Student Achievements: Anush Arakelyan and Syuzan Margaryan
Yerevan, Armenia — Two students from the American University of Armenia’s (AUA) Bachelor of Arts in Politics and Governance (BAPG) program — recent graduate Anush Arakelyan and senior Syuzan Margaryan — have taken their classroom research into an international academic conversation, publishing papers in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Ethics, Politics & Society.
Their articles appear in the journal’s 2026 special issue, Thinking for the Future: Gosseries and His Critics, dedicated to philosopher Axel Gosseries’s 2023 book What Is Intergenerational Justice? The special issue brings together four critical engagements with Gosseries’s work and concludes with a response from Gosseries himself, creating a direct dialogue between the philosopher and the authors examining his ideas.
For Syuzan, what eventually became a published article began as a class assignment.
“The paper began as a class assignment in which we were asked to critically engage with Axel Gosseries’s What Is Intergenerational Justice?,” she recalled. “At the time, publishing an academic article felt like something quite distant from me, so the opportunity seemed like a significant leap.”
In her article, “Non-identity and Collective Responsibility for Past Harms”, Syuzan challenges Gosseries’s approach to the “non-identity problem” by arguing that nations can be understood as enduring collective entities rather than simply aggregates of individuals. If nations preserve a collective identity across generations, she argues, they may also experience intergenerational harm, raising questions of responsibility and compensation for historical injustices.
The idea grew out of a part of Gosseries’s argument that Syuzan initially found difficult to accept. “I remember thinking that if something is so difficult for me to understand, then there must be something I do not agree with,” she said. That initial disagreement eventually developed into a broader argument about collective agency, national identity, and intergenerational justice.
Syuzan also credits Dr. Arshak Balayan with helping her turn that intuition into a rigorous academic argument. The process changed her understanding of research and academic writing.
“The real challenge was thinking: questioning my own position, challenging every argument I made, anticipating possible counterarguments, identifying weaknesses and loopholes, and making sure that the philosophical framework was internally coherent,” she reflected.
For Anush, the question was different but equally connected to the responsibilities societies have toward future generations.
In her article, “Can Discounting Future Benefits and Costs be Just?”, Anush examines whether some degree of intergenerational discounting can be morally justified. Building on Gosseries’s arguments, she focuses on uncertainty about the future value of resources, noting that technological, economic, political, and social changes may significantly alter what future generations need or value.
This uncertainty, she stresses, does not remove present generations’ responsibilities toward the future. Instead, it suggests that long-term decisions should remain flexible and adaptable.
“I believe it has practical relevance for policy-making, as long-term policies are made under uncertainty about the future,” Anush explained, particularly in today’s rapidly changing technological environment.
For Anush, the publication also marked her first experience with the peer-review process in practice.
“This was my first experience publishing a peer-reviewed paper,” she said. “Going through the publishing process gave me a much better understanding of what academic publishing actually involves.”
The experience, she added, gave her greater confidence in taking future research projects from their initial stages through to publication.
What began as critical engagement in the classroom ultimately placed Anush Arakelyan and Syuzan Margaryan in a published scholarly conversation with its author — marking an important achievement in their academic journeys and highlighting the potential of BAPG student research to reach audiences beyond AUA.
*Ethics, Politics & Society is an academic journal focused on political philosophy, political theory, normative and applied ethics, with particular attention to questions of justice and democracy. The special issue explores questions raised by Gosseries’s work, including what current generations owe future ones, responsibility for past harms, and whether giving less weight to future benefits and costs can ever be morally justified.