Panel Discussion: Frozen Conflict

About

The self-proclaimed independent Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh is today a war-torn enclave between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Throughout the centuries the claims over this area have shifted, the borders been mapped and remapped, yet the repression of the region’s indigenous population has persisted. Today, over a million of its Azeri and Armenian inhabitants remain displaced; last year saw some of the worst clashes for a decade, and negotiations for a long-term solution are yet to be reached.

This talk accompanies Imagined Futures, the first UK solo show by internationally exhibited Syrian-Armenian artist Hrair Sarkissian, and aims to shed further light on issues raised by the works in the show.

The panel will include:

Andrew Jack is an award winning journalist who has worked for the Financial Times since 1990. He runs the newly-created curated content team which identifies the best news and analysis from the FT and the rest of the web. He is also an author, the co-chairman of Pushkin House, a London-based independent centre for Russian culture, and a trustee of SciDev.net, a non-profit media group covering science and development. He graduated in geography from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, was the Joseph Hodges Choate Memorial Fellow at Harvard University and a New York City urban fellow. He is a former FT Moscow bureau chief and author of Inside Putin’s Russia.

Marina Nagai is a Senior Projects Manager, Eurasia Programme, at International Alert. Educated at Edinburgh and Stanford Universities, her initial training was in international public law and relations. As a Senior Staff Attorney and Programme Head at the American Bar Association, she focused on promoting legal reforms in the former Soviet Union countries.  She  joined Alert in 2010, and has been involved in peacebuilding initiatives in the South Caucasus that aim at laying the foundation for lasting peace and security in communities affected by conflict.

Hratch Tchilingirian is a sociologist (with a particular reference to sociology of religion) and associate faculty member of the Oriental Institute, Oxford. From 2002 to March 2012 he taught and held various positions at Cambridge University and has published and lectured extensively on inter-ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus, minorities in the Middle East and the Armenian Diaspora. (See www.hratch.info).

Dennis Sammut is a foreign policy analyst with two decades of experience of work in the Caucasus Region and other parts of the Former Soviet Union and the wider Middle East. He is the Director of LINKS (Dialogue-Analysis-Research), and a Member of the Advisory Council of the European Policy Centre in Brussels. Visit his website.

This event is organised in association with Pushkin House.