Introduction

Azerbaijanis. They primarily speak the Azerbaijani language, which belongs to the broader Turkic family, with its closest linguistic relatives being the Turkmens in the east and the Anatolian Turks in the west. Historically, the territorial habitus of Azerbaijanis has spanned the southern Caucasus and the northern Iranian plateau. Speaking of modern political boundaries, Azerbaijanis predominantly reside in Azerbaijan, northern Iran, eastern Georgia, southern Russia, and eastdrn Turkey, if to exclude diaspora communities around the world.

When it comes to naming, there is a range of ethnonyms in use, including "Azerbaijani." This identity has a civic connotation that transcends ethno-linguistic boundaries, encompassing all citizens of the Azerbaijani Republic. Other terms include “Azeri”, “Turk”, and “Turkman”. Historically, exonyms like "Caucasian Tatars" or simply "Tatars" were used by the Russian imperial administration, while locals of that time commonly referred to themselves as "Muslims" or "Mohammedans" (Altstadt, 1992). For clarity, it may be best to use "Azerbaijani" throughout this paper, even when discussing historical contexts, to avoid confusion.

The emergence of the Azerbaijani nation in the modern sense happened in milieu of national movements in Europe. Reached its peak in May 1918, when an independent Azerbaijani state first appeared on the political map of the world. Though short-lived, this was a significant milestone in defining national borders where none had previously existed.

This papers explores the formation of the Azerbaijani nation through three key epochs. The first epoch focuses on the emergence of the national concept, culminating in the establishment of a nation-state. The second epoch looks at how these national boundaries were initially defined and then maintained within the Soviet Union. The third epoch examines the rise of an independent Azerbaijani state, shaped by the conflict with Armenia.

First Epoch: Azerbaijan Between Empire and Independence

In 1828, the Aras River became the boundary between the Russian Empire and Iran, embedding the Turco-Muslim population of the region — later known as Azerbaijanis — at the intersection of three imperial powers: the Ottomans, Iranians, and Russians. As political boundaries solidified, Azerbaijanis found themselves navigating two conflicting meta-systems that would shape future national projects.

Within the Ottoman Empire, the shared linguistic (Turkic) and religious (Islamic) ties left little space for a distinct Azerbaijani identity. The only real differentiator between Azerbaijanis and Turks was Shiism, as the ethno-linguistic lines between them were otherwise blurred. As the Ottoman state pursued modernization to fix its dysfunctionality, the Shia Turkic population (Azerbaijanis) of eastern Anatolia was largely absorbed into the "Turco-Islamic national space." This got accelerated especially ever since the Young Turks came to power in 1908 as they used multiple demographic engineering tools, from violent persecutions to mass population movements, to re-structure the multi-confessional landscape of Anatolia (Suny, 2015).

A similar dynamic existed in Qajar Iran. The Shiite core of the Iranian state, combined with the use of Turkic as a second language alongside Persian — given the predominantly Turkic elite in the government until the Pahlavi era — created conditions that mirrored the Ottoman case (Keddie, 2006; Atabaki, 2000). The Turkic-speaking population in Iran was absorbed into the larger Iranian national space. While the linguistic boundaries between Persians and Turkic speakers were clearer than in Anatolia, Iran’s long history as a Turco-Persian polity prevented the emergence of strong antagonism between the two groups (Ashraf, 2011).

In contrast, Azerbaijanis under Russian rule faced a vastly different situation. Russian expansion north of the Aras River — where the Azerbaijani republic would later be established — placed Azerbaijanis in an empire with a meta-system that was often regarded as hostile to meta-system that they represented – this was Islam (Kappeler, 2001). As Russia sought to rebrand itself as the new “Rome,” defending eastern Christians, its victories over Iran (1813, 1828) and the Ottomans (1829) led to significant forced population movements (Layton, 1994). Many Muslims were deported to Ottoman Turkey and Iran, while large numbers of Christians sought refuge in the Russian Caucasus (Bournoutian, 2020).

In modern Azerbaijani national narratives, the Russian arrival and subsequent demographic shifts are viewed as part of a deliberate imperial grand-strategy to uproot local Muslims and make room for incoming Christians (Broers, 2019). While there were indeed significant demographic changes in certain areas, this view often overlooks earlier movements, such as those during the Ottoman-Safavid wars of the 17th century, and is largely shaped by present-day political considerations (Broers, 2019).

The Russian yoke, as many Azerbaijanis refer to it, brought not only demographic shifts but also structural developments that eventually paved the way for the emergence of an Azerbaijani nation-state. Perhaps the most significant of these developments was the industrialization of the oil industry in the Absheron Peninsula, which transformed Baku from a small coastal town of a few thousand into a thriving, multinational city of international importance (Swietochowski, 1985). By the turn of the siecle, Baku held a role in the world economy similar to that of today’s Chicago or Dubai. Rapid industrialization spurred an unprecedented wave of migration, attracting not only major investors like the Nobels, Rockefellers, and Rothschilds, but also a multinational labor force, including Azerbaijanis from as far as Iran (Cronin, 2010).

Baku’s industrial boom, alongside the Russian agrarian reforms of the late 19th century, disrupted the long-standing feudal order, accelerating the formation of a local Muslim urban intelligentsia. Initially co-opted by the empire to strengthen its rule, this emerging class grew increasingly antagonistic toward the imperial authorities to re-negotiate maxims of whatever autonomy they had and expand their authority over their kins in the south of the Caucasus (Swietochowski, 1985). The local elite grew stronger as the empire entered into final stage of its life cycle.

It was the Russo-Japanese War that turned tide. Russia’s defeats created a political vacuum that new political actors were eager to exploit, challenging the once-unshakable imperial control. In central Russia, it was the socialist revolutionaries that tested the limits of imperial power. In the Caucasus, however, the political unrest took the form of violent conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Baku, igniting an ethno-political rivalry that would endure for decades. The clashes, which began in 1905, were initially fueled by a class struggle between the Armenian and Azerbaijani intelligentsia, both seeking to alter the economic balance of power over Baku’s oil fields (Swietochowski, 1985). The violence quickly spread to other cities, such as Nakhchivan, Shusha, and Ganja, where Armenians and Azerbaijanis had previously coexisted peacefully. The 1905 Armenian-Azerbaijani clashes — often referred to as the Armenian-Tatar clashes — left many dead and memory of inter-communal antagonism.

A new cycle of violence soon followed. World War I brought widespread bloodshed to Anatolia and northern Iran, displacing many communities who fled to Caucasus to escape persecution and massacre. Once again, the Caucasus became a battleground for global imperial conflict. Despite Russia’s territorial successes in the Caucasian front, internal unrest led to the disintegration of the Russian Empire. In the ensuing chaos, Azerbaijan’s quest for a separate national polity, already gaining momentum before the war, intensified. Azerbaijani intellectuals, along with their Armenian and Georgian counterparts, vacillated between various political models, from a united pan-Caucasian state to full independence (Brisku, Blauvelt, 2021). Ultimately, the drive for separation prevailed.

In May 1918, the political map of the South Caucasus underwent unprecedented changes. First Georgia, then Armenia, and finally Azerbaijan declared independence from the collapsed Russian Empire. These new states, modeled after European liberal nation-states, lacked the capacities to establish control over the territories they claimed. This weakness made seeking foreign assistance the only viable option for their survival.

In Azerbaijan, the prelude to independence was marked by the mass killing of Muslims in Baku and other areas by a small Bolshevik ruling class aligned with Dashnak militants. To regain control of Baku, the most important political and economic center in the region, the Azerbaijani government turned to the Ottoman Empire for help. This request was favorably received, as the Ottoman elite, reeling from defeats in the Balkans and Mesopotamia, saw an opportunity to achieve military success and potentially expand into Turkestan (modern-day Central Asia) by supporting Azerbaijan’s independence (Shaw, 1977).

Yet Ottoman assistance was neither extensive nor long-lasting. Defeat in World War I forced the Ottomans to withdraw. A new imperial force soon arrived from afar — Great Britain. Initially, the Azerbaijani pro-independence elite viewed the British presence with anxiety and frustration, as the British saw them as mere Ottoman sympathizers (Swietochowski, 1985). But as the British realized their empire was overstretched and lacked the resources to maintain control everywhere, they gradually recognized Azerbaijan’s de facto independence. Yet, this brief period of optimism was soon cut short. The first Azerbaijani republic failed to secure control over its claimed territories, gain full international recognition, or build alliances capable of defending it against either Russian monarchist or Bolshevik forces. All this failed and in April 1920: Baku fell to the Bolsheviks. The Soviet Azerbaijani republic was established.

First Epoch saw new imperial takeover brining sweeping changes, from demographic shifts to radical societal transformations. Baku, turned into a major economic hub of global importance, fostered an emerging urban Azerbaijani elite exposed to Western ideas of nationhood and statehood. Two rounds of violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis — in 1905-1906 and again in 1918-1920 — solidified the roots of ethno-political antagonism in the decades to come. The establishment of the first Azerbaijani republic, though brief, marked both the apex and the end of the First Epoch.

The Second Epoch: Soviet Azerbaijan

A uniformly binary interpretation of Soviet nationality policies is fundamentally flawed, as these policies varied not only across different regimes but were also influenced by a multitude of factors, including geopolitical considerations and geo-economic imperatives. A common misconception arises from the assumption that communism's rejection of ethno-centric nationalism equates to a wholesale denial of national identities. However, being anti-nationalist does not imply being anti-national. In reality, Soviet nationality policies, while promoting the "friendship of nations" and advancing an overarching Soviet identity (homo sovieticus), simultaneously facilitated the establishment of distinct — often coercively imposed — national boundaries for the titular nations of each republic.

Moreover, in multi-ethnic regions like Azerbaijan, home to approximately 30 ethno-confessional groups, the process of nation-building was characterized by a mutually interdependent dynamic: the national space allocated to the titular nation was intricately designed to accommodate the national spaces of ethnic minorities, thereby creating a two-layered territorial habitus.

The Soviet takeover of the Caucasus posed a formidable challenge for the Bolsheviks in their efforts to territorialize the three constituent nations (Saparov, 2014). A central issue was the enduring legacy of Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over three contested territories: Nakhchivan, Zangezur, and Karabakh. In Nakhchivan, a degree of territorial autonomy was established within Soviet Azerbaijan, largely influenced by the geopolitical pressures exerted also by Kemalist Turkey. In Zangezur, the region was partitioned, with Armenian-majority areas incorporated into Soviet Armenia and Muslim-majority areas absorbed into Soviet Azerbaijan. Karabakh, however, underwent territorial reorganization, resulting in the establishment of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, predominantly populated by Armenians, within Soviet Azerbaijan (Saparov, 2014).

Lenin conceptualized Azerbaijan as the "Lighthouse of the East," envisioning it as a potential stronghold for export of communism into Western Asia (Swietochowski, 1985). In alignment with this vision, the Congress of the Peoples of the East was convened in Baku in December 1920. This period was marked by a notable degree of autonomy for local Azerbaijani Bolsheviks. However, this autonomy began to deteriorate as the Soviet Union entered into Great Russian Chauvinism under Stalin. The purges of the 1930s had devastating effects on Azerbaijani intellectuals, including those who had initially supported the Bolshevik takeover in 1920, many of whom faced execution in show trials.

The vision of Soviet Azerbaijan as the "Lighthouse of the East" rapidly lost its relevance. During this era, the Soviet regime undertook concerted efforts to isolate Soviet Azerbaijan from its neighbors, particularly Turkey and Iran (Altstadt, 1992). This strategy was twofold: first, the term "Azerbaijani" was institutionalized to distinguish it from "Turk," while the Azerbaijani language was reorganized in Cyrillic script, effectively severing connections with the broader Turkic and Islamic world. Second, Soviet policies sought to reframe Azerbaijani identity as an "autochthonous genesis zone" through the strategic deployment of national historiography to ground Soviet Azerbaijani identity in a localized, indigenous narrative that emphasized a deep historical continuity within the territorial boundaries of Soviet Azerbaijan (Broers, 2019).

As the tide of World War II turned in its favor, those in Moscow understood that it got a unique chance to reimagine its political geography, particularly in the South Caucasus. The shift reopened the Caucasus as a frontier for Soviet ambitions, with Azerbaijan positioned as a new Lighthouse but no longer for Western Asia. Soviet Azerbaijan become central to Soviet attempts to influence Azerbaijanis in northern Iran, a region occupied earlier in the war to secure supply routes but increasingly viewed as a potential sphere for Soviet territorial expansion (Hasanli, 2014).

Following the Nazi defeat in 1945, Moscow supported the establishment of short-lived the Azerbaijan People’s Government for Iranian Azerbaijanis. It was an important moment for the Soviet Azerbaijani elite, some of whom had survived the Great Purge only to be entrusted with a bold new experiment in nation-building beyond the Soviet borders. Yet, this project required more than mere state creation; it demanded the institutionalization of ethno-centrism of all spheres of life — from language policy to governance and the economy — within a meta-system that formally suppressed ethno-centrism. Long story short, the Azerbaijan crisis of 1946, often cited as the first Cold War confrontation, forced the USSR to retreat, bowing to Anglo-American pressure and abandoning its ambitions for a secessionist experiment in northern Iran (Hasanli, 2014).

Despite its brevity, the experiment's repercussions echoed through Soviet Azerbaijan for decades. Stalin’s death opened the door for the reversal of purges and, with it, the rise of a more autonomous and nationalizing local elite. This autonomy gradually enabled the Soviet Azerbaijani republic to pursue a more overtly nationalistic trajectory, paralleling developments in neighboring Georgia and Armenia (Broers, 2019). The notion of a "lost homeland" in Iranian Azerbaijan became an enduring motif and shaped the nationalizing agenda of the Soviet Azerbaijani leadership. Yet, this latent aspiration was soon subsumed by a more immediate crisis: the outbreak of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh — a region that, until then, held little, if any, ethno-political resonance for most Azerbaijanis.

Third Epoch: Azerbaijan Between War and Independence

The secessionist movement in Nagorno-Karabakh, began in 1988, quickly escalated into violent inter-communal clashes that engulfed both Soviet Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan. Over the next four years, as the Soviet Union crumbled, approximately half a million people were displaced from both sides — Armenians fled from Azerbaijan to Armenia, and Azerbaijanis from Armenia to Azerbaijan (De Waal, 2003). As each republic largely “eliminated” its ethnic minority populations, the conflict became increasingly focused on Nagorno-Karabakh, where a bi-communal life still existed. The First Karabakh War, which erupted in 1991 and lasted until May 1994, ended in a decisive Armenian victory. Azerbaijan not only lost control over Nagorno-Karabakh but also over seven surrounding regions, leading to the displacement of an additional 650,000 people, predominantly Azerbaijanis (De Waal, 2003).

The Azerbaijani Republic emerged in the ashes of this humiliating defeat, with the loss of Karabakh becoming a new cause celebre. The unresolved conflict with Armenia shaped the very foundations of Azerbaijani national identity, to the point where one could argue the conflict itself became a defining element of national meaning. As the peace process stalled, with Armenia refusing to return occupied territories and communication between Armenians and Azerbaijanis reduced to virtually non-existent levels, the Azerbaijani national dream increasingly centered on reversing the outcomes of the first war, which were widely perceived as unjust and illegitimate.

On the foreign dimension, in 1992-1993, President Abulfaz Elchibey pursued a vision of greater Turkic unity, hoping to secure Turkey's political and possibly military support in the conflict with Armenia. Yet the strategy proved misguided. Not only Turkey was unable to offer the desired level of support, but this also raised alarms in Iran, concerned about the potential spread of pan-Turkic sentiment to its own large Azerbaijani population, as well as in Russia, which viewed Azerbaijan’s growing ties with NATO-member Turkey as a geopolitical threat.

Domestically, Elchibey’s pan-Turkic orientation sparked an identity crisis. The resurrection of the "Turk" label for Azerbaijani identity and language, intended to counteract the Stalin-era isolation of Azerbaijan from its non-Soviet neighbors, was met with micro-resistance among non-Turkic ethnic groups. In areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, there were instances of pro-secessionist movements, though it remains difficult to determine whether these were mass social movement seeking greater rights or local warlords exploiting ethno-linguistic differences (De Waal, 2003).

Pan-Turkic orientation was swiftly abandoned when Heydar Aliyev came to power in 1993. Aliyev reversed Elchibey’s nationality policies, rejecting any irredentist aspirations in favor of a pan-Azerbaijani approach with two layers: all individuals of diverse ethno-confessional backgrounds within the territorial boundaries of Azerbaijan, and ethnic Azerbaijanis living both within the republic and abroad (Broers, 2019). The boundaries between these two were deliberately left ambiguous, and any attempts to further define or distinguish them were condemned.

The conflict with Armenia ignited what can be termed a "battle of histories," wherein both sides have crafted competing historical narratives to legitimize their territorial and political claims. In Azerbaijan, two dominant historiographical schools have emerged and become deeply institutionalized, reinforcing the broader contours of the conflict. The first is the Caucasian Albanian School, which posits that Armenians, particularly those in Nagorno-Karabakh, are descendants of "Armenianized" Caucasian Albanians. This school of thought seeks to appropriate the region’s Christian past, linking its religious and cultural heritage to the Caucasian Albanians, who are framed as ancestral to modern Azerbaijanis. By doing so, it challenges the Armenian historical claim to Karabakh by recasting Armenians as later colonial settlers who assimilated an indigenous, pre-Armenian Christian population (Broers, 2019).

The second historiographical school revolves around the concept of "Western Azerbaijan," which reclaims contemporary Armenian territory, including the capital, Yerevan, by invoking historical arguments about the region's Muslim-majority composition prior to the 19th century. This narrative is further intertwined with broader interpretations of Russian imperial intervention, suggesting that demographic shifts during the Russian Empire's expansion resulted in the displacement of Azerbaijanis and the establishment of what is now seen as an Armenian "settler colonial" state. By framing Armenia’s current territorial presence as illegitimate and portraying its foundation as a product of imperial manipulation, this interpretation lays the groundwork for irredentist aspirations, alluding to the possibility of a "Greater Azerbaijan" that encompasses lands now part of Armenia (Broers, 2019).

Battles did not happen only in history: political protagonists in both countries weaponized the continuous armed rivalry to strengthen domestic legitimacy, portraying the conflict not only as a territorial dispute but as a matter of existential survival. Ethno-nationalist rhetoric became more pervasive in political discourse, marginalizing alternative narratives. This went in parallel with unprecedented spike in arms procurement and collective militarization on both ends. Fueled by revenues from  oil and gas sector, military expenditures in Azerbaijan saw significant growth and this military buildup reinforced narratives that framed the conflict as a zero-sum struggle, where strength and deterrence were perceived as prerequisites for national security.

In 2020, Azerbaijan realized its long-held aspiration by regaining control over the majority of its previously occupied territories. Then, in September 2023, when Azerbaijan reasserted control over the remaining parts of Nagorno-Karabakh, there was a mass exodus of Armenians from the region to Armenia within weeks. The nearly century-long Armenian-Azerbaijani ethno-territorial rivalry has thus reached a points, where both nations-states have effectively become ethnically homogenized, with few or no members of the “opposing group” remaining within each other's borders. In essence, the history of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is a story of forced displacement, with the creation of mutually exclusive national spaces rooted in the elimination of the "Other."

The Third Epoch began as Azerbaijan became embroiled in conflict with its neighbor Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. The first war resulted in a decisive defeat for Azerbaijan and led to a significant humanitarian catastrophe that affected the entire social fabric of both countries. The rise of ethno-nationalism and militarization, fueled by the expanding and strengthening coercive state apparatuses supported by abundant resources flowing into Azerbaijan, paved the way for the second war. This second war, along with the more recent 2023 offensive, has resulted in mass displacement and significant losses for Armenia and Armenians. This is how the Third Epoch concluded as Armenia and Azerbaijan transition into a post-Karabakh era, albeit one characterized by a violent nation-building process that has incurred a humanitarian toll of over a million displaced individuals. Whether a Fourth Epoch will emerge and what form it will take remains to be seen.

Conclusion

Three Epochs of Azerbaijani nation are about Empire, Oil and War as it is by centuries of imperial rivalry, conflict, and survival within a volatile geopolitical environment. The century-long rivalry between Armenians and Azerbaijanis is not an isolated occurrence; rather, it is part of a broader historical trajectory influenced by larger meta structures, characterized by the struggle to carve out national identities in an antagonistic manner and the quest for national cohesion in a region historically plagued by fragmentation and external intervention. The entry of the nation-state into the Caucasus disrupted the long-established linguistic and confessional mosaic of the region.

Azerbaijani identity emerged at the intersection of imperial confrontations among Russia, the Ottomans, and Iran. For Azerbaijan to establish itself as an independent nation-state in 1918, it endured nearly a century of imperial domination, a process that ultimately proved counterproductive. The Soviet period significantly shaped Azerbaijan's territorial contours, as Soviet policies of national delimitation and controlled autonomy reinforced distinct national identities. Moreover, the brief Soviet experiment in northern Iran had lasting effects, fostering a more nationalistic Azerbaijani identity within the Soviet system of the “friendship of nations.”

Azerbaijan's independence was gained alongside a humiliating defeat, which transformed the national project into an institutionalized antagonism toward the "Other." This antagonism manifested in various forms, from nationalist historiographical narratives to increased militarism. The fulfillment of the Azerbaijani “dream” in 2020 and 2023 came at the cost of widespread suffering among Armenians during the most recent cycles of Armenian-Azerbaijani violence. While territorial claims may have been ostensibly resolved for the time being, the legacies of displacement, loss, and inter-communal animosity will continue to shape the region's future. The creation of ethnically homogeneous spaces in both Armenia and Azerbaijan suggests that, despite the cessation of large-scale hostilities, the prospects for reconciliation remain tenuous.

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