Dissolution of the Republic of Artsakh §

Decree and context

On 28 September 2023, after the Azerbaijani military operation of 19-20 September and the capitulation of Karabakh Armenian forces, Artsakh President Samvel Shahramanyan signed a decree dissolving the Republic of Artsakh and its institutions effective 1 January 2024. By the time the effective date arrived, the overwhelming majority of the Armenian population had already fled in the September 2023 exodus.

The dissolution formally ended the de facto state structure created after the 1991 independence referendum. That structure had survived the First Karabakh War, decades of non-recognition, the 2020 defeat and three years of partial Russian protection. It did not survive blockade, military assault and the disappearance of its population.

What ended

Artsakh was never recognised by UN member states, including Armenia. But non-recognition did not make it politically unreal. It had institutions, elections, courts, schools, military structures, tax systems and a population that experienced it as a homeland polity. Its dissolution therefore cannot be reduced to the closure of an illegal separatist entity, nor can it be detached from the territorial-integrity framework that made international recognition unattainable editorial.

For Azerbaijan, the dissolution represented the final restoration of sovereignty. For Armenians, it marked the end of continuous Armenian self-government in Nagorno-Karabakh and the erasure of the political vessel through which Karabakh Armenians had articulated collective security since the late Soviet period.

Legal and political afterlife

After dissolution, the conflict did not vanish. It moved into questions of return, property, detainees, cultural heritage, border delimitation, transport corridors and the Armenian state's security choices. The ICJ November 2023 order required Azerbaijan to ensure safe and unimpeded departure and to preserve registration, identity and property documents, while also protecting rights of those who wished to return. Whether those protections become operational is a separate question.

The dissolution is one of the atlas's terminal events: it closes the Artsakh institutional timeline but opens the post-Artsakh Armenian political problem. Armenia must now decide how to pursue rights for a displaced population without territorial control, without a local government in situ, and without the old status framework that structured diplomacy for three decades.