Once again, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, failed during their recent summit to reconcile their differences on the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process. If this is starting to sound familiar, it should. The two countries have spent almost four years getting nowhere on finalizing the supposed “basic principles” for a Karabakh peace deal.
At the age of 14, Kifayat Mammadova was married and already an expectant mother. A year and a half later, her marriage had failed, her child had died, and she was on the road to Baku from her village in the mountains of southern Azerbaijan in search of a new life.
In a sign that Islam’s role in Azerbaijan may be slowly evolving, the country’s largest and only state-owned bank, the International Bank of Azerbaijan, plans this autumn to open a specialized branch offering limited Islamic banking services.
Could it be that pop music, traditionally viewed by conservative governments as a scourge, is precipitating a thaw in Azerbaijan? Human rights activists in Baku are hopeful that is the case following the recent release of a prominent independent journalist from prison.
Officials in Azerbaijan want to make the act of spreading “misinformation” a “cyber-crime.” Some Azerbaijani civil rights activists worry that the initiative is driven by a desire to restrict Azerbaijani web users’ access to online information.
Two weeks after a surprise pro-hijab protest by scores of Muslim believers outside Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Education, authorities are still trying to figure out who organized the show of defiance.
To many in Azerbaijan, winning Europe's ultimate pop-music contest produced a surge of national pride. But as the cheering over the Eurovision victory subsides, a tricky debate is just starting to unfold: what image of itself should Azerbaijan project to the outside world next year?
It’s a bright spring morning in Baku, and, at Azerbaijan’s only non-profit school for snipers, 10 students are diligently taking notes about the “peculiarities” of a Russian-made, semi-automatic Dragunov sniper rifle and those of a Israeli-made Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle.
Could turmoil in the Middle East provide a market opportunity for Azerbaijan’s state-run energy company SOCAR? A pending energy deal with Jordan could open the way for the company’s aggressive expansion into Arab markets.
Azerbaijan’s recent move to indefinitely postpone joint military exercises with the United States is a sign that bilateral strategic ties are stagnating, analysts in Baku believe. Some wonder whether the social-network-inspired unrest that has swept the Middle East and North Africa, and which has also touched Azerbaijan, played a role in Baku’s decision.
