Future of Nagorno-Karabakh

The Patterson School just finished a negotiation exercise based on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. Set ten years in the future, the simulation involves teams representing Russia, the United States, Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijian, Armenia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. The key points:

The point of the exercise, however, is to highlight the importance of process. Principally, the problems result from asymmetries in interest, information, and commitment. Negotiators have a strong incentive to withhold information about the intensity and nature of their interests, in large part because others might take advantage of that information. The incentive to deceive animates all sides, narrowing the space in which agreement can be achieved. While outsiders can imagine a variety of potential settlements to the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, the dynamics of negotiation make arriving at any of those outcomes difficult. Players have an incentive to kill acceptable agreements because the distribution of goods isn’t optimal — “we could get more” — and because accepting an agreement attached with conditions or terms signals weakness.

Problems of trust and commitment mean that certain outcomes that are acceptable as an end state cannot be reached because they require impossible intermediate steps. Multilateral negotiations create multiple veto points in which any player can scuttle an agreement. In this case, the outside powers — the United States, Russia, Turkey, and Iran — were often able to arrive at agreements on potential solutions, only to be stymied by opposition from Armenia, Azerbaijan, or Nagorno-Karabakh. Entrenched animosities and domestic politics in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, combined with the unwillingness of leaders to prepare their citizens to accept the compromises that must come with an agreement, proved to be the main impediments to a successful peace agreement. What the local players lacked in economic and military power, they more than made up for in commitment to their bargaining positions.