North Caucasus 6 - PONARS Eurasia

Assuaging Ethnic Factionalism Dagestan’s Lessons for Post-Taliban Settlement in Afghanistan

Studies of post-conflict settlement have shown that political decentralization rarely eliminates ethnopolitical violence. Yet, some form of decentralization often has to be used as a confidence building mechanism in the…

Opposition to the War in Chechnya: Antimilitarist Organizing in Russia

Patriotism, or the devoted love of one’s country, is a phenomenon that can be used in the service of the state. Often, during wartime, the militarized aspect of patriotism is…

How Russians Think about Chechnya

Human rights activists have documented mass graves, disappearances and torture, as well as the indiscriminate use of force by Russian federal forces against civilians in the current war in Chechnya.…

The Disconnect in How Russians Think about Human Rights and Chechnya: A Consequence of Media Manipulation

Despite considerable evidence collected by Russian and Western organizations of human rights abuses in Chechnya and a roll back in civil liberties in other spheres of life in Russia, survey data suggest…

‘Extremists and Bandits’ How Russia Views the War against Terrorism

When President Vladimir Putin picked up the phone to express his sympathy to President George W. Bush in the aftermath of September 11, and then followed-up by providing concrete assistance to the…

From Afghanistan To Ingushetia

Recently, I have been receiving many calls from journalists who want me to discuss what lessons, if any, the United States can learn from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. It…

Toward a U.S. Policy on Chechnya

Co-author: Scott Lindsay U.S. policy on Chechnya must bridge three objectives: cooperating with Russia on counterterrorism, stopping abuses in the conduct of the war in Chechnya, and finding a political…

Russia’s Periphery in the Global Arena: Do Regions Matter in the Kremlin’s Foreign Policy?

The conventional wisdom is that since the collapse of Communism the regions and republics of the Russian Federation have taken advantage of political and economic decentralization to articulate and conduct…

Broken Pendulum: Recentralization Under Putin

The development of center-region relations in Russia since 1990 is analogous to the oscillations of a pendulum, reflecting the changing balance between the alternative processes of decentralization and centralization. These…

The Forgotten Abkhazia: Anatomy of Post-Socialist Ethnic War

Local wars in the Caucasus have always tended to follow precedents–whether in the 19th century, in 1917-21, or in the period of 1989-94. It remains uncertain whether the NATO operation…

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North Caucasus