Patterns for Cooperation in the Southern Caucasus Area. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey - Triangular diplomacy in the shadow of energy strategy

The Caucasus has been defined as a “broken region” by both practitioners and scholars. Although the regional “protracted” conflicts clearly represent a stumbling block to the development of inclusive cooperation schemes, nevertheless the “broken region” interpretation seems to hide a Western prejudice – i.e. a tendency to label as inefficient or ruinous any political relations regulated by values and interests different from the Western ones. On this backdrop, the partnership among Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, a mutual dependent yet asymmetrical axis for cooperation, is crucial to assess the existence of an effective synergic axis in the contemporary Caucasus-Caspian scenario. The cooperation in the energy field has been the main feature of the trilateral partnership, with a series of spill-over effects as well as connections with balance of power dynamics in the area and within the axis itself. In order to understand the relations among Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, as well as the impact on those interactions of natural resources and capital flows, this paper will then analyse the landlocked states behaviour - especially the energy producers - and the AGT cooperation system trough Theodore Caplow’s theory of coalitions in triads