Why Armenia’s Latest Anti-Government Movement Failed and What South Caucasus Conflicts Reveal About Future of Global Politics – Byline Times

Tens of thousands took to the streets of Yerevan earlier in May to demand the resignation of the Armenian government. Coming at the same time as massive popular protests in neighbouring Georgia over a punitive new law on ‘foreign influence’, it seemed change was in the air in the South Caucasus.

However, while the demonstrations in Georgia have since galvanised the country’s previously fractured political opposition toward unity ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for October, experts say the ‘Tavush for Homeland’ protests in neighbouring Armenia appear to have now ended not with a bang, but a whimper. 

“After its initial launch in May, we saw a rapid decline in the number of people. It’s one thing to come out and yell and make fiery speeches, but then everyone just went home,” says Richard Giragosian, founding director of the Regional Studies Centre, a Yerevan-based think tank. “In other words, it simply petered out after a steady erosion of momentum.”

Led by the charismatic Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, Armenia’s latest anti-government movement stood as testament to the sheer scale of popular outcry over Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s recent decision to hand four villages in the country’s northeast Tavush region over to Azerbaijan, with whom Armenia has been locked in a perpetual cycle of either frozen or active conflict since both nations’ independence from the Soviet Union. 

These territorial concessions have come just months after the latest chapter in the ongoing conflict saw more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians forced to flee a lightning Azerbaijani assault on Nagorno Karabakh – a previously autonomous mountain enclave within Azerbaijan’s borders, regarded by many as the spiritual homeland of the Armenian people – following a ten month blockade that had pushed the region’s inhabitants to the brink of starvation. 

“The primary driver behind the recent protest movement was this feeling of hopelessness, the anger and resentment for everything that has happened between Armenia and Azerbaijan, especially over the past four years,” says Benyamin Poghosyan, a senior research fellow at think-tank ARPI Armenia. “Then in the spring, the government said they were going to start this border delimitation process, starting from the Tavush region – I think for many people, it was simply the last straw.”

Despite the scale of public outcry, Giragosian and Poghosyan say there are a variety of reasons the recent demonstrations failed to mount a challenge to the incumbent administration of comparable force to that which saw the previous government ousted in Armenia’s pro-democracy, anti-corruption revolution of 2018.

The protests were blighted almost from the start by an apparent absence of effective political coordination. Although a highly popular public figure, Galstanyan has no experience in office, while Armenia’s political opposition have largely failed to recover their credibility since the revolution. 

Demands for the government’s resignation, and the protesters’ nomination of Galstanyan to replace Pashinyan as prime minister, therefore came without a clear roadmap for how exactly this envisioned transition of power was actually supposed to take place. 

“For me, the key moment was when Archbishop Galstanyan said, ‘Ok, we will resolve everything within a month’, but did not then provide a viable way to do that,” says Poghosyan. “How were they going to achieve this, how were they going to force ruling party members to vote to impeach the prime minister? How were they going to force resignations? The lack of understanding about how it was all going to happen, that was a key factor.”

Pashinyan also continues to wield what critics have described as excessive control of both the country’s judiciary and law enforcement authorities. This not only meant any chances of a coup were slim to none, but also that the government was able to prevent early episodes of police violence against protesters from progressing to a severe crackdown.

“After an initial degree of overreaction by the police and security forces, I think the government was very careful and cautious to ensure discipline – in other words to avoid an escalation, coupled with a strategy of simply not going for the bait,” Giragosian says. “Think of it as prime minister’s question time in the House of Commons, that question from the backbench opposition that simply goes unanswered.”

Giragosian adds there is also a degree to which, behind the outrage and fury of the protests, a reluctant resignation has set in over the desperate position that Armenia now finds itself in both with regard to ongoing border disputes with Azerbaijan, and on the international stage. 

With its hands full carrying out Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, Moscow has gradually distanced itself from its historic role as security guarantor between Armenia and Azerbaijan. This has in turn witnessed something of a deepening trend toward irredentism and domestic radicalism in Baku, with diminishing Kremlin interest most recently being perceived as having provided something of a greenlight for Azerbaijan’s attack on Nagorno Karabakh last September.

Locked between two historically hostile nations, with Turkey to its west and Azerbaijan in the east, many feel Armenia has found itself in dire need of new alliances. Among those voices would appear to be Pashinyan, who has lately confirmed Armenia’s imminent withdrawal from the Russian-led CSTO while also seeking mediation from the US on peace talks with the Aliyev regime and deepening defence ties with France.

“It is a difficult resignation of the population, accepting our weakness and lack of leverage,” Giragosian explains. “However, that has ended from a state of denial into a much more realistic accommodation of how to play a weak hand better, which is why I think the outlook for domestic stability is actually pretty strong.”

Whether this shift in foreign policy outlook will yield greater national security in the longer-term remains to be seen. As Giragosian notes, Western engagement in negotiations for a lasting amnesty between Armenia and Azerbaijan does not necessarily ensure the outcome of those talks will not prove a “punitive peace” for Armenia, nor afford a guarantee of protection in the event Azerbaijan should choose to violate whatever treaty may eventually be put in place. 

What’s nevertheless clear is how even after two years, the fallout of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine continues to prove a driving force in a wider realignment of powers in this former corner of the Soviet Union, itself perhaps something of a study-in-miniature on the wider shift in global order prompted by the conflict. 

“Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the South Caucasus is becoming more and more entangled in a confrontation between Russia and the West,” Poghosyan says. “What’s happening in the region is a sign of what the post-unipolar world is going to look like. More chaotic, more complex – many actors with contradicting interests fighting between themselves, and meanwhile using smaller states and smaller powers as leverage.”