Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2020.1712897
Adrian Brisku, Timothy K. Blauvelt
During the brief period between 22 April and 26 May 1918, the leading Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian political forces of the early twentieth century, having established the shared federative structures of the Transcaucasian Commissariat and the Seim in the preceding months, declared an independent Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) (see Figure 1). Emerging as it did from the ruins of an imploding tsarist empire and the still glowing embers of the First World War, and facing the imminent threat of invasion from the Ottoman army and the power ambitions of incipient Soviet Russia, the TDFR seemed both to the actors at the time and to later scholars of the region to be unique, contingent, and certainly unrepeatable. For Noe Zhordania, for example, who as leader of the Georgian Social Democratic Party played a key role in the creation of the TDFR and the founding of the Georgian Democratic Republic, declaring independence was entirely contingent upon the political developments in Russia and the designs of the Ottoman Empire towards those territories that it had lost in the 1878 Russo-Ottoman War. This sense of contingency could be felt in his speech to the Transcaucasian Seim shortly before the declaration of independence, entitled “On the Independence of Transcaucasia,” in which he stated that such a political union could achieve independence only if a democratic Russia abandoned it, even though Transcaucasia would have to face the Ottomans on its own (1919, 76). The hopes of Zhordania and many others for the emergence of a democratic Russia failed to materialize, while an Ottoman invasion did, forcing the main Transcaucasian political forces, primarily the Georgian Social Democrats and the National Democrats, the Armenian Dashnaktsutyun (or Dashnaks), and the Azerbaijani Musavatists, to agree to declare the independence of the Transcaucasus/Transcaucasia. While the TDFR appeared to these historical actors, as well as to later historians and scholars of the region (more on this below), as a unique political phenomenon that resulted from happenstance, how the TDFR emerged, what the political discourses were that sustained or contested it, and what the positions of the main political actors and interested parties/states towards it were have not been studied systematically. This set of questions and others were addressed in the contributions of historians and specialists on the region and its surrounding areas at an international conference on the centennial of the TDFR that was organized at Charles University in Prague on 24 May 2018. Building on the contributions from the only international academic event to mark this centennial, this special issue offers to readers interested in the region a comprehensive and multi-perspective historical account of the TDFR. It does so via a few guiding questions, namely:
{"title":"Who wanted the TDFR? The making and the breaking of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic","authors":"Adrian Brisku, Timothy K. Blauvelt","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2020.1712897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2020.1712897","url":null,"abstract":"During the brief period between 22 April and 26 May 1918, the leading Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian political forces of the early twentieth century, having established the shared federative structures of the Transcaucasian Commissariat and the Seim in the preceding months, declared an independent Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) (see Figure 1). Emerging as it did from the ruins of an imploding tsarist empire and the still glowing embers of the First World War, and facing the imminent threat of invasion from the Ottoman army and the power ambitions of incipient Soviet Russia, the TDFR seemed both to the actors at the time and to later scholars of the region to be unique, contingent, and certainly unrepeatable. For Noe Zhordania, for example, who as leader of the Georgian Social Democratic Party played a key role in the creation of the TDFR and the founding of the Georgian Democratic Republic, declaring independence was entirely contingent upon the political developments in Russia and the designs of the Ottoman Empire towards those territories that it had lost in the 1878 Russo-Ottoman War. This sense of contingency could be felt in his speech to the Transcaucasian Seim shortly before the declaration of independence, entitled “On the Independence of Transcaucasia,” in which he stated that such a political union could achieve independence only if a democratic Russia abandoned it, even though Transcaucasia would have to face the Ottomans on its own (1919, 76). The hopes of Zhordania and many others for the emergence of a democratic Russia failed to materialize, while an Ottoman invasion did, forcing the main Transcaucasian political forces, primarily the Georgian Social Democrats and the National Democrats, the Armenian Dashnaktsutyun (or Dashnaks), and the Azerbaijani Musavatists, to agree to declare the independence of the Transcaucasus/Transcaucasia. While the TDFR appeared to these historical actors, as well as to later historians and scholars of the region (more on this below), as a unique political phenomenon that resulted from happenstance, how the TDFR emerged, what the political discourses were that sustained or contested it, and what the positions of the main political actors and interested parties/states towards it were have not been studied systematically. This set of questions and others were addressed in the contributions of historians and specialists on the region and its surrounding areas at an international conference on the centennial of the TDFR that was organized at Charles University in Prague on 24 May 2018. Building on the contributions from the only international academic event to mark this centennial, this special issue offers to readers interested in the region a comprehensive and multi-perspective historical account of the TDFR. It does so via a few guiding questions, namely:","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"8 1","pages":"1 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2020.1712897","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45163071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2020.1714882
Sarah Slye
ABSTRACT This article traces the efforts of the Union of Allied Mountaineers (UAM) to uphold the indigenous North Caucasians’ right to self-determination from March 1917, when the organization hoped for Russia’s restructuring as a federal republic wherein the Mountaineers (gortsy) would enjoy full political autonomy on their own territory (national-territorial autonomy), to May 1918, when the Mountaineer leaders attempted to join the Transcaucasian Federation. After the Bolshevik coup d'état in October 1917, the Mountain leaders declared the autonomy of the Provisional Mountain Government on 2 December 1917 and later the independence of the Mountain Republic on 11 May 1918 – in order to join the newly independent Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR). Since the UAM had been resistant to the idea of administrative unity with Transcaucasia for most of 1917, this article clarifies the logic behind the Mountain leadership’s reorientation away from Russia and towards Transcaucasia in early 1918. And considering the Mountain Republic declared independence at the very moment when the anti-separatist Terek People’s Republic insisted that it represented the political will of both the settler and native populations of the North Caucasus, this article also evaluates these two rival republics’ claims to popular legitimacy among the autochthonous Mountaineers.
{"title":"Turning towards unity: a North Caucasian perspective on the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic","authors":"Sarah Slye","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2020.1714882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2020.1714882","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article traces the efforts of the Union of Allied Mountaineers (UAM) to uphold the indigenous North Caucasians’ right to self-determination from March 1917, when the organization hoped for Russia’s restructuring as a federal republic wherein the Mountaineers (gortsy) would enjoy full political autonomy on their own territory (national-territorial autonomy), to May 1918, when the Mountaineer leaders attempted to join the Transcaucasian Federation. After the Bolshevik coup d'état in October 1917, the Mountain leaders declared the autonomy of the Provisional Mountain Government on 2 December 1917 and later the independence of the Mountain Republic on 11 May 1918 – in order to join the newly independent Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR). Since the UAM had been resistant to the idea of administrative unity with Transcaucasia for most of 1917, this article clarifies the logic behind the Mountain leadership’s reorientation away from Russia and towards Transcaucasia in early 1918. And considering the Mountain Republic declared independence at the very moment when the anti-separatist Terek People’s Republic insisted that it represented the political will of both the settler and native populations of the North Caucasus, this article also evaluates these two rival republics’ claims to popular legitimacy among the autochthonous Mountaineers.","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"8 1","pages":"106 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2020.1714882","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41717601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1687181
M. Kemper, A. Alikberov, V. Bobrovnikov, M. Gadzhiev, S. Shikhaliev
With great sadness we feel the loss of Professor Amri R. Shikhsaidov, the patron of Arabic studies in Russia’s North Caucasus. A native from the Lezgi areas around Derbent in southern Dagestan, in 1946 Shikhsaidov went to Leningrad State University to pursue Oriental Studies; there he belonged to the last student generation that had classes from the USSR’s foremost Arabist of the time, Ignatii Krachkovskii (1883–1951). While at Leningrad University, the young Shikhsaidov met his future wife, Reia Sergeevna (née Davydova, b. 1928), who had just experienced the horrors of the German blockade; Reia Sergeevna would be Shikhsaidov’s companion for the rest of his life. After graduation Shikhsaidov briefly worked as a school teacher in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, but then made a career at what is today the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography in the Dagestani Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the same city. In 1963 he defended his doctoral dissertation on the study of regional Islamization narratives (Islam in Medieval Dagestan, printed as a monograph in 1969), followed in 1976 by his habilitation thesis, Dagestan in the 10th to 14th Centuries: An Attempt at a Social and Economic Evaluation (published in book form already one year earlier). From 1973 to 1998 Shikhsaidov directed the Institute’s Department of Oriental Studies, known for its growing manuscript collection. He also taught throughout his career at Dagestan State University and other institutes of higher education. While the study of Islam and Muslim culture in the North Caucasus was a sensitive issue in Soviet times, Shikhsaidov managed to sideline some official taboos by focusing on medieval historiography in the Arabic language. Before him Krachkovskii had already emphasized Arabic’s role as a written lingua franca for the many small nations of Dagestan. Yet Arabic also linked the North Caucasus to the wider Muslim world. Shikhsaidov developed this research agenda considerably further by organizing yearly expeditions to Dagestani villages for the study of Arabic manuscripts in private collections that had survived Stalin’s terror and Soviet modernization. He discovered (and published in Russian translation) numerous historical narratives from the medieval period, including the famous Dagestani chronicle of Islamization (Ta’rikh Daghistan). Starting in the 1980s he also edited and translated Arabic manuscripts produced during the long nineteenth-century Caucasian War when Dagestan entered tsarist Russia (in particular the memoirs of Imam Shamil’s son-in-law, ‘Abdarrahman al-Ghazighumuqi, 1994), and even Arabic works from the early Soviet
{"title":"In memoriam. Amri Rzaevich Shikhsaidov (20 March 1928–21 September 2019)","authors":"M. Kemper, A. Alikberov, V. Bobrovnikov, M. Gadzhiev, S. Shikhaliev","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2019.1687181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1687181","url":null,"abstract":"With great sadness we feel the loss of Professor Amri R. Shikhsaidov, the patron of Arabic studies in Russia’s North Caucasus. A native from the Lezgi areas around Derbent in southern Dagestan, in 1946 Shikhsaidov went to Leningrad State University to pursue Oriental Studies; there he belonged to the last student generation that had classes from the USSR’s foremost Arabist of the time, Ignatii Krachkovskii (1883–1951). While at Leningrad University, the young Shikhsaidov met his future wife, Reia Sergeevna (née Davydova, b. 1928), who had just experienced the horrors of the German blockade; Reia Sergeevna would be Shikhsaidov’s companion for the rest of his life. After graduation Shikhsaidov briefly worked as a school teacher in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, but then made a career at what is today the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography in the Dagestani Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the same city. In 1963 he defended his doctoral dissertation on the study of regional Islamization narratives (Islam in Medieval Dagestan, printed as a monograph in 1969), followed in 1976 by his habilitation thesis, Dagestan in the 10th to 14th Centuries: An Attempt at a Social and Economic Evaluation (published in book form already one year earlier). From 1973 to 1998 Shikhsaidov directed the Institute’s Department of Oriental Studies, known for its growing manuscript collection. He also taught throughout his career at Dagestan State University and other institutes of higher education. While the study of Islam and Muslim culture in the North Caucasus was a sensitive issue in Soviet times, Shikhsaidov managed to sideline some official taboos by focusing on medieval historiography in the Arabic language. Before him Krachkovskii had already emphasized Arabic’s role as a written lingua franca for the many small nations of Dagestan. Yet Arabic also linked the North Caucasus to the wider Muslim world. Shikhsaidov developed this research agenda considerably further by organizing yearly expeditions to Dagestani villages for the study of Arabic manuscripts in private collections that had survived Stalin’s terror and Soviet modernization. He discovered (and published in Russian translation) numerous historical narratives from the medieval period, including the famous Dagestani chronicle of Islamization (Ta’rikh Daghistan). Starting in the 1980s he also edited and translated Arabic manuscripts produced during the long nineteenth-century Caucasian War when Dagestan entered tsarist Russia (in particular the memoirs of Imam Shamil’s son-in-law, ‘Abdarrahman al-Ghazighumuqi, 1994), and even Arabic works from the early Soviet","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"7 1","pages":"253 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2019.1687181","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42441989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1666231
Vahram Ter‐Matevosyan, Edita Ghazaryan
ABSTRACT The Nagorno Karabakh conflict remains a perplexing challenge for the regional security of the South Caucasus. In spite of decades of negotiations under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group, the final resolution of the conflict remains a distant goal. Against this background, since 2012 several US and Australian states as well as the Basque Parliament started to support the right of the people Nagorno Karabakh to self-determination. The resolutions passed by these states were not only unprecedented but were also inconsistent with the foreign policies of their federal governments. The present paper examines the underlying reasons for nine US states (California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, Louisiana, and Colorado), and the most populous state of Australia, New South Wales, to have recognized the right of the people of Nagorno Karabakh to self-determination. The paper also looks at the legal and political implications deriving from these resolutions as well as possible prospects for this pattern of recognitions. The paper argues that recognition of de facto states by federal sub-states is a new, albeit isolated, phenomenon. It may potentially enhance visibility of de facto states and help them to gain more support for their pursuit of international recognition.
{"title":"Navigating between international recognition paradigms: prospects and challenges for Nagorno Karabakh","authors":"Vahram Ter‐Matevosyan, Edita Ghazaryan","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2019.1666231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1666231","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Nagorno Karabakh conflict remains a perplexing challenge for the regional security of the South Caucasus. In spite of decades of negotiations under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group, the final resolution of the conflict remains a distant goal. Against this background, since 2012 several US and Australian states as well as the Basque Parliament started to support the right of the people Nagorno Karabakh to self-determination. The resolutions passed by these states were not only unprecedented but were also inconsistent with the foreign policies of their federal governments. The present paper examines the underlying reasons for nine US states (California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, Louisiana, and Colorado), and the most populous state of Australia, New South Wales, to have recognized the right of the people of Nagorno Karabakh to self-determination. The paper also looks at the legal and political implications deriving from these resolutions as well as possible prospects for this pattern of recognitions. The paper argues that recognition of de facto states by federal sub-states is a new, albeit isolated, phenomenon. It may potentially enhance visibility of de facto states and help them to gain more support for their pursuit of international recognition.","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"7 1","pages":"181 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2019.1666231","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49526359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1674497
S. Alieva
{"title":"A. M. Topchibashi: the Paris archive (1919–1940)","authors":"S. Alieva","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2019.1674497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1674497","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"7 1","pages":"251 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2019.1674497","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44484551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1674114
A. Gasparyan
ABSTRACT The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict negotiations have been continuing for more than two decades now, but a settlement still remains elusive. This paper is an exploration of the reasons for that failure, and it argues that the real obstacle for the peaceful settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh was the domestic politics of the parties to the conflict. By clarifying and testing alternative perspectives, this paper seeks to resolve an important debate about the causes of the OSCE Minsk process failure.
{"title":"Understanding the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: domestic politics and twenty-five years of fruitless negotiations 1994–2018","authors":"A. Gasparyan","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2019.1674114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1674114","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict negotiations have been continuing for more than two decades now, but a settlement still remains elusive. This paper is an exploration of the reasons for that failure, and it argues that the real obstacle for the peaceful settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh was the domestic politics of the parties to the conflict. By clarifying and testing alternative perspectives, this paper seeks to resolve an important debate about the causes of the OSCE Minsk process failure.","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"7 1","pages":"235 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2019.1674114","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43323803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1693238
Bakur Kvashilava
ABSTRACT This study provides an examination (and an evaluation) of the reforms of the civil service of Georgia since its independence. These are divided into five distinct periods. The first one encompasses the time immediately after independence until the adoption of the Law on Civil Service in 1997. The second lasts until the end of the President Shevardnadze’s government as a result of the Rose Revolution in November 2003. The third period – until 2007 – marks important reforms that the new United National Movement (UNM) government was able to implement capitalizing on overwhelming public support it enjoyed. From the second half of 2007 to 2012, the fourth period, the UNM government’s pace of reforms significantly decreased, and even stalled in some areas. The last, fifth period, starts from the end of 2012 and continues to this day. That is when the Georgian Dream Coalition (GD) won the Parliamentary Elections. In the fifth and last period the government showed a clear preference for an independent, Weberian civil service as opposed to New Public Management (NPM) principles preferred by the UNM in their most decisive reforms. Success of reforms irrespective of the type of civil service preferred seems to be highly dependent upon political will and favourable political context.
{"title":"The political constraints for civil service reform in Georgia: history, current affairs, prospects and challenges","authors":"Bakur Kvashilava","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2019.1693238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1693238","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study provides an examination (and an evaluation) of the reforms of the civil service of Georgia since its independence. These are divided into five distinct periods. The first one encompasses the time immediately after independence until the adoption of the Law on Civil Service in 1997. The second lasts until the end of the President Shevardnadze’s government as a result of the Rose Revolution in November 2003. The third period – until 2007 – marks important reforms that the new United National Movement (UNM) government was able to implement capitalizing on overwhelming public support it enjoyed. From the second half of 2007 to 2012, the fourth period, the UNM government’s pace of reforms significantly decreased, and even stalled in some areas. The last, fifth period, starts from the end of 2012 and continues to this day. That is when the Georgian Dream Coalition (GD) won the Parliamentary Elections. In the fifth and last period the government showed a clear preference for an independent, Weberian civil service as opposed to New Public Management (NPM) principles preferred by the UNM in their most decisive reforms. Success of reforms irrespective of the type of civil service preferred seems to be highly dependent upon political will and favourable political context.","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"106 22","pages":"214 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2019.1693238","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41250915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1690384
Tatia Chikhladze, H. Aliyev
ABSTRACT Since the early 1990s, the NGO sector in the South Caucasus has faced countless challenges on its road to development. Among these, an endemic “informalisation of society” – to a certain degree inherited from the Soviet Union – posed a seemingly insurmountable number of obstacles for the emergence and establishment of an egalitarian and open civil society in the region. This study explores the uneasy relationship between formal civil society and the informal sphere in the republic of Georgia. We argue that scholars and policy-makers alike need to pay close attention to how informal institutions, regardless of their non-civil nature, often become part of the civil sector in the context of developing countries. Informal patronage networks, radical movements and extremist organizations ̶ some registered and some remaining informal – often pose as civil society organizations, functioning as a “dark” side of NGOisation in post-Communist countries. This “uncivil” society thrives due to the low popular participation in formal civil society in this region and undermines the potential gains to be made by the development of a robust civil sector.
{"title":"Towards an “uncivil” society? Informality and civil society in Georgia","authors":"Tatia Chikhladze, H. Aliyev","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2019.1690384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1690384","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Since the early 1990s, the NGO sector in the South Caucasus has faced countless challenges on its road to development. Among these, an endemic “informalisation of society” – to a certain degree inherited from the Soviet Union – posed a seemingly insurmountable number of obstacles for the emergence and establishment of an egalitarian and open civil society in the region. This study explores the uneasy relationship between formal civil society and the informal sphere in the republic of Georgia. We argue that scholars and policy-makers alike need to pay close attention to how informal institutions, regardless of their non-civil nature, often become part of the civil sector in the context of developing countries. Informal patronage networks, radical movements and extremist organizations ̶ some registered and some remaining informal – often pose as civil society organizations, functioning as a “dark” side of NGOisation in post-Communist countries. This “uncivil” society thrives due to the low popular participation in formal civil society in this region and undermines the potential gains to be made by the development of a robust civil sector.","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"7 1","pages":"197 - 213"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2019.1690384","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49055025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-04DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1626150
B. Tashev
{"title":"We need to talk about Putin: how the West gets him wrong","authors":"B. Tashev","doi":"10.1080/23761199.2019.1626150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1626150","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37506,"journal":{"name":"Caucasus Survey","volume":"7 1","pages":"176 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23761199.2019.1626150","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46324008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-04DOI: 10.1080/23761199.2019.1617652
David Gogishvili, Suzanne Harris-Brandts
ABSTRACT Since 1991, armed conflicts in regions of Georgia have forced over 300,000 people to become internally displaced persons (IDPs). Many settled on the outskirts of cities in state-provided, non-residential buildings called collective centres, which function as distinct neighbourhoods with their spatial segregation and community networks. This article charts the impacts of social and spatial insularity on IDPs in these centres and frames it within the concept of neighbourhood effects. Research on neighbourhood effects has shown that physical and social isolation can exacerbate issues of health, education, living conditions, and employment, present in particular areas. Although IDPs are a vulnerable, socio-economically disadvantagedpopulation often living in concentrated poverty, to date this concept has not been applied to their conditions. This article addresses that gap by examining the neighbourhood effects of collective centres. The work provides a meta-analysis of existing research on Georgian IDPs and complements it with two years of first-hand data collected through a representative survey. The results show that IDPs within Georgia are at multiple disadvantages as a result of their isolation in collective centres. The article concludes with a call for greater government consideration of IDP isolation in situations of protracted conflict, so as to resist such detrimental effects.
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