Today’s guest post is from Aram Simonyan, a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Scholar at the University of Sussex.

Artsakh, or Nagorno-Karabakh, is an autonomous region primarily populated by ethnic Armenians. (That the region is part of Azerbaijan rather than Armenia is due to a 1921 decision by the USSR central government.) In 2020 Azerbaijan, with outspoken support from Turkey, gained power over notable territory in Nagorno-Karabakh. Then, in December 2022, the Azerbaijani government closed the Lachin corridor (the only land route between Nagornon-Karabakh and Armenia), thereby cutting off 120,000 ethnic Christian Armenians in the contested enclave from the outside world—and from food, medicine, and other primary goods. And in September 2023 Azerbaijani military, with the apparent support of the Turkish president, forces swept into towns and villages, killing, shelling, and bombing civilians—evoking trauma of the Armenian Genocide among the population.

Yet the reaction from the West has been shockingly muted. It’s hard to ignore the striking contrast between the round-the-clock media coverage of the Gaza conflict and the scarcity of news on Nagorno-Karabakh even when Azerbaijan was bombing Armenian hospitals, schools and beheading people. Critics have also pointed out how European institutions and Western companies have continued to do business as usual with Azerbaijan, notwithstanding its aggression.

Part of the justification for this may be that Azerbaijan helps meet the EU’s need for natural gas. (In July 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen referred to Aliyev as a “trustworthy partner” for gas supply to the EU, though since Azerbaijan imports gas from Russia, it’s not at all clear why the EU wanted to involve the Azerbaijani government in the supply chain.) But another reason is that Azerbaijan has made use of what critics have dubbed “caviar diplomacy”: the use of strategic bribery (direct and indirect) to corrupt and curry favor with Western governments and institutions.

That Azerbaijan, a consolidated authoritarian regime, has a serious domestic corruption problem is well-known. The country ranks 157^th among 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. Azerbaijani corruption scandals regularly make headlines, and President Ilham Aliyev has long been known as a kleptocrat whose family controls the country’s key resources. But Azerbaijan is also an exporter of corruption—indeed, this has become the defining facet of Azerbaijan’s international political strategy. Gaining undue influence by bribing European politicians with luxurious gifts has become a mainstay and symbol of Azerbaijan’s politics. Between 2012 and 2014, for example, Aliyev’s government sent more than 16,000 covert payments totaling €2.9 billion to bribe prominent Europeans through shell companies in the UK to act in favor of his regime. In 2014, Azerbaijan spent at least $4 million lobbying lawmakers in the US, organizing fancy trips and bestowing luxurious gifts. And in 2017, journalists published documents showing that Aliyev’s family had paid significant bribes to senior political figures in Malta. While this illegal bribery is the most egregious, Azerbaijan has also made use of “soft” (and not obviously illegal) corruption to expand its influence and suppress criticism. The Azerbaijani government financed a Professorship at the Humboldt University in Germany between 2010 and 2021 for more than €100,000 annually until the Professor ended the activity and the department changed its focus. 

This “caviar diplomacy” strategy of strategic corruption has played a significant role in shielding Azerbaijan from the meaningful sanctions that are necessary to counter the Aliyev regime’s aggression and egregious human rights abuses. While the most recent violence in Nagorno-Karabakh may have prompted some Western governments to start rethinking their relationship with Azerbaijan, more action is needed—including measures to enhance the transparency and accountability of the relationship between Azerbaijani politicians and their Western counterparts. Otherwise, Azerbaijan’s abhorrent behavior may also become normalized, and set a dangerous example for other corrupt authoritarian regimes as well.