On September 19, Azerbaijan’s army launched a full-scale invasion of the largely Armenian-populated region of Karabakh. The breakaway state, also known as the Republic of Artsakh, surrended within twenty-four hours, agreeing to transfer its territory to Azerbaijan’s control and dissolve at the end of this year. Its fall came at the cost of hundreds of lives and the massive displacement of the Armenian population from Karabakh.

If Artsakh is now rapidly reaching its end, this owes to a dramatically changed domestic and regional balance of hegemony, which has shifted in Azerbaijan’s favor since the forty-four-day war in the autumn of 2020. It also owes to a process in which Azerbaijan has built partnerships with the dominant powers, from Turkey and Russia to the West, amid wider geopolitical turmoil.

It was clear that Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 war — the largest fighting since the 1994 ceasefire agreement — did not bring an end to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This was not only because Azerbaijan was unable to win total control of this territory, but also because a war that aims to create and maintain social order can have no end. It must involve the continuous, uninterrupted exercise of power and violence. In other words, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it: “one cannot win such a war, or, rather, it has to be won again every day.”