Anna Ohanyan

Anna Ohanyan is the Richard B. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Stonehill College, and two-time Fulbright Scholar to the South Caucasus. She has authored and (co)-authored five books, which include The Neighborhood Effect: The Impact Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia, published by Stanford University Press in 2022, Russia Abroad: Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond, an edited volume published by Georgetown University Press in 2018., and Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management, published by Stanford University Press in 2015. Her articles appeared in Nationalities Papers, International Studies Review, Peace and Change, Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Global Governance, and Global Society, among other journals. She has also contributed to the Washington Post, National Interest. Foreign Policy magazine, Al Jazeera, and Wilson Quarterly. She has appeared in various media outlets, including the BBC, PBS, CBS, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera.

Ohanyan served as a doctoral fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (2002-2004), and her research has been supported by IREX, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the German Marshall Fund, the U.S. State Department, and Eurasia Foundation among others. She has consulted for numerous organizations such as the United Nations Foundation, the World Bank, the National Intelligence Council Project, the U.S. Department of State, the Carter Center, and USAID. Her work has taken her across the globe, from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, Russia, and the South Caucasus. 

Her current scholarship explores the regional dimensions of armed conflicts as well as regional approaches to security provision and conflict management. Focusing on post-communist Eurasia and the Middle East, her work explores how fractured regions perpetuate ongoing armed conflict, nourish authoritarianism and state weakness. In doing so, her work places a particular emphasis on the problem of regional fracture in Russia's post-Soviet neighborhoods. Her current book project probes the extent to which the fractured, imperially-rooted nature of regional neighborhoods causes, enables, or facilitates communal violence and armed conflict in contemporary Eurasia today. It examines why some regional neighborhoods emerged peacefully from the Cold War, while others found themselves in armed conflict of various intensities. 

In addition, she also studies the processes of democratic breakthroughs in Russia’s security orbit, with a focus on Armenia’s Velvet Revolution and the subsequent democratic breakthrough, and the mass protests in Belarus. Her work probes the pattern of mass-scale civic disobedience campaigns as they condition chances of successful democratic transitions and consolidation. Her co-edited volume, Armenia’s Velvet Revolution: Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World, was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2020.