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Michael Hikari Cecire is Director of the Eurasia Democratic Security Network (EDSN), an international fellowship program and research platform that examines linkages between democracy and security. Cecire is also an associate at the Institute for Middle East, Central Asia, and Caucasus Studies at the University of St Andrews, where he is also a doctoral researcher.
Cecire is a member of the editorial board for the journal Caucasus Survey, and is a regular lecturer on Black Sea regional issues at the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. Cecire has previously served as an international security fellow at New America, as a non-resident fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, as a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, as a policy advisor at the Georgian Economy Ministry, and in a variety of policy advisory and political risk analysis roles. He is a co-founder of the Georgian Institute of Politics in Tbilisi, and has published in a variety of international media and peer reviewed publications on issues of international security, Black Sea regional affairs, and democracy.
Escalation and Regional Risks in a New Karabakh War
Fierce fighting between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces represents a dramatic escalation in longstanding tensions, with the two countries on an all-out war footing following over a week of battle. Although the fighting has already dramatically eclipsed previous spikes in violence since the 1994 ceasefire, the most recent conflagration shows no signs of abating anytime soon, and raises the specter of even greater escalation among regional and global powers.
For those who study the countries and regions that surround it, the Black Sea is many things — a global trade thoroughfare, a zone of contestation, a cradle of civilizations, and a dying ecosystem. But, curiously, one of the more opaque factors is whether the Black Sea region — the states and polities on its littoral and immediate hinterland — is a region at all.
