Armenia’s Impossible Position
For years, the EU did nothing to reign Putin in. Finding an alternative for its energy needs, the EU traded one gas supplier waging a genocidal war of aggression—Russia, with another—Azerbaijan.
Dr. Karena Avedissian is a political scientist focused on social movements, new media, civil society, and security in the former Soviet Union, with an area focus on Russia and the Caucasus. She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2015. Since then, she has worked as Research Fellow at the University of Southern California and the University of Birmingham on topics of comparative democracy and authoritarianism, state-building in Armenia, and state influence in the post-Soviet space. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, the Moscow Times, Open Democracy, Global Voices, Transitions Online, and Hetq. She is currently a lecturer at the American University of Armenia.
For years, the EU did nothing to reign Putin in. Finding an alternative for its energy needs, the EU traded one gas supplier waging a genocidal war of aggression—Russia, with another—Azerbaijan.
Following Azerbaijan’s latest attack, this time against Armenia proper, international actors are calling on both sides to de-escalate the situation. Bothsidism in this context is ridiculous, tiresome, and shameful. Not naming the aggressor or who is benefiting from violence is not a neutral act. It is not telling the truth.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union, despite the mostly peaceful nature of the process itself, was followed by significant conflicts in a number of the newly independent states. Karena Avedissian looks at the territorial conflicts in the Caucasus.
International human rights defending organizations have been speaking in a language of “neutrality” which, in the context of the war crimes committed by Azerbaijan during and after the 2020 Artsakh War, is anything but objective, writes Karena Avedissian.
More than 27 million people globally have contracted COVID-19 and almost 900,000 have died. For this installment of “Understanding the Region,” we look at how the three countries of the South Caucasus have fared in their response to the pandemic.
The tourism industry has been particularly hard hit because of the COVID-19 pandemic. What does this mean for the three countries of the South Caucasus?
The South Caucasus is a region with three unresolved armed conflicts that began in the 1990s: Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh). What is the state of democracy in these three statelets?
When parents have a child born with a disability, it is usually healthcare professionals who often apply social pressure on them to reject their baby. This is a primer of EVN Report’s White Paper, “Retraining Healthcare Professionals: The Practice of Placing Children with Disabilities in Institutions in Armenia.”
Once-integrated energy channels were disrupted with the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia began rebuilding their impaired energy infrastructures. How have these countries with different degrees of European and Russian influence and different energy needs and natural oil and gas reserves fared so far and what do they have in common?
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the three countries of the South Caucasus declared independence in 1991. This new instalment of “Understanding the Region” looks at the democratic trajectories of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Part II will look at the state of democracy in the statelets of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
EVN Report’s mission is to empower Armenia, inspire the diaspora and inform the world through sound, credible and fact-based reporting and commentary. Our goal is to increase public trust in the media. EVN Report is the media arm of EVN News Foundation registered in the Republic of Armenia in 2017.
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