Richard Giragosian died in Istanbul on September 19, 2026, in the city that for a century has stood at the center of Armenia's fraught relationship with Turkey, the subject he had spent two decades trying to explain and, where he could, to bridge. He was 61, and until his death he was the founding director of Yerevan's Regional Studies Center, the Armenian think tank he built into a leading voice on South Caucasus security over more than three decades in international affairs.

Born January 8, 1965, in Providence, Rhode Island, Giragosian spent the first half of his career inside the machinery of Washington policymaking. For nine years he served as a professional staff member of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, where he was the panel's principal staffer on the former Soviet Union and China, organizing hearings and briefings for members of Congress on questions that would later define his own research agenda in the Caucasus. In the same period he worked as an analyst for the consulting firm Abt Associates from 2000 to 2005, and from 2002 to 2006 he was a guest lecturer for U.S. Army Special Forces at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He also wrote regularly for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty beginning in 1999, and served as a contributing analyst for Jane's Information Group and Oxford Analytica from 2003 to 2010.

In 2006, after two decades in Washington, Giragosian moved to Yerevan, and the region itself became his subject rather than a beat he covered from a distance. From 2008 to 2010 he wrote a column for the Turkish-language edition of Newsweek, carrying his analysis of Armenia-Turkey relations directly to Turkish readers, and he contributed occasional analysis to Agos, the Istanbul-based Turkish-Armenian newspaper that would later report his death. In 2012 he founded the Regional Studies Center, an independent Yerevan think tank built, in its own description, to strengthen Armenian statecraft and give the country's perspective a hearing among diplomats and foreign ministries.

Giragosian kept one foot in the classroom throughout this period. He taught as a senior expert and visiting professor at Yerevan State University's Centre for European Studies, was a visiting professor at the College of Europe's Natolin campus, and lectured for the NATO Defense College in Rome. In 2018 he contributed the chapter "Small States and the Large Costs of Regional Fracture: The Case of Armenia" to Anna Ohanyan's edited volume Russia Abroad: Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond, published by Georgetown University Press, one of more than a dozen book chapters he wrote on Armenian and regional geopolitics. He also consulted for the Asian Development Bank, the European Union's delegation to Armenia, the European Parliament, France's Ministry of Defense, the International Crisis Group, the OSCE, and the U.S. Departments of Defense and State, and his own commentary appeared as a contributing analyst for Al Jazeera and Turkish Policy Quarterly, and in the European Council on Foreign Relations.

He had traveled to Istanbul for a meeting in the days before his death, according to Agos, the newspaper he sometimes wrote for; a funeral was planned to follow in Armenia, the country he had made his home for two decades. News of his death drew tributes from colleagues across the region he had studied. Nigar Goksel, the International Crisis Group's Turkey director, wrote that she and Giragosian had appeared together on panels across Western Europe, Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia through their thirties and forties, debating Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and that even where they disagreed there was always a foundation of mutual understanding between us. She recalled that he liked to close those panels with a line of his own: the conclusion we have reached is that there is no conclusion. His absence, she wrote, leaves a huge void in the small world we shared for more than twenty years. Emilio Cricchio of BBC Radio, who had served in Armenia, said Giragosian took his work seriously and worked tirelessly to promote peace in the region and had a wonderful sense of humor, a description echoed by Hetq, the Armenian outlet that also reported his death.

Giragosian's own name is attached to no single treaty or headline; his work was the slower kind, the hearings and consulting memos, classroom lectures, and syndicated columns that shape how officials and readers in Washington, Yerevan, and Ankara alike come to understand one another. What persists is the Regional Studies Center he built in Yerevan, the chapter he left in the scholarly record on Armenia's geopolitics, and the columns that carried his arguments for Armenia-Turkey dialogue into a Turkish-language publication most Armenian analysts of his generation never reached.