Recent peacebuilding efforts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the wider South Caucasus have been dominated by transactional logic. Governments and civil society actors alike tend to favor projects that emphasize trade and reconstruction. While such initiatives are welcome as they help reduce the risk of renewed violence, they rarely address the deeper social dimensions of conflict. The everyday needs of conflict-affected communities, including trauma recovery, displacement, memory, and social trust, remain largely unattended. Peacebuilding is treated merely as a technical fix rather than a process of transformation.
Civil society, expected to bridge the gap between state policy and societal needs, has struggled to fill this vacuum. Despite decades of activity and some remarkable individual efforts, non-governmental actors have not succeeded in introducing a people-centered agenda into the political mainstream. Instead, civil society itself has remained fragmented and ineffective. This article examines the institutional structures that shape peace activism in the region and asks how solidarity and agonistic dialogue can be built within and beyond peacebuilding circles.
Over the past two decades, international support for peacebuilding in the South Caucasus has been guided by the liberal peace paradigm, which privileges professionalization, accountability to donors, and measurable outcomes. While these principles improved transparency, they also gradually alienated peacebuilding from the conflict-affected communities it was meant to serve. As earlier studies and field reports show, project-based funding fostered competition rather than collaboration, rewarding organizational survival over social impact. Larger NGOs with established international connections became gatekeepers, while smaller community-based actors were left to compete for small sub-grants at the cost of solidarity, or collapsed altogether. Reporting and compliance, performed in the name of transparency, consumed nearly all available time and resources. Maintaining institutions became an end in itself, and the social legitimacy of peacebuilding eroded.
This dynamic is not unique to peacebuilders. Feminist movements across the region have experienced similar pressures as advocacy work became professionalized and donor-driven. Earlier critiques of NGO-ization warned that bureaucratic dependency was depoliticizing activism, replacing solidarity with competition and grassroots organizing with managerialism. Movements once animated by collective imagination became industries of log-frames and deliverables. Environmental organizations faced comparable constraints, functioning within narrow thematic silos. Across the region, civil society has been divided by sector, ideology, and generation.
Ideological divisions compounded institutional ones. For more than three decades, peace and security discourse in the South Caucasus has been shaped by successive paradigms. The early 1990s were defined by realist thinking that prioritized state security at the expense of dialogue. The 2000s and 2010s saw the rise of liberal peacebuilding, which introduced participatory and rights-based language but remained tethered to external frameworks detached from local realities. More recently, post-liberal and decolonial networks have sought to critique dependency on external actors, yet these too have often been led by elite intellectuals based abroad and increasingly detached from local constituencies. Each of these currents contributed valuable insights but also generated blind spots. Realism reinforced elitism and reified conflict, liberalism created donor dependencies and detachment from local realities, and post-liberalism, though offering sharper critique, remained fragmented and often incoherent. None succeeded in mounting a sustained challenge to entrenched ethnonationalism or in offering a viable alternative to the social fatigue that followed decades of protracted conflict.
In the absence of a unifying vision or shared end-goal, effective peacebuilding in the 2020s requires not the triumph of one paradigm over the other but dialogue across them. In a post-normative era where consensus on what peace should mean no longer exists, plural conversation becomes the only realistic pathway forward. Recent debates on agonistic peace provide a useful framework for this. Rather than seeking to erase disagreement, agonistic approaches accept conflict as inevitable and even necessary, provided it is stripped of violence and domination. In this view, opponents are not enemies to be destroyed but adversaries whose legitimacy is recognized. Such an ethos allows rivalry to persist without enmity, making coexistence thinkable even when reconciliation seems distant. For the South Caucasus, this shift from liberal to agonistic visions of peace reframes dialogue itself as a form of conflict transformation, not a path to consensus but a disciplined practice of living with difference.
Recognizing fragmentation as both institutional and epistemic reframes the problem. The issue is not merely that NGOs fail to cooperate, but that peace work itself has become compartmentalized by ideology, by funding stream, and by identity. Overcoming this requires a new political culture of listening and engagement. Building consensus across ideological divides may be futile, but building solidarity through respectful disagreement and continuous dialogue is not. Dialogue, in this sense, becomes a mode of coexistence that turns dissent into productive engagement. Participants in recent cross-movement dialogues articulated a dual set of commitments: solidarity through coordination, care, and resource sharing, and decentralization through acceptance of difference, self-critique, and non-hierarchical collaboration. This dual commitment reflects the agonistic spirit, relations marked not by harmony but by principled contestation.
Experiments with such dialogue have also revealed that solidarity must extend beyond the peacebuilding field itself. Peace, gender justice, and environmental protection are interdependent struggles. The people who face insecurity in one domain often face it in others. Yet their advocates rarely coordinate strategies. Feminists, environmentalists, human-rights defenders, and peacebuilders often operate in isolation despite overlapping constituencies and values. Cross-movement alliances could link these issues in ways that resonate with everyday experience, grounding peacebuilding in ordinary concerns. To encourage this, donors and local organizations could co-fund intersectional initiatives, for instance, joint campaigns on climate resilience in border areas or on women’s leadership in peace and security that create shared ownership and tangible outcomes across sectors.
Rebuilding solidarity also demands confronting the generational gap that divides practitioners. The first generation of peacebuilders, emerging in the early post-war years, brought courage and moral clarity but often worked within elite networks. The second generation professionalized the field but became entangled in donor logics and detached from communities. A third, emerging cohort of critical, digitally connected activists risks disengagement from institutional memory and from conflict-affected populations not always plugged into global networks. Dialogue across generations is essential to retain experience while renewing imagination. Universities, training centers, and established NGOs could institutionalize intergenerational mentorship programs that pair senior practitioners with younger peacebuilders, encouraging joint reflection and knowledge transfer.
To move from fragmentation to dialogue, peacebuilding must also reclaim the legitimacy of reflection and learning from failure. Current funding mechanisms reward success stories and punish honest learning. Organizations become reluctant to acknowledge mistakes for fear of losing financial support. Reorienting incentives toward reflective practice would allow peacebuilders to analyze missteps and share lessons publicly, turning individual experience into collective learning. International partners could fund regional review platforms such as annual retreats, joint learning sessions, or practitioner journals where Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, and other South Caucasus actors exchange analyses without fear of reputational loss.
Digital platforms present another opportunity to model dialogue in practice. When used intentionally, online spaces can connect communities across closed borders and hostile media environments. Small acts of empathy, such as acknowledging loss or celebrating progress in the neighboring society, can challenge entrenched enemy images. Civil society actors could invest in joint peace media initiatives that curate and translate local stories of coexistence, provide space for respectful debate, and counter hate narratives with credible, human-centered storytelling. Such initiatives would strengthen public resilience against disinformation and state propaganda alike.
Finally, solidarity requires rethinking how resources are mobilized and distributed. Recent cross-ideological dialogues underscored the importance of decentralizing funding to reduce dependence on a small set of international donors. Diversified mechanisms, including regional pooled funds, community-based endowments, and partnerships with ethical private foundations, could foster autonomy and reduce competition. Governments, donors, and universities could collaborate to establish Caucasus Peace Funds managed jointly by civic representatives from across the region to support small-scale, trust-based cooperation and research. Transparency and shared governance are essential to ensure these mechanisms reinforce trust rather than reproduce hierarchy.
In reimagining solidarity, the task is not coordination for its own sake but the cultivation of a community capable of sustaining dialogue through disagreement. Dialogue and solidarity, in this sense, are both method and outcome, means of building trust and cooperation despite divergence while modeling, for wider societies, the relations they seek to create. The alternative is the continued reproduction of silos, professional, ideological, and generational, that leave civil societies ill-equipped to face shared challenges. The South Caucasus has no shortage of expertise or commitment; what it lacks is the connective tissue that binds individual efforts into collective purpose.
Peace is rarely achieved by agreement alone. It endures when educators, artists, journalists, and civic leaders sustain dialogue despite fatigue, repression, or indifference. Rebuilding solidarity across movements and within peacebuilding networks is therefore not a luxury but a precondition for resilience and sustained peace. By investing in networks of trust, reflection, and agonistic solidarity, civic actors in Armenia and Azerbaijan can begin to lay the social foundations for a peace that serves the interests not only of corporations and political elites but of the societies as well.