BLOG: Articles in Social Science in the Caucasus

Counting People Makes them Count Richard Rose
von Social Science in the Caucasus von HansG
Richard Rose, a renowned specialists in the field of Social Capital, is currently visiting Georgia to deliver trainings at CRRC. He offered a public lecture setting out the case for conducting surveys, and entitled "Counting People Helps Make People Count". Not that we needed convincing, but we still enjoyed the way the argument was set out.

Tourism: Structure and Cost-sharing
von Social Science in the Caucasus von HansG
A slightly specialized topic: what's the cost of tourism? Often suggested as a way of developing parts of the South Caucasus, especially Georgia, quickly, it's interesting to take a quick look, since in tourism many factors interact: business, environment, architecture, urban planning, societal habits, local versus national government, local and foreign expectations, and the challenge of reconciling all of those.

Social Science in the Caucasus: Georgian Borderlands Mathijs Pelkmans
von Social Science in the Caucasus von AaronE
Social Science in the Caucasus: Georgian Borderlands Mathijs Pelkmans

Philanthropy in Georgia
von Social Science in the Caucasus von Nana
Corporate Social Responsibility, a fashionable issue, is becoming a topic in the South Caucasus as well. CRRC research fellow, Giorgi Meladze, explored Georgian corporations’ generosity in his research undertaken in 2006.

Intravenous Drug Users in Tbilisi Survey Data
von Social Science in the Caucasus von AaronE
As part of a four part series, Save the Children in cooperation with a host of other organizations have released reports from survey data they have collected from Female Sex Workers (FSWs) and Intravenous Drug Users (IDUs). All of the surveys are funded by USAID. This entry reviews the Tbilisi report on IDUs. If you are interested in the other reports, please contact us.

Carnegie Research Fellowship Program!
von Social Science in the Caucasus von HansG
CRRC is happy to announce the Carnegie Research Fellowship Program. The program offers exceptional social science research opportunities in the United States for scholars from the Caucasus.

Book Review The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict and Nationhood in the Caucasus Christoph Zürcher
von Social Science in the Caucasus von AaronE
The earliest books that came out about the Caucasus after the collapse of the Soviet Union were firsthand accounts of events. Now, a second spate of books, which attempt to apply analytical frameworks to the turbulent events that occurred have the breakup of the Soviet Union are beginning to appear. Christoph Zürcher’s The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict and Nationhood in the Caucasus, published with New York University Press, falls into this category. The book examines where wars occurred in the Caucasus (Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Chechnya) and where they didn’t (Dagestan and Ajara) and places those cases studies within the context of the international quantitative literature that attempts to explain why internal wars occur.

Georgian Borderlands Mathijs Pelkmans
von Social Science in the Caucasus von AaronE
Many social researchers working on the Caucasus bemoan the lack of good scholarly works on the region. However, one recent book, which is both excellent and readable, seems to have fallen under people's radars -- Mathijs Pelkmans' Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia, which came out in 2006 with Cornell University Press.