State Building and Conflict Resolution in the Caucasus by Charlotte HilleReview by: Levon ChorbajianSlavic Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (SUMMER 2012), pp. 481-482Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.71.2.0481 .

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Book Reviews 481

ism. In the end, we do not have direct evidence that titulars feared for their jobs, or that alternative measures of ethnic identity might not be equally correlated with support for nationalist claims.

The book’s strongest aspect is the detailed analysis of the sovereignty issue in Ta-tarstan. Yet, some things remain odd. Giuliano ignores the fact that Tatar Muslim identity has been shown to strongly infl uence political preferences apart from religiosity. Tatar rural passivity, supposed to demonstrate ethnic identity’s lack of impact, can be explained by other factors. Strong nationalist support in Chelny is attributed to job insecurity without acknowledging the effects of cultural dislocation among recent Tatar rural immigrants. Giuliano stresses that Soviet policies assisted titular nationals and that nationalist elites ignored this. Yet, the issue is not whether economic inequality declined among titulars as compared to Russians during the Soviet era, but whether there is direct evidence demon-strating that titulars supported national sovereignty due to a sense of job insecurity and perceived ethnic inequality in the workplace or for some other reason. The book is stron-gest in presenting the claims of national entrepreneurs, but titular nationals must accept these claims. This requires direct evidence of why they did so.

Cynthia S. Kaplan

University of California, Santa Barbara

State Building and Confl ict Resolution in the Caucasus. By Charlotte Hille. Eurasian Studies Library: Historical, Political and Social Studies of Slavic and Islamic Cultures in the Eurasian Region, no. 1. Leiden: Brill, 2010. xiv, 359 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Maps. $153.00, hard bound.

Charlotte Hille argues that current state building in the Caucasus, north and south, is profoundly affected by past histories and local cultures as well as by the Soviet and post-Soviet experiences. Her position stands in welcome contrast to those of state departments, foreign ministries, the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the transnationals, and most other play-ers whose interest in history and culture generally runs from low to nil. Among their more immediate and prosaic concerns are stopping the fi ghting, privatizing the economy, ex-tracting raw materials, building the pipelines, and keeping the oil and natural gas fl owing. Inevitably in such a hierarchy of priorities, the confl icting aspirations of the peoples of the north and south Caucasus fail to attain legitimacy and quickly come to assume their place as obstacles in the path of a progress defi ned by others. One of the strengths of Hille’s book is that she clearly documents the long-standing practice of excluding the peoples of the region from the treaty negotiations and peace settlements that most directly affect them. She begins with Brest-Litovsk, continues with the post–World War I peace negotia-tions and treaties, and moves into the present-day marginalization of the breakaway states of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia.

The fi rst of the book’s twenty chapters is historical and cultural. Here Hille lays out her argument that these regions are home to religious and clan traditions as well as is-sues of national minorities that pose daunting problems for those seeking to promote western-style democratic values and institutions. At one point she approaches despair in speculating that this form of democracy may not be suited to regions characterized by long histories of conquest and foreign interference; regions rife with clan loyalties, corruption, and nepotism; and, in areas of the north, blood vengeance, and, in Chechnia, warlordism. Despite the many obstacles though, Hille retains her faith in western-style democratic institutions and practices, but she is mindful of the long, slow trek to achieve them.

Since so much of the modern history of the Caucasus is defi ned by attempts to create new territories and states out of preexisting arrangements that claim legitimacy but are themselves constructed out of violence and power politics, Hille devotes her second chap-ter to the legal framework for statehood beginning with the 1933 Montevideo Convention, and later developments such as the European Badinter Commission and United Nations standards. The bulk of the book is divided into regions and time frames—the north and

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482 Slavic Review

south Caucasus each receive two chapters on state building up to 1918. Then Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are the subjects of individual chapters covering the years 1918–1921, 1921–1936, and post-1991. Areas of the north Caucasus are treated jointly in their own chapters. Rounding out the book are chapters on territories contested by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey; territorial claims after World War II; and current efforts at confl ict resolution in the north and south. Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Ajaria receive consider-able attention within appropriate chapters.

Hille’s ambitious project requires her to cover a great deal of territory, literal and fi gurative, in less than 400 pages. The size of Hille’s task, along with her legalistic approach emphasizing negotiations and treaties, means that her coverage of the material does not provide the depth one would fi nd in a more narrowly defi ned, specifi c monograph. The reader learns a great deal about what happened but little about how and why other than that one side held more and better cards than the other. Thus, there is little in the volume that will be new to specialists, and occasional points may be contested. Nonetheless, Hille makes an important contribution in gathering a vast amount of material about a strategic and complex part of the world in a single place. Having done so, she succeeds in present-ing us with a valuable reference that deserves a place in graduate libraries and private collections.

Levon Chorbajian

University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Stable Outside, Fragile Inside? Post-Soviet Statehood in Central Asia. Ed. Emilian Kavalski. Post-Soviet Politics. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010. xvi, 236 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tables. Maps. $114.95, hard bound.

In this work, Emilian Kavalski expands upon his previously researched notion of the “awkward state” in Central Asia and brings together a group of scholars on Central Asian politics and history to support and expand on this analytical framework. As noted in the introduction, the editor wants to move past viewing Central Asian states as pawns on a chessboard, as states “in transition,” or as weak or failed states. Instead, there is a “fl uid-ity of regional politics” that requires “more comprehensive conceptualizations of their dynamic frameworks” (8). The Central Asian countries, now twenty years after indepen-dence, still maintain a certain unpredictability based upon a shifting internal dynamic coupled with a volatile international arena. The editor stresses that even as one accepts a nonwestern state trajectory among the Central Asian countries, there will be multiple defi nitions and forms of this “non-Western-ness” (29–33). In short, Kavalski challenges the reader to think differently about Central Asian politics.

The nine contributions to this volume, in addition to the introduction, are divided into two sections that roughly correspond to issues and countries: four address specifi c areas of politics, and fi ve present country case studies. The fi rst part offers ways in which one can apply concepts of democratization, clan politics, international political economy, and postcolonialism to better understand the Central Asian political experiences. Of par-ticular strength is the contribution by John Heathershaw, who examines the postcolonial concept and queries the challenges involved in considering Central Asia a “post-colonial region” (87).

The fi ve case studies fall less in line with the theoretical framework of the book. Each offers a discussion of current politics in the respective countries, with an emphasis on insti-tutional, and especially presidential, developments. For example, Steven Sabol examines the impact of the personality of Saparmurad Niyazov on current Turkmen politics, while Claire Wilkinson addresses the relationship between domestic politics and international agencies and actors over the course of Kyrgyz politics. All fi ve country chapters provide a chronology of events in the respective countries and offer their own perspective as to the pressures facing the current regimes. Specifi cally, factors that might be sources of instability, such as social inequalities, “clan” dynamics, or the uncertain political structures

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