This research examines educational stratification cross-nationally through the context of German division and unity. Drawing on representative German Social Survey (ALLBUS) data from 1991-1998 on cohorts schooled in the 1980s and 1990s, the analysis explores educational inequality at the...

This article focuses on religious practices among Muslims in the Republic of Georgia today. It considers relations between Muslims and other religious groups; the influence of religion on everyday life in Georgia; the relationship between the religious and national consciousness; and tensions...

Surveys rank Russians among the unhappiest people in the world. Contrary to popular accounts of a uniquely melancholic national character, the subjective wellbeing of Russians depends heavily on both individual and collective economic wellbeing. Individual differences in living standards account...

The Pankisi Gorge region is located just south of the Georgian-Chechen border in the Republic of Georgia. Most of the inhabitants of the region are descendents of ethnic Chechen and Ingush, known as "Vainakh" or "Kists." Since 1994, Pakisi has witnessed an influx of refugees from the...

Since the late 1980s, the Caucasus and Caspian littoral states have passed through a period of extreme turmoil. In addition to the economic costs of decentralizing and marketizing their economies and the political difficulties associated with constructing new political and institutional...

This paper analyzes the Armenian government under president Levon Ter-Petrosian during the 1990s and the transition to prime minister Robert Kocharian in 1998. It mainly looks at the underlying causes of Ter-Petrosian's downfall and his forced resignation, focusing on the country's economy,...

Russia's literary tradition was the primary locus of Russian debate on the Caucasus until the media revolution of the post-Soviet 1990s. This paper examines how the idiom of nineteenth-century literary romanticism, both in its representations of the North Caucasian peoples and in its implied...

In this paper, it is argued that the abandoning of the command administrative economy in the Soviet Union and its transformation into an ostensibly market capitalist system in post-Communist Russia was a reaction by the Soviet elite to emerging threats to their accumulated privileges and power...

The essay traces the origins and development of Soviet area studies from their inception in the early 1940s to the present. The first part examines the institutional framework and the funding sources for Soviet and post-Soviet area studies. The second part concentrates on the connection between...

Tatar is a Turkic language spoken in Tatarstan, Russia, by one quarter of its four million residents. Tatar ethnic identity, as constructed through linguistic performance, is inextricably linked with orientation towards or away from Russian language and culture, such that the integrity and...