Carnegie Moscow Center
While an analysis of the military aspects of the 2008 Russian-Georgian conflict is important, it is also necessary to understand the timeline of political events, in Russia and Georgia, that led to the war.
The political, social, and cultural influence exerted by the ethnic solidarity of the Cherkessian people, located both in the Russian Federation and in the diaspora, has the potential to further destabilize the North Caucasus.
The Pacific island microstates of Nauru and Tuvalu have found an incentive to take sides in the efforts of Caucasian breakaway territories like South Ossetia and Abkhazia to gain international recognition of their sovereignty.
While the Caucasus is too often treated as a subset of Russian history or as merely a gateway to Asia, it remains an important and combustible region, whose inner dynamics and history deserve a much more complex appreciation from the wider world.
Recent developments in Russia's foreign policy reflect the country's struggle to preserve its status as a “great power” through modernization.
The current political and economic situation in the South Caucasus is partly the result of the misconceptions about the region that have been propagated by both outsiders and locals.
Located in an important economic and transport corridor, the countries of the South Caucasus are grappling with the challenges of post-Soviet independence, internal and external tensions, and unresolved conflicts in three breakaway territories.
The blast in Vladikavkaz is the latest episode in what is becoming a latent civil war in the North Caucasus, where the Russian authorities are facing an opposition with its own specific religious and political ideology.
Narrow bilateralism is an abiding problem in regional policies in the South Caucasus, and it is only complicated by the multiple policy agendas of outside interests such as Russia or the United States.
Religious services held inside Turkey’s borders by Pontic Greeks are a sign of the breakthrough in Turkish-Greek relations and a similar initiative at an Armenian church inside Turkey would be another step toward the normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia.