Bringing together scholars and public intellectuals, the event explores competing visions of Armenia: from civic understandings of nationhood and democratic politics to ethnic and religious conceptions of national belonging. It examines how war, displacement, memory, and a shifting regional order, from Iran and Turkey to Azerbaijan and the West, are reshaping Armenian society and its political imaginaries.

Drawing on ethnographic perspectives, the event also asks how these visions are experienced, negotiated, and contested in everyday life: in social relations, cultural practices, and personal understandings of belonging. 

Situated within the Global Easts perspective, the event approaches Armenia not simply as a country caught between competing powers, but as a place where imperial legacies are negotiated, political agency is exercised, and alternative futures are imagined. Rather than treating decolonisation as a straightforward departure from Russian influence, it asks how multiple imperial histories, contemporary geopolitical pressures, and locally grounded aspirations intersect in shaping Armenia’s future.

Programme

13:00–13:15   Welcome and Introduction

Welcome: Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, UW

Introduction: Zuzanna Bogumił (University of Warsaw), Iwona Kaliszewska (University of Warsaw) and
Aneta Strzemżalska (Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences): Between Civic and Ethnic
Visions of the Nation: Rethinking Decolonisation in Contemporary Armenia

13:15–14:40   Panel I. Living with Uncertainty: Politics and Everyday Life in Post-Karabakh Armenia

Moderator: Zuzanna Bogumił

• Nona Shahnazarian (National Academy of Sciences of Armenia / Centre for Independent Social Research Armenia): Mapping Lost Homes: Displacement, Memory and Gender among Karabakh Armenians after 2020 and 2023
• Konrad Siekierski (University of Łódź): “One Church, One State” to Where? Changing Church–State Relations in Contemporary Armenia
• Mikayel Zolyan (ProgLab-Progressive Politics Laboratory): A Revolution Revisited: Civil Society and the Limits of Civic Nationhood after Karabakh 
• Adam Pomieciński (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań): [title TBC]

14:40–15:00   Coffee Break

15:00–16:30   Panel II (Roundtable). Between Empires: Armenia in a Shifting Regional Order

Moderators: Iwona Kaliszewska and Aneta Strzemżalska

• Hrant Mikaelian (ARI – Armenian Research Institute): Bringing the Conflict Inside: How Regional Rivalries Reshape Armenia’s Domestic Politics
• Stefania Kolarz (Polish Institute of International Affairs, PISM): Renegotiating Sovereignty: Armenia’s Disengagement from Russia and the Normalisation Process with Azerbaijan
• Karolina Wanda Olszowska (Jagiellonian University): Ankara’s Moment? Turkey, Armenia and the Azerbaijani Condition in the New South Caucasus
• Gevorg Avetikyan (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin): Iran’s Northern Dilemma: Armenia, TRIPP and Tehran’s Security Calculus

16:30–17:00   Closing Discussion

Iwona Kaliszewska and Zuzanna Bogumił (University of Warsaw)

Organised by the Global Easts Centre and Studies, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology (University of Warsaw), and the Institute of Slavic Studies (Polish Academy of Sciences), with support of IDUB Programme University of Warsaw and National Centre of Science, Poland (No. UMO-2025/56/C/HS3/00247).

More on Global Easts: https://etnologia.uw.edu.pl/global-easts