In just a few days, it will be one year since Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Washington Joint Declaration, a document intended to lay the foundation for a lasting peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The declaration was widely regarded as a historic diplomatic breakthrough, raising hopes that decades of conflict in the South Caucasus could finally give way to a new era of regional stability and cooperation.

However, diplomatic signatures alone do not guarantee lasting peace. History has repeatedly demonstrated that peace agreements succeed only when accompanied by political will. Nearly one year after the declaration, optimism has been tempered by a series of unresolved political, legal, and geopolitical challenges that continue to complicate the normalization process between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The obstacle is not, at this stage, the battlefield. It is a tangle of constitutional disputes, domestic political polarization in Armenia, diaspora activism, and the residue of geopolitical ambitions that resist the logic of the post-war settlement.

Just recently, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that the draft of the country’s new constitution will be made public by the end of the year. Speaking about the timeline for releasing the text of the proposed fundamental law, Pashinyan said that a specific date could not yet be provided but confirmed that the draft would be published before the year’s end. Despite these commitments, no draft has been released yet, and there has been little visible progress in completing this politically sensitive process.

Besides, constitutional change in Armenia is not a simple executive act. It requires broad parliamentary support, public backing, and navigation through a polity that remains deeply divided.

From Azerbaijan's perspective, as........

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