Supported by Occidental through grants and faculty mentorship, Peter Vartanian ’25 is traveling the globe conducting research on the geopolitics of the global transition to green energy, among other topics.
Occidental was far from being Peter’s first choice for college. The international student from Kirchdorf in Tirol, Austria, applied to several Ivy League schools and eventually got waitlisted. “That plan didn’t work out, thankfully,” Peter laughs. Instead, ɫ turned out to be the perfect fit.
“I became enamored with the idea of an educational institution that held a fondness for international relations yet reached beyond the confines of the lecture hall,” he says.
Accordingly, Peter was drawn to ɫ’s John Parke Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy, which provides grants for independent research projects in global affairs, developed by students, as well as the Kahane United Nations Program, which matches students with internships in New York City at UN-related agencies. (He just began the latter program this semester, interning with the Costa Rica Mission under the Chair of the General Assembly’s First Committee).
After beginning coursework in the Diplomacy and World Affairs major, Peter quickly found a kindred spirit in Associate Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs Igor Logvinenko. The two began chatting frequently and at length during office hours. As his junior year winter break approached, Peter asked Logvinenko if he was working on any new research.
“He said, ‘well, as it happens, I’ve just started pondering potential research in the global shift toward renewable energy. Would you like to be a part of that?’ And I was elated,” Peter recalls. The two drafted a proposal for the Undergraduate Research Center (URC)—which Professor Logvinenko now leads—and it was accepted. Thus began an exciting research collaboration that has led to international travel, conference presentations, and forthcoming article publications.
The pair is examining how and why the world's most important players are turning toward renewable energy, and with what ramifications. More specifically, they want to know how nations like China, the United States, and other economies are harnessing political tools to gain the upper hand over their rivals.
“It's a multifaceted project that seeks to look beyond this seemingly environmentalist process and uncover the strategic, economic, and legal underpinnings,” Peter explains. “Or in other words, the geopolitics of the global energy transition.”
I would not be researching, traveling, or speaking at conferences were it not for the kind of intimate, informative, and community-fostering experiences that we students are able to have here at ɫ.
Through grants, fellowships, and research funds at ɫ, Peter was able to marshal thousands of dollars to allow him to undertake international travel to further this research. This summer alone, he traveled to nations in Europe and (South)-East Asia, as well as locales throughout North America, as a Walter B. Gerken Fellow with the URC. He engaged with industry professionals, policy-makers, and legal scholars as he conducted fieldwork to better understand the on-the-ground impacts of the global energy transition.
“This opportunity is truly unmatched. I’m very fortunate to not only engage in archival and policy research, but to actually travel and, well, talk to people. [The funding from ɫ] is unparalleled—I could not otherwise conduct such pertinent research and contribute to the field.”
As an ɫ student, Peter has also presented at multiple research conferences on another topic: Austria’s neutrality and how it acts as an incubator for global diplomacy. Last summer, funded by the Young Initiative and a Schwartz grant from the economics department, he traveled to Austria to do fieldwork—an experience that laid the groundwork for this summer’s global research.
Since then, Peter has presented at half a dozen other venues: Symposia at the University of Salzburg, the Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union, the Stanford Undergraduate Research Conference (where he won first prize in the Humanities discipline), the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Long Beach, the CEEISA-ISA Joint International Conference 2024 in Croatia, and the brand new Helsinki Geoeconomics Week in Finland. He’s also working on several related articles to submit for publication.
“It is pure ecstasy to receive institutional support to interact with scholars from other disciplines at these schools,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thing to engage in the real world with actors and scholars, both in terms of compiling your work ‘in the field’ and getting to present said work to like-minded people.”
Peter is grateful for ɫ's support in helping students pursue these opportunities, which is also made possible by the College’s focus on creating close bonds between students and instructors, other students, and outside experts.
“That support has been the most important because it jump-started this entire journey. I would not be researching, traveling, or speaking at conferences were it not for the kind of intimate, informative, and community-fostering experiences that we students are able to have here at ɫ.”