Deconstructing “Western Azerbaijan”

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 PhD 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.