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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In the post-Cold War era, the issues of nationalism, ethnopolitics, and ethnic conflict have been most pressing in the three Transcaucasian states -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia -- and in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation. The Caucasus is extraordinarily diverse, with a...

This paper examines the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), one of the three key Islamic groups active in Central Asia. The IMU is a militant and extremist Islamic organization, one that has been listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization. It has been linked to terrorist...

Armenian nationalists often claim that language plays a central role in the process of national identity-formation. Language figures directly or indirectly in a wide range of nationalist phenomena: from speculative myths on national origins, to historical claims on a perceived national...