BELMONT, Mass. — The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will host an in-person and online lecture by Prof. Anna Ohanyan on her new publication, The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia, on Thursday, September 29, at 7:30 p.m., at the NAASR Vartan Gregorian Building, 395 Concord Ave. The program will be presented as the 3rd Annual Prof. Charles B. Garabedian Lecture at NAASR.
Why are certain regions of the world mired in conflict? And how did some regions in Eurasia emerge from the Cold War as peaceful and resilient? Why do conflicts ignite in Bosnia, Donbas, and Damascus — once on the peripheries of mighty empires — yet other postimperial peripheries like the Baltics or Central Europe enjoy quiet stability?
In The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia (Stanford Univ. Press, 2022), Ohanyan argues for the salience of the neighborhood effect: the complex regional connectivity among ethnic-religious communities that can form resilient regions. She examines case studies from regions once on the fringes of the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires to find the often-overlooked patterns of bonding and bridging, or clustering and isolation of political power and social resources, that are associated with regional resilience or fracture in those regions today.
Ohanyan is the Richard B. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Political Science & International Relations at Stonehill College, a Nonresident Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace/Russia and Eurasia Program, and a two-time Fulbright Scholar to South Caucasus. Ohanyan founded the Global Development and Security Studies Program at Stonehill and served as the chair of the Political Science & International Studies Department from 2014 to 2017. She is the 2022 recipient of the Michael Horne Award for Distinguished Faculty Scholarship at Stonehill and is a member of the NAASR Board of Directors.
She has authored and co-authored five books, including Armenia’s Velvet Revolution: Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World (I. B. Tauris, 2020), Russia Abroad: Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond (Georgetown Univ. Press, 2018), and Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management (Stanford Univ. Press, 2015.)
The Neighborhood Effect is available for purchase from the NAASR Bookstore.
