Stephen F. Jones

• PhD, Politics, L.S.E.
• Professor at Mount Holyoke College

This article focuses on the paradoxes inherent in the Rose Revolution in Georgia. The Rose Revolution and its colored companions precipitated two disappointing reactions in the former Soviet space: first, disillusion with popular democracy movements, and second, what Vitali Silitsky calls ‘preemptive authoritarianism’, or the ability of post-Soviet...

War and Peace in the Caucasus: Ethnic Politics and the New Geopolitics. By Cheterian Vicken . New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. viii, 395 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tables. $40.00, hard bound. - Volume 69 Issue 3 - Stephen F. Jones

In this investigation of the sources of the Rose Revolution in Georgia in November 2003 and presentation of the challenges the new leadership faces, the author argues that there are four contexts to the Georgian revolutionary events of 2003: first, a popular and romantic yearning among Georgians for union with Europe; second, the dismal failings of...

The Georgian state, almost destroyed by two secessionist wars, a civil war, and an economic catastrophe, had by 1997 reestablished an orderly political life. The messianic rhetoric of the early postindependence years was replaced by a new language of civic values and pluralism. The former Soviet nomenklatura—never really ousted by the revolution or...

Minority language rights in Georgia, which are inseparable from economic, social and educational inequalities among the different ethnic groups, run along two axes: Georgian's relation to Russian and Georgian's relation with its own minority languages. Since the late 1980s, Moscow's diminishing power and the republic's internal fragmentation have s...

“We, the nationals of a big nation, have almost always been guilty, in historic practice, of innumerable cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult innumerable times without noticing it.”