The Ghosts of the Return: Why Reconstruction Alone Cannot Secure Peace in Post-Conflict Karabakh

Executive summary

Azerbaijan’s military victory in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war has transformed a frozen conflict into an acute reconstruction and resettlement challenge. Baku’s “Great Return” programme aims to repopulate the regained territories with internally displaced persons (IDPs). This paper argues that the primary barrier to a sustainable return is not a lack of funding or physical infrastructure, but a critical failure to conceive of reconstruction as a process of political reintegration. By disaggregating the challenge into its component parts such as de-mining, physical reconstruction, economic viability, and the unresolved political and security architecture; this paper demonstrates that the current trajectory prioritises symbolic resettlement over the creation of a durable peace. Without addressing the political economy of return, the spectre of ethnic displacement, and the absence of a credible regional security framework, the “Great Return” risks producing depopulated Potemkin villages, perpetuating regional instability, and embedding new cycles of grievance rather than resolving old ones.

Introduction

The trilateral statement of 10 November 2020 not only ended six weeks of active hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan but also fundamentally rewrote the geopolitical map of the South Caucasus (President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, 2020). For Azerbaijan, the agreement represented the restoration of territorial integrity and the prospect of righting a historical wrong: the displacement of approximately 700,000 Azerbaijanis from the territories surrounding the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and seven adjacent districts during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the early 1990s (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2019). The immediate policy response was the launch of the “Great Return” programme, a state-led initiative to resettle these IDPs in the recovered lands of Karabakh and East Zangezur.

The scale of the ambition is matched only by the scale of the devastation. Nearly three decades of occupation, neglect, and active destruction left urban centres in ruins and rural areas heavily mined and uninhabitable. Initial international estimates place the cost of reconstruction in the tens of billions of dollars (International Crisis Group, 2021). The Azerbaijani government has framed this as a monumental national project, a triumph of resilience and state capacity. Roads, airports, and smart villages are the foundational symbols of this narrative (Azertac, 2021).

However, this paper challenges the core assumption underpinning this narrative: that the challenge is primarily a technical and logistical one of building back. Based on a reading of Azerbaijani state discourse, early international reporting, and comparative analysis of post-conflict returns, we contend that the central challenge is political. A successful return is not a return at all if it merely shifts a population into subsidised, securitised enclaves in a depopulated, hostile territory. The key question of 2021 is not how fast can Baku build houses? but can reconstruction catalyse a sustainable political and economic reintegration that makes peace more durable than war?

This paper identifies and analyses the four core challenges that must be confronted to avoid a hollow victory.

The De-mining Precondition: Speed Versus Safety

Azerbaijani and international sources are unanimous on the most immediate practical barrier: the saturation of the regained territories with landmines and unexploded ordnance. The Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action (ANAMA) identifies extensive contamination, particularly in former front line areas and around civilian infrastructure booby-trapped during the Armenian withdrawal (ANAMA, 2021). The de-mining challenge shapes every other aspect of the return. It dictates the pace of rebuilding, the routes for transportation, the availability of agricultural land, and, most fundamentally, the physical safety of any potential returnee.

The pressure to achieve rapid progress creates a perilous tradeoff. Politically, Baku is under immense domestic pressure to deliver on the promise of return, a promise central to the national identity and trauma narrative of post-Soviet Azerbaijan. A slow, meticulous, internationally supervised de-mining process, potentially taking over a decade, stands in direct tension with the political imperative to show tangible results (HALO Trust, 2021). This creates a risk of prioritising clearance for high-profile infrastructure corridors and symbolic settlements while leaving vast swathes of rural, agricultural land uncleared. Such an approach would render returnees permanently dependent on the state, unable to return to their ancestral livelihoods in farming, grazing, and cross-border trade. The first and most foundational barrier to return is therefore not the mine itself, but the governance decision that determines whether de-mining serves a long-term livelihood strategy or a short-term political spectacle.

The “Build It and They Will Come” Fallacy: Livelihoods Beyond Housing

The official framing of the Great Return, heavily documented by Azerbaijani agencies, emphasises physical construction: smart cities, eco-friendly villages, and modern infrastructure built from near zero (Azertac, 2021). This is a necessary and legitimate response to the level of destruction. However, the focus on capital-intensive infrastructure obscures a more critical gap: the creation of a viable and self-sustaining economic environment. The world is littered with failed post-conflict cities, modern ruins built with good intentions and oil revenues but devoid of organic economic life (Barakat and Zyck, 2009).

Returning IDPs are not just residents; they are economic actors. Without jobs, accessible public services like schools and healthcare, and functioning transport links to markets, return risks becoming purely symbolic and, perversely, unsustainable. A returnee in a state-provided smart home who has no viable source of income is merely a ward of the state in a new location. The political economy of Karabakh and East Zangezur, traditionally based on agriculture, mining, and light industry, has been completely obliterated (World Bank, 2021). Reviving it requires more than state investment; it requires a conducive environment for small and medium enterprises, access to credit, and a clear regulatory framework. The danger, visible in the state’s initial planning, is an economy dominated by state contracts, extractive industries, and a security apparatus, a formula that generates patronage networks and inequality, not the broad-based prosperity that anchors a community and makes people stay (Collier, 2007). The most critical metric is not the number of houses built, but the number of new business registrations in Aghdam or Zangilan.

The Security Trap: Reintegration Without a Settlement

The greatest threat to the Great Return is the unresolved security and political framework. The trilateral statement was a ceasefire agreement, not a peace treaty. There is no final status agreement, no normalisation of relations between Baku and Yerevan, and the fate of the ethnic Armenian population remains a gaping wound. The Financial Times and other outlets correctly identified that the military outcome, far from diminishing conflict risks, elevated fears of further escalation, particularly concerning southern Armenia and the proposed transport corridors (Foy, 2021).

This uncertainty creates a security trap for returnees. A return to an active or frozen conflict zone is a return to a frontier, not a home. It requires a permanent, militarised presence, blurring the lines between civilian resettlement and strategic consolidation. This environment is antithetical to private investment, which seeks regulatory certainty and physical security beyond the perimeter of a military base. It also perpetuates a wartime political culture in the returned communities themselves, a militant irredentism that makes any future reconciliation with Armenians politically impossible. A settlement built in this climate will be a fortress society, not a reintegrated one (International Crisis Group, 2021). The failure to decouple civilian return from military strategic depth is the single greatest obstacle to long-term viability.

The Monologue of Return: Narrative, Legitimacy, and the Other

Finally, the project is pursued within a profound narrative vacuum. For Azerbaijan, this is a story of return, liberation, and restoration. Yet the 2020 war did not end the human dimension of the conflict; it simply reversed the direction of displacement (Human Rights Watch, 2020). The ethno-nationalist logic of the first war was not resolved but realised, producing a new wave of suffering. To ignore this context is to build the project on a foundation of unacknowledged trauma.

Azerbaijan’s official line offers Armenians in Karabakh the prospect of staying and being reintegrated. Yet almost the entire population fled, and with them went the possibility of a multi-ethnic return (UNHCR, 2021). A reconstruction that proceeds purely on the narrative of Azeri return implicitly validates the idea that the territory must be ethnically homogeneous. This stance, while domestically resonant, cedes the moral ground to international actors who increasingly view the project as the consolidation of a military conquest, not a restorative act. A policy paper that fails to acknowledge this dual narrative of Azeri return and Armenian loss is not serious. The political sustainability of the Great Return does not just depend on the loyalty of its own IDPs, but on whether it can ever credibly be seen by external partners and a future Armenian interlocutor as something other than a triumph of force (De Waal, 2013). Failing this, the project will remain a permanent target of international condemnation and a casus belli for future generations.

Conclusion

The challenge identified in 2021 is clear. Azerbaijan has secured military control. The far more difficult task is to transform this control into a form of governance that is safe, economically viable, and politically legitimate enough to be durable. The current trajectory, prioritising rapid, symbolic, state-led construction over the messy, slow, and politically sensitive work of de-mining for livelihoods, fostering an open economy, and pursuing a real security settlement, is a path toward an unsustainable Potemkin return. The ghosts of this return are not just the displaced seeking a home, but the unaddressed political failures that could turn newly built cities into future ghost towns.

References

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