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, 2022, at 7:30 p.m., at the NAASR Vartan Gregorian Building, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA. The program will be presented as the third annual Prof. Charles B. Garabedian Lecture at NAASR.

This will be an in-person event and also presented online live via Zoom and YouTube. For those attending in person, NAASR recommends the wearing of masks to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

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 post-imperial 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.Dr. Anna OhanyanDr. 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. Dr. 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.

Dr. Ohanyan 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.

Professor Garabedian (1917-1991) was born in Everett, Massachusetts and graduated magna cum laude from Everett High School and Tufts University (A.B. English and History). He attended Harvard Law School and graduated magna cum laude from Boston University Law School. During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and in the late 1940s, he began his teaching career at Suffolk University Law School. His expertise was tort litigation and damages, courses which he continuously taught at Suffolk University Law School for over 40 years. At the time of his death, Professor Garabedian was the Senior Faculty Professor at Suffolk University Law School. The annual lecture in his memory has been established at NAASR by Prof. Garabedian’s niece, NAASR Board member Joan E. Kolligian.