On the Recent US-Azeri-Armenian Agreement

Saturday, August 10, 2025

The US, Armenia, and Azerbaijan signed a "peace accord" in Washington this week. 

Indeed, the Azeri-Armenian border has been largely at peace since 2023, when Azeri forces took back the rest of its territory in Nagarno-Karabakh following more than three decades in which the region had been occupied by pro-Armenian rebels. 

This week's agreement in Washington formalizes the end of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, but also places the United States at the center of the region's new reality. This is an interesting and significant change that upends the Moscow-centric deal that was struck five years ago and which placed Russian peacekeepers in the region. 

All in all, it's an intriguing move. 

My Thoughts on Nagorno-Karabakh

Sunday, October 1, 2023

Since Azerbaijan's attack on the remaining Armenian-held territory in Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19-20, a number of people have gotten in touch and asked me what I thought.

So, here goes:  

Russia-Ukraine Notes: Early October Edition

October 2, 2022

After almost eight months of fighting, it feels like developments have been shifting in the Russia-Ukraine war in recent weeks, doesn't it? 

Separated at birth?

On the face of things, there is worrying news. The prospect of Russia using nuclear weapons is particularly frightening, without question. It is unclear what the US or NATO response would be to something like that, but at the same time I don't know how Putin's making these threats should change Washington's behavior right now. 

N & P: Christmas at the Borderlands Lodge Edition

Saturday, December 26, 2020

On the heels of last week's International Monkey Day edition, now we've got still more special days this week and next. All of these holidays just keep coming.

While I enjoy getting a tree and putting it up in my place here in Bozeman, Christmas has never been a particularly big holiday for me in this part of the world. As an adult, I've appreciated Christmas most of all during the years when I was abroad. As I've written elsewhere, back when I was living full-time in Turkey in the 1990s, Christmas felt like my own personal secret holiday of sorts, something most of the people around me were not celebrating, or even aware of. That's how I like my holidays sometimes: in isolation.  

And indeed, Christmas this year was spend largely in isolation. I made ribs and mashed potatoes, with margaritas on the side. A friend came by to eat and drink on the landing leading up the stairs to my balcony. So, we were distanced by about 10-12 feet and outside. Otherwise, I spent the day the way that I've spent most of the past nine months: working on my book, reading, and taking an hourlong walk. 

In other words: exciting times, all around. The other day I found a can of split-pea soup in my cupboard and literally thought to myself: "Oh, split-pea soup. That might be fun."   

So yeah, on second thought I guess nothing exciting is happening here, after all. 

And what about the Eurasian borderlands, you are asking, what's been going on there? Well, let's have a look...

N & P: End of Semester Edition

Friday, December 4, 2020

The fall semester has come to an end at Государственный университет Монтаны--at least pending the final revision of grades over the next couple of days. As always, the end of the classes been a rather bittersweet experience, but then again all good things come to an end. Yet, it seems like just yesterday that I was writing my Back to School edition of the N & P. Or something along those lines. 

It was nice to get back to teaching in the fall, even if it was online. Now that the semester is over, however, it's also good to put it behind me. We've got an extra-long winter break this year--I'll end up going about eight weeks between my last class in the fall and first of the spring. Normally, I would be lighting out for the territory at around this point, but instead I'll be biding my time at the Borderlands Lodge, plotting my next move. There's a book to be finished, and a publisher to be found.  

I also hope it snows soon.

Meanwhile, across the Turkic-Russian borderlands a number of interesting developments have been taking place, including:

N & P: Annual Conference Edition

Friday, November 13, 2020

Things have been pretty busy up here at the Borderlands Lodge these past few weeks. I've been writing a lot. The semester is coming to an end, and many other projects are coming due. 

One of the scholarly organizations that I'm a part of [ASEEES] held the first half of its annual conference last weekend. It was a nice experience. Way back in January, I had organized a panel called "Communist Internationals: the Lives and Networks of Foreign Communists in the USSR." My talk was called "Grumpy Old Communists: The Ageing Rivalries of Turkish Communist Party Leaders in the Late Cold War East Bloc." The talk related to some of the elderly Turkish communists--especially the enigmatic "Marat"--who were still living in the USSR in the 1970s and 80s, and is based upon material from the epilogue of the book I'm writing on Nâzım Hikmet. Interestingly, there was a great turnout, despite the early hour--perhaps a consequence of the online format? I was also a discussant on another panel about the South Caucasus, which was likewise really fun.

İsmail Bilen (a.k.a. "Marat") and Zeki 
Baştımar were both featured in my talk

My first panel started at 6 am,     Mountain Time. Since the conference was virtual, we were recommended to meet up fifteen minutes ahead of time to make sure the Zooms would work. Because I live in an apartment building and felt uncomfortable about the prospect of delivering a 15-minute paper in my loud Zoom voice at that early hour, I opted to walk to my office on campus and do the first panel from there. 

It was nice to be in my office again. 

I'd only been back a couple of times since March, each time very briefly. It was weird to be hanging out there, doing my panel, but also kind of a great experience. It reminded me of some of the things that I miss most these days: going to school and seeing my colleagues and students on campus. 

Anyway, the conference was a good experience, and I look forward to attending more of it this weekend--because when a conference is virtual, it turns out that you don't have to put it on four days in a row. All in all, the organization has been really impressive, all things considered. 

And in the rest of the world? Well, that's been a bit more hit or miss...

N & P: David Halberstam Edition

Friday, October 16, 2020

As I've been writing a biography in recent years, I also read a lot of biographies. Many of these are more scholarly or academic-type volumes, but a lot have been trade-press works of varying quality. Especially with regard the latter, I pay particular attention to the writing and what you might call the "storytelling" aspect of the book. I pick biographies mainly based upon how interesting I find the subject, regardless of how closely connected they might be to my interests in the Turkic-Russian borderlands. This year I've read bios of Charles Schultz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, L. Frank Baum, Jim Henson, and Rudolph Nureyev, to name just a few. 

For the past couple of weeks I've been reading David Halberstam's book on Michael Jordan, which was first published over 20 years ago. I love Halberstam's writing, and have read probably eight or nine of his books over the years. Breaks of the Game is, of course, a classic, but others like War in a Time of Peace and The Best and the Brightest are also really impressive. 

In Playing for Keeps, Halberstam's book on Jordan, I found the organization of the writing--and the chronology of the book--particularly exceptional. It starts in Paris in 1997 and ends in Chicago one year later, but throughout its 32 chapters the book goes backward and forward constantly. Some might complain that Halberstam was "jumping around" too much, but not me. In fact, I'd say that this work was masterfully put together. It's a cliche to refer to a book as a "tapestry," but that's really the effect here. Whereas most biographies plod slowly forward, Playing for Keeps zooms in and out, hitting at different moments of Jordan's life and then circling back in time in a manner that kept me interested. The chronology of the book also had the effect of tying together Jordan's playing career in a much more coherent manner than simply telling the story from beginning to end. 

I'm not trying to write the kind of book that Halberstam would have written. As an academic and scholar, I've received too much training on specific areas of the world and developments in modern history to do that. Trying to say something bigger and important about an era, as opposed to talking about a single individual in a vacuum--or simply recounting the details of a person's life--will usually slow down a narrative to a certain extent. But still, it's so inspiring to read the books of such a beautiful writer. I actually shed a few tears when I got to the very end of Playing for Keeps this morning. 

One last thing--I couldn't help but notice how much the much-ballyhooed 10-part Michael Jordan document released this summer picks up on so many threads from Halberstam's book. I really liked the documentary, and it's one of the reasons why I ended up finally buying this book a few months ago. But still--I kind of think Halberstam should have gotten some credit here. Obviously, if different creative types are working on the same subject, there's bound to be a lot of overlap. But the insights of the documentary--I see a lot of them in Halberstam from more than 20 years back. 

David Halberstam died 13 years ago in a traffic accident at the age of 73. He had published 20 books, of which Playing for Keeps was one of his last. What a career that guy had. I wonder if anyone's ever considered writing a biography of him. 

***

Meanwhile in the Eurasian borderlands, the world continues to turn. Stories from the region which caught my eye this week include: 

N & P : Padre Possibility Edition

 Friday, October 9, 2020

While I'm a stalwart supporter of the Detroit Tigers baseball team, I occasionally engage in flirtations with various National League temptations. This occurred for the first time when I was a university student in Montreal. The 1$ (Canadian) bleacher tickets in the late 80s-early 90s at Olympic Stadium and easy access via the metro made the Expos my National League mistress of choice for some time. These loyalties, such as they were, were eventually transferred to the Washington Nationals. 

This year I've been meeting up furtively with another team in the hours after the Detroit Tigers have lost yet another game. While Dan Dickerson and Jim Price are packing up their microphones in Detroit, I've been listening to a different radio broadcasting team on the Pacific coast. I've been fooling around with the San Diego Padres.  

Why the Padres? Family connections--my maternal grandparents lived there for many years. Moreover, because the Tigers crushed the Padres in the 1984 World Series, I've always felt a certain patronizing magnanimity toward their squad. I've never feared them, and the Tigers rarely play them anyway. 

And I've always liked the idea of San Diego. It seems like a nice place to live. It reminds me vaguely of the Crimea. Nice weather, a lot of Navy people, proximity to the ocean, little green men. That kind of vibe. 

Out here in Montana, moreover, I like listening to the West coast radio broadcasts late at night. The Padres tend to be one of the last games of the evening to finish up, so I usually end up with them. A lot of great relationships have started off with far less. 

So don't call it an affair: I was just enamored by the lure of possibility. 

Alas, while the Padres made the playoffs this year and extended their season beyond Detroit's, they lost in the--which series was this again?--to the Dodgers. So now I've lost my baseball mistress as well.

***

And what about the Eurasian Borderlands, you might be asking? A lot has been going on this past week, including: 

N & P: Farewell, Tigers Edition

Friday, October 2, 2020

The Detroit Tigers' season has come to an end, and I sure will miss them. True, the team hasn't been good in recent years. And this season was something of a joke--just 60 games, with all sorts of weird rule changes and a couple of franchises swimming up to their necks in Covid. 

Nevertheless, listening to the Tigers on the radio--or at least an internet-based radio feed--has been so great this summer. As I mentioned in a post devoted solely to baseball this summer, I've always preferred baseball on the radio over TV, and this year especially. For long stretches, it's been great to these games, piped-in crowd noise and all, and forget about everything that's been going on. 

No, it hasn't been perfect. But Dan Dickerson and Jim Price, the Tigers' radio broadcasting duo, have done a great job this season. As I've written elsewhere, I love listening to them--they seem to genuinely like one another and always talk about the Tigers--and even their opponents--in a generous, positive, yet quite nuanced manner. Even though the Tigers have been pretty bad in recent years, listening to their games with Dan and Jim has been such a pleasure. They're great. 

I was listening to an interview the other day with Tiger Pitcher Daniel Norris. The "Van Man" is one of my favorite players on the team. Somehow, he was able to talk about how this was a good year for him because he regained confidence in his arm and developed a new pitch. It was so great to hear someone describe their life in terms other than the relentlessly negative narratives that--understandably, of course--have dominated this year. 

But that's baseball for you--it's a game of yearly rejuvenation, even as we get older--and even if the seasons don't always go the way we'd like them to.  

***

All of this fun and games notwithstanding, a lot has been going on in the Eurasian borderlands over the past week: