Caspian Energy Politics analyses the role of oil and gas in the development of the three main petroleum exporters in the Caspian region - Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan - and how energy resources influence interactions with semi-authoritarian Russia and China.

Due to volatile commodity prices and competition for the resources in and around the Caspian Sea, the governments of these petroleum-exporters face a series of difficult decisions. These governments have sought to balance short-term incentives to spend oil revenues as a means to maintain power against the...

The Sami are a Northern indigenous people whose land, Sapmi, covers territory in Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. For the Nordic Sami, the last decades of the twentieth century saw their indigenous rights partially recognized, a cultural and linguistic revival, and the establishment of Sami parliaments. The Russian Sami, however, did not have the same opportunities and were isolated behind the closed border until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This book examines the following two decades and the Russian Sami's attempt to achieve a linguistic revival, to mend the Cold War scars,...

"Excellent chapters detail the emergence of cross-border ties between Russia's Sami communities and Nordic Sami and assess their contributions to cultural renewal... The socioeconomic and cultural portrait will likely seem all too familiar to scholars of other Arctic and subarctic indigenous populations in northern Eurasia, but some of the information is unique to Russia's Sami, making this an indispensable contribution to the documentation of northern peoples. Essential." - Choice

"The Sami political movement, although mentioned in many works, has been a central topic in very few...