Armenia sits on the cusp between Europe and Asia, landlocked between Turkey and Iran, two opposing powers. For much of its history, Armenia was forced to contend between two greater powers positioned on either side of it. There was Persia and its powerful influence on one side and Turkey on the other, both interested in advancing and assuming control over the Armenian Plains. Today, these enmities continue to persist, with Turkey refusing to open its borders with Armenia, while there is a strong tourist trade with Iran. Besides these competing countries, Azerbaijan claims the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, as does Armenia. There are periodic flare-ups, with the most recent ceasefire, brokered by Russia, taking place on 10 November 2020, resulting in Azerbaijan gaining a distinct military advantage, large territories in the disputed region. In August 2017, I traveled to and spent a nearly month in Armenia, visiting sites both in Yerevan, the capital and in locations distant from the capital. The ancient Zorats Karer, site of the Armenian Stonehenge, has massive stones configured in a curving 'S' shape, placed by ancient and unknown people. The site is also known as the 'singing stones' because of the holes bored into the stones. One must conjecture that the ancient construction of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, attracted ancient hunter-gatherers to this large region, where they constructed these sites for reasons with which we are not familiar. Other than these stones, nothing is known of them, why they were built, and its overall purpose. Even their age is contested. Further south is Tatev, site of an ancient monastery, containing a unique scientific obelisk. The tall stone column, standing free at its base, was designed to predict the severity of earthquakes by its movement. This is a remarkable construction, made by an early seismologist interested in calibrating the periodic earthquakes this area experiences. To travel to the monastery grounds, I crossed the deep gorge by way of the world's longest cable tramway, the Wings of Tatev. As I review in my reviews of journeys to different countries, I visited with the small Jewish community in Armenia. Its chief rabbi, the only formal Jewish leader in the country, welcomed me and I spent one Sabbath as we discussed the history of Jews in the country and the minuscule community he leads today. During the Second World War, he, his mother and aunt sheltered here, finding the country and city a welcome respite from Nazi and Soviet anti-Semitism. Thousand of fellow Jews did the same and were grateful for this place of refuge. But in the years following that world conflict, all but approximately one hundred Jews left the country. Today, they reside in Israel, as in other counties. There is an enduring question why the Armenian setting was not conducive to Jewish settlement and business development. I found Armenia to be a fascinating country, with a long and complex history. Known for the Armenia Genocide, it is a place with attractions that remain unique. I share my journey and the places of interest about this country, with its complex history and its special people.

2011 Updated Reprint. Updated Annually. US--Armenia Diplomatic and Political Cooperation Handbook

Although "democracy promotion" has become a popular term for policy makers and scholars, democratization is rarely a smooth or linear transition. While some countries quickly democratize, others lag behind despite a long period of democracy promotion activities. Furthermore, while democracy promotion itself has been widely studied, there is a paucity of literature available assessing the outcome or the impact of democracy promotion. This book investigates democracy promotion by the European Union and the United States of America, and seeks to uncover why intensive democracy promotion has resulted in limited democratic progress. Exploring case studies of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, this book examines the conditions in which democracy promotion is more likely to result in democratic transformation. In addition, it introduces the concept of the "democracy blocker," a powerful authoritarian regional actor that is capable of blocking democratization in other countries. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Political Science, Democracy, Democratization, EU Studies, US Politics, Comparative Politics, and Foreign Policy.

This book examines the way democracy is thought about and lived by people in the post-communist world.

The book investigates the substance of the European Union's (EU) democracy promotion policy. It focuses on elections, civil and political rights, horizontal accountability, effective power to govern, stateness, state administrative capacity, civil society, and socio-economic context as components of embedded liberal democracy.

The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) was a unique, bottom-up, and a fleeting display of political unity and federalism among the main Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian political factions between 22 April 1918, when it declared its independence, and 26 May 1918, when it was dissolved and replaced by the three nation-states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Focusing on a crucial but poorly understood moment in the modern history of the Caucasus at the end of the First World War, this book offers a systematic, contextually-rich, and multi-perspectival—Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Ottoman, German, British, American, Italian, Bolshevik, Ukrainian and North Caucasian—account of the TDFR, drawing on contributions (with the new material from archives in Tbilisi, Grozny, Yerevan, Baku, Istanbul, Berlin, London, Washington D.C.) by a new generation of historians and scholars working on the region. The book argues that despite its month-long existence in this geopolitically volatile region, the TDFR, with and its federative nature and the various discussions about federalism and federation that it provoked, continued to have an appeal for Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians as well as for the Great Powers well beyond its dissolution. Moreover, the experience of the TDFR reifies federalism as a key political concept in the modern history of the Caucasus. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Caucasus Survey.

What does compliance with judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) look like in states on the spectrum of democratisation? This work provides an in-depth investigation of three such states—Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia— in the wider context of the growing 'implementation crisis' in Europe, and does so through a combined lens of theoretical insights and rich empirical data. The book offers a detailed analysis of the domestic contexts varying from democratising to increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which shape the states’ compliance behaviour, and discusses why and how such states comply with human rights judgments. It puts particular focus on ‘contested’ compliance as a new form of compliance behaviour involving states’ acting in ‘bad faith’ and argues for a revival of the concept of partial compliance. The wider impact that ECtHR judgments have in states on the spectrum of democratisation is also explored.