Western Azerbaijan: Inside Baku's State-Funded Campaign to Erase Armenia

What "Western Azerbaijan" actually means

"Western Azerbaijan" (Azerbaijani: Qərbi Azərbaycan) is an irredentist concept that designates not a region of Azerbaijan, but the territory of the Republic of Armenia itself. Its core claim is that modern Armenia was built on lands that once belonged to Azerbaijanis, and that those Azerbaijanis -- or their descendants -- have a right to "return." The concept has received official endorsement from the government of Azerbaijan and has been used repeatedly by President Ilham Aliyev, who since roughly 2010 has referred to Yerevan as "Irevan," Lake Sevan as "Göyçə," and Syunik as "Zangezur" -- describing all three as once and future "Azerbaijani lands."

Historians and regional analysts have characterized the concept plainly. The scholar Laurence Broers describes "Western Azerbaijanism" as a vision that "absorbs a modern Armenian territoriality in its entirety," one in which Armenians are portrayed "as usurping interlopers with neither an indigenous state nor a culture of their own." Carnegie Europe's Thomas de Waal, writing in 2023, called the initiative "simply irredentist." Harvard professor Christina Maranci has described it as "the propaganda of a 'Western Azerbaijan' in place of the Republics of Armenia and Artsakh." This is the analytical consensus, not an Armenian talking point.

From a colloquialism to a state project

The term began as a colloquialism used by some Azerbaijani refugees to refer to Soviet Armenia. For most of the post-Soviet period it faded, because a "return" to Armenia was never considered politically feasible and those refugees integrated into Azerbaijani society. What revived it was the state.

After his 2018 nomination as presidential candidate, Aliyev called for "the return of Azerbaijanis to these lands," framing it as "our political and strategic goal" that Azerbaijan "must gradually approach." In July 2021 Baku reorganized its economic regions to create an "Eastern Zangezur" zone bordering Syunik -- a designation that implies a "Western Zangezur," meaning Armenia's Syunik province. Days later, Aliyev confirmed the implication directly: "Western Zangezur is our ancestral land [...] we must return there and we will return. No one can stop us." At his December 2022 inauguration he went further: "Present-day Armenia is our land. [...] I am saying this as a historical fact."

That same December, Azerbaijan inaugurated a "Great Return" program ostensibly promoting the settlement of ethnic Azerbaijanis who once lived in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The rhetoric had become policy infrastructure.

The machine, as its own documents describe it

The clearest window into how the campaign is run comes from leaked documents from the Azerbaijani government, obtained and reviewed by the Caucasus outlet OC Media. They show that the discourse is "closely coordinated and supported by the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan," even though it is publicly fronted by a body called the Western Azerbaijan Community (WAC).

The WAC was originally registered as a refugee initiative in the late 1980s and remained largely inactive for decades. In August 2022 the Azerbaijani government reactivated it, giving it updated charters and a new name. In October 2022, Azerbaijan's parliament created a working group focused on policies of "return" to "Western Azerbaijan." A refugee charity had been converted into a parliamentary-backed instrument of state policy.

Independent observers quoted by OC Media are blunt about the function. Altay Goyushov, a scholar of Azerbaijani civic space, called the discourse "a tool to mobilise public opinion and distract people from social issues," and "a kind of Damocles' sword to intimidate Armenia." Vafa Naghiyeva, a researcher at the University of Leipzig, described it as a strategy that "keeps society emotionally mobilised around the idea of unfinished justice."

Escalation: from claim to "strategic goal"

By January 2025, as peace-treaty talks intensified, Aliyev escalated rather than softened. In a long interview with state media he described Armenia as a "fascist state" and declared: "fascism must be eradicated. Either the Armenian leadership will destroy it, or we will. We have no other choice." In the same period, according to OC Media's account, Aliyev added a third strategic goal to his stated objectives: after (1) the "liberation" of Nagorno-Karabakh and (2) its reconstruction, the new goal was ensuring the "return" of the Western Azerbaijan Community to Armenia.

This is the single most important fact for understanding the campaign's stakes. The first two goals were achieved by force: the 2020 war and the September 2023 offensive that emptied Nagorno-Karabakh of its Armenian population. Listing the "return to Western Azerbaijan" as the next item on the same list places a claim on the territory of the Republic of Armenia in the same sentence as two objectives Baku accomplished militarily.

The Washington pause -- and why it is only a pause

After a US-brokered summit in Washington on 8 August 2025, at which Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders initialled but did not sign a draft peace treaty, the "Western Azerbaijan" rhetoric publicly softened. The draft reportedly includes a clause prohibiting territorial claims by either side and another on withdrawing legal claims against each other in international courts. Analysts quoted by OC Media read the softening not as abandonment but as tactics: Goyushov described the discourse as "a bargaining chip" Baku holds over the more than 100,000 Armenians who left Karabakh.

The machine did not stop. In October 2025 the state-governed ADA University funded a book on "Western Azerbaijan"; Azerbaijan organized a side event on the theme at an OSCE conference in Warsaw; and the WAC held awareness events with state-linked diaspora groups in Germany and Brussels. On 5 December 2025, Aliyev again publicly demanded that Armenia ensure the "return" of Azerbaijanis displaced from Armenia, calling it essential to ending the conflict. The WAC's chair, ruling-party MP Aziz Alakbarli, framed the demand as an ultimatum: Armenia, he said on 26 October, has "no other choice but to reckon with Azerbaijan and its President," and must accept "all of Azerbaijan's conditions," including the WAC "return," or "jeopardise the existence of the Armenian state."

What Yerevan has done -- and the question that leaves

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has not endorsed the "Western Azerbaijan" claim. His on-record rebuttal has been a narrow one: he has argued it would be more accurate to compare so-called "Western Azerbaijanis" to the Armenians who once lived in Azerbaijan's exclave of Nakhchivan -- a near-total ethnic erasure that Baku never reversed and never compensated. That is a real counter-argument, and we note it plainly.

But a rebuttal is not a strategy. Over the same years in which Baku built and funded this machine, the Armenian government's documented posture in the negotiations has been to prioritize signing a treaty quickly -- a posture that, as OWL's separate reporting on the "politics of silence" has noted, has included signals of willingness to drop the international-court cases (at the ICJ and ECHR) arising from the 2020 and 2023 wars. The analyst Benyamin Poghosyan summarizes Baku's logic: Azerbaijan "uses this concept as a stick to force Armenia to drop its demands" for any international presence or accountability over Nagorno-Karabakh.

That is the asymmetry worth sitting with, and we frame it as a question rather than a verdict. Baku has institutionalized a territorial claim on the entirety of the Republic of Armenia -- with parliamentary backing, presidential funding, and a place on its list of "strategic goals." Yerevan's answer has been a single rhetorical analogy and a negotiating posture oriented toward concession and speed. Who benefits from that asymmetry? Not the Armenian state whose existence the WAC's own chairman openly threatens. When a foreign government spends state money to brand your capital as its "ancestral land," the absence of a confrontational response is itself a policy choice -- and one that a government answerable to its own citizens owes them an explanation for.

Sources: OC Media, "EXCLUSIVE: Azerbaijan's 'Western Azerbaijan' campaign exposed in leaked documents" by Rasmus Canbäck (reporting on leaked Azerbaijani Presidential Administration documents; the December 2023 Baku conference and its ~$65,000 state funding; the WAC's August 2022 reactivation; the October 2022 parliamentary working group; Aliyev's January 2025 "fascist state" remarks and the stated third strategic goal; the post-August-2025 softening and the October 2025 ADA University book, OSCE Warsaw side event, and Germany/Brussels events; and the quoted experts Altay Goyushov, Vafa Naghiyeva, and Thomas de Waal). Wikipedia, "Western Azerbaijan (irredentist concept)," citing Laurence Broers, Thomas de Waal, Christina Maranci and Benyamin Poghosyan (the concept's history; Aliyev's 2018, 2021 and December 2022 statements; the "Eastern/Western Zangezur" designation; the "Great Return" program; and Pashinyan's Nakhchivan comparison). Azatutyun (RFE/RL) and The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, reporting Aliyev's 5 December 2025 renewed "return" demand and WAC chair Aziz Alakbarli's statements. Direct quotations are reproduced from these sources. OWL editorial framings -- the "machine" structure, the escalation-from-claim-to-strategic-goal reading, and the closing who-benefits asymmetry -- are identified as OWL analysis and are clearly distinguished from the sourced factual record above.