Armenia, the Regional Powers, and the West

Description

This work represents the first systematic study of Armenia’s foreign policy during the post-independence period, between 1991 and 2005. It explores four sets of relationships with Armenia’s major historical ‘partners’: Russia, Iran, Turkey and the West (Europe and the United States). Each relationship reveals a complex reality of a continuous negotiation between ideas of history, collective memory, nationalism and geopolitics. As a result, an important conclusion of this work is that an analysis of a small state’s foreign policy is best captured by looking at regional dynamics rather than more structural approaches to international politics. For Armenia, this book argues that although its foreign policy has been severely constrained, it was nonetheless adept at carving a space for action that privileged the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh over other geopolitical imperatives.