Pax Logistica? Mapping the interplay between war, peace and infrastructure in Azerbaijan after the 2 nd Karabakh war (2020–2023)

This article examines the role that infrastructure and logistics have played as a method of authoritarian conflict management implemented by Azerbaijan after it regained control of most of the disputed territory of Karabakh in 2020. It provocatively conceptualizes Azerbaijan’s Pax Logistica as a dromocratic and authoritarian endeavor in which the territory of Karabakh is physically and symbolically reconnected to Azerbaijan through infrastructuring practices that are defined by accumulation, speed and spectacle. To investigate how these spatial politics are deployed in time and space, two case studies are considered through the mixed use of GIS cartography and qualitative methods. Looking at road-building in Karabakh (case study 1) and the region-scaled project of a Zangezur corridor (caste study 2), they question the technical, bureaucratic, and geopolitical articulations of infrastructural development as performative integration. Ultimately, Pax Logistica as a heuristic device explores how post-Soviet desires for connectivity and movement that are manufactured globally are imagined locally and woven into geopolitical projections, authoritarian statecraft and conflict.