There Is No Peace Without Justice

Responding to the Shaki shooting, in which an armed Azerbaijani serviceman crossed roughly 20 kilometers into Armenian territory and shot a mother defending her children, Arthur G. Martirosyan steps back from the incident itself to state a principle. There is no peace without justice. A settlement built on flawed foundations, or bluntly on the wrongdoings of one side, will not hold for long. That line reframes the entire discussion from a single tragic event into a question about the structure of the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process.

Martirosyan describes what he sees as Pashinyan’s working definition of peace: unilateral concessions designed to keep the other side satisfied, with Armenia implementing whatever demands arrive in order to confirm the so-called hundred-year peace. He frames this as a pattern rather than an isolated misstep, tying it to Azerbaijan’s larger aim of making Armenians forget about Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), the territory ethnically cleansed of its more than 150,000 Armenian inhabitants in September 2023. In his telling, Pashinyan is playing into whatever tune Baku sets.

The moment lands because it is self-contained and blunt. Martirosyan, a specialist in international conflict management, is not litigating the details of one shooting; he is naming the logic that, in his view, dooms a peace lacking accountability, enforceable agreements, and a delimited border. For an audience following the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, the claim connects the Shaki case to Ilham Aliyev’s broader leverage and to the risk that Armenia drifts toward subservience. It is a compact argument about why appeasement, dressed as diplomacy, tends to invite more pressure rather than less.