Vicken Cheterian
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Russia Protests: The Putin System in its winter
Now, in power now for over two decades the “Putin system” shows signs of fatigue. Paradoxically, Vladimir Putin is vulnerable more than ever to street pressure now that he ensured total control over Russian political institutions.
6 February 2021
How the Failed Arab Spring Changed Our World?
The first reason for the failure of the Arab Spring was therefore regime repression. It is not enough to have a “revolutionary crisis” to produce “revolutionary change”.
22 January 2021
The Day Symbols Paraded on the Streets of Baku
During the parade, he not only shared the victory with the Turkish leader, but also seemed to be a junior partner in the achievement. The participation of Erdogan might be explained by the important role Turkey played in enabling Azerbaijan win the war.
15 December 2020
War and Defeat
Between the First Karabakh War and the Second Karabakh War there is a long period of 26 years, so many missed opportunities to resolve the conflict through negotiations. The failure should be found in the wrong beliefs, wrong ideas that led to wrong policies.
27 November 2020
Karabakh: The War Moves to the Diplomatic Front
After 44 days of war in Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan saw acceleration of military operations, an accidental shooting of a Russian helicopter, and finally signing an agreement to stop the hostilities. Russian troops will be deployed in the conflict zone.
11 November 2020
Karabakh: War Aims of the Belligerents
For now, Ankara failed to ensure its place on the negotiations table: the humanitarian cease-fire deal reached on the early hours of Saturday October 10, between the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers mediated by Lavrov in Moscow, the four short points did not mention Turkey, and insisted on preserving the current OSCE format of negotiations.
14 October 2020
Why Turkey is a factor of War, and not of Peace in Karabakh Conflict?
The majority of Turks in Turkey have no idea about Azerbaijan, they do not know its people, history or culture. They hear about them from their TV screens only when war erupts. Still, they are certain about their deep friendship and strong ethnic solidarity with Azerbaijan, and their antagonism towards everything Armenian.
1 October 2020
From “Zero Problem” to “Blue Homeland”: Turkey's interventionist policy
In fact, Turkish policy in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean is conditioned by the collapse of the regional security architecture, and power vacuum left behind.
5 September 2020
Armenia-Azerbaijan Diasporas: From Opportunity of a Dialogue to Its Necessity
Even at the height of the Karabakh war (1991-1994), there were no acts of violence among diaspora communities. Moreover, the scale, and the fact that it happened in numerous sites in a short time, shows there is a pattern developing
17 August 2020
From the Nile to the Euphrates, Water Conflicts
The Nile is not the only source of “water conflicts” in the Middle East. On social networks videos circulate of a near dry riverbed of Euphrates.
3 August 2020
The Third Conversion of Hagia Sophia
Today, the city is being conquered again. But from whom? There are no more Orthodox left – although the few remaining are still persecuted and victimized by the state...
20 July 2020
Libya: Dance Macabre in the Desert
To understand the dynamics of the Libyan conflict, it is important to consider the local belligerents as well as the logic of external interventions.
11 June 2020
Midhat Pasha in Beirut
Midhat Pasha played a key role in bringing Abdul Hamid II to power, in the hope of establishing a constitutional monarchy. This was a pyrrhic victory: the sultan first declared the constitution only to suspend it soon after, and send Midhat once again away to the provinces, and later arrest him, exile him to Taif, and have him assassinated in prison.
23 May 2020
Siruni: The Witness to the Great Calamity
At the end of the war, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated and the Ittihadist leaders escaped to Germany, Siruni came out of his hiding, and with few surviving intellectuals tried to re-establish a community that was mortally wounded.
24 April 2020
Covid-19: There’s no Pilot in the Cockpit
The centre of global humanitarianism is Geneva, a small town in Switzerland. There you can find WHO headquarters, as well as UN’s OCHA, UNHCR, and the international Red Cross movement and many other international bureaucracies. Yet, Geneva is not the place where multilateral political decisions are taken.
1 April 2020
Why Russia and Turkey will not Fight Each Other for Idlib?
The possibility is high that the two leaders Putin and Erdogan will try and meet in the next days to defuse the dangerous situation in north-west Syria. This does not mean that the two sides do not have major differences in Idlib – they do. But if one considers bilateral interests, and more broadly their tense relations with Europe and the US, they have an interest in de-escalating, just like they did after the Sukhoi incident in 2015.
5 March 2020
Turkey in the Syrian Quicksand
On February 10, six Turkish soldiers were killed as their positions came under artillery fire from the Syrian regime troops. Are we witnessing the risk of a major escalation in northern Syria? Will the Turkish army directly confront the advancing Syrian loyalist forces? And if so, are we facing the risk of a larger conflict between Ankara and Moscow?
13 February 2020
Trump and Soleimani: “With us or against us”!
In spite of tensions between Tehran and Washington, the frontal confrontation was excluded, adopting instead indirect competition and a game of influence. Then, why did Trump decide to change the rules of the game and ordered the assassination?
9 January 2020
Khojaly, Genocide, and Other Taboos
Only some days back, the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan remembered again the words of Ayaz Mutalibov. While in Milan at the Armenian Church, during a meeting with the local Armenian community, he was confronted by an Azerbaijani blogger who accused the Armenian side of “genocide”.
6 December 2019
Post-Sectarian Revolts
The new protest movement in a radical break with the ideology and methods of struggle that emerged form the 2011 revolts: the protests are young and feminine, and are self-consciously non-violent.
15 November 2019
Ankara’s Dangerous Flirtation with Jihadists
In fact, Turkey is not the first country that flirts with jihadis. In the 1980’s three states - Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and USA - invested money, arms, and provided logistics to the first generation of salafi-jihadis, known as Arab Afghans, to use them against the Soviet army occupying Afghanistan.
25 October 2019
Time for Armenian and Azerbaijani diasporas to talk to each other
The 2018 changes in Armenia did not produce any revolutionary discourse concerning the Karabakh conflict. In Yerevan as in Baku, political elites do not seem able to imagine how to resolve this conflict. I call Diaspora Armenians and Azerbaijanis living abroad to make a bold initiative and start a new dialogue, may be they could move a process that is central in determining the future of their homelands, yet remains paralyzed for nearly two decades.
7 October 2019
When Two Israeli Historians Discover (the other) Genocide
The end result is not very different from other books written on the topic, since the days of Vahakn Dadrian, Richard Hovannisian, Taner Akçam, Stefan Ihrig, and of course the monumental work of Raymond Kévorkian, and many others.
13 September 2019
“Bird’s Nest” – The Orphanage-Museum
The Armenian communities in those countries are largely orphan communities. They were communities that had lost their land, and large part of their material culture such as monasteries, schools, libraries, and archives. They were also orphan communities in a literary sense, as an important segment of those communities had arrived in Syria or Lebanon and orphans.
9 August 2019
Syria’s Kurds, and Middle East’s Democracy
The Kurdish de facto authorities in northeast Syria organized from June 4-6 the “International Forum on ISIS” inviting some 200 international guests to Qamishli. More than the fate of the defeat Islamic State, it is the future of the Kurdish autonomy that is the real challenge.
12 July 2019
Gorky in Venice
Gorky, in Venice, is a unique exhibit. To have so many of his works, few of which survived the numerous disasters during his lifetime, is in itself an event.
17 June 2019
Teaching as an act of social justice
Teach for Armenia represents a dissenting set of values, and marks a departure from the generation of capitalist grab: the movement away from the capital to serve in impoverished towns and villages, and to volunteer – that is to give your time not for profit but for a social cause.
10 May 2019
Yazidis Who Call Armenia Home
When I asked Jasem Mahmudyan whether he had been to Iraq to visit the Yazidi holly sites in Lalesh, he answered in negative. The tragic events in Sinjar had shaken the entire Yazidi community, and some families had found temporary refuge in Armenia, but they had eventually continued to European destinations. From the village of Alakyaz, Iraq seemed very far away indeed.
12 April 2019
Rediscovering the History of Armenian Revolutionaries
Why did a Turkish intellectual was suddenly interested in Armenian (revolutionary) history? The other side of the question (that I ask in my book Open Wounds) is: why was the Armenian history reduced to silence for so long? “The Genocide of the Armenians destroyed this memory, the historic experience of Hunchags and Tashnags from todays political experience,” told me Akin.
15 March 2019
Armenia: What Comes After a Revolution?
The Armenian government can learn from the lessons of Georgia and elsewhere. For three decades, neoliberal policies did not bring happiness. To imagine solving Armenia’s problems by attracting foreign investments will fail.
6 February 2019
Who needs a Ministry of Diaspora?
4 January 2019
Who is the New President of Georgia?
The fact that Salome Zurabishvili belongs to the Georgian diaspora is another positive factor. In a post-Soviet country where all foreign born could be suspected of being spies, where minorities are treated as second class, where concepts such as “the nation” or “the citizen” have a very narrow definition, to have a foreign born president who speaks Georgian with heavy accent is again positive.
10 December 2018