№ 2 - 2005
Rasskazov S.V.
Geographical Ideas of the Parties in the Process of Settling Ethno-Political Conflicts in the Commonwealth of Independent States

The article presents a review of geographical ideas of those engaged in major ethno-political conflicts on the post-Soviet expanse: the Transdniestrian, the Abkhazian, the South-Ossetic, the Karabakh and the Tajik ones. On distinguishing the “European” group of conflicts, the author demonstrates that most of them are underlain not so much by ethnic, as by center/peripheral contradictions determined by a combination of socio- and politico-cultural, economic, religious and other factors. The only exception is the Karabakh conflict in which the struggle between the center and a region (Azerbaijan and Nagorny Karabakh) occasions participation of another center ethnically similar to the latter (i.e. of Armenia). Specificity of the only “non-European” conflict (the Tajik one) the author relates to its regional-clannish character.