Tatev Derzyan (41794665) The Effectiveness of Erasmus+ and UGRAD Soft Power on Armenia during Hard Times (Nagorno-Karabakh War 2020) Abstract The thesis focuses on soft power and public diplomacy through exchange study programs of the European Union and the United States. Precisely, the thesis studies the influence of the educational exchange programs (Erasmus+ and UGRAD) on the Armenian exchange students in the scope of soft power. After establishing the influence of the exchange programs on the formation of the perceptions about the host countries, the thesis further focuses on the sustainability of the perception taking into consideration the Nagorno-Karabakh Second war which is a 'critical juncture' as it was a dramatic event in the life of the Armenian youth and could have influenced their views of the EU and the US. It is important to note that the academic literature on the exchange students' perceptions does not provide any studies through the lenses of the political events in the participants' home country. Thirty-nine semi-structured interviews have been conducted among the Erasmus+ and UGRAD participants from Armenia alongside the content analysis of the documents that the EU and the US released during the Nagorno-Karabakh Second war in order to understand what was the politics of the host...

In over 20 years of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, there has been no significant progress towards a peaceful agreement. It has been argued that there is not enough incentive for leaders to agree to a compromise and that the citizens are not ready to accept one. In this context, the way the conflict and the enemy are described in public discourse is important not only because it represents the viewpoints of those producing the discourse but because it can have a real effect on public opinion. This paper examines discourse on Azerbaijan and the future of Nagorno-Karabakh in an official newspaper, showing that distrust of Azerbaijan and rigid expectations about the future of Nagorno-Karabakh are dominant.

After the fall of the Soviet Union a number of violent ethnic disputes were concluded through the establishment of ceasefires but have yet to be finalized through peace accords. This development resulted in the creation of de facto states in a setting known as ‘frozen conflicts’. These de facto states have managed to endure decades of unrecognition, stuck in a situation of “no war, no peace” and constitutes today “effective” political entities. The post-war development in these frozen conflicts has continuously surprised academia, defying pessimistic prediction of their sustainability. Following the positive, hybridized peace etymology laid out by Oliver Richmond, this thesis aims at exploring the peace- and state processes that has occurred during the Nagorno Karabakh peace process in order to explain the ambiguous developments that have been going on despite the limbo-like state of unrecognition. The relation between external and internal processes is interrogated through a periodization of key events, and thereafter a comprehensive analysis of how the processes relate to each other over time. The thesis concludes that the strong presence of identity politics regarding the historical Nagorno Karabakh favors the often violent and protective state formation process but is at least partially controlled by the international attempts at peace building. Local formations of peace do not allow for a reintegration of Nagorno Karabakh into Azerbaijan, at least not without explicit and extensive security and autonomy guarantees. Likewise, the external processes of peace and state building does not allow for local agency from Nagorno Karabakh, as it is viewed through a negative ontology of peace. The processes does provide some rather successful developments, as the almost finalized Land swap deal and the Madrid principles, but lacks the momentum of conquering the dominance of perceived or actualized violent state formation processes.

This thesis analyses speeches and interviews given by Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev in 2018–23 to understand how victimhood narratives based in genocide memory are utilised before and during violent conflicts. Using critical narrative analysis and an overall inductive approach, the themes, and myths present in narratives, and role of genocide memory have been found to follow the theoretical framework of collective memory, social identity theory, framing theory, and strategic narratives. The results provide context into the move away from historic ‘chosen traumas’ to recent ‘hot traumas’ to gain sympathy and validation for the securitisation of a nation. This being in addition to a strategic use of competitive victimhood that clearly follows the political elites’ stances of what constitutes morality, group identity, and accepted historical narratives. Overall, it is possible to sum up this thesis as the securitisation of genocide memory.

in English The object of this diploma thesis is to answer the question, how can international organizations (UN, Council of Europe and OSCE) effectively regulate conflicts among their member states, or which instruments are they for this purpose equipped with. The thesis is divided into three main parts - theoretical study, part dedicated to the individual international organizations and the case study. The first part offers a definition of basic legal concepts, as they will be used in the following parts of the study with an emphasis on the definition of the concept "coercion". The following part deals with the instruments of coercion the international organizations are equipped with. In the third part are the findings from the previous parts confronted with a real case of the effort to regulate the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno Karabakh. This structure of the thesis can be also described as a progress from a theoretic basis, through an applied theory contained in particular agreements, to their practical realization in the concrete case. Based on the completed study the author concludes that unilateral instruments of coercion, that the particular organizations have at their disposal, are often not appropriate (exclusion from organization), ineffective (political declaration)...

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The thesis concerns with communication of Armenian and Azerbaijani Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Ministries of Defence on Facebook in relation to 2020 Nagorno Karabakh conflict. The official institutional accounts were used to bolster one sided narratives of the conflict, often by emotional appeals and misinformation targeting international and domestic audence. By analyzing FB communication of the named institutions, it aims to identify the key narrative-building tools utilized by state institutions in communication practice and how these tools are used prior to and during wartime. It also aims at comparing the communication practice across the institutions and in between the countries by analyzing Facebook posts of named ministries over period of 100 days using a dataset generated via Crowdtangle.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to theoretically sound concept of Peace Journalism, which combines theoretical foundations from two spheres: conflict and peace studies and media studies. Influence of journalists as intervening force and explaining factor with regard to (violent) conflict is neglected. However, Peace Journalism is not theoretically strong and builds upon dualistic definition vis-á-vis so-called War Journalism. The concept of Peace Journalism has to overcome this delamination in order to reflect theoretical underpinnings of conflict transformation theory and conflict analysis. Moreover, Peace Journalism has to differentiate media according to an involvement of given societies in a conflict. This offers an opportunity to specifically and accurately analyse news coverage of conflicts. Case studies analysing Czech coverage of Cyprus and Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts illustrates this approach. The coverage is essentially flat, distorts a reality of the conflict, pays attention to visual and physical aspects of the conflict and closes the conflicts in arbitrary time boundaries.

The thesis analyses two modern surprise attacks - the 1982 Falklands War between Argentina and Great Britain; and the 2016 April War (also known as the Four Days War) among Azerbaijan, Armenia, and de facto Republic of Nagorno Karabakh. Using literature of the Theory of Surprise, the study tries to determine the reasons why states chose the strategy of surprise, and how did they decide on the timing of the wars. It also displays the shortcomings inherent in the strategy of surprise, and points out where the mistakes, false assumptions of the belligerents in these two cases studies lay. Finally, a comparative study of the cases highlights the ideas that can improve a state's preparedness and hopefully avoid surprise attacks in the future. Thesis title: The Element of Surprise: A Study of Two Modern Surprise Attacks Author: Tatevik Tadevosyan Study programme: Security Studies Supervisor: Dr Jan Ludvík, PhD Year of the defence: 2020

Author Samuel Lavoie Thesis Diplomacy and Diplomatic Institutions of Unrecognized De Facto States Somaliland, Transnistria and Artsakh (2020) Abstract As a topic, international recognition has been increasingly studied over the past twenty years, particularly since Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008. This thesis attempts to advance our understanding of the underlying causes of the inability to gain political recognition by examining several factors that have been omitted from the academic literature. Specifically, it examines several key aspects of the diplomatic institutions, personnel, and approaches of three unrecognized de facto states that meet most of the criteria for statehood under international law, but have so far received no recognition recognized states. These entities are Somaliland, Transnistria, and Artsakh. This paper also draws on partially recognized states and finds that geopolitical and ideological factors generally prevail over diplomatic ones as the main drivers of political recognition. This is especially true when an entity is located in an area of fierce rivalry for influence, such as the PMR and the Republic of Artsakh. However, while remaining a secondary factor, diplomacy becomes more important for international recognition when the interests of...