Armenia’s Policy ‘Twist’ to Cumbersome Tactical ‘Hedging’

Since mid-1990s Russia had been Armenia’s ‘strategic ally’, although Yerevan was inclined to a foreign policy coined as ‘complementarity’. Meanwhile, Armenia backtracked from the Association Agreement (AA)/Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) with the EU in September 2013 in favour of joining the Customs Union (CU)/Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU); such a shift was justified by membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and entailed switching to a policy of ‘supplementarity’. Forging the relations with the EU through the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in 2021, Yerevan’s relations with Moscow deteriorated after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war stopped through the Russian mediation. After Azerbaijan’s subsequent attack on Armenia proper in 2021 followed by the ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population in 2023 the Armenian government resorted to cumbersome tactical ‘hedging’. Whereas the concept of ‘hedging’ has been widely applied to small and middle powers, ontologically, this article will undertake the task of explaining the puzzle of Armenia’s foreign policy ‘twists’ focusing on the empirical developments as of 2018. Epistemologically, it will be inductive. Methodologically, it will employ process-tracing relying on primary (official discourse, visits, data, figures) and secondary sources to demonstrate the transition from the strategy of ‘bandwagoning’ to cumbersome tactical ‘hedging’. It is inferred that the latter is fraught with risks for Armenia given the persistent great-power competition between the US and Russia, the stakes of middle powers Turkey and Iran in the South Caucasus and the Middle East, which have inflated the previously manageable in-betweenness/ entre-deux into unwieldy in-amongness/ entre-plusieurs.