The Books Every Armenian Needs to Read: Free Samples Now Open at the GPI Bookstore

BURBANK, Calif., October 19, 2026. Global Peace International (GPI) today announced that free book samples are now available in the GPI Bookstore, alongside a website published in 20 languages. Each sample includes the preface, the introduction, and selected chapters, so readers can judge the research and the writing for themselves. To begin reading, open any title in the bookstore and select “Read a Sample.”

GPI books are grounded in documented facts and original sources, with little to no opinion. Many explore questions readers have long wondered about but rarely seen answered in print. Others address subjects often considered too dangerous to touch. Current titles include Betrayal Unfinished; Tala’at’s Confession: Not Holy War, but Plunder; Western Azerbaijan: The Next Stage After Artsakh; The Armenian Civil Contract; and The Armenian Genocide and the Architecture of Power.

The bookstore’s latest addition, Political Zionism and the Armenian Question: How Faith Was Used to Sell a Political Project, examines how religious faith was enlisted to advance political Zionism and traces the consequences for Armenians from the Ottoman era to Artsakh and the present day.

A Thousand Years of Unbroken Work

GPI founder Ara Khachig Manoogian is the grandson and final student of Shahan Natalie, who organized and directed Operation Nemesis. From 1920 to 1922, Nemesis tracked down the architects of the Armenian Genocide who had escaped justice. Its best-known target, Tala’at Pasha, was executed in Berlin in 1921. Natalie also organized the defense of Soghomon Tehlirian, the man who carried out the sentence, hiring and preparing the lawyers who represented him. A German jury acquitted Tehlirian.

Ara attended his first demonstration at the age of three. At five, his grandfather told him and his brothers that they would carry on his work. At nine, he became his grandfather’s final student. When Shahan Natalie died in 1983, his work passed to Ara, then seventeen. His uncle, His Beatitude Archbishop Torkom Manoogian, Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, of blessed memory, was a lasting spiritual influence.

On his mother’s side, that legacy reaches back more than a thousand years. His grandmother Angel Natalie, Shahan Natalie’s wife, was the daughter of Sarkis Agha Gandzabedian of Tarsus, from a line the family traces to Armenia’s Bagratuni royal house. The Bagratunis served as hereditary crowners of Armenia’s earlier kings before ruling as kings themselves from 884. They held the title “king of kings” from 919 until Ani fell in 1045. Their realm included Artsakh, whose princes ruled as their vassals.

According to the family’s history, each generation passed its history and custodial duties to the next without interruption. Angel’s father carried those responsibilities in Tarsus. In 1909, he chaired the Armenian board of trustees and safeguarded artifacts of the Cilician Armenian kings in the church treasury. Armenians brought their problems to him, and he often served as their intermediary with the Ottoman government. He carried the same duties in Constantinople, where Armenians brought him their petitions as a member of the royal line. The family remembers him as a banker with close ties to the French consulate. Angel passed that history and those responsibilities to Ara and continued his education until her death in 1995.

Ara also inherited the Shahan Natalie archive, Natalie’s complete personal archive. Along with his own papers, it holds many documents, once classified as top secret, that he acquired during his work. Many of those documents have since been declassified and are held in the national archives of several countries, which confirms the authenticity of the copies Natalie kept. The archive is also the only known archive of Operation Nemesis. Natalie kept his records himself and never deposited them with any organization. Other collections on Nemesis are compilations of public records and newspaper clippings. Many GPI books draw directly on the archive.

Written in Artsakh

Ara worked in Artsakh from 1993 to 2010 and lived there full time from 1998 to 2006. In the Martuni district, his reforms brought about the removal of the district governor, the police chief, and the prosecutor. He served as a custodian of a land his family had once ruled as kings, continuing a tradition of service that, in the family’s history, stretches back more than a thousand years.

Like his great-grandfather Sarkis, Ara became someone people turned to with their problems, both in Artsakh and in Armenia. He acted as their intermediary, helping them obtain their rights without paying bribes in a deeply corrupt system. In August 2014, the Azerbaijani outlet Haqqin.az called him a “Don Quixote.” The writer Lev Maas, quoted in Ara’s latest book, described him as “waging a fight against a system which is more powerful than windmills and is called corruption.”

Many GPI books began in Martuni. Through the long winters there, with snow waist high, he fed the woodstove and wrote. His only link to the outside world was a 27 bps dial-up internet connection, routed from Martuni to Stepanakert, that failed whenever the line got wet.

On June 17, 2026, during the government question period in Armenia’s National Assembly, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan twice asked who thinks about the fate of the homeland. Both times he answered with ridicule, pointing to the man who in 2013 went on a hunger strike before the president of another country. Ara was that man. On March 17, 2013, in support of Raffi Hovannisian, whom Ara and many others believed had been robbed of that February’s presidential election, he began a hunger strike outside Congressman Adam Schiff’s Burbank office, demanding that President Barack Obama withdraw his congratulations to Serzh Sargsyan. He carried the strike across the country by car and ended it twenty-four days later in front of the White House. Ara took the prime minister’s question as a call to answer. The Armenian Civil Contract and Political Zionism and the Armenian Question, and the actions they advocate, are his response. Harut Sassounian, president of the Armenia Artsakh Fund and publisher of The California Courier, called The Armenian Civil Contract a masterpiece.

“The research has been done for years. Now it is time to get these books into readers’ hands.”

What Comes Next

Operation Nemesis: The Final Act will be released soon. Twenty-five more books are in various stages of development, with publication planned over the next couple of years. Some are unfinished works by Shahan Natalie himself, including screenplays, one of which concerns Operation Nemesis.

All GPI books are published in English, and translation is underway into the website’s other 13 languages: Armenian, Russian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Persian, Arabic, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Greek.

More from GPI

• Free white papers and risk assessment reports, including Artsakh Is Not Lost and Armenia Is Next.
• The 1,000 Book Initiative, which places documented research in the hands of every Member of Congress. Anyone can sponsor a package for $50.
• The Global Armenian Registry, where Armenians around the world can stand and be counted.

About Global Peace International

Global Peace International is a research and accountability organization based in Burbank, California. It was founded by Ara Khachig Manoogian, an author, investigative journalist, and geopolitical analyst who has documented Armenian history and South Caucasus affairs for more than thirty years. GPI publishes books, white papers, and legal analyses on Armenian affairs and international law.

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