian and broader diasporas, this book provides a meticulously documented structure for thinking about the next phase of the conflict. It insists that what has been done cannot be dismissed as a closed chapter—and that the doctrine of “Western Azerbaijan,” if unchallenged, points directly toward a new stage of danger for Armenia itself.