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Since the fall of the Soviet Union, one-third of the former republics have experienced some level of civil conflict. These conflicts often embroil neighboring states, threatening regional stability. Many of these conflicts are still ongoing. However, it is difficult to find studies that tackle the violence of this region in an analytical way or seek to identify a unifying characteristic of these conflicts. I propose that Soviet-imposed institutional policies and practices can be identified as factors that caused major problems in these areas after the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly the matrioshka system that designated some areas within the republics as autonomous and the language policies that imposed certain languages on all peoples in a republic regardless of the autonomous indicator. The autonomous designations provided an incubator. This policy provided a piece of land that actively prevented assimilation. In other areas, groups could be fused with other ethnic minorities or the Russians more easily. Within these zones, however, the language of the host republic was often imposedâ??for example, Georgian was forced on the people of Abkhazia. It has been argued that if Russian was forced on everyone in Georgia each person within Georgia, regardless of region, would feel a bond form being equally oppressed. Utilizing a case study approach, I explore each of the post-Soviet civil conflicts and outline the ways in which these policies caused and protracted these conflicts. Finding unifying characteristics could contribute to efforts to make peace in these areas. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past attempts at defining American grand strategy rely too heavily upon the enunciation of hard power objectives as both a means for achieving goals and as the goals themselves. Alternatively, we recognize that a state's grand strategy is far more nuanced than simply an explanation of hard power objectives and that a more comprehensive viewpoint must be achieved as a starting point for analysts, scholars, and policy makers. Our paper seeks to define contemporary American grand strategy in a new and holistic analytical framework that recognizes the interrelated nature of the multitude of goals of the contemporary state. This framework for grand strategy is unique in both its comprehensiveness and flexibility, in that it is a totally "living document" - one that is not limited by perspective or time for analysis. Therefore, even though our current paper focuses on the significant shift in modern American grand strategy in the Obama administration, its core model can be applied to any state, at any time in history. Our three tiered model rests upon the five Elements of defense, diplomacy, economics, environment, and ideology, which together form the basic analytical lens for interpreting any event of grand strategic importance. From this analytical foundation stems the Principle layer, which consists of hard power, soft power, multilateralism, humanitarian leadership, and natural resource security. This layer forms the organizational basis for our paper and is essentially universal as interpretive mechanisms in that they are flexible enough to interpret grand strategy from any perspective, be it modern Chinese goals or those of ancient Athens and Sparta. Finally, we recognize that specific incidents in the international system are essentially combinations of the various principles and thus constitute a third Issues layer for specific examples. These three layers - Elements, Principles, and Issues - all combine to produce a country's multifaceted and comprehensive grand strategy. In our current paper, we use the model to analyze the grand strategic shift in American grand strategy from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]