For the first time since the early 1990s, the South Caucasus can be described as an island of relative stability, given Russia’s war to the north and escalating instability to the south. Despite these surrounding conflicts, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia remain relatively stable, creating a narrow but important strategic opportunity.
At the same time, the region is entering a new phase. With the Karabakh issue largely resolved and Armenia and Azerbaijan moving toward border demarcation, the first tangible signs of post-conflict normalization are beginning to emerge. In this context, transit cooperation is finally starting to take shape following the latest Washington agreement.
For example, in November 2025, wheat shipments from Kazakhstan and Russia reached Armenia via Azerbaijan for the first time in nearly three decades. In December, Azerbaijan delivered fuel to Armenia via Georgia. In February 2026, another grain shipment followed the same route. These movements remain limited in scale, but their significance is not economic — it is political. They signal that previously blocked routes can function again. For Armenia and Azerbaijan, they represent cautious confidence-building steps. For external actors, they indicate that the region may be shifting from conflict management toward selective re-engagement. Although these steps are primarily unfolding between Armenia and Azerbaijan, they also underscore Georgia’s continued importance as a transit facilitator, linking emerging routes and ensuring their practical viability.
The question is whether the three states will recognize the strategic significance of this moment and act on it collectively. This paper argues that without a shared regional identity and a sense of ownership, the South Caucasus will remain subject to divide-and-rule dynamics by external and regional powers, leaving Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia to navigate these pressures rather than shape the region’s future. In this context, a C3+ format offers a practical mechanism to begin reversing this dynamic by creating a flexible platform for coordination, allowing the three states to collectively define their regional priorities while engaging external partners on their own terms.
Living in the South Caucasus, Dreaming Elsewhere
Although Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia live in the same region, they imagine themselves elsewhere. More specifically, each state has defined itself outward rather than regionally. Azerbaijan positions itself as a bridge to the Turkic world and increasingly looks toward Central Asia, engaging with formats such as C5+. Armenia frames itself as a sovereign-controlled crossroads while moving between the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union. Georgia, meanwhile, situates itself within the Black Sea context and often distances itself from the South Caucasus as a political concept. They occupy the same geography, but operate within different strategic maps.
This fragmentation of identity creates geopolitical opportunities for both regional and external powers. If the three South Caucasus states do not collectively define and manage their region as a shared geopolitical space, others will continue to do so for them. For example, Russia seeks to retain leverage through security legacies and economic entanglements, despite its declining capacity. The European Union, meanwhile, is attempting to rebalance its regional engagement by increasing investment in Armenia, potentially reducing Georgia’s relative transit centrality. Iran’s primary interest is not connectivity but containment — specifically, preventing any transit architecture that could decrease its influence in the South Caucasus. Turkey is structurally embedded through its strategic partnership with Azerbaijan, using energy and transport corridors to anchor its influence in the South Caucasus while extending connectivity toward Central Asia.
Why C3+ Matters Now
The term C3 refers to the three South Caucasus states — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia. The plus sign signals openness to structured engagement with external partners — the EU, Turkey, the United States, or multilateral development banks — without granting them agenda-setting authority. The C3+ format should not be viewed as an integration project and not as a formal institutional framework, but as a mechanism for coordination among Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, with external partners engaged on their terms.
In this context, C3+ could function as a regional operating system — structuring how these fragmented, project-based interactions connect over time. At the same time, it carries an emerging ideological dimension: a shift toward viewing the South Caucasus as a shared strategic space that should be coordinated from within rather than defined from outside. It does not eliminate political divergence or the trust deficit between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but the format could organize these differences, identify areas of shared political interest, and enable coordination across sectors.
Recent security risks affecting Nakhchivan have exposed the region’s underlying interdependence and how the C3+ format could work in practice. In this context, Armenia could serve as an alternative link between Azerbaijan and its exclave Nakhchivan. Azerbaijan’s energy exports could, in turn, diversify Armenia’s energy profile and connect it more directly to Central Asia. On the other hand, Georgia plays a central facilitation role, connecting trade between Armenia and Azerbaijan and external markets.
The region already contains a dense network of strategic assets — the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, the Southern Gas Corridor, regional railways, and emerging projects such as the Black Sea undersea cable. This interdependence is becoming more complex as a new corridor initiative namely the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) is added to the region. The TRIPP corridor illustrates both the opportunity and the risk. While it is expected to create new economic linkages between Armenia and Azerbaijan, it is also viewed in Georgia as a potential challenge to its established role as a transit hub. Yet in practice, Georgia remains a critical link in regional connectivity, facilitating routes that connect Armenia and Azerbaijan. Considering these projects, it can be argued that what is missing is not infrastructure, but a framework that connects these assets into a coherent regional strategy.
Therefore, C3+ could serve that role — not by imposing integration, but by structuring coordination. It would also mark a shift in how risk is managed. Until now, security and transit risks in the region have largely been externalized — mediated or influenced by outside actors. A C3+ framework would begin to internalize parts of that responsibility, allowing the three states to manage economic and logistical interdependence more directly. The recent Armenia–Azerbaijan bargaining process already suggests this logic: when negotiations are conducted directly, without third-party framing, they tend to produce more pragmatic, sequenced outcomes than externally structured formats have delivered in the past (e.g. the EU, Russia or the US).
Learning from Central Asia, the C5+ format offers a partial but instructive comparison. Although the C5+ format has not produced deep regional integration, it has created a habit of coordination through regular consultative meetings, joint external engagement, and issue-based cooperation. It has enabled five states with differing foreign policy orientations to coordinate pragmatically while maintaining strategic autonomy. Its strength lies in its flexibility: it does not impose alignment, but creates space for cooperation and allows engagement with external partners without forcing zero-sum choices. The lesson for the South Caucasus is not to replicate C5+, but to adapt its minimalism: coordination without integration, and engagement without uniformity.
In the South Caucasus, where even technical issues are treated as high politics, any trilateral initiative must begin at the political level to be viable. Yet political signaling alone is insufficient. A more realistic pathway is dual-track: political engagement provides legitimacy, while implementation advances in parallel through narrowly defined, technical cooperation. For example, C3+ could structure cooperation in lower-sensitivity domains, including river basin management in shared systems such as the Kura–Aras basin, and establish a Regional Emergency Action Partnership for coordinated disaster response (e.g. early-warning alerts). Given the frequency of floods, earthquakes, and climate-related shocks, such a mechanism would enable joint preparedness, pooled resources, and faster cross-border responses.
Conclusion
Acting together, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia could present a coherent pipeline of regional projects to external investors (e.g. the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank), rather than competing individually for attention and financing. They could improve their bargaining position vis-à-vis external actors and reduce the risk of being played against each other. Just as importantly, they could begin to articulate a shared regional narrative — something that has been largely absent.
In this sense, C3+ should not be understood as a unifying policy framework, but as a regional operating system — a platform for coordinating corridors, aligning investment narratives, and managing shared risks. At the same time, it introduces a functional ideological shift: encouraging the South Caucasus states to view the region as a shared strategic space to be managed collectively, rather than navigated individually.
If the region is to move beyond fragmentation, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia must first recognize that they share not only geography but an interest in managing that geography collectively. At the same time, the three states should not ignore or downplay their South Caucasus identity by projecting themselves exclusively into other regions. While they naturally connect to different geopolitical spaces — the Black Sea, the Caspian, or Central Asia — these orientations need not come at the expense of recognizing their shared regional reality.
As I mentioned above, the current moment — shaped by external conflicts and shifting geopolitical attention — offers a rare opportunity to test this approach. It may not last. If missed, the region is likely to return to familiar patterns of fragmentation, external dependency, and competing infrastructure logics. The South Caucasus does not lack connectivity. It lacks coherent and pragmatic political coordination.