Fear Weakness And Power In The Post Soviet South Caucasus

This book provides a multi-level analysis of international security in the South Caucasus. Using an expanded and adapted version of Regional Security Complex Theory, it studies both material conditions and discourses of insecurity in its assessment of the region's possible transition towards a more peaceable future.

This book provides a multi-level analysis of international security in the South Caucasus. Using an expanded and adapted version of Regional Security Complex Theory, it studies both material conditions and discourses of insecurity in its assessment of the region's possible transition towards a more peaceable future.

In recent years, competitive authoritarianism has become an increasingly common form of non-democratic politics. What is the relationship between the demand for particular public policies and a regime’s durability in office in such cases? How does policy-making interact with organizational power, the willingness to resort to coercion and patronage politics in countries home to democratic-looking institutions that none the less fall short of democratic standards? In this book we show that such regimes do more than just survive and collapse. Moreover, we argue that far from being passive pawns in the hands of their leaders voters in competitive authoritarian regimes, do matter are taken seriously. We investigate how regimes and voters interact in the cases of Georgia and Armenia, two post-Soviet countries in the South Caucasus, to identify how voters preferences feed into policy-making and gauge the extent to which the regimes’ adjustment of their policies crucially affects regime stability. To these ends, we draw on a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, including a survey experiment carried out in the two countries. The volume was originally published as a special issue of the journal Caucasus Survey.

This collection examines the social, economic, and political evolution of the South Caucasian states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the creation of new national identities and value systems, institution-building, and the influence of regional and international actors.

The Routledge Handbook of the Caucasus offers an integrated, multidisciplinary overview of the historical, ethno-linguistic, cultural, socio-economic and political complexities of the Caucasus. Covering both the North and South Caucasus, the book gathers together leading Western, Caucasian and Russian scholars of the region from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Following a thorough introduction by the editors, the handbook is divided into six parts which combine thematic and chronological principles: Place, peoples and culture Political history The contemporary Caucasus: politics, economics and societies Conflict and political violence The Caucasus in the wider world Societal and cultural dynamics. This handbook will be an essential reference work for scholars interested in Russian and Eastern-European studies, Eurasian history and politics, and religious and Islamic studies.

The Caucasus, including the South Caucasus states and Russia’s North Caucasus, continues to be an area of instability and conflict. This book, based on extensive original research, explores in detail at both the local and regional level the interaction between state and society and the impact of external actors' engagement in the region within a conceptual framework linking security and democracy. Unlike other books on the subject, which tend to examine the issues from a Western political science perspective, this book incorporates insights from sociology, geography and anthropology as well as politics and contains contributions from scholars who have carried out extensive research in the region within a European Commission-funded Seventh Framework Programme project.

This volume critiques contemporary power trends by examining key bilateral dynamics between five putative ‘poles’ of the multipolar order in the twenty-first century. Written by emerging scholars and established academics, this work provides a timely and authoritative analysis of one of the most controversial and compelling security debates of the twenty-first century. Adopting a detailed case study approach, the volume examines contemporary great power relations between the US, China, Russia, India and the EU. Each chapter explores the essential nature and characteristics of individual inter-state relationships in order to explicate and appraise the empirical evidence for a putative multipolar order. The volume aims to deepen understanding of power trends and critically assess the individual inter-dynamics at play. In doing so, it critiques the various models offered, such as the hub and spoke model (with the US remaining as the primary actor) and Zakaria’s ‘networked’ model, as part of a purported ‘post-American world’. The work places each of the individual relationships into a wider strategic and political context, in relation to the continued international turbulence and change that has seemed even more prominent in recent times, taking into account the twin challenges of Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump. It concludes by returning the focus to the central questions of if, how and when a post-American, multipolar world could develop. This volume will be of much interest to students of global security, foreign policy, and IR in general.

While we know a great deal about the benefits of regional integration, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to areas with weak, dysfunctional, or nonexistent regional fabric in political and economic life. Further, deliberate “un-regioning,” applied by actors external as well as internal to a region, has also gone unnoticed despite its increasingly sophisticated modern application by Russia in its peripheries. This volume helps us understand what Anna Ohanyan calls “fractured regions” and their consequences for contemporary global security. Ohanyan introduces a theory of regional fracture to explain how and why regions come apart, consolidate dysfunctional ties within the region, and foster weak states. Russia Abroad specifically examines how Russia employs regional fracture as a strategy to keep states on its periphery in Eurasia and the Middle East weak and in Russia's orbit. It argues that the level of regional maturity in Russia’s vast vicinities is an important determinant of Russian foreign policy in the emergent multipolar world order. Many of these fractured regions become global security threats because weak states are more likely to be hubs of transnational crime, havens for militants, or sites of protracted conflict. The regional fracture theory is offered as a fresh perspective about the post-American world and a way to broaden international relations scholarship on comparative regionalism.