RIP Alexandros Petersen

January 23, 2014

On January 17, 2014 Dr. Peterson, young scholar of geopolitics and an AUCA professor was murdered by the Taliban during terroristic attack in restaurant in Kabul.

Dr. Peterson was a brilliant young scholar, who wrote a book  The World Island:Eurasian Geopolitics and The Fate of the West. He was Senior Fellow with the Eurasia Center and Fellow for Transatlantic Energy Security at the Atlantic Council. He came to the Council from the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he was Southeast Europe Policy Scholar and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he was an Adjunct Fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program. Previously, he served as Program Director of the Caspian Europe Center in Brussels and Senior Researcher at the International Institute for Strategic in London. In 2006, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies in Tbilisi. He has also provided research for the U.S. National Petroleum Council’s Geopolitics and Policy Task Group and the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Russian-American Relations. Dr. Peterson joined AUCA last year and taught courses at International and Comparative Politics department.

“Alex was an absolutely nice guy, easygoing in that American way I find so agreeable, and with a great sense of humor. He had a very keen fashion sense, as the pictures of him online attest, and I’m still impressed that his shirts always looked pressed even though we were living out of our suitcases. Despite the pocket squares, the intelligence and the scholarship, there was not a hint of pretension about him,” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Dr. Peterson’s friend, remembers. ("In Memoriam: Alexandros Petersen, Murdered By The Taliban In Kabul", Forbes)

AUCA student, Zhypar Chotonova, posted an article in memory of Dr. Peterson from all AUCA community.

“On my question, on what are his future plans, Alex said, "I will travel around the region doing some researches. I will go back to US for a while and then I will be back"- but he couldn't,” Zhypar remembers. (http://myaucajourney.blogspot.com/2014/01/in-memory-of-alexandros-petersen-from.html)

We would like to extend our deepest condolences to family and friends of Alexandros Petersen. He was a great person and outstanding scholar and professor. May he rest in peace.

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