The peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan has entered a phase where its feasibility depends less on geopolitical alignment than on the internal coherence of Armenian statehood. What once seemed a matter of diplomatic choreography now turns on domestic institutions, elite fragmentation, and unresolved tensions of national identity. The external framework for settlement may be emerging, but the internal capacity to ratify and legitimise such a framework remains uncertain.
By Robert M. Cutler
Armenia’s internal politics have become the primary constraint on concluding a peace treaty with Azerbaijan. While the external parameters of a settlement have been taking shape, domestic alignment remains elusive. The next parliamentary elections, just announced to take place on 7 June 2026, impose a time horizon on the institutional path for the treaty’s ratification.
This path involves the convergence of formal legal requirements and political timing, specifically from executive initiative to constitutional amendment, to popular referendum, and ultimately to potential ratification. As opposition parties prepare for the June 2026 elections, the peace process is increasingly subsumed into broader questions of regime legitimacy and national identity.
The government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, whose authority has been diminished by setbacks in municipal contests and a waning popular mandate, now struggles to present the argument for peace as one of strategic necessity. The opposition has transposed public disaffection with his domestic stewardship into a broader repudiation of normalisation, casting the treaty not as policy but as capitulation.
Such a reframing is not merely opportunistic. It is structurally embedded: the treaty’s dependence on constitutional revision necessitates a referendum. What should have been a matter of constitutional housekeeping becomes a public reckoning with the moral and political ledger of the post-2018 order. The legal procedure thus becomes a direct challenge to executive legitimacy. The opposition need not articulate a coherent foreign policy; it need only voice ambient disquiet. Its denunciations gain traction through transnational reinforcement, chiefly via the diaspora.
Organisations like the Armenian National Committee of America do not merely lobby foreign capitals. They preserve an ideological infrastructure linking external diasporic activism to domestic Armenian dissent. The result is an informal but potent trans-territorial veto power, capable of obstructing practical settlement.
The legacy of the Karabakh-era elite inside Armenia still informs institutional structures and public identity. Though no longer controlling the commanding heights of state authority, this stratum retains symbolic and practical influence. For over two decades, Armenia’s legal and strategic architecture was constructed around the Karabakh imperative. That legacy is foundational: any treaty seen as reversing its influence risks being perceived as a revision of the state’s symbolic boundaries.
The treaty thus carries as much psychological as strategic weight. The referendum has ceased to be a formality; it is now the axis of political conflict. The opposition has exploited this bind and recast the vote as a plebiscite on sovereignty, thereby conflating treaty ratification with a regime change. There is a growing disconnect between the government’s urgency and the slower pace at which public attitudes change.
Pashinyan and his allies are trying to shift Armenia away from a Karabakh-centred view of national identity. Yet older narratives of threat, sacrifice, and historic obligation remain embedded, reinforced by schools, political parties, and diaspora organisations. These continue to shape the public's understandings of legitimacy for a substantial portion of the population.
Even younger political parties, especially those formed since 2020, are caught in a discursive field saturated with the language of historic grievance. Attempts to introduce a pragmatic lexicon—sovereignty without maximalism, peace without capitulation—are met with suspicion, or are absorbed into opposition rhetoric as further evidence of surrender.
Diasporic resistance reinforces this dynamic. Notably in the United States and France—but also in Russia—diaspora organisations have secured a normative stranglehold over what constitutes acceptable Armenian policy. The “Greater Armenia” imaginary remains politically salient abroad, even as it proves strategically untenable at home. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun, “Dashnaks”) plays a bridging role between domestic opposition and diasporic activism, ensuring that rejectionist positions persist institutionally even amidst domestic elite turnover.
Pashinyan’s attempt to pivot Armenia westward has not yielded strategic depth. Although the European Union has expanded its political dialogue with Armenia and increased funding through mechanisms such as the Eastern Partnership and the Economic and Investment Plan, these initiatives remain limited in scope and uneven in implementation.
Brussels has offered technical support and rhetorical solidarity, but has stopped short of providing security guarantees or hard-power commitments. Even the EU Mission in Armenia (EUMA), launched by the European External Action Service, while symbolically significant, does not alter the operational security environment and may even exacerbate tensions.
The United States has confined itself mainly to diplomacy and conflict monitoring. France, though more assertive rhetorically and materially, has not significantly changed the regional balance. Thus far, Western support has enhanced Pashinyan’s international standing. Still, it has not equipped Armenia with the strategic levers necessary to withstand domestic and external pressures from Russia and the Armenian diaspora.
This creates a legitimacy trap: to sustain the reform agenda, the government needs peace, but to secure peace, it must expend political capital that it no longer possesses. External actors, for their part, must reframe their engagement. Symbolic endorsements of democratic resilience are insufficient.
For the treaty to survive domestic contestation, it must be nested in a broader project of state consolidation. This requires fine-tuned incentives—economic, technical, and diplomatic—that are tied not to personalities but to institutions. Support for constitutional reform should be decoupled from Pashinyan’s political fortunes and framed as a generational transition beyond Karabakh-era paradigms.
Every delay further entangles the treaty in partisan contestation, while premature action risks outright defeat. The government faces a dilemma: how to desynchronise constitutional reform from electoral dynamics without sacrificing either. What is at stake is not simply the peace process but the autonomy of Armenian statehood. The treaty is not just an instrument of foreign policy; it is a test of Armenia’s ability to take sovereign decisions under democratic conditions.
If that test is failed—through rejection, deferral, or incoherence—the consequences will extend beyond bilateral relations. Armenia would be perceived, both internally and externally, as being unable to convert loss into strategy or necessity into governance. What is required is not unanimity, but institutional clarity —a state that can absorb losses, reorient its approach, and build legitimacy through informed decision-making.
None of this implies that peace is structurally impossible. Instead, it underscores that any viable settlement must attend not only to bilateral diplomacy but to the structure of Armenian political legitimacy. The treaty cannot succeed as a state project unless it becomes a societal one. Yet the institutional vehicles for such translation—parliamentary dialogue, elite consensus, public trust—are not presently aligned favourably.
Judging by Pashinyan’s past behaviour—including his irredentist speeches made before the 2020 war—his political survival likely outweighs the peace treaty in his calculus. He likely fears, and not without reason, that if his coalition loses the 2026 elections, then he could face legal and political retribution, including loss of parliamentary immunity and possible imprisonment. The stakes, therefore, are existential not only for the country but for its current leadership.
The durability of any future settlement will depend not only on bilateral compromise but on Armenia’s ability to reconstitute political legitimacy on foundations that are no longer defined by territorial maximalism. Without that shift, even the best-designed treaty will remain suspended between formal agreement and societal rejection. What is at issue is not merely the framework of the peace, but the reconstruction of a state capable of making decisions in the aftermath of a strategic reversal.
