Description
The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and the reverberations of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have dramatically reconfigured South Caucasus geopolitics, reinforcing Azerbaijan’s strategic role as a hub for Europe-Asia connectivity and global supply chains. Amidst a shifting regional and global order, Azerbaijan has sought to mainstream two seemingly progressive agendas into its foreign policy repertoire: the green energy transition and the fight against neocolonialism. In parallel, the government has intensified repression of critical voices, while seeking to normalise its military settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Combining debates on global authoritarianism with insights from epistemic governance, this paper examines green politics and anti-(neo)colonialism in contemporary Azerbaijan as authoritarian practices. It asks: how and for which goals are these agendas mobilised by actors within and beyond the state in post-2020 Azerbaijan? And what do they reveal about the globalised nature of authoritarianism in Azerbaijan and beyond?
Building on fieldwork and on the close reading of secondary sources, the paper argues that green politics and anti-(neo)colonialism simultaneously produce legitimacy for domestic authoritarian governance and for Azerbaijan’s repositioning within global moral and political economies. It also demonstrates that state-driven authoritarian practices create opportunities for non-state actors (CSOs, think tanks and cultural institutions), who reproduce them to maintain relevance or access resources within a repressive civic space.
By showing how authoritarian practices are imbricated in transnational financial flows – including Western development interventions for climate action, peacebuilding and democratisation, the paper contributes to critical scholarship on authoritarianism beyond state-centric and normative frameworks. Moreover, through the case of Azerbaijan it illuminates how authoritarian actors in semi-peripheral Eurasian states (mis)use emancipatory politics to adapt to a changing global order.
