Armenia and Azerbaijan share a thorny history of a decades-long conflict, militarization, exclusive nationalism, mistrust, and displacement. Within this context, the meeting between the Prime Minster of Armenia and the President of Azerbaijan on August 8, 2025 at the White House was framed as a historic peace summit hosted by US President Donald Trump. The photo-ops, handshakes, and social media posts that followed referred to a historic agreement that is seen as the final step in ending the conflict. While this is a real and significant breakthrough in the peace processes between these two rival neighbors, it is also fragile. If history tells us anything, it is that the signing of a document does not by itself guarantee peace.
From Mediation to Direct Engagement
The decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh region (internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but historically populated by ethnic Armenians) began as a late Soviet dispute. It has since escalated into two full-scale wars (which occurred in 1992-1994 and 2020), repeated clashes, and mass displacements that left behind legacies of militarization, competing victimhoods, and hardened mistrust that still shapes both societies today.
Between 1994 and 2020, international mediation facilitated through the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group produced little progress. While some argue that the Minsk Group remains important for its unique mandate, institutional memory, and international legitimacy, in practice, the approach of this mediation platform proved to be limiting since the talks rarely included direct bilateral engagement. Since the 2020 war, the Azerbaijani government has been more openly critical of the international mediators, accusing them of ineffectiveness and stalling the process, even very directly calling for the disbandment of the group. In addition, for the past decades civil society-led dialogue processes and workshops also failed to produce any tangible results, partly because they were disconnected from the high-level diplomacy efforts and were running on parallel tracks rather than reinforcing the overall peace process.
With this historical context, the pathway of the peace summit in Washington and the framework peace agreement is central. Since the 2020 war, the intensity of bilateral engagements between Armenia and Azerbaijan has increased substantially, and many working on these issues have rightfully noted that this bilateral approach has done more to bring the sides closer than decades of externally driven diplomacy.
Avoiding the trap of photo-ops
While many local and global headlines rushed to frame this as a “historic peace deal,” quickly moving to the next news sensation–Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska—it is important to pause and understand what exactly happened in Washington. First of all, it would be a mistake to consider this a final peace accord. While some of the major points of contention have been agreed upon and reflected in the text of the initialed Agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the timing of actual signing by the heads of states into a binding agreement remains unknown. More importantly, even with the signing of the agreement, we need to be careful not to hang the “mission accomplished” banner too quickly. Decades of comparative research show that what matters most is not the signing of the document but the implementation process that follows: Agreements with weak implementation rarely hold, while those with robust implementation are far more likely to sustain peace.
The recently published PA-X Peace Agreements Database by Peace Rep also confirms this pattern at a global scale. According to the report, 2024 was the second year in a row without a single comprehensive peace agreement in the world. Instead, most new agreements worldwide were partial, technical, or procedural, and did not address the root causes of the conflict. While these kinds of agreements are necessary steppingstones, their design is extremely fragile and can lead to weak implementation and eventual collapse of the agreement. Peace agreements are the starting point; what builds sustainable peace is the creation of practical follow-up mechanisms and tools that translate words on paper into ongoing action.
From Corridors to Community
One of the most immediate and visible outcomes of the Washington process is the much-discussed transport corridor. Designated as the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), it allows Armenia to avoid the politically sensitive “Zangezur Corridor” label that implies a loss of sovereignty over the southern border in Syunik and territorial concessions, which has created major domestic backlash in Armenia, while satisfying Azerbaijan’s strategic goals.
More importantly, this road is not just an abstraction. This road will pass through real geographies where real people live. It will run along villages, homes, and landmarks that locals call their backyard. This creates very real, practical, and potentially explosive challenges. What happens if an Azerbaijani driver crashes on the new road, or an Armenian driver causes a fatal accident that involves an Azerbaijani vehicle? Are local police, courts, and medical systems prepared, after decades of animosity, to manage such crises in ways that will reinforce trust rather than inflame resentment? We must be fully aware that this road will carry not only goods (the issue of customs and inspection is another potential challenge) but more importantly, real humans with all their fallibilities will be travelling across it. Unless there are well thought-out and carefully crafted mechanisms in place, and both sides are committed to managing such incidents fairly and transparently, this important breakthrough could quickly fall apart under the weight of avoidable crises.
The painful memory of the 2015 Gyumri massacre lingers as a warning. When a Russian conscript killed an Armenian family of seven, he received a life sentence. Yet, the case still sparked mass protests amid fears of cover-up, even though it involved Armenia’s strategic partner, not its long-time enemy. This shows that perceived fairness and transparency matter as much as formal processes in highly emotionally charged contexts. If cross-border incidents on this new corridor are not handled credibly, they could trigger street-level outrage and political backlash derailing the fragile peace process.
Sustaining the Breakthrough
The Washington summit opened a window of opportunity that many had a hard time imagining in 2020 and 2023. But windows can close. The true test of leadership and commitment to the peace process in Yerevan and Baku is not the handshakes in front of cameras. It is their ability to build institutions, practices, and habits of trust that will allow everyday peace to become reality in everyday lives of their citizens. August 8, 2025, can easily become another missed opportunity, but it has the potential of opening a new chapter in the history in which Armenians and Azerbaijanis live as neighbors rather than enemies.
Keywords: Azerbaijan, Armenia, peace, conflict, conflict resolution, peace summit, Trump Corridor
Margarita Tadevosyan
Margarita Tadevosyan is a Research Assistant Professor at Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution and the Executive Director of the Center of Peacemaking Practice. She is a scholar-practitioner of conflict resolution with a geographic concentration in the countries of the South Caucasus and post-Soviet spaces. As a practitioner, she has over a decade of experience in designing, convening, and facilitating Track II dialogue workshops, and has expertise in program design and evaluation, local–international coordination and complementarity, and civil society engagement for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Her practical work in collaboration with Dr. Susan Allen has been supported by the US Department of State, European Union, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Swiss MFA, UN and other major donors.
