Simon Maghakyan to lecture on the ‘Western Azerbaijan’ expansionist narrative
Political scientist and investigative researcher Simon Maghakyan will speak in a virtual lecture on “Deconstructing ‘Western Azerbaijan’: Synthetic Memory and the Politics of Perpetual Conflict” at 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific on Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026, presented by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research’s Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lecture Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues.
Since the violent expulsion of Armenians from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in 2023, Azerbaijan has pursued normalization with a defeated Armenia while advancing a new territorial narrative against it. Delivered on the third anniversary of Azerbaijan’s capture of Stepanakert, this lecture will investigate Baku’s ongoing construction of “Western Azerbaijan” through archival research and Frederick Barghoorn’s largely forgotten concept of “synthetic memory.”
Dr. Simon Maghakyan is a political scientist specializing in the emerging interdisciplinary field of heritage and security. He is an associate member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. Previously, he held appointments at Colorado College, the University of Denver, Fresno State and Tufts University.
He earned his Ph.D. in security studies in 2024 from Cranfield University, an academic partner of the British defense ministry, after a decade in nonprofit, research and teaching roles, including at his alma mater, the University of Colorado Denver. His collaborative predoctoral research, published in Hyperallergic and The Art Newspaper, exposed Azerbaijan’s systematic destruction of the Armenian heritage in Nakhichevan. This forensic work was praised as “rock-solid” by The Guardian and cited at the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Security Council.
Dr. Maghakyan is the author of “Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past” (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and chief co-editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Heritage and Security,” forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His public commentary on heritage and security, particularly as it relates to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, has appeared worldwide, including in interviews with the BBC and essays in Time magazine.
The lecture will be streamed via Zoom and YouTube. To register and learn more, visit https://naasr.org/blogs/events-1/deconstructing-western-azerbaijan.
