All posts tagged: post-soviet

Young Explorers’ Grant Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline Photo Essay Published On National Geographic Website

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Pictures: At Five Years Old, BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture National Geographic June 10, 2011 A New World Unveiled Photograph by Amanda Rivkin The landlocked Asian nation of Azerbaijan forged a powerful connection to the West five years ago with the first delivery of oil through one of the most ambitious energy projects of a generation—a $4.2 billion, 1,100-mile (1,800-kilometer) pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean coast. When the deal was originally struck in 1994 for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline, the late Azerbaijan President Heydar Aliyev called it “the Contract of the Century”—the first time a former Soviet state had signed a deal for its oil to reach international markets without going through Russia. It was also hailed as a major policy success for the United States, which had engaged in years of intensive diplomacy to build an avenue for Caspian oil wealth that did not rely on Moscow. (Related: BP’s map of the pipeline route) The BTC has the capacity to deliver 1.2 million barrels of oil per day to the Turkish port of Ceyhan …

From the Archive: The Beginning of a Post-Soviet Dream

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Yesterday, I won a Fulbright (!!!) student scholarship to Azerbaijan. Today I began to reflect on what this might mean and began to think of some images, among many other things, that united me to Azeris and other people in the region. Peculiarly, the first thing that came to mind was this quote from my U.S. passport that anyone who has seen it from Bratislava to Baku (if you were a “Seinfeld” fan you must surely remember, “It’s been a long journey from Milan to Minsk…”) cannot help but memorize, recite and possibly even begin to call me “young man”. One friend sent a note when I received the Fulbright, “Go east, young man,” no doubt a tribute to the Horace Greeley quote in the latest U.S. passport design: “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” – Horace Greeley Additionally, I combed through some old images to find a few that united east, and west in some interesting form: (It is the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, celebrated as a …

How to Write a Graduate Student Thesis on Military-Media Relations in the USA! in 120 Days

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(Plagiarizers, be forewarned mine is already officially submitted to the Georgetown Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and yours will only be an imitation at best and at worst get you in really, really big trouble with the man either now or later in life. See: former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.) Photojournalists like to create what are called “gear posts” whereby they empty the contents of their backpack and dutifully record each and every item down to the essence and origin of even the lint in the lining (“specially made in Nepal” or “hair from a lamb we slaughtered in Sudan”). I have no intention of doing any such thing, because I imagine most of you would probably be correct to assume that I wear a scarf with a bit of perfume on it (protective against offensive odors), and carry a whole bunch of lenses and batteries (for making pictures and ensuring I do not run out of power in the process), and other things too like cameras, notebooks, water. With that accomplished …

The Bi-Products of Our Labors: Charting Progression Through Progress Charts

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This week I hand in my thesis on media-military relations to my adviser, the Georgetown University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Proquest, and hopefully a few people who will be generous enough to edit it before then. As is often the case when you write something longer than 700-800 words, getting people to read something closer to 10,000 words can be a bit tricky. I am not suggesting tools of deception, “psych-ops,” or anything so ordinary as blackmail. Rather, humor and a little prodding. Inspired by the magnanimous work of Bill Mauldin, Second World War cartoonist with the U.S. Army, I created a few cartoons, one of which I am sharing here. Without further ado, some scenes from the war room (gentlemen, no fighting…): In the past two years as a student in the security studies program at Georgetown, I have learned to adjust my own pedagogical background in various ways to a culture where the military dominates. One aspect of this has involved adjusting to methods I never quite understood, such as Power …

From the Archive: Same Scene, Only Two Years Later “Post-War”

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In late July and early August I was traveling in Georgia, a post-Soviet state on the make, as part of my work following the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline route. Two years ago in 2008, the new nation-state was beset by misfortune in the form of invasion by its northerly neighbor, Russia. A short but devastating nine day war ensued in mid-August over the self-proclaimed independent republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia’s north and northwest. A primary theater in the armed conflict was the Georgian city of Gori, most famous as it is the birthplace of Iosef Dzughashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin who ruled the former Soviet Union with an iron first and a mass murderous streak from 1922 until his death in 1953. In some parts of the now former Eastern Bloc like Poland, de-Stalinzation did not occur until 1957, a year after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) renouncing the Soviet crimes of Stalinist excess. In 2008, several images from the Georgian …