De Waal is a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe, specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region.
Tom de Waal is a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe, specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region.
He is the author of numerous publications about the region. The second edition of his book The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford University Press) was published in 2018. He is also the author of Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2015) and of the authoritative book on the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (NYU Press, second edition 2013).
From 2010 to 2015, de Waal worked for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. Before that he worked extensively as a journalist in both print and for BBC radio. From 1993 to 1997, he worked in Moscow for the Moscow Times, the Times of London, and the Economist, specializing in Russian politics and the situation in Chechnya. He co-authored (with Carlotta Gall) the book Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (NYU Press, 1997), for which the authors were awarded the James Cameron Prize for Distinguished Reporting.
When it should be dealing with issues of global importance, Georgia’s government seems intent on shredding the country’s democratic credentials and waging an acrimonious political civil war on its domestic opponents.
Russia’s peace deal for Armenia and Azerbaijan has halted the war over Nagorny Karabakh and exposed the Western countries as bystanders. The Europeans must now try to help shape a lasting peace on the ground.
The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorny Karabakh is a humanitarian catastrophe. A failure to respond properly undermines the European Union’s claims to be a strategic actor in its neighborhood.
The Georgian-Abkhaz ethnic conflict looks rather small and old-fashioned in light of the coronavirus pandemic. The two sides should seize the moment to start working more closely together.
By recycling conspiracy theories and distorted versions of the past, the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders only prolong their unresolved conflict over the territory of Nagorny Karabakh.
Azerbaijan has long been an island of unchanging continuity, but a generational overhaul is underway. With mounting expectations and a resurgent opposition, 2020 will be a testing year for Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
Boris Johnson could end up being the English leader who allowed the breakup of the UK to achieve Brexit. There are lessons in the dissolution of two other unions, the USSR and Czechoslovakia, and the role played by Boris Yeltsin and Václav Klaus.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s use of soft power can cause the Kremlin problems.
Formal reunification talks in Cyprus are suspended. It is time to give a boost to some stalled confidence-building measures and enable Turkish Cypriot voters to vote freely in the European elections.
What would it take to make Russia more comfortable with its neighbors, the EU, and NATO?
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