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The paper explores a shift from engagement to confrontation in Russia’s policy toward Georgia since the Rose Revolution. In addition to emphasizing power and security as explanations of Russia’s behavior, the paper focuses on considerations of honor and prestige. The latter are relational and a product of Russia’s perception of its ties with Western nations. Honor also plays a crucial role in Georgia’s attitude toward its northern neighbor, and the entire Caucasus area emerges as a battleground for symbolic attributes of power among larger states with capabilities to influence the region. The case of Russia–Georgia divide is important for demonstrating benefits and limitations of traditional foreign policy explanations and for learning possible ways to de-escalate dangerous bilateral conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North Caucasus region of Russia is known for spawning the highest number of adverse judgments from the European Court of Human Rights compared to any other Russian region—over 500 as of mid-2020. Since 2005, the Court has found Russia responsible for enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture carried out on a mass scale during the second Chechen war and in its aftermath. The Head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, has become internationally infamous for the brutal repression of even his mildest critics, ensuring that most Chechens will be too afraid to claim their rights in any forum. Domestically, the Russian federal authorities have either ignored or tacitly condoned the increasing subversion of state law in the region in favour of de facto customary norms— adat —and elements of sharia law that have had a devastating effect mainly on women's and girls' rights. Harmful traditional practices such as 'honour killings', child marriage, bride-kidnapping, and—in certain remote mountain regions of Dagestan—female genital mutilation take place on a regular basis. Yet such violations, however grave, do not easily lend themselves to litigation. This practice note focuses on one of the few areas in the region in which systematic focused litigation is being carried out in domestic courts, often against enormous odds: the systematic denial of women's right to family life after divorce or the death of their children's biological father. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does political violence affect the attitudes and beliefs of affected populations? This question remains of central concern to the discipline of conflict studies. In response, we make the case (by empirical example) that the choice of spatial and temporal ranges of analysis influences conclusions about the associations between exposure to political conflict and subsequent opinions. Using 2005 survey data from Russia's North Caucasus and georeferenced conflict data for the preceding 2 years, we find that violence affects levels of ethnic pride, trust in public institutions, and preferences for ethno-territorial separation, as well as other postwar attitudes. By designating a wide range of distance and time boundaries for capturing a conflict/attitude relationship, we argue for a more inductive style of analyzing theoretical propositions than is usually found in the field of conflict research. Our research is framed within the theoretical and empirical discussions of contextual-, neighborhood-, and community-level drivers of individual-level outcomes from the political geography and conflict studies literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]