Violent Georgia

Anotace

This book intends to show that the violent disintegration of the Soviet Union, characteristic for the South Caucasus region and most prominently Georgia, cannot be fully explained solely by an investigation of the ethnopolitical and national uprisings which were stimulated by the political changes of the Perestroika period. Instead, it argues that a rigorous analysis of the late 1980s/early 1990s violent transitions has to be linked with a longer-term perspective focusing on the function and development of the Soviet developmentalist state. This perspective tends to view the Soviet system as an alternative to the Western capitalist system and aims towards an understanding the socio-economic processes which determined the dynamics of the system.