Chechnya From Nationalism to Jihad James Hughes "James Hughes has produced the most comprehensive, thoroughly documented, and up-to-date study of the Chechen conflict available. This sophisticated and subtle analysis places Chechnya in the context of broader debates about nationalism and ethnic politics, theories of empire and secession, and the propensity of new democracies to go to war."--Matthew Evangelista, Cornell University "Hughes offers a new way of thinking about ethnopolitical conflict by examining conflict dynamics as part of the causation chain in a conflict."--History: Reviews...

Endowed with natural resources, majestic bodies of fresh water, and a relatively mild climate, the Great Lakes region of Central Africa has also been the site of some of the world's bloodiest atrocities. In Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo-Kinshasa, decades of colonial subjugation--most infamously under Belgium's Leopold II--were followed by decades of civil warfare that spilled into neighboring countries. When these conflicts lead to horrors such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, ethnic difference and postcolonial legacies are commonly blamed, but, with so much at stake, such simple explanations...

Russian Minority Politics in Post-Soviet Latvia and Kyrgyzstan The Transformative Power of Informal Networks Michele E. Commercio "The fate of Russian minorities in former Soviet republics has attracted considerable attention since the demise of the Soviet Union. In this book Michele Commercio offers an original contribution to the literature by focusing on the little-researched sphere of informal policies to argue that the degree to which official policies exclude ethnic minorities is in fact inversely related to their propensity to mobilize and seek redress."--Dominique Arel, University of...