Western Azerbaijan Community programme
The Western Azerbaijan Community (Qərbi Azərbaycan İcması) programme is the institutional vehicle for the "Western Azerbaijan" doctrine, asserting that the territory of the present-day Republic of Armenia is historically Azerbaijani land from which Azerbaijanis were forcibly expelled. It was established in its current state-organised form in Baku on 24 December 2022, building on a 1989 refugee organisation founded after the late-Soviet expulsion of Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR.
The Community has three institutional pillars. A "Concept of Return", adopted by Ilham Aliyev's decree on 24 March 2023, formalises a programme of "peaceful and dignified return" to "ancestral lands". A documentary apparatus, including conferences, books, and the Western Azerbaijan Journal, produces historical, demographic and cartographic claims. A diplomatic vector mobilises the Community's leadership at international fora (UN, OSCE, OIC, European institutions) to press for recognition of the displacement and for engagement of the "rights of return" frame.
The empirical foundation of the doctrine is real but limited. Azerbaijani Soviet citizens were displaced from the Armenian SSR in two episodes: the 1948–53 deportation of approximately 100,000 rural Azerbaijanis to the Kura-Aras lowlands of Soviet Azerbaijan under Council of Ministers decree 4083 of 23 December 1947; and the 1988–91 expulsion of the remaining roughly 167,000 Azerbaijani residents during the Karabakh Movement mobilisation and the inter-ethnic violence of those years. The historiographical leap consists in projecting these 20th-century displacements backward as evidence of an autochthonous Azerbaijani territorial claim contesting Armenian demographic continuity, which extends back at least to the 1897 Russian imperial census and earlier Persian and Ottoman tax records contested.
The Republic of Armenia, the European Parliament (October 2023 resolution), and most Western analysts have characterised the Community as an instrument of strategic ambiguity that signals territorial maximalism while preserving plausible deniability. The programme is rhetorically asymmetric to the Armenian discourse on Western Armenia (the lost Ottoman vilayets), but is operationally connected to live Azerbaijani territorial demands, including the Zangezur corridor claim.
editorial Whether the Community programme will function as a maximalist negotiating position to be wound down in exchange for concrete Armenian concessions, or as a long-term doctrinal foundation for further territorial pressure, will be one of the structural variables of the post-2023 South Caucasus order.