"ACNIS AT 15: THE POWER OF NEW IDEAS"
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18:23:08 – 22/02/2010
On February 19, the Armenian Center for National and International
Studies (ACNIS) hosted a special reception to release the new
ACNIS annual yearbook publication, entitled "ACNIS at 15: The
Power of New Ideas". The reception was attended by over 100 guests,
including members of the Armenian parliament and government officials,
representatives from international organizations and members of the
diplomatic community in Armenia, including Italian Ambassador Bruno
Scapini, British Ambassador Charles Lonsdale and Ambassador Sergey
Kapinos, the head of the OSCE Office in Yerevan.
Welcoming the guests, ACNIS Director Richard Giragosian explained that
the release of the "ACNIS at 15: The Power of New Ideas" yearbook
represented the Center’s mission to offer innovative research and
objective analysis on a wide range of critical issues in order
to raise the level of public awareness and to encourage greater
knowledge and debate within Armenian society. He added that the
yearbook also reflected the Center’s past fifteen years of objective
and professional analysis, which he stressed was rooted in a broader
effort to strengthen and deepen the formulation of public policy in
Armenia. The ACNIS director specifically pointed to the significance
of the name of the yearbook, highlighting that it was based on "the
power of new ideas" in order to contribute to the development of
critical thinking in Armenia.
Giragosian also expressed sadness, however, with the fact that the
reception coincided with the sixth anniversary of the tragic murder
of Armenian Army Lieutenant Gurgen Markarian, who was brutally killed
by an Azerbaijani soldier during a NATO language training course
in Budapest, Hungary. Commemorating the Armenian officer’s murder,
Giragosian explained that the tragic crime only affirmed the larger
reality of threats to Armenian security that he explained were not only
demonstrated by the murder but that are also confirmed by Azerbaijan’s
repeated threats of war and militant rhetoric directed against Armenia.
On behalf of the Center, Giragosian then welcomed the more than
100 guests and specifically thanked the representatives from the
embassies of France, Italy, Romania, Syria, the United Kingdom and
the United States, as well as from international organizations, such
as the Council of Europe, the European Union Delegation in Armenia,
the OSCE Office in Yerevan, the Red Cross, United Nations and the
US Agency for International Development (USAID). He also noted
the presence of officials from the Armenian ministries of defense,
finance, foreign affairs and justice, as well as Armenian Members
of Parliament Larisa Alaverdyan, Anahit Bakhshyan, Armen Martirosyan
and Stepan Safaryan from the "Heritage" Party.
Giragosian then introduced two prominent contributors to the Yearbook,
Dr. Tatoul Manasserian and ACNIS Senior Analyst Manvel Sargsian. Dr.
Manasserian, a Professor of Economics at Yerevan Sate University,
offered his congratulations to ACNIS for its decade and a half of
work and hailed the yearbook as the latest example of the Center’s
commitment to innovative and objective analysis. For his part, ACNIS
Senior Analyst Sargsian expressed his appreciation to the guests and
added that the new publication offered a diverse set of papers and
studies covering a broad range of domestic and foreign policy issues
with a national, regional and international focus.
In his closing remarks, ACNIS Director Giragosian reminded the guests
that the Center was created 15 years ago as a pioneering institutional
initiative by Raffi K. Hovannisian, Armenia’s first Minister of
Foreign Affairs, whose vision centered on the need for an objective and
independent strategic research institution or "think tank" in Armenia.
The nearly 500-page "ACNIS at 15: The Power of New Ideas" yearbook
offers a unique collection of two dozen essays and articles, in
Armenian, English and Russian, authored by leading Armenian and
international experts. The yearbook also includes a comprehensive
summary chronology of significant events in each of the countries of
the South Caucasus region since 1991, focusing on political, economic,
social and security-related developments in Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Georgia and Nagorno Karabagh, and offers the reader an accompanying
set of reference maps, documents and materials. The "ACNIS at 15: The
Power of New Ideas" yearbook is available by contacting the Center
and the electronic version can be readily downloaded from the ACNIS
website at