Failed Transition?: the Nagorno-karabakh Conflict and Armenia's Transition to Democracy

Using the two-level game model first proposed by Robert Putnam in 1988, this book analyzes the impact of domestic variables (ethnic composition, institutional constraints, economic development, and the civil society) on shaping the policy of intervention in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the early 1990s by Armenia¿s first democratically elected leaders. Then it looks at how the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, in turn, affected the trajectory of Armenia¿s transition to democracy. The discussion of a number of domestic factors contributing to the failure of democratic consolidation in post-Soviet Armenia follows. Parallels are drawn between Armenia and two other post-socialist countries in the conflict situation, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, with specific emphasis on quality of leadership of the elites. Finally, two early successful anti-communist democratizers, Armenia and Poland, are compared, and the later divergence of their political paths is analyzed.