Introducing Hafiz Pashayev’s An Ambassador’s Manifesto

There is a word in the Azerbaijani language—ağsaqqal—which means something like a wise and respected elder of the community from whom one traditionally seeks advice. Hafiz Pashayev is widely acknowledged as the ağsaqqal of the country’s diplomatic service.

And the book we are here to celebrate is an important element in explaining this status he deservedly enjoys.

Now, before Hafiz m. came to be widely regarded as the ağsaqqal of Azerbaijani diplomacy, he became a founder (fondatore) of “new modes and orders,” as a Florentine political philosopher of the highest rank memorably put it centuries ago [NM, D I:pr.1]. In fact, Hafiz m. founded two such new modes and orders: Azerbaijan’s diplomatic presence in Washington in November 1992, and, here in Baku, the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in March 2006, which in January 2014 was granted a charter and thus officially transformed, following the founder’s original intention, into ADA University. 

We are here this evening to discuss his memoir of this first founding, titled An Ambassador’s Manifesto. A memoir of the second—or at least on the pedagogical and state‑building logic informing this second founding—is yet to come.

As a founder—but even more broadly—“in every phase of his life, at every position he has held, Hafiz Pashayev took Azerbaijan’s interests over everything. In his political, public, and scientific endeavors have served just one purpose: strengthening Azerbaijan and its development.” That is the judgment pronounced by the First Vice‑President of this country during her ADA University commencement address, which took place around this time back in 2016. And she was correct in this, and in the implication that his two foundings—i.e., Azerbaijan’s diplomatic presence in America and ADA—are intimately connected.

As Hafiz m. said in a July 2007 interview to the New York Times, “To spread our image in the world, we need a real presence. But we have a shortage of diplomats.” My point here is that his experience in Washington— the experience he accumulated during the 14 years he served as Ambassador to the United States—led him to understand the strategic necessity of establishing a diplomatic academy to train Azerbaijani present and future diplomats.

Now, training diplomats was our university’s first mission, and we still do that through our flagship Advanced Foreign Service Program and other executive education courses. But as I said a moment ago, it was understood from the onset that ADA would evolve into a fully‑fledged university. The founding logic, which was executed over time, was that ADA would train not only Azerbaijani diplomats, but also many Azerbaijanis striving for excellence. Each student would specialize in one (or more) of the fields necessary for this country to develop, maintain, and strengthen its sovereign independence, mindful of the legacy the university was both shaping and by which it was being shaped: a comprehensive national quest to consolidate peace, stability, prosperity, and self‑reliance, which is located in a particularly complicated geopolitical neighborhood. 

One of the things I have learned in the more than five years that I have lived and worked in this country is that positions in the public and private sectors—certainly in those areas that matter most—are filled, by and large, with the most qualified and competent person that can be found. And ADA University has had a lot to do with ensuring that what some call “technocracy” but is better termed “meritocracy” is becoming this country’s overarching governance lodestar. 

This national accomplishment is oftentimes underappreciated, or its significance downplayed, when, in fact, it should be recognized as one of President Ilham Aliyev’s most noteworthy achievements. Indeed, it is an indispensable part of the explanation for how, in just 30 years, Azerbaijan has gone from being a failing state to what a Harvard University historian has called a “project state”—that is, a country that has the ambition, power, and human capital to mobilize the entirety of the nation’s potential to get behind larger, aspirational goals. 

In more than a few ways, this national raising up, we can call it, began in that embassy in Washington that Hafiz m. founded. And that is why, to me, this is at bottom what Hafiz m.’s memoir is about. The book shows how, under his leadership and with the help of colleagues he chose personally on the basis of his estimation of their competence and potential, both the project state took on embryonic form and the meritocratic drive was launched. I note, here, that the word ada in Azerbaijani and other Turkic languages means “island,” as in island of excellence.

The memoir is also a written testament or bequest to the generations who don’t remember how difficult that founding period truly was for this country—and when I speak of such generations, I speak of both Azerbaijanis and foreigners. In this sense, it is a “manifesto”—a clear statement of the path that was cleared in the wilderness and a teaching on how taking care that it remains as free of obstacles as possible is a national strategic imperative. And it is also a “manifesto” in the sense that, as he tells us on the first page, the choice of the title has its origins in the title of his father’s famous novel, A Young Man’s Manifesto (1938).

My bottom line is that one cannot hope to understand Azerbaijan as it understands itself without reading and reflecting on Hafiz m.’s book.

Let me now come back to the matter of founding. To simplify for the sake of clarity, a founding is made up of two basic elements. First, the acquisition of knowledge. In perfect circumstances, this takes place prior to a founding, although it is not strictly necessary. Second, the act of founding  itself, which is the founder’s task properly understood. In other words, it is the doing of something from scratch—from the beginning, “without any respect,” as the Florentine said. 

Some founders have the leisure of preparing themselves through the acquisition of a body of knowledge; others act without it, proceeding by their wits or what the Florentine calls “virtue” (virtù). Either way, a founding can only partly be mapped out in advance by theoretical knowledge. 

As Hafiz m. put it in the New York Times interview I mentioned earlier, “Our advantage is that we don’t have old baggage. We’re a new academy.” The same, of course, could be said about the founding that his memoir recollects. 

Because, at best, prior knowledge serves as a partial guide for execution— for the doing of deeds—given the importance of particular circumstances in actual situations. Facts on the ground demand different strategies. “We had been sent to an unfamiliar country to master the profession to which we’d been assigned,” he writes. Hafiz m.’s memoir is thus also an account of the travails of fortuna (translated as fortune, but which can also mean influence or legacy)—the particular circumstances and strategies he employed as he began from scratch. “The question of where to start appeared both complex and strange in the situation we were in,” he tells us.

The combination of virtù and fortuna suggests to me that—obviously, at a much smaller scale and scope—Hafiz m. followed a logic that the American Founders would have understood. 

I teach American politics this semester, and so the opening paragraph of the first Federalist Paper is fresh in my mind. The text announces what is at stake in the American founding by presenting two alternatives: on the one hand, there can be a founding based on “reflection and choice.” On the other hand, there can be a sort of anti‑founding based on “accident and force.” The Americans chose the former, making the argument, first in speech and then in deed, that an intentional founding is clearly possible. And like the Florentine thinker before them, they were right—to their enduring credit. 

In Azerbaijan, there have been both types of founding at the national level. The collapse of the Soviet Union produced an accidental founding— or re‑founding—of this country. It was short‑lived, ending in territorial loss, economic locomotion, and an almost descent into civil war. A few years later, the return to power of Heydar Aliyev produced one based on “reflection and choice,” pulling the country back from the edge of total collapse and, in so doing, becoming what Hafiz m. called “the architect of Azerbaijan’s modern statehood.”

And in both foundings that he planned and executed, Hafiz m. chose “reflection and choice”—also to his enduring credit. 

Although I have no personal connection to the founding of Azerbaijan’s diplomatic undertakings in the United States, I do know something of the adverse political circumstances in which Azerbaijan found itself upon Hafiz m.’s arrival in Washington. 

One of these remains an exposed nerve—or, as Hafiz m. calls it in his book, a “wretched act” and a “nasty sore […] impossible to cut out”—to this very day. I refer here to Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act. This section, titled “Restriction on Assistance to Azerbaijan,” prohibits any kind of direct U.S. government‑to‑government aid to Azerbaijan. This law put the United States government in the official business of sanctioning Azerbaijan—and only Azerbaijan, of all post‑Soviet states. Washington’s baseline posture toward Baku was punitory. And no one in this town has forgotten that this baseline remains on the books. 

Section 907 of what Hafiz m. reminds us was ironically termed the “Freedom Denial Act” was championed by then‑Senator (and later U.S. Secretary of State) John Kerry and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. And all this happened a month or so before Azerbaijan had the opportunity to establish an embassy in the United States. It was the diplomatic equivalent of a sneak attack—a preemptive strike. 

I will not go into the details of all this, because you can read about them in Hafiz m.’s memoir, and you can also read a complementary account in various places, including in an article that S. Frederick Starr wrote four years ago in Baku Dialogues about Hafiz m., titled “Azerbaijan’s Educator‑Statesman at Eighty."

But I will reproduce what Hafiz m. said in an Azerbaijani publication in 2006 about Section 907: “Throughout those long years of the Soviet  occupation of our country, we had looked to America as a beacon of hope, democracy, and justice. [...] So [...] as we were trying to shake off Soviet oppression—an effort which the United States itself had actively endorsed and encouraged—we discovered that they, too, had shunned us, ignored our needs, and abandoned us when we needed help the most. Psychologically, it was a demoralizing blow.” In his book, Hafiz m. characterizes it as a “humiliation."

This was especially so not only for the reasons he mentioned, but also because those who championed Section 907 did so in support of a country that not only committed territorial aggression against its neighbor, but because just as Section 907 was adopted, that same country, which benefited the most from its provisions, was well on its way to orchestrating the most successful, and the most complete, act of ethnic cleansing of the post‑Cold War era in the OSCE space. By the time the First Karabakh War was over in May 1994, not a single Azerbaijani remained in that neighboring country and in the Azerbaijani lands it had occupied.  

These are indisputable facts, because the relevant census data is very clear on this point. But also because the first president of that country, Levon TerPetrosyan, said so explicitly. There’s a video of him from 23 July 1993 giving a speech in which he said, “Armenia and Artsakh have been completely cleansed of other ethnicities. […] Imagine if today there were those 180,000 non‑Armenians in Armenia who lived here until 1988, then today we would not have a state."

That country and its supporters—in Washington and other Western capitals—have never suffered any political, diplomatic, economic, or even moral consequences because of any of this. This is, to my mind, unconscionable. 

That is why Section 907, which not only remains on America’s legislative books but had been unjustly invoked by the previous U.S. administration recently, is a textbook example of an American diplomatic double standard (at the very least)—a “stain on American democracy,” as Hafiz m. puts in his book. Its continued existence has done sometimes significant harm to a bilateral relationship that could have become an incontestable anchor for advancing the strategic interests of the United States and its allies in the Silk Road region. I make this judgment on the country’s strategic importance on the authority of Hafiz m.’s good friend, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote in 1997 that “Azerbaijan is the cork in the bottle containing the riches of the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia."

Of course, Section 907 did not prevent the development of U.S.‑ Azerbaijan ties, which really flourished in some periods—including during much of Ambassador Pashayev’s years of service. As Starr put it in his aforementioned article, “There is nothing more bizarre than the fact that the struggle over Section 907 took place simultaneously with the development of an important strategic relationship between Azerbaijan and the United States, and that this relationship was to prove as enduring as the shell of Section 907.” 

I’m referring here, inter alia, to the 1994 Contact of the Century and to Heydar Aliyev’s historic 1997 state visit to the United States (“the greatest honor in my life,” Hafiz m. writes)—and you can find the details of both in Hafiz m.’s memoirs. But I’m also speaking of everything that has derived from it, including Azerbaijan’s important contribution to the War on Terror (facilitated by the introduction of an annual waiver provision to Section 907), an account of which you can also find in the book (including the role Hafiz m. played in establishing what he calls the “foundation for truly strategic cooperation” between the two countries during this period). 

Beyond then and into the present, I can refer to the quest to build a series of undersea cables that will carry to European shores electricity produced from renewable sources like wind and solar in Azerbaijan, as well as neighboring Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

The United States is far less involved in this enterprise—although this could still change. And if it were to change—if, for instance, American investment, financing, or technological solutions were to become present—then the strategic argument for deepening engagement with Azerbaijan would be all the greater. Of course, Section 907 would need to be repealed, as part of a broader bilateral package reflective of the new geopolitical reality in this part of the world, including the fact that with the liberation of Karabakh, the territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has effectually come to an end.

The cable project is but part of an even greater enterprise: east‑west economic connectivity, anchored by the Middle Corridor, which is becoming the backbone of the new Silk Road region in general, and the new South Caucasus in particular. There is room for American involvement in the execution of this even greater enterprise, too.

In the Introduction to a forthcoming book that I have co‑edited with Svante E. Cornell, titled After Karabakh: War, Peace, and the Forging of a New Caucasus, we write that the success of external players, like the United States, in becoming a strategic part of the Silk Road region’s new geopolitical reality will largely be determined by whether they learn to 

_{accept, in both theory and practice, that the rules of the game in this part of the world are not theirs to either set or revise anymore. For quite a few of them, this would constitute a heretofore largely untried approach. To succeed, each will need to show a degree of restraint, humility, and respect that has been traditionally exhibited in a limited manner towards the countries that make up the core Silk Road region. […] As things now stand, local suspicions regarding the preferences and aspirations of the various outsiders remain very much alive. These can be mitigated, and perhaps even removed, in the time ahead largely in proportion to the extent that these same outsiders choose to temper their speeches and deeds in such a way as to harmonize them with those now prevalent in the Silk Road region itself. For most external, that is, foreign players, this will be easier said than done. Those for whom more interest‑based, transactional approaches represent their [present] diplomatic norm could be said to have an advantage over those [that remain] habituated to pursue different ones.}

Inter alia, this will require the U.S. (and all other external players) to embrace the principle of inclusivity as the price of admission, which translates into accepting that there is now conceptual room for the Silk Road region to gain substantive agency—to become a fully‑fledged, distinct, and emancipated subject of international order. The foregoing is in the U.S. national interest, since Washington has neither the ambition nor the capability to act hegemonically or unilaterally in this part of the world. The welcome corollary is that America appears now to be out of the sordid interventionist and nation‑building business, which should mean that henceforth it will stay out of the domestic affairs of sovereign states. As U.S. President Donald Trump stated in his May 2025 Riyadh address, “In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.” 

This Trumpian doctrine applies as much to the Middle East (his immediate focus in that speech) as it does to the Silk Road region—particularly its three keystone states (i.e., Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan). Here, in this part of the world, that should translate into a policy that comes to terms with the fact that Brussels will—more likely than not—ultimately accept Beijing’s offer, made by the latter’s seniormost foreign policymaker, Wang Yi, during his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, to “synergize high‑quality Belt and Road cooperation with the European Union’s Global Gateway strategy, so as to empower each other and empower the entire world.” 

In the Silk Road region, as in most other regions, “the preferred mathematical operations are [now] addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division,” as a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State put it around this time last year. Thankfully, that seems to be understood by the external players, as is the fact that Azerbaijan has stood up straight—no longer a bent, passive, or powerless object to be coveted, manipulated, or disputed over by anyone.  

In short, Hafiz m. and his two foundings have been an integral part of the statecraft that lifted this country from its knees, playing an oftentimes unsung role in ensuring that all requisite precautions are taken to ensure that no one can demand that Azerbaijan sits back down again.

I now turn to my conclusion, which consists of two parts. First, as bitter as some of his experiences in Washington could have made him, the overall impression from reading his memoir is that Hafiz m. is a gentleman diplomat: prudent, warmhearted, low‑key, persistent, effective, and, to borrow a phrase from Kurt Riezler, “passionately reasonable.” Without rancor or hubris, he shows his readers, in page after page, that history never ends, geography matters, the future is uncertain, one’s friends are always imperfect, and power politics never truly goes away. This is a critical lesson— whose origins go back to Thucydides—for those who believe that the “rules‑based international liberal order” and the “end of history” paradigm that served as its intellectual dibber ever had a chance at enracination. 

Second, I wish to end by coming back to my beginning. In the same context in which that Florentine thinker writes of founders, he also writes of the interplay between necessity and choice. Each of the two new modes and orders that Hafiz m. founded was a product of this interplay. Their foundings were necessities; their long‑term design and execution were choices. In both foundings, the quality and direction of the choice was largely a product of the founder’s character, which, as I’ve said, our Florentine thinker calls virtù and says is “seen to be greater where choice has less authority” [NM, D I.1.4]. When, in other words, the choice is restrained by a different sort of necessity—namely, the inborn necessity of the founder, which ultimately means the founder has little real choice in the matter because he is driven by a “natural desire” to “work, without any respect, for those things [the founder] believe[s] will bring common benefit to everyone” [NM, D I:pr.1]—it is all the more virtuous.  

From my vantage point, both of Hafiz m.’s foundings—driven by the sort of virtue that accompanies necessity—have indeed brought common benefit to everyone. That is why it is fitting and proper for him to be considered a contemporary Azerbaijani embodiment of ağsaqqallıq.