By Bakhtiyar Aslanov (the 30/10/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Since the 1994 cease-fire agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia, negotiations between the parties have been overseen by the OSCE Minsk Group without any particular success towards peaceful solution. After the deadlock in peace negotiations over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2011, Azerbaijan and Armenia both accelerated their stockpiling of arms and intensified their public rhetoric of preparing for a new war.

131016Analyst.pdf

By Michael Hikari Cecire (the 16/10/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Though one of the quieter subplots in Black Sea geopolitics, the emergence of an increasingly cohesive trilateral grouping between Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan is reconfiguring the regional balance of power. This entente was officiated in the 2012 tripartite Trabzon Declaration, but is rooted in growing economic and strategic interdependencies. While the grouping remains vulnerable to both pressure from Moscow and internal challenges, this trilateral entente has the potential to be the prevailing player in the South Caucasus if it maintains its upwards trajectory, and its interests largely overlap with those of the West.

By Bakhtiyar Aslanov (the 16/10/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)

On October 8, a scandal erupted over the new IOS and Android application that Azerbaijan’s Central Election Commission (CEC) planned to launch for voters to follow the presidential election vote count on their mobile phones on Election Day, October 9.

Stephen Blank (the 02/10/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Five years after its war with Georgia, Russia is now moving to institutionalize its gains into enduring territorial-political structures. During September 2013, Moscow effectively blackmailed Armenia into joining the Eurasian Union and has now announced that it is going to sign a treaty with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, recognizing the “international borders” between them and Russia. As a result, Russian soldiers are now erecting fences effectively demarcating these territories from Georgia, if not formally annexing them to Russia. Both of these moves undermine the sovereignty, and in Georgia’s case the integrity, of these two South Caucasian states and demonstrate that Russia’s neo-imperial effort to create a closed bloc in the CIS is intensifying and accelerating.