Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has called for an end to formulaic approaches and events held merely for show. Behind that demand lies a hardheaded calculation: in an age of cyberattacks and artificial intelligence, a country is defended by a teenager who knows how to check a source and calculate percentages. A flag in a staged photograph is powerless here.
On October 2, 2026, 960 delegates gathered at the Heydar Aliyev Center for the Eighth Congress of the New Azerbaijan Party. For the first time in the party’s history, its congress was taking place in a country that had fully restored its territorial integrity and sovereignty. There was every reason to celebrate. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev reminded the audience of a Victory that, he said, had no precedent anywhere in the world, adding: “And, let me repeat, we did it alone.” Then the head of state made a move rarely expected in a victory speech.
He began talking about threats.
“Ideological risks know no borders, especially in today’s world—the world of the internet, cyberattacks, and artificial intelligence,” the president said. He then identified an internal weakness that hinders resistance to those risks: “The time has come to organize ideological work properly, to abandon formulaic approaches and events of a purely formal nature.”
Here is the paradox. A state that won a war its adversaries had spent decades declaring unwinnable acknowledges, at the height of its strength, that the old tools for educating the next generation have run their course. An assembly hall, the front row, a flag in a schoolchild’s hands, a speech written in advance, a photograph for the report. All of it served as a ritual of waiting while the national mission remained unfinished. After 2020 and 2023, that ritual lost its meaning. The new task requires people who know how to do the work, rather than display the appropriate emotions for the camera.
Victory Has Been Won. Now the Adversary Arrives Through a Smartphone
The chronology explains why this conversation has begun now. The 44 days of the Patriotic War, from September 27 to November 10, 2020, returned most of the occupied territories to Azerbaijan. The counterterrorism operations of September 19–20, 2023, completed the restoration of sovereignty. On August 8, 2025, in Washington, the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia initialed an agreement on the establishment of peace and interstate relations. Several weeks later, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe decided to dissolve its Minsk Group, and on December 1, 2025, the institution that had spent 33 years going through the motions of mediation ceased to exist.
The military phase is over. The information war continues, and its intensity is increasing. Azerbaijan experienced this firsthand in November 2024, when Baku hosted COP29: sections of the Western press and a number of European politicians greeted the climate conference with a campaign in which environmental concerns were little more than a pretext. For years, Paris promoted an anti-Azerbaijani agenda within European institutions, while Baku responded by openly raising the issue of France’s colonial legacy in New Caledonia and other overseas territories. Such confrontations play out in social media feeds, where the primary audience is under 30.
One telling detail: on that same day, October 2, Azerbaijan’s State Security Service issued a warning about cyberfraud involving artificial intelligence. A synthesized voice, a fabricated video, a convincing email impersonating a government agency. Technology capable of tricking a retiree out of their savings can just as easily trick a student into believing a fabricated news story. The president described the threat, and the security service demonstrated its operation within hours.
That is the logic behind the speech. The country’s security after Victory depends on the ability of millions of citizens to recognize manipulation. A tank column will be of no help here. Schools, universities, fair rules, and the personal example set by adults will.
Today’s Eighteen-Year-Old Was Twelve: The Arithmetic Adults Forget
A simple calculation changes the perspective. An Azerbaijani citizen who was 18 in the fall of 2026 was born in 2007 or 2008. In the fall of 2020, that person was in sixth or seventh grade. Today’s ten-year-old schoolchild was about four at the time. For these children, the liberation of Shusha on November 8, 2020, is an event from a textbook, as distant as the collapse of the Soviet Union is for their parents.
Adults often address teenagers as though they personally remember Khojaly on February 26, 1992, the fall of Shusha on May 8 of that year, or the tent camps in Saatli and Bilasuvar. Teenagers do not remember any of this. The roughly one million refugees and internally displaced people whose plight Baku raised in every international forum for three decades are, to a schoolchild, a number. Someone else’s memory becomes one’s own only through explanation and personal engagement.
Journalists of my generation wrote about Karabakh for more than 30 years. Almost every such article ended on a note of waiting: justice deferred, peace still absent, the key to an apartment in Aghdam or Fuzuli hanging from a nail in a rented room in Baku. A teenager in 2026 lives in a country where the waiting is over. That teenager needs to understand what it cost, without being made to experience someone else’s trauma as their own.
The answer lies in the method. A school project can center on a single episode in a family’s history or on one town or village. A student finds documents, records an interview with a grandmother, builds a chronology, and cross-checks accounts. The student must clearly distinguish what has been confirmed from what remains conjecture. The material becomes part of the school archive. The teenager takes on the role of a researcher entrusted with serious work and, after a year, understands the history of displacement better than after ten ceremonial assemblies.
Four Resolutions No One Enforced: The Best Law Lesson for a High School Student
The history of Karabakh offers exceptional material for teaching international law. In 1993, the United Nations Security Council adopted four resolutions: Resolution 822 on April 30, following the seizure of Kalbajar; Resolution 853 on July 29, following the occupation of Aghdam; Resolution 874 on October 14; and Resolution 884 on November 12. All four demanded the immediate withdrawal of occupying forces. None was implemented for 27 years.
Memorizing the numbers accomplishes nothing. It is far more useful to place the texts of the resolutions beside a map of the fighting in 1993 and examine their wording. Why did a document adopted by the UN’s highest body remain on paper, while the OSCE Minsk Group, established in 1992 and counting three permanent members of the Security Council among its co-chairs, failed to return a single village to Azerbaijan in three decades of negotiations? Given the materials, high school students can find the answer themselves: an international decision and its implementation are two different processes, and the latter depends on a state’s power, its economy, its diplomacy, and its armed forces.
Such a lesson produces an understanding of the national interest. Azerbaijan’s legal position had been unassailable since 1993. The territories were recovered by an army built with revenues from oil and gas projects and shaped by the lessons of the defeats of the early 1990s. A young person who grasps that connection will no longer believe that security can be guaranteed by a declaration or a promise from an influential patron. Armenia tested its patrons’ promises in 2020 and 2023. An Azerbaijani schoolchild can learn that lesson without paying the price.
A Fabrication in Defense of the Truth Costs More Than Any Enemy Propaganda
This leads to a requirement that sounds uncompromising and should: patriotic education demands absolute factual accuracy. An invented quotation, a misappropriated photograph, an inflated figure, or an unsubstantiated accusation harms a just cause more than an adversary’s propaganda does. Once exposed, a fabrication discredits the entirely genuine claims alongside it. Young people accustomed to sharing debunkings within seconds notice such things faster than adults.
At the congress, the president expressed this principle succinctly: “We do not need to create myths.” Azerbaijan truly has no such need. The UN resolutions exist. The devastated city of Aghdam, which foreign journalists called the Hiroshima of the Caucasus, exists. The minefields that have killed and injured hundreds of civilians since 2020 exist. The truth works in Baku’s favor, and any carelessness with facts merely gives its opponents an excuse to change the subject.
Love of country does not exempt a writer from verification. On the contrary, it increases the responsibility: anyone who circulates a fabrication in defense of the homeland puts the credibility of the very cause they are defending at risk.
A 75-Point Deficit and a 63-Point Leap: What Happened in Baku’s Schools
The most uncomfortable conversation concerns the quality of education, and Azerbaijan now has fresh evidence to bring to it. In the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, 15-year-old students in Baku scored an average of 397 points in mathematics, 365 in reading, and 380 in science. The averages across countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development were 472, 476, and 485, respectively. Thirty-eight percent of Baku’s participants reached at least the baseline Level 2 in mathematical literacy, compared with an OECD average of 69 percent. Under the OECD’s approximate benchmark, 20 points correspond to roughly one year of schooling, meaning that the 75-point mathematics gap represented more than three years of learning.
The PISA 2025 results were published on September 8, 2026. The picture had changed dramatically. Baku improved its mathematics score by 63 points, its science score by 60, and its reading score by 40. By the combined gains across all three subjects, Azerbaijan ranked second among the assessment’s 91 participants. For comparison, only 16 participating education systems improved their mathematics results. Over the same period, the OECD average fell to 463 points in mathematics and 461 in reading.
Starting from the 2022 mathematics score of 397, Baku’s students would now be scoring around 460 points, placing them very close to the new OECD average. In three years, the capital’s schools narrowed a learning gap with developed countries from more than three years to a matter of months. Minister of Science and Education Emin Amrullayev placed the real impact of these changes on a ten- to fifteen-year horizon, when today’s 15-year-olds enter the workforce.
Why do these figures have anything to do with patriotism? Someone who struggles to understand a written text will have greater difficulty noticing when its meaning has been distorted. Weak mathematical literacy makes it harder to interpret percentages, budgets, and statistical comparisons—the tools on which a large share of information manipulation depends. As early as 1784, Immanuel Kant formulated the Enlightenment’s imperative: “Have the courage to use your own understanding!” Today, that phrase reads like a set of specifications for the education system. A country’s resilience to information manipulation begins in an ordinary math lesson.
Here is a prediction that can be tested. Azerbaijan has already signed an agreement to participate in PISA 2029. If the current trajectory continues, that assessment’s results, due toward the end of 2030, will show Baku’s students exceeding the OECD average in mathematics. Such a milestone would carry more weight in a debate about the country’s future than any ceremonial resolution.
The Finnish Formula and Singapore’s Playbook: What Baku Can Adopt and What It Can Leave Behind
The training method is familiar. Students receive three accounts of the same event: one accurate, one partially distorted, and one fabricated. Their task is to find the original source, check the date, separate fact from opinion, and identify missing context. They then explain why the falsehood appears convincing. What is assessed is their reasoning, rather than whether they guessed the right answer. After a year of such exercises, teenagers develop the habit of checking before forwarding. In a country where millions of people forward messages through messaging apps every day, that habit becomes an element of national security.
Finland has turned this practice into a system. Its National Agency for Education treats media literacy as a cross-curricular competency, while the core curriculum introduced beginning in 2016 distributes work with texts, images, charts, statistics, and videos across different subjects. The result is measurable: for years, the country has led European rankings of resilience to disinformation, despite sharing a border with a state that has subjected it to information pressure for decades.
Transplanting the Finnish model wholesale would be pointless. The principle of regular practice, however, can be adopted intact. Mathematics classes can examine manipulation through percentages and truncated chart axes; history classes can investigate the provenance of documents; literature classes can explore the emotional effects of language; and computer science classes can explain how fake accounts and generated images work. This requires trained teachers, materials, and time in the schedule. An obligation without resources will become another line in a plan, precisely the kind of line the president called on people to abandon.
Singapore offers a different framework. Its Total Defence concept, adopted in 1984, brought together military, civil, economic, social, and psychological defense. Digital defense was added in 2019. Every year on February 15, the anniversary of Singapore’s fall in 1942, the country observes Total Defence Day. On that day, schoolchildren examine crisis scenarios rather than ceremonial displays. Estonia followed a similar path after the cyberattacks of April 2007, establishing a volunteer cyberdefense unit in the early 2010s that attracted civilian programmers and engineers.
For Azerbaijan, these examples point toward a broad understanding of civic duty. A specialist protecting a hospital’s information system in Ganja is performing a task of national importance. An energy worker at a compressor station on the Southern Gas Corridor, through which Azerbaijani gas has flowed to Europe since 2020, helps sustain the country’s reputation as a reliable supplier. An entrepreneur who fulfills contracts on time strengthens the economy that supports an independent foreign policy. Young people benefit from seeing their own specific place on this map. Patriotism then finds expression in their chosen profession and the quality of their work.
A Competition Without a Favor Called In: Why a Fairly Awarded Scholarship Teaches More Than a Lesson in Courage
In his 1748 treatise The Spirit of the Laws, Charles-Louis de Montesquieu wrote: “It is in a republican government that the whole power of education is required.” He connected political virtue with love of both the laws and the homeland. The implication for our subject is direct: every decision that demonstrates how equally the rules apply teaches young people more than any lesson can.
Teenagers pay close attention to how scholarships are awarded, competitions are conducted, and internships are allocated. A transparent process teaches them to trust their own efforts: the winner knows why they earned a place, and the unsuccessful applicant understands which skills need improvement. Azerbaijan has built a strong record in this area. Centralized entrance examinations administered through the State Examination Center long ago removed personal discretion from university admissions. The ASAN public service network, established in 2012, brought dozens of government services into a single transparent framework and received a United Nations Public Service Award in 2015. It is precisely this logic that the president proposes extending to ideological work: results instead of going through the motions.
Every official, teacher, and manager helps educate the next generation, whether or not that responsibility appears in their job description. A promise kept, a refusal explained, a mistake corrected, and a respectful response to a complaint shape the understanding of the state held by someone who was listening to a lesson on civic responsibility only yesterday. Teenagers compare what they hear in the classroom with what they see in public institutions. When words and practice align, trust grows more reliably than it does through any appeal to civic conscience.
The family remains the first school of citizenship. Children observe how their parents treat neighbors, approach their work, care for public property, and honor their own promises. A father who arranges to jump the line at a clinic in front of his son negates a dozen classroom discussions about honesty. A mother who pays the electricity bill on time and does not throw garbage off the balcony explains how a shared home functions without uttering a single slogan. Government programs can reinforce such norms, but the personal example of adults retains a particular power precisely because it is repeated every day, something no organized event can provide.
National culture offers an enormous wealth of material for this work: language, literature, the mugham musical tradition, the architecture of the old neighborhoods of Shusha and Sheki, and the local history of every district. Young people benefit from engaging creatively with this heritage by making documentary films, recording the memories of longtime residents, and translating literary classics into English for peers abroad. Quality standards must be professional, because careless editing and historical errors do not become virtues simply because the subject is worthy. Respect for one’s own culture requires exacting standards in how it is presented to the world.
A Veteran Is Not a Prop: Military Preparation Without Camouflage Theater
The military dimension of education remains important, especially in a country whose armed forces have just demonstrated their effectiveness. Its content demands professionalism. Physical conditioning, land navigation, discipline, teamwork, and first aid taught by qualified instructors are skills as useful in an earthquake, a fire, or an accident as they are in the military. Camouflage in a photograph says nothing about readiness to act in a crisis. The ability to follow instructions, remain composed, and help an injured person without taking unnecessary risks comes from practice, not posing.
Meetings with veterans of the Patriotic War and the families of fallen service members require particular sensitivity. Participation should be voluntary, questions prepared in advance, and the conversation respectful. A veteran is not a prop used to add emotion to an event. An account of soldiers helping one another in a trench near Fuzuli, of a commander’s responsibility, or of the difficulties of returning to civilian life conveys the price of Victory more honestly than any poster. Remembrance deepens when the name on a memorial plaque acquires a biography: a profession, a hobby, favorite music, letters home.
Forty Thousand Volunteers and 28 Billion Manats: Where Patriotism Finds Work
Patriotism needs the experience of doing something useful, and Azerbaijan has a functioning model. The ASAN Volunteers organization, established in December 2013, takes on young people between the ages of 15 and 26 for two-month placements at public service centers. According to the organization, more than 40,000 volunteers have passed through its programs; it has conducted more than 5,500 training sessions and over 850 local and international projects; and more than 3,300 alumni have found jobs through the ASAN employment portal. A volunteer helping an elderly visitor navigate an electronic service learns patience. Working a shift teaches the consequences of being late. An understanding of mutual dependence develops, providing the foundation for mature civic awareness.
Karabakh offers a setting for such experience that no previous generation of Azerbaijanis has had. At the congress, the president reported that 96,000 people live, work, and study in Karabakh and East Zangezur, that former internally displaced people have been resettled in 48 communities, and that 28 billion manats have been allocated to rebuilding the territories. The figure of 96,000 must be read accurately: it includes residents, workers, and students. Behind these numbers are jobs for architects, teachers, energy specialists, agronomists, doctors, and entrepreneurs.
Karabakh University in Khankendi provides the clearest illustration. The president signed the decree establishing it on November 28, 2023, and the university officially opened on September 20, 2024. In its inaugural 2024–2025 academic year, it enrolled 1,104 students against a target of 1,120, filling 98.5 percent of its places; 101 first-year students had scored more than 600 points on their entrance examinations. By the end of 2025, enrollment had reached 2,154 students across six schools. In the 2026–2027 academic year, the university admitted 1,235 students to 49 degree programs, total enrollment was approaching 3,500, and the number of schools had risen to nine. According to Minister Emin Amrullayev, the number of first-year students with entrance scores above 600 had doubled compared with the inaugural class.
Behind these figures lies a historic reversal. A city that served for three decades as the capital of a separatist entity is becoming an Azerbaijani university center. Applicants with top scores are choosing Khankendi voluntarily, through competitive admissions. No propaganda campaign can do more for Karabakh’s integration than a student dormitory filled through merit-based selection.
The next milestone can already be identified. In the summer of 2028, Karabakh University will graduate its first class of bachelor’s degree students. The principal measure of success will be the proportion of graduates who remain to work in Karabakh and East Zangezur, rather than the number of diplomas awarded. If that share exceeds half, the region will acquire a professional elite of its own, and the recovery of land will become the restoration of life.
It makes sense to connect student internships here with communities’ actual needs. Future teachers can teach in new schools, engineering students can study the infrastructure of smart villages, and economics students can analyze conditions for small businesses. Young people see the results of their work in the life of a particular village. Such experience builds a stronger attachment to the country than any slogan.
Youth policy must, meanwhile, retain its nationwide reach. A schoolchild from a remote village in Lerik or Gabala has the same right to a laboratory, a sports program, and a capable mentor as a peer in Baku. If participating in a program requires spending money on travel and accommodation, an opportunity that is open on paper becomes available to only some families. Programs should therefore be judged by their actual accessibility, rather than their presence in a plan.
A Failing Student Is a Mentor’s Failure: Measuring What Cannot Be Photographed
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche observed: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.” Applied to education, the phrase defines a mentor’s task: preparing a person to make independent decisions. In a youth organization, that means having the right to propose a project, justify a budget, assemble a team, and take responsibility for the outcome. Where adults have scripted every action in advance, participants gain no experience in making decisions.
The New Azerbaijan Party’s extensive network of regional organizations can connect schoolchildren and university students with teachers, entrepreneurs, veterans, and engineers. The format is straightforward: a local problem, a small team, a mentor, a completed project, and an open discussion of the results. Young people’s proposals may be imperfect. Working through mistakes is precisely what turns attendance at an event into participation in the life of the country.
Results will have to be measured differently. First, establish a baseline of knowledge and skills; then conduct the program; six months later, assess what has been retained. Four things should be checked: whether participants have learned to recognize unreliable messages, whether they can work with documents, whether they have completed their own projects, and whether they are still engaged in community work a year after the program ends. These indicators are harder to collect than an audience head count, but they show whether the investment of money and time has paid off. A program that produces no results must be examined: Were participants the wrong age? Were mentors ineffective? Was the schedule overloaded? Was there no meaningful task? A system that declares every event a success loses the ability to learn. Abandoning the formulas the president criticized begins with the right to acknowledge that a format has failed.
The Daily Plebiscite: Who Loses if Baku Succeeds
In his lecture “What Is a Nation?,” delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882, Ernest Renan described a nation’s existence as a daily plebiscite: a continually renewed desire to carry on a shared life. For multiethnic Azerbaijan, this formulation is especially apt. Lezgins and Talysh, Avars and Udis, Russians and Mountain Jews helped build the state and fought for it in 2020. Children should recognize their own families in the history of their shared country. Azerbaijanism, as a state ideology, rests on precisely that recognition.
The same logic applies to young people who have gone abroad to study. It is more useful to ask what expertise a person has acquired than to judge their convictions by their residential address. A graduate of a European or American university can bring back a research partnership, a technology, or a contract. An invitation to a ceremonial reception rarely substitutes for an offer of work suited to their qualifications.
That leaves the question any serious analysis must ask: Who benefits, and who loses? The first beneficiary is the state, which gains citizens whose convictions cannot be overturned by a single evening on social media. The economy benefits as well, gaining specialists for Karabakh and energy projects. Those who lose are the actors who have counted on Azerbaijani society’s vulnerability to information manipulation: revanchist circles that still refuse to accept the outcomes of 2020 and 2023, and external players accustomed to pressuring Baku through media campaigns. The bureaucrat who has learned to report success by counting events also loses. Those reports will no longer be accepted as results.
One question remains unanswered. How long will it take for the new approach to travel from the congress podium to a village school where a teacher has been conducting compulsory assemblies from the same script for years? The speed of that journey will determine whether the generation of 2026 has time to develop within the new system or passes through before it arrives.
The true results of education will appear in actions no one photographs. An engineer will refuse to sign off on an unsafe technical design. A journalist will double-check a news story that conveniently supports their position. A Karabakh University graduate will stay to work in Aghdam despite a better offer in Baku. Thousands of Azerbaijani families still keep the keys to apartments they could not return to for 30 years. For the generation born after 2007, such a key is no longer a symbol of loss. It becomes an ordinary object that a grandson can place on a classroom desk and explain which door it once opened. A country where children tell that story accurately, with dates and documents, is more securely defended than any declaration could make it.