You are cordially invited to a lecture on the topic of
Between Extermination and Persecution:
Christians in the Post-Ottoman Zone
with
Aram Hamparian
Executive Director, Armenian National Committee of America
Marek Chodakiewicz
Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies, IWP
Vilen Khlgatyan
Vice-Chairman, Political Developments Research Center
Thursday, April 24
1:30 PM
The Institute of World Politics
1521 16th Street NW
Washington, DC 20036
This event is part of a series on the Intermarium sponsored by the Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies.
The Christian population of the Near East has been stuck between repressive governments on one side and militant Islamists on the other for decades. Since the turn of the last century a wave of ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and genocide have engulfed the Near East with the Christians of the region bearing the brunt of the carnage. Once home to a large and prosperous multi confessional Christian population, Christendom is now on a demographic and geopolitical track to lose the place of its origin. An overview of mass violence against various Christian groups will be discussed with an emphasis on the perpetration of genocide against the Armenian, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the current threats facing Christians in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt.
Dr. Marek Chodakiewicz is the current holder of the Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies, which is now here at IWP. He has authored numerous works in both English and Polish. While at the University of Virginia, he edited the Kosciuszko Chair’s bulletin: Nihil Novi.
Dr. Chodakiewicz writes weekly columns for popular Polish press and contributes to the SELOUS Foundation internet hub. He has also published on foreign policy in various venues, including The Journal of World Affairs, American Spectator, and National Review Online.
In addition to numerous popular and scholarly articles, Dr. Chodakiewicz authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited over fifteen scholarly monographs and documentary collections. His latest include Intermarium: The Land Between the Black and Baltic Seas (2012), which is a depiction of the Eastern Borderlands of the West on the rim of the former Soviet Union, and On the Right and Left (2013), which is a textbook of intellectual history of modern ideologies. He translated and edited the correspondence of the Ulam family of Lwów to the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam at Harvard from 1936 until after the Second World War and co-edited a selection of Ronald Reagan’s speeches published as My Vision of America in Polish.
His interests include the post-Soviet zone, the Second World War and its aftermath, Europe in the 19th and 20th century, Western civilization and its intellectual tradition, extremist movements in history, conspiracy theory and practice, and comparative civilizations.
At IWP, Dr. Chodakiewicz teaches courses on Genocide and Genocide Prevention, Geography and Strategy, and Russian Politics and Foreign Policy. In addition, he leads directed studies.
Vilen Khlgatyan is Vice-Chairman of Political Developments Research Center (PDRC), a virtual think tank based in Yerevan, Armenia. He attended Webster University, where he double majored in International Relations and International Business, and graduated in Spring 2010. He spent a semester studying in Vienna, Austria, where he also attended OPEC and OSCE workshops.
In 2013, he graduated from The Institute of World Politics, where his studies focused on national security and the geopolitics of energy. He wrote his honors thesis on the “Geopolitics of Energy in the South Caucasus.”
Mr. Khlgatyan was a campaign staffer for Congressman Russ Carnahan of Missouri’s 3rd District, who sat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.