Azerbaijan Since Independence: (Studies of Central Asia and the Caucasus)

Azerbaijan, a small post-Soviet republic located on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, has outsized importance becaus of its strategic location at the corssroads of Europe and Asia, its oil resources, and

Table of Contents:
Preface; Chapter 1 Azerbaijan Before Soviet Rule; Chapter 2 Soviet Azerbaijan; Chapter 3 The National Revival and the Road to Independence; Chapter 4 The Rise and Fall of the Popular Front; Chapter 5 The Aliyev Era: Restoring Stability; Chapter 6 Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan; Chapter 7 The Shadow over Azerbaijan: Karabakh; Chapter 8 Politics and Power in Azerbaijan; Chapter 9 Azerbaijan’s Economy: The Primacy of Oil; Chapter 10 Azerbaijani Society: Identity, Modernity, and Tradition; Chapter 11 Caucasus Context: Formulating Foreign Policy; Chapter 12 Iran and the “Other” Azerbaijan; Chapter 13 Russia,the Resurgent Imperialist; Chapter 14 Turkey, Best Neighbor or Big Brother?; Chapter 15 Azerbaijan and the West; Chapter 16 Epilogue; Bibliographical Note;

About the Author :
Svante E. Cornell is Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, a Joint Research and Policy Center affilated with the School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Washington D.C., and the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy (ISDP), of which he is a co-founder and Director. Cornell was educated at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and received his Ph.D. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University in 2002. He was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the Behmenyar Institute for Law and Philosophy of the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences in 1999. Cornell has academic affiliations as Associate Research Professor at SAIS, and as Associate Professor of Government at Uppsala University. He is a Research Fellow with the Brussels-based Center for European Studies, and previously served as Course Chair of Caucasus Advanced Area Studies at the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. Since 2001, he has been the Editor of the Joint Center’s biweekly journal, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst (www.cacianalyst.org). His main areas of expertise are security issues, broadly defined, and state-building in the Caucasus, Turkey, and Central Asia. He is the author, among other works, of Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus (Curzon Press, 2001), the first comprehensive study of the post-Soviet Caucasus, and is co-editor, with S. Frederick Starr, of The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia (M.E. Sharpe, 2009).