With U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a tour of the South Caucasus last week, hopes that Washington’s top diplomat could use the visit as an opportunity to push for regional peacemaking and democracy support were quickly overcome by events on the ground, underscoring the region’s volatility. Though Clinton’s meetings in Georgia were mostly low key, the brittle cease-fire between arch-nemeses Azerbaijan and Armenia was sorely tested by a series of clashes, fueling fears that another Caucasus war was in the offing. Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been rocky since the two former Soviet republics fought a war […]

Armenia and Azerbaijan, former Soviet republics in the South Caucasus, have been at war for two decades over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist ethnic-Armenian province internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but occupied since 1994 by Armenia. Over the past week, renewed fighting has left eight soldiers dead. The outbreak of violence along the border, which comes as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits the region, underscores the difficulty in resolving this not quite frozen conflict. Amanda Paul, a policy analyst and expert on the South Caucasus at the European Policy Center, talked to Trend Lines about […]