The Security Concept of the Civil Contract Party: Normative Illusion and Strategic Vulnerability

The concept of Armenia’s external security set out in the ruling party’s electoral program for the upcoming elections is built around a distinct logic and possesses a certain internal normative coherence. It rests on a combination of international legitimacy, economic interconnectedness, predictability, a peace agenda, and defense reforms. Yet it is precisely the predominantly doctrinal nature of this construction that constitutes its main vulnerability.

First and foremost, the document clearly overestimates international legitimacy as a source of power and a means of deterrence. Undoubtedly, from the standpoint of international law, recognition of a state’s territorial integrity strengthens its subjectivity and enhances its political and diplomatic resilience. However, the practice of contemporary international relations shows that legitimacy in itself does not eliminate the anarchic character of the international environment and therefore cannot substitute for deterrence mechanisms, allied guarantees, or a state’s own capacity for self-defense. In other words, legitimacy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ensuring external security.

Against this backdrop, particularly alarming is the relegation of the army in the published document as a “reserve” instrument, which, according to the authors, becomes necessary only if diplomatic and political means of deterrence “fail.” From a normative point of view, such an approach may appear justified, since it underscores the defensive nature of military power and broadly aligns with the logic of international law. However, in security theory and in the practice of conflict resolution, military capability performs not only a function of last-resort response, but also one of strategic deterrence. A state’s effective defense capacity shapes the calculations of a potential adversary well before political and diplomatic mechanisms have been exhausted.

Treating the military component as “reserve,” rather than as one of the fundamental pillars of Armenia’s security architecture, also gives rise to an obvious logical contradiction. On the one hand, the pre-election program describes the army as an instrument to be employed only after diplomatic, legal, and political means have failed. On the other hand, state policy consistently emphasizes the importance of large-scale military reforms, the development of defense infrastructure, the modernization of armaments, and the introduction of a comprehensive security system. Such duality is difficult to regard as coherent: if the force component is truly of merely auxiliary significance, then it is hard to explain why it receives such substantial institutional and material-financial attention. Conversely, if the state in practice proceeds from the army’s indispensability as a basic factor of survival, then portraying it as a “reserve” element is less a reflection of the real hierarchy of priorities in the security sphere than a political-normative formula. It follows, therefore, that assigning the army a “reserve” role in the security program should be understood прежде всего as a political signal to the adversary, one that in essence fits into the logic of the appeasement strategy consistently pursued by the current government since its defeat in the 2020 war.

From the standpoint of international security and geoeconomics, one of the shortcomings of the proposed program is that it is built almost entirely on a logic of cooperation, whereas Armenia’s external environment is clearly competitive in character. In the context of the TRIPP project, this is evident in the fact that the program ignores the clash of interests among rival powers and instead proceeds from the assumption that transport and logistical interconnectedness will in itself generate external actors’ interest in Armenia’s stability. Yet under conditions of competing external interests, such a route is unlikely to function automatically as a stabilizing factor, because from the outset it contains not only elements of economic interdependence, but also levers of political influence, strategic competition, and external pressure.

The projected ownership structure of the Armenian-American joint venture also appears problematic, since it already limits Armenia’s ability to influence the formation of the project’s strategic parameters and to exercise effective control over the related economic and political processes. The project relies more on a normative expectation of mutual benefit than on a realistic understanding of economic interdependence as a mechanism for distributing leverage. It therefore remains unclear whether the document’s pronounced optimism regarding TRIPP and the strategic role it attributes to the project are based on external guarantees unknown to the public or, on the contrary, on an underestimation of fairly obvious risks.

Another problematic aspect lies in the emphasis placed on internal discourse, as well as on psychological and cultural transformation, as components of external security. In the long run, such an approach appears broadly justified, since sustainable peace does indeed presuppose changes in public consciousness, educational policy, and, more broadly, political culture. Yet it is necessary here to distinguish between a reduction of internal conflict-proneness and an external change in Azerbaijan’s strategic behavior: however important the former may be, the latter does not follow from it automatically.

Moreover, such transformation presupposes reciprocity, since its stabilizing effect is possible only if analogous processes—softening hostile rhetoric, abandoning the image of the adversary as a mobilizing symbol, and revising educational and symbolic practices—also occur on the other side of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. In the absence of such reciprocity, unilateral transformation may fail to reduce tensions and may instead produce additional asymmetry in threat perception and in political readiness to resist. Consequently, the effectiveness of this component depends not only on changes within Armenia, but also on the extent to which it is combined with stronger deterrence institutions, crisis-management instruments, and a realistic assessment of the fact that present-day Azerbaijan shows no signs of comparable socio-psychological and cultural transformation.

Finally, the last fundamental problem concerns the relationship between ideology and rationality within the logic of the program itself, where the peace agenda, predictability, and de-escalation are granted not merely importance, but axiomatic status. Yet in the logic of international security analysis, state behavior is considered rational insofar as it contributes to maximizing the country’s security. This leads to an important warning: when a normative stance begins to be regarded not as a means of ensuring security but as an end in itself, the ideological component inevitably undermines the rationality of strategic behavior. In such a case, the state may overestimate the stabilizing effect of its own moderation and underestimate situations in which external actors interpret that moderation not as constructiveness, but as a lack of will to resist. The key question, therefore, is not whether a peace agenda is desirable in itself, but whether it retains its instrumental character—that is, whether it remains subordinated to the task of maximizing security—or whether it is gradually acquiring the features of a self-sufficient political doctrine.

In conclusion, although the presented concept may be regarded as a normative framework, its practical viability depends on whether this ideological construction can be transformed into a policy that genuinely provides for the highest possible level of security. The vulnerability of the ruling party’s program stems above all from the gap between the normative coherence of the model it proposes and the reality of the external environment, which is marked by intense competition, clashes of interest, geoeconomic dependencies, and strategic uncertainty.

The foreign policy and security provisions of the Civil Contract party’s 2021 electoral program were likewise built on such illusory expectations, with consequences that led to irreversible human, moral, material, and territorial losses. Today, continuing to adhere to the same logic, the party once again makes the premature claim in its new electoral program that “peace has been established between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and thus an era of peaceful development has opened for Armenia,” whereas in reality this is not a peace grounded in reconciliation, but one imposed through coercion.

Armen Martirosyan

Member of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Armenia (1990-95)

Member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia (1995-99)

Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Armenia