ABSTRACT
The Caucasus has arguably been one of the regions of the Eurasian continent most affected by what in the last decade has come to be called ‘the new world disorder’. Together with former Yugoslavia, it is the area of Eurasia most gravely hit by ethnopolitical conflict and warfare. Indeed, of the eight instances of armed civil conflict that have occurred on the territory of the former Soviet Union, five have taken place in the Caucasus. The conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, the Prigorodniy Rayon of North Ossetia, and Chechnya have together resulted in close to a hundred thousand deaths and an estimated two million six hundred thousand refugees and Internally Displaced Persons.1 The humanitarian burden has nevertheless been borne by the people of the region more than by the international community, whose aid and relief efforts have been less than satisfactory.2 A corollary of the armed conflicts of the region has furthermore been to aggravate the economic situation of the region, which was already suffering the problems of transition from the centralized and planned Soviet economy to a market economy. This, together with the availability of weapons that accompanies any war, has accentuated the risk of degeneration of tensions in other potential trouble spots, such as Javakheti in Georgia or Dagestan in the northeastern Caucasus.
