Lecture on Long-Term Effects on Armenia of April 2016 War to Be Offered at NAASR

BELMONT, MA — Dr. Gayane Novikova, the Founding Director of the Spectrum Center for Strategic Analysis in Yerevan, Armenia, and currently an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, will give a lecture entitled “Armenia: Some Features of Internal (In)Stability,” on Thursday, April 20, 2017, at 7:30 p.m., at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) Center, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA 02478. The lecture is presented as part of the NAASR / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues.

The April 2016 four-day war within the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, as well as the developments that followed, have unveiled a whole stratum of serious problems in “stable” Armenia, including issues relating to defense. The aftermath of these events will continue strongly to influence internal processes in Armenia, in particular.

In this presentation, Dr. Gayane Novikova will analyze some long-term consequences of the April 2-5, 2016, events in terms of their influence on Armenian internal political and social developments, including the results of the recent parliamentary elections.

The political transformations ongoing currently in Armenia can be best described as a “palace” coup d’état, initiated by a ruling elite who have benefited from the general population’s low levels of public participation and social mobilization. In the absence of a charismatic leader and strong leadership in general, a tangible program of action, and unity among the different components of civil society, the ruling elite retains the capacity to influence the varying reconstitution of groups and to alleviate, through small-scale concessions, tensions in Armenian society.

Dr. Gayane Novikova is Founding Director of the Spectrum Center for Strategic Analysis (since 2001) in Yerevan, Armenia, and is presently Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (2008-2009) and from 2009-13 a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and at the Davis Center. She has also been a Visiting Lecturer in the International Relations Department at Boston University. She is the author of several books, including The Conflict Potential of the South Caucasus: the Geopolitical Dimension, more than ninety chapters and articles in peer-reviewed anthologies, and she serves as the editor of Spectrum’s annual Regional Security Issues anthology.

For more information about Dr. Novikova’s talk, contact NAASR at 617-489-1610 or hq@naasr.org.