French Armenian Scholar Gerard Chaliand Passes Away at 91: A Lifelong Voice for the Armenian Cause

Gérard Chaliand, the French researcher, writer, and strategist whose career spanned more than six decades, passed away on Wednesday, in the French capital Paris at the age of 91. His scholarly work left a profound mark on the study of irregular warfare, international conflicts, and national identity movements. An expert in geopolitics, his analyses of insurgencies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, mostly based on his field experience with insurgent forces, have appeared in more than 20 books and in numerous newspaper articles.

Born in 1934 in Brussels to Armenian parents and raised in Paris, Chaliand was a participant-observer in various guerrilla conflicts including Nagorno Karabagh.

He taught in Paris, France, at the École nationale d’administration (1980–1987) and at Ecole de Guerre (the French War College) from 1990 to 1995. Chaliand spent more than five years as a visiting professor in the United States at Harvard, UCLA and UC Berkeley.

He was an independent adviser to the Centre for Analysis and Planning of the French Foreign Ministry from 1983 to 1994. He founded and was the Director of Minority Rights Group (France), from 1978 to 1987.

He was the initiator of the cession of the Permanent People’s Tribunal that was dedicated to the genocide of the Armenian people whose jury comprised three Nobel Prize winners, including Mr. Sean Mc Bride, Founder of Amnesty International, and which took place at Sorbonne and saw the sentence towards the Turkish state delivered to the National Assembly.

He co-authored the book ‘The Armenians: From Genocide to Resistance’ with french historian Yves Ternon.

Partial list of Chaliand’s publications

A World History of War, UC Press Berkeley, 2014.
History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qaïda (with Arnaud Blin), Berkeley, 2007.
Mirrors of a Disaster. The Spanish conquest of America, Transaction, Rutgers University Press. N.J. 2005
Nomadic Empires, From Mongolia to the Danube, Transaction, Rutgers University Press, N.J. 2003.
The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, New York, 1995. ISBN 0-670-85439-5
The Art of War in World History, Berkeley, 1994. ISBN 978-0-520-07964-9
The Kurdish Tragedy, Zed Press, London, 1994, Report to the sub-commission on Human Rights (UN) on the situation of the Kurds in the Middle East.
Strategic Atlas: A Comparative Geopolitics of the World’s Powers, with J.P. Rageau, Harper & Row, New York 1987, 1990, updated edition 1992.
Minorities at the Age of Nation-States (ed) Pluto Press, London, 1988.
Terrorism, Saqi Books, London: 1987.
The Genocide of the Armenians, Zoryan Institute, Boston, Mass, 1986
Guerrilla Strategy. A Historical Anthology From the Long March to Afghanistan, ed. Berkeley, 1982.
The Struggle for Africa. Great Power Strategies, Macmillan, London 1982.
Report from Afghanistan, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1982.
A People without a country, The Kurds and Kurdistan, (Ed), Zed Books 1980, Olive Branch Press, 1993
Revolution in the Third World: Myths and Prospects, Viking, New York 1977; updated edition, Penguin Books, 1989.
The Palestinian Resistance, Penguin Books, Baltimore 1972.
Peasants of North Vietnam, Penguin Books, Baltimore 1970.
Armed Struggle in Africa: With the guerrillas in Portuguese Guinea, Monthly Review Press, New York 1969.