Podcast

If you thought diplomats had to leave their personalities behind to do their jobs, think again. Elin Suleymanov is Azerbaijan’s current ambassador in the UK. Before that he spent a decade as Baku’s main man in Washington, becoming probably the only ambassador to have appeared on Comedy Central. There’s plenty of humour in this very human yet incisive podcast conversation, but much to think about as Mark asks Elin about “caviar diplomacy,” Armenian detainees and hopes for longer term peace in the Caucasus.

Armenian-American analyst Richard Giragosian is the founder of the Regional Studies Center - an independent geopolitical think tank based in Yerevan. He’s a frequent contributor to global news networks, newspapers and periodicals. Before moving to Armenia a decade and a half ago he had been a staffer in the US congress and a lecturer to the US Special Forces. In this eloquent podcast, Richard suggests that, in the Caucasus, there is a clear window of opportunity for reframing decades of conflict. He gives insights as to how Azerbaijan might better understand Armenian viewpoints and how Armenia itself could benefit from greater diversity.  

Though Armenians and Azerbaijanis were often friends and neighbours during the Soviet period, since independence – and the two Karabakh wars – contact between the two peoples has been sadly lacking. And that has made it easy for each side to dehumanize and demonize the other. Whether online or in person, contact and discussion between everyday Azerbaijanis and Armenians could help to slowly reverse this process and bring about the conditions needed for lasting peace. That’s the philosophy behind Bright Garden Voices, whose co-founder, Arnold Alahverdian, joins Mark on this edition of the Caspian Podcast.

Teaching students using their own non-Persian mother tongue is enough to get you arrested. In Iran anyway. This we learn from Ramin Jabbarli who was born in that country to an Azerbaijani-Turkish family. He is now based in Seattle as an academic researcher and teacher at the University of Washington. Ramin explains the difficulties faced by linguistic minorities in Iran and touches upon a perceived element of ethnic bias in a range of other fields, including ecological movements hoping to improve water resource management.

Polina Dessiatnichenko is a Ukrainian-Canadian ethnomusicologist and player of the 11-stringed tar, an archetypally Caucasian musical instruments typically used to accompany Azerbaijani mugham. In this unique edition of the Caspian Podcast Polina explains with demonstrations various musical motifs with which tar players build up the structure of that Unesco-listed form of very traditional yet partly improvised music. Polina also explains a little about the linkages between mugham and ghazal poetry and reveals that learning these art forms is an all-encompassing spiritual endeavour rather like becoming the devotee of a guru.