The four-year-old International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University (ISET) in Tbilisi, Georgia was founded to unite students and faculty from all three South Caucasus countries for a Western-style education in economics. And, as if undergoing a rite of passage in its growth as an institution, it underwent its first major academic controversy this year.

Students were agitated, donors threatened to withdraw funding and an ambassador warned of unilateral sanctions.

What caused all the fuss? — A master’s thesis that used game theory to create a model for the probability of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Ani Harutyunyan, 23, originally of Vanadzor, Armenia, set out last November to create a model that could determine the probability of all-out war breaking out between the two countries over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh based on a variety of factors.

Now, mind you, creating a game theory model is not the same as predicting whether war will happen or not – it’s not a magic eight ball.

Basically it works like this: say you are hungry and the two main factors governing your action are price of the food and deliciousness of the food. You have three options to choose from:

1.) Don’t eat. You save your money, but you don’t resolve the problem.

2.) Throw something together at home. You expend very little money, but, although your bachelor-pad-borne concoction is filling, it’s hardly gourmet.

3.) Go out to eat. You’ll have to pony up some dough, but you’ll get some good food out of it.

And so, if you make a formula out of those choices and input subjective number values for your culinary pickiness and current level of poverty, one can compute which action you are most likely to take.

Harutyunyan’s thesis created the formula for the major factors that would play into what Azerbaijan would demand as a settlement in the peace negotiations and what Armenia would be willing to accept, with renewed war being the probable result of a total deadlock; but she did not input her own subjective numbers to find a result. As Harutyunyan put it, “unlike journalists, scientists never make conclusions explicitly” (like I did earlier this month).

Nonetheless, her model and the thesis’ conclusions are quite interesting.

The basis of the model puts the Defender (Armenia) at the negotiating table with the Challenger (Azerbaijan). Because Armenia currently holds the territory that Azerbaijan wants, it is more or less satisfied with the status quo and is less likely to make a deal in which it sacrifices territory unless it is facing a war it thinks it will lose.

Azerbaijan wants the territory, but in assessing the war option it must decide if the costs of fighting the war are worth the benefits of potentially regaining control of Nagorno-Karabakh and other territories currently held by Armenia. The more Armenia believes Azerbaijan, which is more powerful militarily, is willing to go to war, the more amenable it will be towards cutting a deal.

The X-factor is the potential for third-party intervention as both Armenia and Azerbaijan have much larger allies in the region – Russia and Turkey respectively. The mood of each nation towards intervention on a scale of “reluctant” to “motivated” then factors into each side’s stance.

In the end, if Azerbaijan believes Russia will back Armenia strongly, then it will demand less, just like it will demand less if war appears to be too costly. If Turkey appears willing to strongly support Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan appears to be willing to take the costs of war, then Armenia is likely to accept a less favorable settlement. There are plenty of other combinations to this scheme.

However, the most important factor in the formula — as in most wars — is information. The study found that “there is no risk of war when disputants are perfectly informed about each other’s costs, the distribution of power, utilities for different outcomes.”

“However,” the paper continues, “states are rarely informed about each other completely.”

The paper also presupposes logical thinking on both sides, as well as the audience, which may have been a stretch.

As Harutyunyan presented her thesis this May to a mixed audience of Georgians, Armenians and Azeris in Tbilisi, she got heckles and interruptions – mostly from Azeri students objecting to a map used in the presentation which showed Nagorno-Karabakh and other Armenian-held territories shaded a different color from Azerbaijan. Some students shot video with their cell phones, although the university was filming the presentation as well.

When it came time for group discussion the room was silent. The shouting would start a few days later.

Karine Torosyan, a professor of economics at ISET, said that some students complained to school advisors and within days the university received a letter from the embassy of Azerbaijan in Georgia demanding Harutyunyan rewrite her thesis on a different topic or Azerbaijan would take steps to prevent Azeri students from attending ISET and would impede the school’s activities in the country.

Furthermore, the school, which is supported by British Petroleum, the World Bank and various other organizations and governments, began receiving calls from donors expressing concern over the thesis, intimating that future grants and donations hung in the balance.

Torosyan said the university held a series of meetings with concerned embassy officials, who said they believed in freedom of speech, but wanted the university to guard against “uncivilized discourse.”

ISET didn’t budge.

In the end, the university agreed to set up a faculty academic integrity committee to deal with future controversies but accepted the thesis and awarded Harutyunyan her master’s degree.

Torosyan said the university has not faced any consequences thus far from the Azerbaijani government or independent donors, but the fact that such a risk remained was “very embarrassing” for academia in the region.

In some ways, the reaction to Harutyunyan’s thesis tells nearly as much about the potential for resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as the thesis itself. The issue is so sensitive that the roles could have easily been switched. Had the paper been written by an Azeri student and presented with a map that showed Karabakh and the other territories shaded the same color as Azerbaijan, it’s likely it would have received a similarly dismissive and off-put reaction from Armenians.

But Harutyunyan, for her part, said she reflects unfazed by the controversy that could have cost her her MA.

“Come on, it was funny for me all that,” she said. “What can I think? You wrote something, you are open for discussion, you want to reveal things, but then you are told to shut up.”

The post What Game Theory Can Tell Us About a Possible Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict appeared first on The Faster Times.

Everyone wishes it was easier to tell the difference.

“Bellicose” has become the favorite word of South Caucasus diplomacy this summer as rhetoric and actions have been ramping up between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the past few months despite several moderated peace summits, leading some to fear a definitive heating up of the two nations’ frozen conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

After backing an ethnic-Armenian secession movement in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan in the early 1990′s, Armenia continues to militarily control most of Karabakh and other Azeri lands.

To a certain extent, these new daggers in the dialogue are not surprising as politicians from both sides have made diplomatic sniping into a sort of sport, but Azerbaijan has increasingly shown its dissatisfaction with the peace talks, with statements focusing on a expedient resolution “by any means possible.” On June 25, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev said publicly that if the long-running peace talks did not yield a positive result soon, then Azerbaijan was prepared to retake Karabakh and the Azeri territories surrounding it by force.

This came exactly one week after the deadliest skirmish on the line of contact between Armenian and Azeri forces in two years. It occurred near the village of Chayil just 24 hours after a meeting between the Armenian and Azeri presidents in St. Petersburg as a part of a Russian-mediated peace conference. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe released a statement three days later that said the skirmish ”can only be seen as an attempt to damage the peace process.” Experts said the facts pointed towards an Azeri incursion into Armenian-held lands, which killed four Armenian soldiers and one Azeri.

Richard Giragosian, director of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies (ACNIS) in Yerevan, said that while the June 18 attack fits into “a consistent pattern of limited skirmishes and probes, especially Azerbaijani probing the defensive positions on the Armenian side,” it was nonetheless the most serious cease-fire violation in the past two years.

Citing unidentified Armenian military sources, he said the attack must have been prepared over a period of several days. He described it as more professional and more deadly than previous such incursions. The attack began with an Azerbaijani sniper inflicting a fatal head wound on an Armenian soldier on the front line.

The skirmish was followed by an Armenian counter attack which killed one other Azeri soldier. The Azeri soldier, Ensign Mubariz Ibrahimov, who was killed in the initial skirmish was later awarded the title of National Hero of Azerbaijan. His service was described by Azeri news agency News.az as such:

On the night of June 19 Ibrahimov killed four occupants and injured five, one of whom is in coma. The hero was shot dead from the back. Ibrahimov’s body has not yet been returned to the Azerbaijani side.

One month later, both sides came together once again in Almaty, Kazakhstan to talk through the OSCE’s proposed resolution for the conflict, which includes “the return to Azerbaijani control of the territories bordering on Nagorno-Karabakh currently occupied by Armenian forces; interim status for Nagorno-Karabakh that provides guarantees of security and self-governance; a land corridor linking Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia; future determination of the final legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh through ‘a legally binding expression of will’; the right of all internally displaced persons and refugees to return to their former places of residence; and international security guarantees that would include a peacekeeping operation.”

Sounds simple enough, no? The issue is that the OSCE path does not directly outline the sequence of these events, and although it includes nearly everything that each side wants, the two sides could not even agree upon a joint statement at the end of the conference that would have outlined some sort of progress or uniting principles.

Both [Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard] Nalbandian and [Azeri Foreign Minister Elmar] Mammadyarov said the initial intention was to release a joint statement by all five officials. Each blamed the other for thwarting that planned statement. Nalbandian termed Mammadyarov’s approach “destructive.” Mammadyarov for his part told journalists he has the impression that “Armenia has no desire to reach an agreement.”

In the end, there are a number of different ways to interpret this summer’s events:

– The pessimistic one is that after more than 15 years of fruitless peace talks, Azerbaijan, now far richer, more developed and more populous than Armenia, has decided to prepare for the final push to resolve this fight militarily. It has been steadily modernizing its military with new Turkish, Israeli and American arms, and now that it has made itself into an important supplier of energy production and transit, the international community will limit their reaction to condemnation, rather than raise their own energy prices over poor little Armenia.

–  The optimistic version is that this is nothing we haven’t seen before, and the stalemate is going to remain in place because of the larger forces at work. These new tensions can be explained away by the fact that politicians on both sides maintain their power amid their flawed democracies by instilling nationalistic pride of their armed forces in the people, supplying examples of heroism in the face of ever-present boogeymen.

The wild card in all of this is Russia. Russia has signed several major energy deals with Azerbaijan over the past few years, and hopes to secure as much Azeri natural gas as it can in order to scuttle Western pipeline projects like Nabucco, which would reduce Europe’s energy dependance on Russian exports. On the other hand, Russia has 4,000 troops based in Armenia, and Armenia is the most enthusiastic member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a loose post-Warsaw Pact military alliance that Russia hopes to eventually fashion into a competitor with NATO.

In a sign that Russia hopes to continue to balance Armenia and Azerbaijan and maintain the status quo, Russia announced last week increased cooperation between Yerevan’s and Moscow’s respective defense industries, and this week announced it would redefine in “more explicit terms” its military cooperation with Armenia.

It said one of the amendments proposed by the protocol makes clear the Russian base will not only protect Russia’s interests but also contribute to Armenia’s national security.

Under another change cited by Interfax, Moscow will explicitly commit itself to providing its main South Caucasus ally with “modern and compatible weaponry and [special] military hardware.”

Here’s to hoping the Russians know what they’re doing.

The post Armenia and Azerbaijan Headed for All-Out War? appeared first on The Faster Times.

Ten years later, after Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and iPhones apps seemed to have successively killed off the first generation of blog platforms and social networks, I was stunned to find that not only was Live Journal not extinct, but was in fact an influential vehicle for grass roots activism, social discussion and independent news sharing in Armenia — a country lacking in all three.

Armenia is rated “partly free” on democracy and “not free” on the status of its freedom of the press by Washington-based pro-democracy NGO Freedom House. According to internetworldstats.com little over six percent of Armenia’s population uses the internet, while most turn to exclusively pro-government broadcast media for information. But for Armenians, seeing isn’t believing.

According to the OSCE, 10 people were killed March 2008 when the government violently dispersed protesters who disputed presidential elections widely considered to be fraudulent. The mainstream media coverage of this event, however, proved to be to a total pro-government wash, causing confidence in media institutions to plummet and blogging boomed.

Today, Armenia’s most popular bloggers get tens of thousands of page views a day while the average circulation of Yerevan’s many newspapers is around 3,000 each. The community of approximately 500 live journals and stand-alone blogs has become an active force in Armenian society, meeting in person and in cyberspace to organize petition campaigns and flash mobs to protest local policies and use their growing influence to spread information.

The government has taken notice.

Artur Papyan, creator of the Armenian Observer Blog, said government officials have hired staffs of consultants to deal with the phenomenon and many high-ranking officials have created blogs of their own. And, earlier this month, when unveiling a controversial new proposal to create a small number of foreign language schools in Armenia, Armenian Education Minister Armen Ashotyan held a nearly 3-hour-long meeting with various bloggers to present the government’s plan.

This makes Armenia a unique case as blogging in the other two countries of the Caucasus region, Georgia and Azerbaijan, largely reflects each of the countries’ respective political environments. In pro-Western Georgia, where freedom of expression is arguably the most respected, the number of blogs is higher, but the blogging community has a much smaller impact on the political dialogue, and in dictatorial Azerbaijan nearly all blogs are apolitical — with two political bloggers already having been sent to prison for “hooliganism.”

In Armenia, meanwhile, the contrast between the country’s largely closed political and media society and the level to which new media has been able to drive the discourse is striking.

Not all Armenians are optimistic about the future of its small, influential blogging community, however. Anna Simonyan, one of the founders of the online magazine Yerevan.ru, which heavily incorporates blogging into its interactive format, believes that Facebook, currently the fastest growing social network in Armenia, will gradually usurp the discussion. Independent bloggers will either be disempowered, or will take salaried positions in media organizations and will be gradually brought into the fold, she said, as very few have made any real advertising money from their blogging exploits.

But information security analyst and blogger Samvel Martirosyan disagrees. He said that Yerevan’s blogging community is already seeing a collaboration between individuals using both Live Journal and Facebook.

“It is a real cooperation; Facebook is good for activism, but blogs are better for brainstorming, creating ideas,” he said. “Platform is nothing, the idea is everything.”

In the end, although Armenia’s low levels of internet penetration may hamper the impact of new media activism within its borders, it hasn’t been an obstacle for the overall consumption of blogs as much of the existing Armenian blogosphere is geared more towards the larger, more internet-savvy Armenian diaspora, which greatly outnumbers the population of the small Caucasus nation of 3.5 million.

With issues like the normalization of ties with Turkey, resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan and balancing the influence of America, Russia and Iran on the country’s politics and economy — issues on which residents and diaspora are often fiercely divided — there’s bound to be plenty to talk about and plenty of places to do it for years to come.

To keep seeing more updates on Armenia and more, check out TFT’s membership plans!

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The post Armenian Bloggers Seize Influence With the Power of … Live Journal? appeared first on The Faster Times.

With that visual in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that after a year of back-and-forths and ups and downs the process came to a screeching halt last month as Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan announced he was “suspending” discussion of the reconciliation protocols — a move that was enthusiastically welcomed by his constituents.

But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean it’s back to the silent game.

Although the highly touted reconciliation protocols are considered to be an important part of U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy ambitions in Europe, the move to freeze the discussions was telegraphed by insiders well in advance and has even been endorsed publicly by administration officials.

Why? Because few seem to have expected it to get this far the first place. The Turkish-Armenian relationship is fraught with unresolved baggage mostly surrounding denial, anger and a bunch of mountains in Azerbaijan.

Sargsyan’s announcement came 48 hours before the day that Armenians regard as the 95th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide — a nearly decade long pogrom of ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire that killed an estimated 1.5 million people. Twenty countries and 44 U.S. states recognize the events that occurred from 1915-1923 as genocide, and Armenians have been upset by their government’s efforts to improve relations with Turkey without forcing Ankara to recognize past crimes.

The last time Turkey and Armenia recognized one another diplomatically was a brief period after the fall of the Soviet Union until 1993, when their already rocky relationship hit a new low over Armenia’s support for ethnic Armenian separatists in the Nagorno Karabakh (Russian for Mountainous or Highland Karabakh) region in neighboring Azerbaijan, a Turkish ally. Armenia continues to occupy Nagorno Karabakh as well as other Azeri territory and the two nations remain in a state of war.

In the end, despite the unprecedented nature of the breakthrough that led to these talks, first announced in April 2009, neither side has been a particularly considerate to each other’s needs, and it’s not surprising both are saying they now need a break from each other.

The preexisting gripes quickly reclaimed the focus of the discussion not long after it started; denial, anger and a bunch of mountains in Azerbaijan.

In the initial aftermath of this most recent hiccup in the dialogue, it’s not difficult to feel like both sides took one step forward and two steps backward. In March, after Sweden and the U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee recognized the Armenian Genocide, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan told the BBC that he was considering deporting 100,000 Armenians he claimed were living in Turkey illegally.

However, many observers see genuine progress amid the habitually fiery rhetoric. Davit Alaverdyan, the chief editor of Media Max News Agency in Armenia said that while he feels it is difficult to see where the process will lead from here, he thinks both sides have made achievements through the past year’s bickering — first and foremost that the two sides were talking at all.

But there’s more to it than that.

When Obama gave a speech on the anniversary of the genocide last April using the phrase “Medz Yeghern” — the Armenian word for the genocide, meaning “Great Massacres” — he was falling short of using the G-word like he promised during his campaign for president, but nonetheless pleased many on both sides.

Suat Kiniklioglu, a member of the Turkish parliament and spokesman of the Turkish Foreign Affairs Commission from the ruling Justice and Development party told Media Max in an interview at the time, “I believe that “Medz Yeghern” is an invaluable term for a positive language about the events of 1915. “Medz Yeghern” is a term whose scope should be widened. World War I and the events leading to the war, namely the physical removal of Turks and Muslims from the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Middle East was a Great Catastrophe for us as well. Turks, Kurds and Armenians in the eastern front of the empire truly experienced a Great Catastrophe [...] The Armenians lost their homes and property and had to leave Anatolia. There were many deaths and it was an immensely sad chapter of this region’s history [...] I hope that when we establish diplomatic relations, open borders and when our peoples get the chance of direct communication with each other, we will be able to elaborate positive wordings.”

It’s certain that there is no consensus for movement towards genocide recognition in Turkey — it remains illegal to insult the Turkish nation or ethnicity, a law that has been invoked to prosecute Turks calling for genocide recognition.

But Armenians continue to point to various signs that an internal dialogue within Turkey about its hard past is beginning. A few hundred Turkish artists and intellectuals marched in Istanbul commemorating the 95th anniversary of the genocide this year chanting “never again.” Also, information security analyst and blogger, Samvel Martirosyan pointed out that new Turkish directives to its diplomats encourage them to engage with Armenian communities abroad and publicly discuss and debate the facts of 1915-1923.

All of this he said shows things are moving, albeit so slowly it’s hard to actually see it. Meanwhile, Alaverdyan said in a Media Max report that the temporary freeze with Turkey will give Armenia more time to devote to resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict while still appearing to be the one committed to the process.

While no one is quite sure when, eventually the orgy of malice and mistrust will be in full swing again in the near future.

The post Denial, Anger and a Bunch of Mountains in Azerbaijan — Acceptance, That’s Several Steps Later appeared first on The Faster Times.