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TERMS OF REFERENCE OF SECURITY POLICY IN THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
Martin MALEK
Martin Malek, Research fellow, National Defense Academy of Austria (Vienna, Austria)
The South Caucasian region is of only very limited interest to the Western public. However, this does not mean that events there have no supra-regional relevance. On the one hand, the ethnically and religiously highly heterogeneous South Caucasian region is itself the scene of a number of crises; on the other, it is close to other trouble spots such as Chechnia, the Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey and Iraq. The South Caucasus is a kind of “hinge” between Europe and Asia, the Orient and the Occident. The zones of interest of several great powers also overlap here, not least of all due to the region’s role as a transportation corridor, in particular for oil. Security policy relations in and around the South Caucasus are therefore much more complex than can be explained in a relatively short account.
The most important challenges for the internal and external security of the South Caucasus are: Unresolved political and ethnoterritorial conflicts, refugee movements, the continuing economic and social crisis, the weakness and ineffectiveness of state institutions (especially in Georgia), crime and corruption and the modest quality of democracy. These six problem areas are so self-evidently linked that it hardly appears possible to tackle and solve them individually.
1. The Main Players
The main security policy players in the South Caucasus are:
The independent and recognized states, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan;
- The states bordering the region, Russia, Turkey and Iran;
- The United States;
- International organizations such as the U.N., OSCE, CIS, GUUAM and NATO.
One could also include the unrecognized, but de facto existing states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan among the players. However, Azerbaijan denies that Karabakh is an independent, i.e. separate factor from Armenia and it is………………..
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