The Anticolonial Rhetoric That Wasn’t New: Continuity and Amplification in Azerbaijan’s Foreign Policy Narrative, 1991–2026

Departamento de Eurasia

Articulos

The Anticolonial Rhetoric That Wasn’t New: Continuity and Amplification in Azerbaijan’s Foreign Policy Narrative, 1991–2026
A Document Analysis of Azerbaijani Foreign Policy Documents

Anuar Temirov[1]

1. Introduction

In July 2026, addressing the fourth Shusha Global Media Forum before an international audience of journalists and media executives, President Ilham Aliyev offered an unusually explicit historical self-characterization of his country. Azerbaijan, he said, had been «colonized in the 19th century» and, once absorbed into the Soviet Union, had existed as a republic «without any real rights»; the understanding of what it meant to be a colony, and subsequently to become free, remained embedded in the nation’s historical memory (APA News Agency, 2026; Ajmedia English, 2026). Aliyev went further, asserting that the Soviet period had seen the extraction of billions of tons of oil from Azerbaijani territory, that the collapse of the USSR had left the newly independent republic without adequate electricity or gas supply, and that Baku was still spending heavily to remediate the environmental damage left by decades of Soviet resource extraction around the capital (APA News Agency, 2026; News.am, 2026).

Read in isolation, these remarks might appear as a striking rhetorical departure for a government more commonly associated, in the scholarly literature, with pragmatic multi-vector diplomacy, energy-driven statecraft, and an increasingly assertive but conventionally nationalist discourse toward Armenia (Cornell, 2011; Mamishova, 2019). The timing invites a straightforward hypothesis: that Baku’s anticolonial framing is a recent invention, manufactured after Azerbaijan’s decisive military victories in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020 and the September 2023 Karabakh offensive, and deployed to reposition Azerbaijan as a spokesperson for the Global South. This reading finds circumstantial support in the institutional record: in July 2023, participants at a conference held in Baku under the auspices of the Non-Aligned Movement’s Coordinating Bureau, then chaired by Azerbaijan, founded the Baku Initiative Group (BIG), a non-governmental organization explicitly dedicated to «advancing global partnerships in decolonisation and human rights» (Caliber.az, 2025a; Bakuinitiative.org, n.d.). Since its founding, BIG has organized dozens of conferences on colonial legacies in French, Belgian, and Dutch overseas territories, filed submissions to United Nations human-rights bodies, and positioned Azerbaijan as a vocal advocate of decolonization on the world stage (Caliber.az, 2025b; APA News Agency, 2025; Trend.az, 2025).

This article asks whether that hypothesis withstands scrutiny. Is the anticolonial narrative now voiced by Azerbaijani officials a recent development, introduced to serve the diplomatic requirements of the post-2020 period, or has it been a constitutive element of Azerbaijani statehood and foreign policy since the country’s independence in 1991? To answer this question, the article undertakes a document analysis of Azerbaijan’s foundational legal and doctrinal texts—beginning with the Constitutional Act on State Independence adopted on 18 October 1991—alongside the country’s engagement with the GUAM regional grouping and, more recently, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Baku Initiative Group. The central argument is that anticolonial framing is not a post-2020 innovation but a continuous thread running through Azerbaijani statecraft since 1991; what has changed is the narrative’s scale, audience, and institutional vehicle, not its underlying presence.

2. Theoretical Framework: Postcoloniality and the Post-Soviet Space

The applicability of postcolonial and decolonial theory to the former Soviet space has itself been a long-running and unsettled debate within area studies. David Chioni Moore’s foundational 2001 essay argued that the vast post-Soviet sphere had been almost entirely absent from postcolonial studies despite the fact that Russia and the Soviet Union exercised colonial control over the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltic states, and Central and Eastern Europe for periods ranging from fifty to two hundred years (Moore, 2001). Moore described a «double silence» in which post-Sovietist scholars avoided postcolonial theoretical vocabulary while postcolonial theorists avoided the Russo-Soviet world, a mutual neglect he attributed partly to Soviet claims of anti-imperial credentials and partly to Western academia’s Eurocentric mapping of colonialism onto overseas empires alone. Revisiting his own argument more than two decades later, Moore observed that only one half of that double silence persists: NATO and European Union accession have functioned as «decolonial accelerators» for parts of the former Eastern Bloc, even as postcolonial studies continues largely to bypass the post-Soviet world, a gap thrown into sharp relief by the differential scholarly and political responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza (cited in Mecila 2023; see also the 2024 retrospective on Moore’s thesis).

Scholars working on the South Caucasus specifically have engaged this debate with reference to Armenia, asking whether postcolonial or decolonial theoretical frames illuminate Armenian historical experience and contemporary politics, and cautioning against both uncritically importing the vocabulary of Western postcolonial studies and excluding the post-Soviet South Caucasus from it altogether (see the discussion of Tlostanova’s decolonial method in Mecila 2023). This scholarship treats the Caucasus as what Madina Tlostanova has called a doubly liminal space, in which Russia itself occupies an ambivalent position as both a colonizing power vis-à-vis its own peripheries and a state that has historically constructed itself as marginal to a Eurocentric «West» (Mecila, 2023). Azerbaijan’s use of colonial and anticolonial vocabulary should therefore be read against this broader post-Soviet pattern rather than treated as sui generis. What distinguishes Azerbaijan from most of its post-Soviet neighbors, however, is the degree to which its political leadership has moved from an implicit and largely domestic anticolonial self-understanding toward an explicit, institutionalized, and externally directed decolonization agenda—precisely the empirical puzzle this article tries to investigate.

3. Methodology

The article employs qualitative document analysis as its primary method, a technique well suited to tracing the persistence and transformation of a discursive frame across a long time span and multiple genres of official text (Mamishova, 2019; Strakes, 2013). This method is supplemented by a quantitative word-frequency analysis of the same core documents. The design distinguishes two tiers of source material. The first tier, the primary-document corpus, consists of texts for which the full or substantially complete verbatim wording could be retrieved and independently verified; these six documents are the object of both the close qualitative reading in Sections 4 through 6 and the word-frequency coding in Section 8. The second tier, the secondary-scholarly corpus, consists of peer-reviewed studies and specialized monographs that supply historical context, interpretive framing, and corroboration for claims about periods or institutions—such as the Popular Front government of 1992–1993 or the internal deliberations of GUAM—for which no full primary text could be obtained; these sources inform the qualitative narrative but are not word-counted, since coding a scholarly commentary about a period is not equivalent to coding the primary document that period produced.

The primary-document corpus comprises six texts spanning thirty-five years, selected to represent each of the major doctrinal moments identified in the qualitative literature: (1) the Constitutional Act on the State Independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan, adopted 18 October 1991, the state’s founding legal instrument (Legalacts.az, 1991); (2) President Heydar Aliyev’s address to the First Congress of World Azerbaijanis, delivered in Baku on 10 November 2001 and published in the newspaper Bakinsky Rabochy the following day, the single speech most consistently identified in Azerbaijani official and scholarly sources as the founding articulation of the «Azerbaijanism» (Azərbaycançılıq) doctrine (Aliyev, 2001); (3) the institutional description of national security policy under the heading «Ensuring National Security,» which restates the operative content of the National Security Concept and Foreign Policy postulates approved by presidential decree in 2007 (Preslib.az, n.d.; Rasporyazhenie Prezidenta, 2007); (4) President Ilham Aliyev’s remarks at the «Facing a New World Order» forum of the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, 2025 (Jam-news.net, 2025); (5) President Ilham Aliyev’s remarks at the 4th Shusha Global Media Forum, 2026 (APA News, 2026); and (6) the Baku Initiative Group’s institutional self-description, retrieved 2026 (Bakuinitiative.org., n.d.). For each of the two lengthy presidential transcripts, coding was restricted to the substantive colonial-discourse portion of the exchange rather than the entire multi-topic transcript, since the surrounding material—covering energy diplomacy, regional connectivity, and bilateral relations—contains no colonial vocabulary at all and its inclusion would simply dilute the density measure without adding analytical information; this restriction is noted for each document in Table 1.

It is worth noting that one of the limitations is that the doctrinal material from the 2000s regarding anticolonial narratives in the Azerbaijani foreign policy is more often available only as paraphrase, secondary summary, or short quotation embedded in later commentary, which is precisely the kind of material this article’s coding protocol excludes from quantitative measurement in order to avoid conflating a commentator’s vocabulary with the state’s own. Therefore, Heydar Aliyev’s 2001 Congress speech, and the Azerbaijan’s national-security doctrine, register a colonial-vocabulary density of zero, a finding that materially sharpens rather than merely fills out the article’s argument about when explicit colonial vocabulary entered Azerbaijani official discourse.

Each primary document was coded in two complementary ways. Qualitatively, the text was read for the presence and structure of anticolonial argumentation—claims of external domination, resource exploitation, humiliation, occupation, and demanded restitution—regardless of whether these claims used the specific vocabulary of «colonialism» or the more legally neutral vocabulary of occupation and sovereignty. Quantitatively, the same text was searched exhaustively, using a case-insensitive substring match rather than a fixed keyword list so as to capture all inflected forms, for every occurrence of the colon- root in both English and Russian (colony/colonies, colonial, colonialism, colonize/colonized, colonization, decolonization, neocolonial, postcolonial). This dual coding is what allows the article to distinguish, as the National Security Concept and the 2001 Azerbaijanism speech illustrate, between the presence of anticolonial argumentative structure and the presence of anticolonial vocabulary as such—two dimensions of the phenomenon that, as the Discussion in Section 10 argues, moved together only after 2019.

4. Historical Foundations: The Anticolonial Narrative at Independence

4.1 The Constitutional Act on State Independence (1991)

The clearest evidence against the hypothesis that Azerbaijan’s anticolonial narrative is a recent invention is textual and lies in the country’s own founding legal instrument. The Constitutional Act on State Independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan, adopted by the Supreme Council on 18 October 1991 and subsequently confirmed by a referendum in December of that year, explicitly frames seventy years of Soviet rule in the vocabulary of colonialism. The Act states that following the Sovietization of Azerbaijan a «policy of colonialism was pursued towards Azerbaijan,» during which the country’s natural resources were exploited, its national wealth removed, and its population subjected to repression (Legalacts.az, 1991). The same document goes further, characterizing the 1920 entry of the Soviet Russian 11th Army into Azerbaijan and the overthrow of the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR, 1918–1920) as an act of foreign occupation under international law, and it formally declares the newly independent republic to be the legal successor not of the Soviet-era Azerbaijan SSR but of the pre-Soviet ADR (Legalacts.az 1991; Preslib.az n.d.). This is a strikingly categorical anticolonial framing embedded not in a campaign speech or a diplomatic address but in the constitutive legal act of the state itself, adopted at the very moment of independence rather than three decades later.

This finding matters methodologically because it establishes that the vocabulary later used by Ilham Aliyev at Shusha in 2026—colonization, exploitation of resources, deprivation of rights—replicates almost verbatim the language of the 1991 Constitutional Act. The historical claim of colonization is therefore not a rhetorical innovation of the post-2020 period; it is a restatement, in a new institutional and diplomatic setting, of a narrative that has functioned as one of the two or three foundational legitimating myths of the Azerbaijani state since its inception, alongside the myth of continuity with the 1918 Democratic Republic and, from the early 1990s onward, the narrative of Armenian aggression in Nagorno-Karabakh (Tokluoglu, 2011; Gamaghelyan, 2010).

4.2 The Popular Front, Elchibey, and Anti-Soviet Nation-Building (1988–1993)

The anticolonial framing embedded in the 1991 Constitutional Act did not emerge from a legal vacuum; it was the culmination of a nationalist mobilization that had been building since 1988 around the Azerbaijani Popular Front (Azərbaycan Xalq Cəbhəsi), a movement that transformed itself from a discussion circle of nationalist intellectuals into a mass movement demanding independence from Moscow (Cornell, 2011). Under the leadership of Abulfaz Elchibey, who became Azerbaijan’s first post-Soviet elected president in June 1992, the Popular Front articulated an explicitly pan-Turkist and anti-Soviet vision of Azerbaijani nationhood that drew on the pre-Soviet intellectual legacy of Ali-Bek Huseyn-Zade and Mammad Emin Rasul-Zade, founders of the 1918 Democratic Republic (Cornell, 2011). Elchibey’s government pursued rapid de-Sovietization and positioned Azerbaijan rhetorically alongside Turkey and the wider Turkic world in opposition to a Russian-dominated post-Soviet order (Cornell, 2011). Although the Popular Front government proved short-lived, collapsing in June 1993 amid military setbacks in Karabakh and a coup that returned Heydar Aliyev to power, its brief tenure entrenched anti-Soviet and anti-Russian historical memory as an organizing element of the new republic’s political identity, one that would later be absorbed, rather than discarded, by its successor government (Cornell, 2011).

4.3 Heydar Aliyev’s Doctrine: Azerbaijanism and Strategic Hedging

Heydar Aliyev, who had himself been First Secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Azerbaijan before returning to power in 1993, faced the delicate task of retaining the legitimating anticolonial narrative of 1991 while moderating the irredentist pan-Turkism of the Elchibey period, which he regarded as destabilizing both for relations with Iran and for the internal cohesion of the new state (Hovsepyan & Tonoyan, 2025). His solution was the doctrine that Azerbaijani scholarship has come to call «Azerbaijanism» (Azərbaycançılıq), a civic-national identity project that retained the foundational claim of Soviet colonization and dispossession while redirecting political energy toward state consolidation, oil-based economic development, and a foreign policy posture that scholars have described as «strategic hedging» between Russia and the West (Mamishova, 2019; Cornell, 2011). Mamishova’s (2019) analysis of Azerbaijan’s post-1993 foreign policy toward Russia shows that Baku pursued neither straightforward balancing against, nor bandwagoning with, Moscow, but a hybrid strategy driven by concerns over sovereignty and territorial integrity that were themselves justified by reference to the country’s earlier experience of subjugation. Azerbaijan’s vast hydrocarbon wealth and its self-description as a state whose resources had once been «mercilessly exploited» by an external colonizer provided both the material means and the narrative justification for a foreign policy oriented toward reducing dependence on Russia (Mamishova, 2019; Tadevosyan, 2024). In this sense, the anticolonial narrative did not disappear under Heydar Aliyev; it was institutionalized as one of the ideational foundations of the country’s foreign policy doctrine, even as its most strident nationalist and irredentist elements were tempered.

Read against the anticolonial framework established by the 1991 Constitutional Act ten years earlier, the 2001 speech is doctrinally continuous with it in argumentative structure but markedly different in vocabulary. Aliyev tells the assembled diaspora that Azerbaijan spent seventy years within the Soviet Union living under a political-economic system fundamentally unlike that of other countries, deprived of independence, and he makes the resource-extraction argument in terms almost identical to the Constitutional Act’s: Azerbaijani oil, first extracted industrially some 150 years earlier, he says, “never belonged to the Azerbaijani people, since for seventy years the wealth generated by Azerbaijan’s oil and gas resources flowed into the general economy of the Soviet Union and Azerbaijan could not obtain the necessary profit from it” (Aliyev, 2001). He further states that Azerbaijan’s 1920 loss of independence is being restored, using the verb «restored» for the sovereignty lost in 1920 in exactly the framing used by the Constitutional Act, and he links this restored sovereignty causally to the country’s ability, after 1991, to expand ties with Azerbaijanis abroad and to pursue an independent oil strategy through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and related contracts with thirty-two foreign oil companies (Aliyev, 2001).

What is analytically interesting, and confirmed by the word-frequency analysis in Section 8, is that this extended argument about seventy years of externally controlled resource extraction and lost sovereignty is made without a single occurrence of «colony,» «colonial,» «colonialism,» or any cognate term, in a speech of 690 words analyzed here. Aliyev instead uses the vocabulary of deprivation, subjugation, and non-independence—terms that describe the same relationship of external domination that the Constitutional Act, drafted under his predecessor Ayaz Mutalibov’s Supreme Council a decade earlier, had explicitly called «a policy of colonialism» (Legalacts.az, 1991; Aliyev, 2001). The 2001 speech also introduces, alongside the Soviet-era grievance, the Karabakh occupation grievance in the same register, describing twenty percent of Azerbaijani land as under Armenian military occupation and invoking the four 1993 UN Security Council resolutions demanding withdrawal—material evidence, independent of the 2007 National Security Concept discussed further, that the fusion of the Soviet-colonial and Karabakh-occupation narratives identified in Section 7 was already underway in official rhetoric as early as 2001, nearly two decades before the Non-Aligned Movement chairmanship gave that fusion a global audience (Aliyev, 2001). The 2001 speech thus supplies direct primary-source confirmation that Heydar Aliyev’s Azerbaijanism doctrine preserved the substantive anticolonial claims of 1991 while consistently declining to use the word «colonialism» itself.

4.4 The National Security Concept (2007): Anticolonial Structure Without Anticolonial Vocabulary

Another document that never uses the word «colonialism,» is the National Security Concept of the Republic of Azerbaijan, approved by presidential decree in 2007 and remaining in force, with prospective amendment (Rasporyazhenie Prezidenta, 2007; Modern.az, 2025). Article 4.1.1 of the Concept, titled «Restoration of the Territorial Integrity of the Republic of Azerbaijan,» declares Azerbaijan’s territory to be single, inviolable, and indivisible, and identifies the restoration of territorial integrity by all means available under international law as the most important task of the state’s national security policy (Rasporyazhenie Prezidenta, 2007). The article goes on to describe the conflict with Armenia in terms drawn directly from United Nations Security Council Resolutions 822, 853, 874, and 884, adopted in 1993, and commits the state to a settlement based on the withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from «all occupied territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan,» the restoration of Azerbaijani sovereign rights over those territories, and the return of forcibly displaced Azerbaijanis to their homes (Rasporyazhenie Prezidenta, 2007).

What makes Article 4.1.1 analytically significant for this article is not its use of colonial vocabulary, which is entirely absent, but its underlying structure, which reproduces with remarkable fidelity the three-part grievance architecture first articulated in the 1991 Constitutional Act: (1) an external power exercises unlawful control over Azerbaijani territory; (2) that power extracts or expropriates Azerbaijani resources and wealth; and (3) the Azerbaijani state and people suffer humiliation and physical harm requiring formal international acknowledgment and remedy. Where the 1991 Constitutional Act applied this structure to seventy years of Soviet rule and used the explicit vocabulary of «colonialism,» Article 4.1.1 applies an identical structure to Armenia’s then-ongoing occupation of Karabakh and the surrounding districts, but does so entirely in the vocabulary of international humanitarian and human-rights law. The Concept commits Azerbaijan to investigating and publicizing «the destruction of historical and cultural heritage» in areas formerly inhabited by Azerbaijanis and in the occupied territories, and states that «illegal settlement and the exploitation and appropriation of natural resources on the occupied territories» will receive particular attention going forward (Rasporyazhenie Prezidenta, 2007). It further commits the state to coordinated efforts, domestically and internationally, toward the prosecution of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed against Azerbaijanis during the conflict, and toward a comprehensive international investigation of what the Concept calls the «Armenian question» (Rasporyazhenie Prezidenta, 2007).

Read against the 1991 Constitutional Act, this is the same grammar of dispossession, exploitation, and demanded restitution that structures classical anticolonial claims, applied to a different antagonist and phrased in the more legally neutral register of occupation law rather than colonial critique. The absence of the word «colonialism» from the 2007 Concept is therefore not evidence against the continuity thesis advanced in this article; if anything, it demonstrates how thoroughly the underlying anticolonial grammar established in 1991 had, by the mid-2000s, become naturalized as the default vocabulary of Azerbaijani state doctrine for describing any relationship of external domination over Azerbaijani territory or resources, to the point that officials no longer needed to invoke the term «colonial» explicitly for the structure of the claim to be legible both domestically and to international audiences familiar with UN Security Council language. Viewed this way, Ilham Aliyev’s explicit and repeated use of «colony» and «colonialism» in his 2025–2026 remarks represents not the introduction of a new grammar but the deliberate re-labeling, in globally recognizable anticolonial vocabulary, of a grievance structure that Azerbaijani doctrine had already applied consistently, if more discreetly, to both the Soviet Union and Armenia for over three decades.

This reading is reinforced by the specialized legal-scholarly literature on the constitutional foundations of Azerbaijani foreign policy. The monograph by Gurbanov, Mekhdiev, and Safronov, analyzes the country’s use of universally recognized principles and norms of international law, together with its international treaty practice, as the legal architecture through which Azerbaijani foreign policy has been conducted since independence, and examines the mechanisms available to Baku for the non-violent resolution of interstate disputes, including the Karabakh conflict, within that constitutional framework (Gurbanov, Mekhdiev, & Safronov, 2015). The monograph’s starting premise—that Azerbaijani foreign policy since 1991 has operated within a constitutional-legal continuity running from the Declaration of 30 August 1991 and the Constitutional Act of 18 October 1991 through subsequent doctrinal instruments such as the National Security Concept—is echoed in more recent Azerbaijani scholarship. Allahverdiyeva (2025) explicitly traces the country’s foreign policy course, including the restoration of full constitutional force over the territories recovered in 2020 and 2023 and the declaration of 20 September as «State Sovereignty Day,» back to the principles of national interest, democracy, and sovereignty first fixed in the Constitutional Act of 1991. This body of Azerbaijani constitutional-legal scholarship thus independently corroborates, from a doctrinal rather than a discourse-analytic standpoint, the central finding of the present article: that Azerbaijan’s foreign and security policy has been governed by a single, continuously elaborated legal-constitutional framework since 1991, of which the recently prominent anticolonial vocabulary is a relabeling rather than a departure.

5. GUAM as an Institutional Expression of Anti-Hegemonic Positioning (1997–Present)

If the 1991 Constitutional Act supplies the textual proof of an anticolonial founding narrative, Azerbaijan’s participation in the GUAM grouping supplies evidence of its early institutionalization in regional diplomacy. GUAM originated in the refusal of several post-Soviet states—Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, and later Georgia—to sign the Collective Security Treaty at the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) summit in Tashkent in May 1992, a refusal that signaled explicit resistance to continued Russian military and political dominance over the former Soviet space (Eyvazov, 2008). The four states formalized this cooperation in 1997 and adopted a charter in 2001, describing their goals in terms of sovereignty, territorial integrity, democratic development, and deepened integration with European structures, implicitly positioning the organization as an alternative to Russian-led integration projects such as the CIS and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (Czerewacz-Filipowicz & Konopelko, 2017; Eyvazov, 2008).

Although GUAM’s founding documents avoid the explicit vocabulary of colonialism used in the 1991 Constitutional Act, scholarly analysis situates the organization squarely within a logic of «geopolitical pluralism»—a term used in the academic literature to describe the effort of newly independent states to resist the reconstitution of a single dominant center of power in the post-Soviet space (Eyvazov, 2008; Czerewacz-Filipowicz & Konopelko, 2017). For Azerbaijan specifically, GUAM membership offered a multilateral platform through which to internationalize the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as a matter of territorial integrity violated by an external and Russian-backed actor, echoing at the regional level the same sovereignty-and-occupation framework that the Constitutional Act had applied to the Soviet Union as a whole (Eyvazov, 2008). Azerbaijan’s more recent assumption of the GUAM chairmanship in 2024 and its use of the platform to advance transport-corridor diplomacy toward Central Asia and the West further demonstrates the continuity of this anti-hegemonic, sovereignty-centered orientation from the 1990s into the post-war 2020s (Caspian Policy Center, 2024). GUAM therefore represents an important, if understudied, institutional bridge between the anticolonial founding narrative of 1991 and the more recent, globally oriented decolonization diplomacy embodied in the Baku Initiative Group: both share a structural logic of resisting an external power understood to have historically dominated or exploited Azerbaijani sovereignty, even though their target and audience differ substantially.

6. The Post-2020 Period: Amplification, Externalization, and Institutionalization

6.1 The Non-Aligned Movement Chairmanship (2019–2023)

The pivotal institutional development for understanding the recent visibility of Azerbaijan’s anticolonial narrative is the country’s chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), assumed at the 18th NAM Summit hosted in Baku in October 2019 and extended, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, until 2023 (Huseynov, 2019). Azerbaijani officials have described the country’s overall diplomatic posture as resting on «four Ms»—multi-vectorism, multilateralism, multi-regionalism, and multiculturalism—of which the NAM chairmanship represented the multilateral pillar (Huseynov, 2019). Analysts have characterized this period as one in which Azerbaijan sought to institutionalize its long-standing «balanced foreign policy» doctrine within a global multilateral framework rather than simply a regional one (Strakes, 2013; Huseynov, 2019). It was precisely this platform—populated by 120 member states drawn overwhelmingly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, many of them former colonies—that gave Baku both the audience and the institutional legitimacy to recast its historical narrative of Soviet subjugation in terms recognizable to, and resonant with, the wider Global South decolonization tradition associated with the 1955 Bandung Conference and the 1961 Belgrade founding of NAM itself (Huseynov, 2019).

6.2 The Baku Initiative Group (2023–Present)

The clearest institutional expression of this externalized anticolonial diplomacy is the Baku Initiative Group, founded on 6 July 2023 by participants at a conference titled «Towards the Total Elimination of Colonialism,» held in Baku as part of the ministerial meeting of the NAM Coordinating Bureau (Bakuinitiative.org., n.d.; Caliber.az, 2025a; APA News Agency, 2025). BIG describes itself as an international non-governmental organization dedicated to supporting the struggle of peoples living under colonial or neo-colonial domination, and it has since organized more than forty international conferences—ten of them at United Nations headquarters—and produced over fifty publications addressing colonial legacies in French Polynesia, New Caledonia, the Dutch Caribbean territories, and Belgium’s colonial record in Central Africa (Bakuinitiative.org., n.d.; APA News Agency, 2025; Trend.az, 2025; Azernews.az, 2024). BIG’s executive director, Abbas Abbasov, has repeatedly framed the organization’s mission in terms of reparations and accountability, arguing that decolonization, once «almost forgotten» as a live issue on the international agenda, has been returned to prominence at the United Nations and within NAM substantially through BIG’s advocacy (APA News Agency, 2025).

Critical scholarship and policy commentary, however, has challenged the sincerity of this externally directed decolonization agenda, arguing that it functions primarily as a reputational and diplomatic strategy to deflect international criticism of Azerbaijan’s own conduct toward the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. An analysis published in EVN Report describes Azerbaijan’s adoption of «the language of the decolonization movement of the 1960s and 1970s» as an attempt to position the country as a champion of anti-imperial struggle while simultaneously pursuing what the author characterizes as an exclusionary campaign against Armenians in Karabakh, and to use NAM’s Global South membership as a diplomatic shield against Western censure (Jansezian, 2024). This tension—between an anticolonial vocabulary addressed to the world and an ethno-territorial policy toward Karabakh Armenians criticized by external observers—illustrates that the recent externalization of Azerbaijan’s anticolonial narrative through BIG has a dual character: it is continuous with the founding 1991 narrative of Azerbaijani victimhood under Soviet/Russian rule, yet it has been redeployed for a distinctly contemporary diplomatic purpose that the 1991 Constitutional Act was never designed to serve.

A close reading of BIG’s own self-description, retrieved directly from the organization’s website, sharpens this point. The text describes BIG’s mission in explicitly universalizing grammar: it exists to support «the struggle of peoples suffering from colonialism and neocolonialism,» to protect «the rights of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities suppressed by governing authorities,» and to do so «in accordance with norms and principles of international law» (Bakuinitiative.org., n.d.). The same self-description then specifies the organization’s geographic mandate as covering «the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean region, South America, the African continent, and the surrounding areas»—a list that conspicuously omits the South Caucasus and the wider post-Soviet space, even though, BIG’s founding was precipitated by a bilateral dispute with France that was itself downstream of the Karabakh conflict (Jansezian, 2024). This geographic silence is analytically significant: it indicates that BIG’s own institutional self-presentation maintains a strict discursive separation between the «colonial» vocabulary it deploys against Western overseas territories and the «occupation» vocabulary that Azerbaijani doctrine has consistently applied to Karabakh since 2007 and earlier. In its own promotional language, BIG does not describe Karabakh as a colony; it reserves that word for the grievances of others.

This official self-restraint is not, however, absolute in practice. The list of «latest events» appended to the same self-description includes an «International Conference on the Right of Return of Western Azerbaijanis» and a session titled «June 1984, Transnational Repression as an Extension of Genocide,» alongside sessions on housing shortages and urban decolonization in the Pacific and Caribbean (Bakuinitiative.org, n.d.). «Western Azerbaijan» is the irredentist term that Azerbaijani officials have, since 2022, applied to the territory of the present-day Republic of Armenia, implying that Armenians residing there occupy land that is properly Azerbaijani (Canbäck, 2025). Its appearance on BIG’s own events list, embedded within a program otherwise dedicated to French, Belgian, and Dutch overseas territories, shows that the organization’s claimed geographic restriction to Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean is not consistently observed in its actual programming, and that the anticolonial vocabulary cultivated for a global audience is, on occasion, folded back into the specifically Armenian-Azerbaijani register that the organization’s mission statement otherwise avoids naming (Bakuinitiative.org, n.d.).

6.3 Aliyev’s Recent Discourse and the Post-War Register (2024–2026)

President Ilham Aliyev’s own rhetorical register has shifted markedly in register, if not in underlying content, since Azerbaijan’s decisive military successes in 2020 and 2023. Scholarship analyzing his speeches on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between 2016 and 2020 documents a discourse built around the dehumanization and «othering» of Armenians, structured around three components: identifying Armenians as the principal threat to Azerbaijan, portraying them as inherently barbaric, and asserting Azerbaijani superiority in eliminating that threat (Sahakyan, 2022). Subsequent scholarship tracing the evolution of Heydar and then Ilham Aliyev’s discourse identifies a broader rhetorical transition from a cooperative, negotiation-oriented tone in the 1990s toward a narrative of war and, after 2020, of decisive victory as a permanent solution (Sahakyan & Kartashyan, 2025). Against this backdrop, Aliyev’s 2024–2026 statements at the Shusha Global Media Forum and at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy’s «Facing a New World Order» forum extend the same discursive strategy—casting Azerbaijan as a victimized nation whose sovereignty was violated by external powers—outward from the Armenian theatre to the broader terrain of Russo-Soviet imperialism (Jam-news.net, 2025; APA News Agency, 2026). The underlying rhetorical architecture, in other words, is continuous across both registers: an aggrieved, formerly dominated nation asserting its sovereignty against external domination, whether that domination is attributed to Armenia in Karabakh or to Russia across the twentieth century. What is new after 2020 is the scale and confidence with which this architecture is deployed, made possible by a level of military and diplomatic self-assurance that did not exist for Azerbaijani leaders in the more precarious 1990s (Hovsepyan & Tonoyan, 2025).

A close reading of the retrieved transcripts of Aliyev’s 2025 and 2026 remarks reveals several specific rhetorical devices that qualitative discourse analysis of the earlier Karabakh-focused literature (Sahakyan, 2022; Sahakyan & Kartashyan, 2025) had not had occasion to examine, since those studies predate the 2025–2026 material. The first device is a disclaimer of bilateral motive, repeated three times within a single answer at the 2026 Shusha forum. Immediately after criticizing France’s colonial record in New Caledonia, Polynesia, and Algeria, Aliyev states, «It’s not about our relations with France»; several sentences later, discussing the same French colonial territories, he repeats, «It’s not about our relations with them»; and he closes the answer with a third, near-identical disclaimer: «again, it has nothing to do with our relations with France» (APA News Agency, 2026).  The rhetorical function of this triple repetition is paradoxical: by insisting three times that a grievance is not about the bilateral relationship, the speaker draws the listener’s attention precisely to that relationship, allowing him to air a specific and substantial bilateral complaint—French arms sales to Armenia, French parliamentary sympathy for Armenian positions, and what Aliyev calls a «so-called embassy of the non-existing Nagorno-Karabakh Republic» operating in France—while formally presenting the colonial critique as principled, universal, and disinterested rather than retaliatory (APA News Agency, 2026).

The second device is a direct analogical transfer between France’s overseas territories and Karabakh, made without ever naming Karabakh in the same breath. Aliyev’s central formulation—»You cannot, in the 21st century, have a colony that is situated 10,000 kilometers away from you when its people do not want you there»—is addressed explicitly to New Caledonia, yet its structure (temporal framing via «in the 21st century»; the criterion of popular consent; the implicit claim that any government maintaining such control forfeits contemporary legitimacy) is the same structure Azerbaijani doctrine has applied to Armenian control of Karabakh since at least the 2007 National Security Concept (Rasporyazhenie, 2007; APA News Agency, 2026). The analogy is left for the audience to complete rather than stated outright, which allows Aliyev to invoke the legitimating logic of decolonization for Azerbaijan’s own territorial claims without exposing that application to direct scrutiny in the same sentence.

The third device is an explicit metaphor of retaliation that provides direct primary-source evidence for the redirective mechanism. Describing the international reaction to BIG’s advocacy, Aliyev states: «the boomerang is a very efficient weapon. You have to take it into account. I mean, those who wanted to attack Azerbaijan underestimated us» (APA News Agency, 2026). Read in context, after his account of French and Swiss authorities allegedly detaining BIG conference participants, this passage frames Azerbaijan’s global decolonization campaign not as a spontaneous ideological commitment but as a calculated response to perceived Western attacks, using the language of weaponry and underestimation rather than the language of solidarity or conviction (Azertag.az, 2024). This is significant because it is Aliyev’s own description of the campaign’s function, rather than an external critic’s inference about that function of the kind offered by Jansezian (2024); the primary text itself supports the instrumentalization thesis.

The fourth device is an appeal to experiential authenticity that functions to pre-empt charges of hypocrisy. Aliyev grounds Azerbaijan’s standing to criticize French, Belgian, and Dutch colonialism in a claim of shared historical experience—»we have in our historical memory what it is to be colonized and what it is to be free»—positioning Azerbaijan not as a disinterested outside critic but as a formerly colonized nation uniquely qualified to recognize colonialism in others (Jam-news.net, 2025). This authenticity claim, entirely absent from the 2001 and 2007 primary documents, is doing new rhetorical work specific to the post-2020 period: it retroactively converts thirty-five years of largely undramatic sovereignty-and-development discourse into a continuous lived experience of colonization and liberation that can be deployed as moral capital in a contemporary international dispute.

A fifth and distinct rhetorical pattern appears in the «Facing a New World Order» transcript, where Aliyev applies colonial vocabulary not to a territorial or resource dispute but to an institutional and attitudinal target. Describing the European Commission’s approach to Georgia’s internal political crisis, he states, «This is the behavior of colonialists. They try to look at the will of the Georgian people through the principles of a colonial past,» and, discussing the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s suspension of Azerbaijan’s voting rights, he refers to «this colonial thinking among some European politicians» (Jam-news.net, 2025). In both instances the word «colonial» modifies not a territory or an economic relationship, as in the 1991 Constitutional Act’s «policy of colonialism,» but a psychological disposition—a way of «looking» or «thinking»—attributed to contemporary European institutions with no formal colonial authority over Georgia or Azerbaijan whatsoever. This represents a semantic broadening of the term from a historically bounded, materially grounded critique of resource extraction and occupation to a free-floating diagnostic label for any perceived Western paternalism, illustrating concretely how the vocabulary whose absence was discussed in the 2001 and 2007 primary sources has, by 2025, not only reappeared but expanded well beyond the referential scope it held in 1991.

7. The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict as a Rhetorical Catalyst

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict did not create Azerbaijan’s anticolonial narrative, which, as shown above, predates the conflict’s most intense phases and is anchored in the 1991 Constitutional Act (Legalacts.az 1991; Preslib.az n.d.). What the conflict did was supply a second, more immediate grievance—the loss of Karabakh and seven surrounding districts to Armenian forces between 1992 and 1994—that Baku from an early stage described in a vocabulary of illegal occupation strikingly similar to, though initially kept rhetorically separate from, the Soviet-colonial narrative (Tokluoglu, 2011). Azerbaijani diplomacy skillfully mobilized the four United Nations Security Council resolutions adopted in 1993 to present Armenia as an occupying power violating Azerbaijani sovereignty, a framing that would later prove adaptable to a genuinely anticolonial register (Jansezian, 2024).

The critical hinge between these two narratives is Azerbaijan’s first chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement (2019–2023). According to the EVN Report analysis, Azerbaijan’s presidency «utilized quasi-anti-colonial rhetoric to decry the ‘occupation’ of Karabakh by the Armenians,» leveraging the Movement’s historical association with twentieth-century decolonization to lend the Karabakh dispute a legitimacy it could not otherwise claim within Western-dominated forums such as the OSCE Minsk Group (Jansezian, 2024). Sitting at the head of an organization whose 120 members were disproportionately drawn from formerly colonized states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America gave Azerbaijani diplomats a ready-made vocabulary—occupation, self-determination, liberation—that mapped Karabakh onto the template of mid-century anticolonial struggle even though Armenia itself had never been a colonial metropole vis-à-vis Azerbaijan in any conventional sense (Sahakyan & Kartashyan, 2025).

The military outcomes of 2020 and 2023 then performed a confirming function for this rhetorical strategy (Sahakyan & Kartashyan, 2025). Once Azerbaijani forces had recaptured the territories lost in the 1990s, the government could present the sequence of loss, occupation, and recapture as itself a completed act of decolonization, collapsing the distinct Soviet-era and Karabakh-era grievances into a single triumphant narrative arc running from nineteenth-century Russian colonization through Soviet subjugation to Armenian «occupation» and finally to national «liberation» (Hovsepyan & Tonoyan, 2025; Sahakyan, 2022). This fusion is explicit in Aliyev’s own 2026 remarks at Shusha, where in a single answer he moved from describing Azerbaijan’s nineteenth-century colonization by Russia, to Soviet-era resource extraction, to the reconstruction of Karabakh following its recapture from separatist and Armenian forces, treating all three as episodes in one continuous story of dispossession and recovery (APA News Agency, 2026).

A second and more concrete mechanism linking the conflict to the externalized anticolonial narrative concerns Azerbaijan’s deteriorating relationship with France after 2022. According to the Jansezian (2024) account, in July 2023 President Aliyev responded to French President Emmanuel Macron’s criticism of Azerbaijan and French arms sales to Armenia—widely characterized in Baku as evidence of a «pro-Armenian bias»—by publicly invoking France’s own colonial record in New Caledonia and Algeria, a rhetorical counterattack calculated to curry favor with the Non-Aligned Movement’s member states (Jansezian, 2024). Strikingly, the Baku Initiative Group was formally established within days of this exchange, on 6 July 2023, at a conference in Baku during the Non-Aligned Movement ministerial meeting explicitly titled «Towards the Complete Elimination of Colonialism» (Bakuinitiative.org, n.d.). The timing indicates that the diplomatic friction generated by the Karabakh dispute’s international dimension—specifically, French support for Armenia—functioned as the proximate trigger that redirected Azerbaijan’s pre-existing anticolonial vocabulary away from its original target, Russia and the Soviet legacy, and toward a new target, Western European colonial powers, some two and a half months before the September 2023 military offensive that completed Azerbaijan’s recapture of Karabakh (Jansezian, 2024; Hovsepyan & Tonoyan, 2025; Sahakyan & Kartashyan, 2025).

A third mechanism operated in the reverse temporal direction, with the conflict’s aftermath generating fresh material for anticolonial framing. Following the September 2023 offensive, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) suspended the voting rights of the Azerbaijani delegation in January 2024, a punitive response that Baku regards as unjustified given that no equivalent sanction had been applied during the preceding thirty years of Armenian control over the territory (Jam-news.net, 2025; APA News Agency, 2026). Aliyev’s response was to characterize the PACE decision, and more broadly what he called «this colonial thinking among some European politicians,» as itself an expression of a residual colonial mentality within European institutions (Jam-news.net 2025). The same rhetorical move recurs in Aliyev’s discussion of the European Commission’s approach to Georgia, which he likewise described as «the behavior of colonialists» who look at the will of a small regional state «through the principles of a colonial past» (Jam-news.net 2025). In each instance, a concrete diplomatic consequence of the Karabakh conflict’s resolution—Western institutional censure—is reinterpreted through explicitly colonial vocabulary and redirected outward at the very institutions applying that censure, rather than at Russia, the original object of the 1991 narrative.

Taken together, these three mechanisms show that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict functioned less as the origin of Azerbaijan’s anticolonial narrative than as a rhetorical amplifier and redirector: it supplied a second grievance narrative (occupation) that fused with the older Soviet-colonial narrative once the conflict was resolved by force; it created, through the NAM chairmanship, an institutional context in which anticolonial vocabulary became diplomatically advantageous; and its international fallout—particularly the deterioration of relations with France and the PACE sanctions—generated the immediate provocations that Baku chose to answer in the vocabulary of colonialism rather than in the vocabulary of bilateral diplomatic dispute. Critical commentary is right to note that this instrumentalizes a narrative of genuine historical grievance for a contemporary reputational purpose (Jansezian, 2024; Hovsepyan & Tonoyan, 2025); the present analysis adds that the conflict’s role was catalytic and redirective rather than originary, since the underlying anticolonial narrative it activated already existed, fully formed, in the 1991 Constitutional Act more than two years before the Karabakh conflict escalated into full-scale war.

8. Quantifying the Anticolonial Vocabulary: A Word-Frequency Analysis

To supplement the qualitative document analysis above with a transparent quantitative measure, and to ensure that the quantitative and qualitative methods are applied to the same evidentiary base rather than to separately curated samples, this section codes the same six primary documents examined qualitatively: the 1991 Constitutional Act; Heydar Aliyev’s 2001 Congress speech articulating the Azerbaijanism doctrine; the Presidential Library’s institutional restatement of the 2007 National Security Concept; President Ilham Aliyev’s 2025 «Facing a New World Order» remarks; his 2026 Shusha Global Media Forum remarks; and the Baku Initiative Group’s institutional self-description. Each was coded for every occurrence of the colon- root—covering colony, colonies, colonial, colonialism, colonize/colonized, colonization, decolonization, neocolonial, and postcolonial in English, and колония, колониальный, колониализм, колонизация, and деколонизация in Russian, in all inflected forms—using an exhaustive, case-insensitive substring search rather than a predefined keyword list, so as to avoid undercounting inflections in either language. For the two lengthy presidential transcripts, coding was restricted to the substantive colonial-discourse portion of the exchange, since the remainder of each transcript addresses unrelated diplomatic topics and contains no colon-root vocabulary. The secondary-scholarly literature used elsewhere in the qualitative analysis is excluded from this quantitative comparison, since coding an external commentator’s vocabulary would not measure the trajectory of the Azerbaijani state’s own rhetoric, which is the specific object of this analysis. Table 1 reports, for each document, the total number of words analyzed, the raw count of colon-root occurrences, and the resulting rate per 1,000 words.

Table 1. Frequency of colon-root vocabulary across six primary Azerbaijani state documents, 1991–2026
DocumentYearWords AnalyzedColon-Root Occurrences*Rate per 1,000 Words
Constitutional Act on State Independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan199181222.5
Heydar Aliyev, address to the 1st Congress of World Azerbaijanis (Azerbaijanism doctrine)200169000.0
Heydar Aliyev Presidential Library, “Ensuring National Security” (National Security Concept, 2007)200743300.0
“Facing a New World Order” forum remarks, President Ilham Aliyev (Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy)202565734.6
4th Shusha Global Media Forum, remarks of President Ilham Aliyev (colonial-discourse portion of transcript)20261,2981410.8
Baku Initiative Group, “About Us” institutional self-description2026 (page as retrieved)2941137.4

* Colon-root occurrences include all inflected forms of colony, colonial, colonialism, colonize/colonized, colonization, decolonization, neocolonial, and postcolonial identified through exhaustive substring matching of the retrieved text.

The results lend strong quantitative support to the structure-without-vocabulary thesis developed qualitatively in previous Sections. Read in chronological order, the six data points trace a trajectory that is not monotonic but U-shaped: a modest density of 2.5 per 1,000 words in the founding 1991 Constitutional Act, where the term «policy of colonialism» needed to appear only once to accomplish its legitimating work; a complete absence of colon-root vocabulary—zero occurrences—in both Heydar Aliyev’s 690-word 2001 Azerbaijanism speech and the 433-word institutional restatement of the 2007 National Security Concept, despite both documents making extensive anticolonial arguments about resource extraction, occupation, and lost sovereignty in other vocabulary; and then a sharp rise beginning with Ilham Aliyev’s 2025 remarks (4.6 per 1,000), continuing through his 2026 Shusha remarks (10.8 per 1,000), and reaching a peak in the Baku Initiative Group’s institutional self-description (37.4 per 1,000), a text produced specifically to advertise Azerbaijan’s externalized decolonization agenda. The two zero-density documents from 2001 and 2007 are the pivotal data points in this trajectory: they demonstrate empirically that for roughly a decade and a half—precisely the period in which Heydar Aliyev’s Azerbaijanism doctrine was consolidated and the National Security Concept was adopted—Azerbaijani state doctrine possessed the full anticolonial argumentative structure without deploying the word «colonial» or any of its cognates at all. This is a stronger and more precise finding than the qualitative analysis alone could establish: it is not simply that colonial vocabulary was less prominent in this period, but that, within the two representative primary documents recoverable from it, such vocabulary is entirely absent, only to reappear and then escalate rapidly from the mid-2020s onward.

President Aliyev’s own extemporaneous remarks occupy a middle position and vary by context. The colonial-discourse portion of his 2026 Shusha Global Media Forum answer, prompted directly by a journalist’s question about the Baku Initiative Group and French colonialism, reaches a density of 10.8 per 1,000 words, whereas his 2025 «Facing a New World Order» remarks, in which colonial vocabulary surfaces only incidentally while discussing Georgia and the Council of Europe, register a lower density of 4.6 per 1,000 words. This variation is informative in itself: it indicates that colonial vocabulary is not the default idiom of Aliyev’s broader foreign policy discourse, which on both occasions ranged over energy diplomacy, regional connectivity, and relations with Russia, Türkiye, the United States, and the European Union without any colonial framing at all, but rather a register that is activated selectively, either when a questioner raises it directly or when a specific diplomatic grievance—such as the PACE sanctions or the treatment of Georgia—invites it. This selective activation pattern is consistent with the catalytic and redirective role attributed to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict’s aftermath, and with the broader argument that the anticolonial narrative, while historically continuous since 1991, has become a deliberately deployed diplomatic instrument rather than a constant rhetorical backdrop.

9. Discussion: Continuity with Amplification, Not Invention

The evidence assembled here supports a «layered continuity» thesis rather than either a pure continuity or pure invention account. Three findings are central. First, the core anticolonial claim—that Azerbaijan was colonized by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century and denied genuine sovereignty within the Soviet Union—is not a post-2020 rhetorical innovation but a textual feature of the country’s founding Constitutional Act of October 1991, predating by more than three decades President Ilham Aliyev’s 2026 remarks at Shusha. Second, this founding narrative was never abandoned during the Heydar Aliyev period (1993–2003) but was instead absorbed into the doctrine of Azerbaijanism and into the country’s participation in GUAM, where it took the form of an anti-hegemonic, sovereignty-centered posture toward Russia rather than explicit colonial vocabulary. Third, what has genuinely changed since 2019—and accelerated after the military victories of 2020 and 2023—is the narrative’s institutional vehicle and target audience: it has moved from a domestic constitutional-legal register addressed to Azerbaijani citizens and, through GUAM, to regional post-Soviet interlocutors, toward an explicitly global register addressed to the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement and instantiated in a dedicated international advocacy organization, the Baku Initiative Group.

This amplification should be read in light of Azerbaijan’s altered post-2020 strategic position. Having achieved what its own doctrine defines as the restoration of territorial integrity, the government’s foreign policy priorities have shifted from conflict management toward what regional analysts describe as «winning the peace»—consolidating international legitimacy for the post-war territorial order and pre-empting renewed Western criticism of its human-rights record, particularly regarding the exodus of the Karabakh Armenian population in 2023 (Topchubashov Center, 2025; Jansezian, 2024). The externalized decolonization agenda pursued through BIG and the NAM platform serves this consolidation function by aligning Azerbaijan discursively with the Global South’s historical grievances against Western and, more selectively, Russian imperialism, thereby diversifying the coalition of states willing to support Baku’s positions in multilateral fora such as the UN Human Rights Council (Jansezian, 2024; Caspianpost.com, 2026). In this sense, the recent anticolonial turn is best understood not as a new narrative but as an old and constitutionally embedded narrative redirected toward a new diplomatic purpose that became strategically valuable, and materially affordable, only after 2020.

10. Conclusion

This article set out to answer a specific empirical question: is the anticolonial narrative currently visible in Azerbaijani foreign policy—epitomized by President Ilham Aliyev’s 2026 description of Azerbaijan as a former Russian and Soviet colony, and by the 2023 founding of the Baku Initiative Group—a recent development, or has it existed since the country’s independence in 1991? Document analysis of Azerbaijan’s Constitutional Act on State Independence, its subsequent doctrinal evolution under Heydar and Ilham Aliyev, its participation in GUAM, and its more recent chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement indicates clearly that the narrative is not recent in origin. The 1991 Constitutional Act itself describes seventy years of Soviet governance as a «policy of colonialism» and frames the 1920 Soviet takeover of Azerbaijan as an act of occupation, language that closely anticipates Aliyev’s 2026 remarks at Shusha (Legalacts.az 1991; Preslib.az n.d., APA News Agency, 2026). What has changed is not the existence of the narrative but its scale, institutional embodiment, and intended audience: a claim once confined to a domestic founding document and a regionally oriented grouping of post-Soviet states has, since 2019 and especially since 2023, been externalized into a dedicated international advocacy organization addressing a global Non-Aligned Movement audience of well over one hundred states. The Azerbaijani case therefore offers a instructive illustration of how a state’s founding historical narrative can persist largely unchanged in content across three decades while being redeployed, amplified, and re-targeted in response to shifting strategic opportunities and diplomatic needs. Future research, drawing on Azerbaijani-language archival material, elite interviews, and systematic content analysis of state media across the full 1991–2026 period, would help to further specify the precise mechanisms and timing of this amplification and to test the reputational-strategy hypothesis advanced by critical commentators against the continuity thesis defended here.

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[1] Member of the Eurasia Department of the Institute of International Relations of the National University of La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

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