ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

Security and democracy in the Caucasus: the interaction of state and society

chapter 1|24 pages

The tip of the democratisation spear?

Role and importance of the Georgian Armed Forces in the context of democratisation and European integration

chapter 2|19 pages

Russian governance of the North Caucasus

Dilemmas of force and inclusion

chapter 3|22 pages

Overcoming the status quo in the unrecognised states of the South Caucasus

Internal and external limitations

chapter 6|25 pages

Arctic labour migration, vulnerability, and social change in the South Caucasus

The case of Azerbaijanis in the polar cities of Murmansk and Norilsk

chapter 7|22 pages

Armenian volunteer fighters in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

An eye on narrative trajectories in a no-war no-peace situation

chapter 8|16 pages

‘Exorcism of cultural otherness’

Refugee women in post-Soviet Armenia