The Armenian Velvet Revolution was marked by organization through digital media and center-stage participation of activist journalists. However, sociological scholarship suggests that while both of these factors can facilitate protests, they fail to produce democratic regime change. Based on interview research in Yerevan, this event explores the ways in which the role of digital media and activist journalists in the context of post-socialist politics were integral to Armenia’s regime change in 2018-2019.
Speaker:
Juho Korhonen is assistant professor of sociology at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He is a historical and political sociologist and has published on post-socialist politics, on imperial transformations in the 20th century and also on the politics of memory related to those issues. He is currently working on a book manuscript on peripheral democracy and imperial politics before 1919 with a focus on anti-colonial democratization not striving for national sovereignty.
Moderator:
Georgi Derluguian is Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University, Abu Dhabi. He was born in Krasnodar and studied African Studies at Moscow State University. He served in Mozambique in the 1980’s and defended his Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1994. His scholarly works have been translated into seventeen languages including German, Korean, Turkish, Arabic, and Polish.