Analysts have believed that the Islamic State (IS) organization would dispatch people to the North Caucasus and include the region in its sphere of influence. The reality appears to be much simpler: the IS came to the North Caucasus through members of the Caucasus Emirate... MORE

The last two weeks in Russia were a nonstop holiday, which only ends on January 12, when the nation returns to work as usual. The banks and the stock exchange will reopen, and no one is expecting anything good to happen: The price of oil... MORE

In the second half of December 2014, five interrelated themes engaged media attention: the last salvos of the Belarus-Russia trade war (see EDM, December 3, 2014); Russia’s reactions to Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s statements regarding this war and his trip to Kyiv; Lukashenka’s speech at... MORE

The much-anticipated verdict of Russian opposition blogger Aleksei Navalny, was unexpectedly moved up from its scheduled reading date of January 15, 2015, and was instead read on December 30, 2014, at the Zamoroveskom court in Moscow. Navalny, one of the leaders of the 2011–2012 mass... MORE

Russian experts say that the Cossack organizations in the North Caucasus are increasingly split and mired in conflicts with each other. The reasons usually given for the internal conflicts among the Cossacks is the government’s inability to organize them, or their own inability to organize... MORE

On December 16, Circassian activists issued a special statement in support of their colleagues persecuted by the Russian authorities in the North Caucasus. The appeal, signed by 65 politicians, writers, civil activists, businessmen and academicians from Turkey, Germany, the United States and several other countries,... MORE

Armenia’s strong economic dependence on the Russian Federation is dramatically being highlighted at the moment by the devaluation of the Russian ruble and the general economic decline in Russia. The structure of Armenia’s economy and the character of its relationship with Russia suggest that Armenian... MORE

The post–New Year holidays in Russia have brought less joy or happy expectations than usual to the country’s elites, the urban middle classes and even to Russia’s millions of labor migrants. Over the past 15 years, all these groups shared in the country’s prosperity, which... MORE

In the midst of the political turmoil that has divided Libya since the Qaddafi era there is a religious scholar and academic with a taste for Islamist politics. Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani is in many ways a product of the turmoil; he was simultaneously praised... MORE

China has the second largest number of think tanks in the world (426), behind only the United States (1,826). [1] On October 27, at the sixth meeting of the Leading Group for Overall Reform, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new type of think... MORE