Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan seen during an official visit to Russia in April 2022. Pashinyan has spearheaded the effort to establish long-term peace with Azerbaijan, at the cost of Armenia’s claim to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. (Government of Russia)

Armenia’s Peace Will Be Decided by One Constitutional Clause

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To prevent a future flare-up of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the people of Armenia must end it once and for all—renouncing the disputed territory through a constitutional change.

In a setback for Russia and a positive sign for America and the West, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan won a major victory in his country’s parliamentary elections on June 7. Civil Contract, Pashinyan’s political party, defied an all-out Russian influence effort and propaganda blitz, winning 64 out of the parliament’s 105 seats—an outright majority, allowing it to govern Armenia alone. But the act that will actually determine whether Armenia’s peace with Azerbaijan holds is not the election just behind him, but the constitutional change still ahead. Until Armenia removes the language in its 1995 post-Soviet constitution that lays implicit claim to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, the deal initiated at the White House last August will remain a mere document, not a settlement. History offers a sharp warning about the difference. 

The clause in question sits in the preamble of Armenia’s constitution, which invokes the 1990 Declaration of Independence and, through it, the 1989 act of “reunification” with Nagorno-Karabakh. That language amounts to a standing claim on territory that every UN member state, now including Armenia itself, recognizes as Azerbaijani, and over which Baku reestablished full control in 2023.

Azerbaijan’s insistence that the provision be struck from the Armenian constitution is often framed in Yerevan as a humiliating demand imposed by the victor. It is better understood instead as the load-bearing element of the peace itself. So long as a state’s foundational text claims a neighbor’s internationally recognized land, the conflict cannot be considered........

© The National Interest