Abstract
In the summer of 2008, open war broke out once again in Georgia, a small, multiethnic country along Russia’s Caucasian border. It was not a new conflict. In 1990, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the region of South Ossetia, then part of Soviet Georgia, fought a war of independence with the Georgian government. Both sides in that conflict signed a cease-fire that left the political question of Ossetian sovereignty unresolved. The outbreak of sustained violence in August 2008 marked the conflict’s most significant renewal since the earlier cease-fire.
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Notes
Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
Svante E. Cornell, “Autonomy as a Source of Conflict: Caucasian Conflicts in Theoretical Perspective,” World Politics 54, no. 2 (2002): 245–76. One exception to this was Transnistria, a Russian enclave in Moldova that did not have territorial autonomy but declared independence. Another Moldovan minority that did not have republic status during the Soviet period, the Gagauz (a Turkic group), also used political mobilization and obtained autonomous status in 1994.
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
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© 2009 Julie A. George
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George, J.A. (2009). Introduction. In: The Politics of Ethnic Separatism in Russia and Georgia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102323_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102323_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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