Biography
Yevgenya Jenny Paturyan is an Associate Professor and the Program Chair of the Bachelor of Arts in Politics and Governance at the American University of Armenia. She received her PhD in Political Science from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Her academic interests span the study of civil society, volunteering, democratization of post-communist countries, and corruption. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, including her 2021 monograph, Armenian Civil Society (Springer).
At the heart of Jenny’s work is an interest in how political culture shapes people’s actions and how these actions, in turn, shape political institutions. At YCIE, she explores this dynamic within the Armenian National Assembly, the country’s primary arena for elite network formation. Her project, “Clans or Cadres?”, investigates the nature of elite turnover following the 2018 Velvet Revolution and the 2020 war.
While public discourse often relies on anecdotal evidence—characterizing the new political elite as “young and inexperienced” or speculating that “Southern” regional clans are simply being replaced by “Northern” ones—Jenny introduces a rigorous quantitative approach through Social Network Analysis (SNA). By mapping relational structures across pre- and post-revolutionary convocations, she examines whether the legislature represents a fundamental break from the past or a reshuffling of existing informal networks. Her research seeks to determine how these internal architectures react to sudden political opportunities and national crises, contributing to broader global debates on institutional continuity and the resilience of power networks in Eurasia.