This paper discusses why large-scale and sustained violence has not come to Dagestan in the Russian North Caucasus despite many sources of instability, such as territorial disputes, the influence of fundamentalist Islam, and the potential for interethnic violence. It assesses the general risk of...

In the early 1990s, energy companies around the world began to realize the enormity of the still-untapped oil and natural gas reserves of the Caspian Sea basin, igniting a scramble to develop new extraction and transport networks to bring these resources to the world market. The result has...

This paper takes up three related questions: (1) what is the difference between ethnic and religious conflict; (2) are theories of ethnic conflict equally applicable to religious conflict; and (3) can available theories of collective violence explain why the nature of internal conflict changes...

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...

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...