Thesiss

The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno Karabakh has been one of the bloodiest and most intractable conflicts in the post-Soviet space. Although there have been a number of recently published important works regarding the conflict they have almost exclusively dealt with e…

The theme of nationalism has long provided the dominant framework for understanding the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and has become an increasingly popular motif in Russian and Soviet historiography. This dissertation sharply challenges that framework. It returns late Ottoman …

Keywords: Caucasus states, Russia, foreign policy analysis, weak state The key features of foreign policy formulation and execution in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are selected in an attempt to reveal the sources of foreign policy-behavior of new, post-Soviet (and in effect p…

This dissertation is the first study to focus on Russia's attempts to build its empire in the Caucasus in the reign of Catherine II (1762-96). Prior to the reign, Russia's presence in the region was concentrated at Fort Kizliar and in a handful of Cossack settlements on the left…

The South Caucasus states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan have shared, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a common strategic environment. To survive as independent states in a turbulent region bordered by Russia, Turkey and Iran, each state has chosen to align themsel…

This study traces the course of the two largest compact population movements in the history of Imperial Russia as experiments in social alchemy, whereby Russian officials sought to convert the Caucasus into a society of loyal, productive subjects. Resettlement opened avenues for…

This dissertation tells the story of how Russian strategies of imperial rule changed as a result of tsarist officials' efforts to expand their empire over the Caucasus in the long nineteenth century (1762-1918). Central to this work is the assertion the Caucasus represented a fr…

The objective of this study is to evaluate claims made by some scholars that there is a significant correlation between certain cultural norms of a given society and that society's propensity towards democratic governance. I will attempt to show that this is in fact a viable, th…

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chechens fought against the Russians for independence. The focus in the literature available has been on the wars and the atrocities caused by the wars. The literature then hypothesizes that the insurgency of today is just a continuation of the …

During the First World War, the Russian Caucasian Army had occupied a territory comprising the Ottoman provinces of Trabzon, Erzurum, Van, and, for a shorter period, Bitlis. The region that the Russian forces occupied was depopulated to a great extent due to the deportation and …

Due to increasing investigations and studies of the Kura-Araxes cultural communities, our information about this enigmatic archaeological culture has increased in many respects. Its interactions and regional variations in terms of cultural materials have been analyzed by many sc…

The Republic of Georgia lies within the Alpine-Himalayan foldbelt system which marks convergence of the Eurasian and African-Arabian plates. Basin development along the margin is complex with basin closure and rejuvenation evident throughout most of the Phanerozoic. Pre-Mesozoic…

This dissertation examines lawyers and lawyering in post-Soviet Georgia. It suggests that the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a rapid de-professionalization of lawyers. The monopoly of the Soviet-era Bar was broken, the number of law graduates multiplied, many of the obje…