ABSTRACT
This comparative study of post-Soviet conflicts stresses the role of political-institutional changes and adjustments to Soviet legacies made during transition in the causation, prolongation and accommodation of ethnic and regional conflicts. The main theoretical assumptions of the diverse literatures on transition, ethnic conflict and regionalism, are evaluated to highlight both their shortcomings and their potential usefulness for understanding post-Soviet conflicts. Four main questions are investigated: the causes and distinctive features of post-Soviet conflicts, the distinction between ethnic and regional conflicts, the impact of the conflicts on broader processes of transition, in particular institutional engineering, and the interaction between domestic and external factors as a formative dynamic of the conflicts.
