Conceptual basics for restoration of post-conflict territories

The Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) has recently hosted a presentation of a book called “Conceptual basics for restoration of post-conflict territories of Azerbaijan” by Farkhad Mamedov and Ildar Ismailov. One of the authors, Mr Ismailov, told a VK correspondent that this research had been previously presented in the US and in London, as well as in the European Parliament in Brussels. The Institute for Strategic Studies of the Caucasus, headed by Mr Ismailov, studies the conflicts, integration processes and economics of the region and during the book’s presentation the authors offered a new theoretical model of a geopolitical structure of the Caucasus, worked out by the Institute’s specialists. According to this new, more complex, system, the region is divided into the Central Caucasus (the independent states of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia), the North Caucasus (a part of the Russian Federation) and the South Caucasus, which includes the South-Western Caucasus (Turkey’s territories and Iran’s province of Azerbaijan) and the South-Eastern Caucasus (Iran’s other Caucasian provinces). According to the expert, the Caucasus has great potential for participating in all international processes and the only thing hampering this potential is territorial disputes within the region.

- The presentation of your book had a wide response from the Russian expert community. Why is that?

- Despite regional and international politicians’ efforts, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remains unresolved for 20 years, and that’s a very long time. We should reevaluate our approaches. If politicians and diplomats can’t settle the conflict, economists and sociologists should try.

- You insisted that the work you presented is purely economic. But how exactly do your economic proposals correlate to political reality?

- Its hard to separate politics and the economy completely. But our work is purely economic. We proceeded from the following assumption: say politicians finally managed to come to an agreement and peace is finally restored. And we propose a package of restoration measures: what the Azerbaijani government should do first, what – second, etc. When peace comes we shouldn’t be taken by surprise. Our government and the World Bank have already conducted economic-technical models of reconstruction in 1998 and 2005, but our book has more of a socio-economic angle.

- Your book is based on wide-scale evidence. But Azerbaijan doesn’t have access to the territories in question. So how did you collect this data?

- We limited our zone of research to 7 regions. We didn’t address Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Reconstruction work in some of these regions has already started, but we are still not fully aware of the situation there. But we hope that the Armenians don’t have any claims to these particular territories and we plan to translate our book into Armenian so that the Armenian people form a positive attitude towards the restoration process.

- Could the conclusions of your work be applied to Nagorno-Karabakh itself?

- The occupied region is basically a single economic zone, so the conceptual results of our work can be applied to Nagorno-Karabakh as much as to the other 7 regions. But it would require some new calculations.

- And the North Caucasus? Could your ideas be applied there?

- The general approach should be different: as far as the North Caucasus is concerned, only one country is involved, unlike our situation where there are two states.

- Are you planning on presenting your book to Armenian experts?

- Representatives from Armenia were present when we discussed our work in Washington, and they seemed ready to discuss it.

- Could one buy your book in Russia?

- We didn’t expect such a great interest to our work from the part of the Russian expert community. Now we want to increase the number of published copies and sell or distribute them in Russia.

- What is your general impression of the discussion in RSUH?

- We are very grateful to the University’s academic council that invited not only prominent experts and diplomats, but also students – it is important that young people participate, as our generation generally failed to settle this conflict.

By VK