the caucasus region is located between the black sea and the caspian sea in south of the russian federation, north west of iran and north east of turkey. geographical situation and strategic significance of the south caucasus, have turned it to one of the most important parts of the world. in an atmosphere of the us -russia geostrategic competition and possibility of waging a cold war between t...

Michael A. Reynolds, an FPRI Senior Fellow, is an Associate Professor in Princeton‟s Department of Near Eastern Studies where he teaches courses on modern Middle Eastern and Eurasian history, comparative empire, military and ethnic conflict, and secularism. He is author of Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)...

For every country national security problems and priorities are of vital and primary importance. New, independent states are particularly sensitive to security problems, as they lack the experience that comes from independent statehood. They have not had the opportunity to develop a defined culture for strategic planning or foreign policy engineering. Furthermore, newly independent states only ...

We describe a laboratory-confirmed case of hantavirus infection in the Republic of Georgia. Limited information is available about hantavirus infections in the Caucasus, although the infection has been reported throughout Europe and Russia. Increasing awareness and active disease surveillance contribute to our improved understanding of the geographic range of this pathogen.

Six new species of the genus Platypalpus are described from the Caucasus: P. abagoensis sp. nov. (Russia: Republic of Adygea), P. arzanovi sp. nov. (Russia: Krasnodarskiy Territory, Rostov Prov.), P. gazaryani sp. nov. (Russia: Republic of Adygea), P. kamyshanovensis sp. nov. (Russia: Krasnodarskiy Territory), P. odintsovi sp. nov. (Russia: Krasnodarskiy Territory), P. neberdzaensis sp. nov. (R...

The Caucasus, at the border of Europe and Asia, is important for migration and over-wintering of wild waterbirds. Three flyways, the Central Asian, East Africa-West Asia, and Mediterranean/Black Sea flyways, converge in the Caucasus region. Thus, the Caucasus region might act as a migratory bridge for influenza virus transmission when birds aggregate in high concentrations in the post-breeding,...

[1] The Arabia-Eurasia collision deforms an area of 3,000,000 km of continental crust, making it one of the largest regions of convergent deformation on Earth. There are now estimates for the active slip rates, total convergence and timing of collision-related deformation of regions from western Turkey to eastern Iran. This paper shows that extrapolating the present day slip rates of many activ...