Why in News ?

• Armenia appealed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to order Azerbaijan to dissolve the road blockade isolating Nagorno-Karabakh. Nagorno-Karabakh is within Azerbaijan but had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since 1994 when a separatist war ended.
• The conflict can be traced back to the pre-Soviet era when the region was at the meeting point of Ottoman, Russian and the Persian empires.
• The self-declaration of independence by Nagorno-Karabakh in September 1991 in the backdrop of an imminent collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) resulted in a war between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh — supported by Armenia.