Svante E. Cornell, born in 1975, is a Swedish scholar specializing on politics and security issues in Eurasia, especially the South Caucasus, Turkey, and Central Asia. He is a director and co-founder of the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy, and Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, a Joint Center affiliated with the ISDP and Johns Hopkins University-SAIS.
He studied at the Department of the International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and holds a Ph.D. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University. From 2003-2007, he served as Associate Professor in East European Studies at Uppsala University. He also briefly taught at the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences and in 2002-03 served as the course Chair of the Caucasus Area Studies at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State.
Currently, aside from his positions at the ISDP and CACI, he holds the position of Associate Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University-SAIS and Associate Professor (part-time) in Government at Uppsala University. He has received an honorary doctorate from the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan.
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Svante is the author of a number of books, including Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus. His doctoral thesis was entitled Autonomy and Conflict: Ethnoterritoriality and Separatism in the South Caucasus - Cases in Georgia. In 2009, together with S. Frederick Starr, he edited The Guns of August 2008: Russia's War in Georgia, which addresses the causes and consequences of the 2008 South Ossetia War. His op-eds and commentary have appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Le Monde, The New York Times,[1] The Guardian,[2] the International Herald Tribune, Le Figaro,[3] The Baltimore Sun, Dagens Nyheter, the Moscow Times, Turkish Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Times, and also published a paper for NRB Analysis.[4]
Due to an article he wrote on the 2008 South Ossetia War, Svante Cornell was criticized by Mark Ames in The Nation.[5][6] Ames rejected Cornell's New York Times op-ed that placed the blame for the conflict squarely on Russia's shoulders.
American journalist Joshua Kucera, in his article about Cornell's new book "Azerbaijan Since Independence" (2010), thinks that "Cornell is generally pretty pro-Azerbaijan, and his framing of the situation as something inevitable seems to absolve Azerbaijan of any responsibility for its actions, which I think one could quibble with. But he knows Azerbaijan well, and this is an analysis worth considering."[7]