Projets associés
‘Araz’ Scholars’ Initiative is a network of Armenian, Azerbaijani and international scholars who seek to challenge the polarising, politicised rhetoric around Armenian-Azerbaijani relations. The goal is to promote discussion about the persistent collective violence and instances of cooperation between these two nations grounded in a new space marked by respect, and the endeavour to seek truth critically and collectively rather than by its unilateral declamation. It is to be achieved through the establishment of an interdisciplinary community of scholars, researchers, students and public intellectuals, who can contribute to shifts in regional and global discussions of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict from instrumentalising power interests to an inclusive and equitable debate founded on academic rigour.
Members of the board:
Vicken Cheterian, founding member of Araz, has completed his PhD at the Graduate Institute of International Relations and Development, specializing on the conflicts in the Caucasus. He is currently a lecturer (chargé de cours) at the University of Geneva. He has written numerous academic studies on the Karabakh conflict, as well as the conflicts and revolutions in the wider Caucasus region, on Armenia-Turkey relations, as well as on the history of a century of denial of the Armenian genocide, and its consequences. He published on the conflicts in the Middle East including on political Islam and sectarianism.
Altay Goyushov, foudning member of Araz, is a leading Azerbaijani historian, and a leading public intellectual. He was a professor of history at Baku State University until 2013, and since 2018 he is the founder and director of Baku Research Institute. Currently, he is visiting scholar at SciencesPo in Paris with the PAUSE program for researchers under threat. He is a leading scholar on the First Azerbaijani Republic (1918-1920) and on Islam in modern Azerbaijan, with his doctoral thesis on the Islamic movement in Azerbaijan under the first republic. He has also published numerous academic papers on Islamic movements in contemporary Azerbaijan, on the history of nationalism in Azerbaijan, and the development of autocratic rule under the regime of Ilham Aliyev.
Aude Merlin, founding member of Araz, is a Professor in Political Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She is specialised in social and political mobilization in Caucasian societies. She has worked extensively on the Chechen wars and is now focusing on conflicts in the South Caucasus, especially on war veterans and post-war reconversions. She is currently working on the “state of alert” in the Armenian society. She cofounded CREG (Centre de Recherche sur l’Expérience de Guerre) at the Maison des Sciences Humaines. She has organized numerous scientific events dedicated to the study of the post-Soviet space, including workshops on armed conflicts in the Caucasus.
Laurence Broers is a researcher specializing in conflict, peace and governance in the South Caucasus. He is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Caucasus Survey, the first dedicated scholarly journal for the Caucasus region, publishing triennially with Brill. In addition to numerous reports and articles, he is the author of Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of the Caucasus (Routledge 2020) and Armenia’s Velvet Revolution: Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World (I.B. Tauris, 2020).
Anita Khachaturova is a researcher at the Centre for the study of politics (Cecipol) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She conducts doctoral research on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in which she explores the local socio-political dynamics cross-cutting the Armenian society of Nagorno-Karabakh after the defeat in the 2020 war and the following erosion of the de facto state. Her research focuses in particular on the role of emotions and affects in the expression of political identities. Over the last four years she has conducted several ethnographic field works in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.She is also a member of the Centre de recherche sur l'expérience de guerre (CREG-MSH, Brussels) and of the Centre for Independent Social Research (Armenia).
Dr. Naira Sahakyan is an Assistant Professor in History at the American University of Armenia. Her research focuses on ethnoreligious nationalism and political discourses in the Caucasus and the Middle East. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Humanities from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and a Master’s degree in Islamic Studies from Yerevan State University (Armenia). She is the author of Muslim Reformers and the Bolsheviks: The Case of Daghestan (Routledge, 2022) and Armenian Price of Peace: The Revolutions of 1917 and the Future of Armenia in the Perception of the Armenian Intelligentsia (Newmag, 2023, in Armenian).
Dr. Turkay Gasimova is a historian of nineteenth-century intellectual history and an activist youth worker. Gasimova did her Ph.D. at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy where she worked on a project that examines the conditions under which the first Azerbaijani intelligentsia emerged as a unique social stratum in the mid-nineteenth century. She is currently lecturer of history at Miyazaki International University (Japan)
Workshops, public events and publications:
The first workshop took place at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) over three days, February 8-10, 2023, during which some 36 scholars discussed various aspects of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. A public event at ULB on the 9th of February informed the larger public about the initiative and its objectives. Moreover, the four initiators of Araz wrote together an article explaining the reasons of their endeavour, published simultaneously in Baku (Baku Research Institute 2023) and Yerevan (Civilnet 2023). https://bakuresearchinstitute.org/en/reframing-the-armenian-azerbaijani-past-what-can-scholars-do/
A second workshop was organized at Manchester University on 18-20 June 2024. The workshop theme was “Preludes to violence: Armenian-Azerbaijani relations on the eve of conflicts in 1905, 1918 and 1988”. Following the workshop, on June 21 a public event was organized at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, continuing the tradition of informing an interested public about the initiative and the work accomplished (Conciliation Resources 2024). https://www.c-r.org/news-and-insight/event-scholars-frame-armenian-azerbaijani-conflict
A public discussion was organized in Paris (CERI, Sciences Po) in January 2025, with the title: “The Armenia-Azerbaijan Negotiations in 2025: Regional and Domestic Developments and the Prospects for Normalization.”
A third workshop took place at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin on 9-10 July 2025 with then title: “Power, place and knowledge: Intellectuals, scholars and epistemologies of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict” (Conciliation Resources 2025). It was followed by a public event on with the title: “Scholars, Academic Freedom and the Future of Armenian-Azerbaijani Relations”, on July 11, 2025, at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient. https://www.c-r.org/news-and-insight/workshop-power-place-and-knowledge-intellectuals-scholars-and-epistemologies#:~:text=About%20the%20workshop&text=This%20year's%20workshop%20will%20be,support%20of%20the%20European%20Union.
Bahruz Samadov:
A member of Araz since the project’s inception, Bahruz Samadov is a PhD candidate at Charles University in Prague and a respected researcher and journalist whose work focuses on authoritarianism in Azerbaijan and the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict.
In August 2024, he was detained in Baku while visiting his family. In June 2025, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of “state treason,” accused of having communicated sensitive information to Armenian counterparts.
Numerous human rights organizations, including UN and EU bodies, have condemned his arrest and denounced the charges as unfounded. The Université libre de Bruxelles, which has hosted Bahruz on several occasions since 2022, has expressed its solidarity from the outset and continues to call for his immediate release.
These appeals were supported by the Council of Rectors of French Speaking Universities’ (CREF)
The Araz Committee is mobilized in the efforts to demand the unconditional release of Bahruz Samadov and other academics currently held in Azerbaijan. https://msh.ulb.ac.be/fr/agenda/conference-peace-without-people-participation-and-sustainability-in-the-transformation-of-armenian-azerbaijani-relations?fbclid=IwY2xjawQNIFNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEewJgzASYc7vwKMJ5U5vuyA86ntqTmp1Q4BA3WhTmBxtRTS5HBj_SqzAyiaSo_aem_v21IRUE6QQqZROFbG1ZQiw