Ashkhen Arakelyan is a journalist from the Syunik region of Armenia who studies communication and media at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After finishing her Bachelor of Science at Yerevan State University, she moved to Germany in 2018, where she has been a scholar at the Hanns Seidel Foundation since 2020. In 2022, Ashkhen will graduate and pursue her master's degree in Germany. Her professional aspiration is to become a full-time conflict, war, and crisis reporter.

Ashkhen's first book, Sadistic Pleasures: Silent Crimes of Azerbaijan, shares her on-the-ground interviews with surviving POWs of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. It sheds light on hidden war crimes and human rights violations that continue to occur with little oversight or scrutiny from the global community.