Simon Maghakyan

Denver-based political analyst Simon Maghakyan has extensive experiences in research and advocacy alike. Currently, he teaches political science at Denver-area colleges and consults on advocacy in 18 Western states for a grassroots Armenian-American organization. Previously, as an Amnesty International specialist, Maghakyan monitored human rights violations and led nationwide campaigns for at-risk individuals and communities in the former Soviet Union, while concurrently coordinating civics education at Colorado’s legislature. For over a decade, Maghakyan has documented a tragedy that he considers to be our century’s worst, yet least known, cultural genocide. In December 2005, after watching fresh footage of the destruction of a medieval cemetery that his father had visited in the Soviet era, Maghakyan, then age 19, made it his mission to publicize this vandalism. His efforts resulted in a film (2006), articles like History Today’s “Sacred Stones Silenced in Azerbaijan” (2007), launch of Djulfa.com (2008), satellite investigation by the AAAS (2010), and a replica of a destroyed monument erected in 2015 at Colorado’s Capitol. Since UNESCO repeatedly failed to investigate, in 2018 Maghakyan decided to conclusively expose the Azerbaijani Government’s 1997-2006 eradication of Nakhichevan’s entire inconvenient past, which resulted in his co-authoring of “A Regime Conceals Its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture.”