Mr. Richard Giragosian is the Founding Director of the Regional Studies Center (RSC), an independent “think tank” located in Yerevan, Armenia and is a guest lecturer for the NATO Defense College in Rome. He has over 35 years of policy experience in the fields of security and international relations and has served as both a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe’s Natolin Campus and as Senior Expert at Yerevan State University’s Centre for European Studies.
Since moving to Armenia in 2006, he has served as a consultant for the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the European Union Delegation to Armenia, the European Parliament (EU), the French Ministry of Defense, the International Crisis Group (ICG) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), as well as the U.S. Departments of Defense and State, among others. He was also a regular contributor to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) publications from 1999-2008, and from 2003-2010, also served as a contributing analyst for the London-based Jane’s Information Group and Oxford Analytica, and from 2008-2010, was a columnist for the Turkish-language international edition of Newsweek.
From 2002-2006, Giragosian served as a guest lecturer for the U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, NC, and has participated in various research projects for the Naval Post-Graduate School (NPS), the U.S. Navy’s Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS), and the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School. From 2000-2005, he has also worked as an analyst for Abt Associates Inc., a social science consulting firm, and was a research consultant for the New America Foundation and the Center for National Policy (CNP) in Washington.
For nine years, Giragosian served as a Professional Staff Member of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Congress. As the committee’s principal staffer for the former Soviet Union and China, he was responsible for organizing Congressional hearings, briefings and conducting analytical studies for Members of Congress. He was twice appointed as a State Commissioner on the Virginia Governor’s Commission on Armenian Affairs and has also served as an honorary member of the National Steering Committees of both the 1996 Clinton-Gore Reelection Campaign and the Gore 2000 Presidential Campaign.
In addition, Giragosian has contributed to over a dozen books, including “Armenia’s transition: The challenges of geography, geopolitics and multipolarity,” in Broers, Laurence and Anna Ohanyan, Editors, Armenia's Velvet Revolution. Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World (forthcoming from I.B. Tauris, September 2020), “Small States and the Large Costs of Regional Fracture: The Case of Armenia,” in Ohanyan, Anna, Editor, Russia Abroad. Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond (Georgetown University Press: 2018) and other chapters in: Kamrava, Mehran, Ed., The Great Game in West Asia: Iran, Turkey and the South Caucasus, Georgetown University, Doha, Qatar (Oxford University Press: 2017); “Twenty-Five Years On: Armenia’s Difficult Period of Statebuilding,” in Hunter, Shireen, Ed., The New Geopolitics of the South Caucasus. Prospects for Regional Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, (Rowman & Littlefield: 2017).