Institutionalizing revenge: state-constructed narratives in Azerbaijan’s policy toward Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh

Explanatory frameworks concerning Azerbaijan’s military assertiveness against Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh have primarily revolved around hard power-based realist propensities. Although useful, the boundaries and meaning of these interpretations downplay the importance of revenge as a conceptual, ideational, mobilizational, and strategic driver. Operationalization of the phenomenon of revenge can serve as an additional analytical framework in explaining Azerbaijan’s excessively coercive stance against Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. Drawing on the theoretical framework developed by Löwenheim and Heimann, the paper examines the instrumental utility and limitations of the concept of revenge in explaining Azerbaijan’s institutional practices and strategic choices of retribution.