"Western Azerbaijan" irredentism §

"Western Azerbaijan" (Qərbi Azərbaycan) is a state-promoted irredentist doctrine, advanced by President Ilham Aliyev from 2022 onward, that designates the territory of the present-day Republic of Armenia as historically Azerbaijani land from which Azerbaijanis were forcibly displaced and to which they have a "right of return". The doctrine is structurally analogous to, and explicitly modelled on, the Armenian discourse of Western Armenia (the lost eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire), and is intended to function as a symmetric counter-claim.

The doctrine is grounded in two historical strands. First, it cites the 1948–53 deportation of approximately 100,000 Azerbaijanis from rural districts of the Armenian SSR to the Kura-Aras lowlands of Soviet Azerbaijan, executed by Council of Ministers decree 4083 of 23 December 1947. Second, it cites the 1988–91 expulsion of the remaining Azerbaijani population of the Armenian SSR (approximately 167,000 according to Soviet 1989 census figures) during the Karabakh Movement. Both events are real; the historiographical leap consists in projecting them backward onto the territory in question as evidence of an autochthonous Azerbaijani presence going back centuries contested.

Institutionally, the doctrine is operationalised through the "Western Azerbaijan Community", a state-organised body established in Baku in December 2022 (continuing from a 1989 refugee organisation under a new mandate), tasked with documenting historical claims, lobbying international organisations, and producing a "Concept of Return" (adopted by Aliyev decree on 24 March 2023). Aliyev's public speeches frame Yerevan, Zangezur, and Lake Sevan as historically Azerbaijani and condition any normalisation on Armenia's acknowledgement of the claim.

Armenian state and scholarly responses (Pashinyan, the Foreign Ministry, multiple academic institutions) have characterised the doctrine as a pretext for territorial aggression, citing demographic continuity going back to the 1897 Russian imperial census and earlier Persian and Ottoman tax records. The European Parliament's October 2023 resolution criticised the doctrine. editorial The doctrine is contiguous with the Zangezur corridor demand and the broader Pan-Turkist geographical imagination of an unbroken Turkic corridor from Anatolia to Central Asia, and is read by most Western analysts as a maximalist negotiating position rather than an imminent war aim, although the asymmetry of military power after 2020 makes the distinction less reassuring.