Caucasus

Diego Benning Wang charts Azerbaijani club Sabah FK’s remarkable rise from obscurity to the Champions League.

Diego Benning Wang argues that the North Caucasus is difficult to define because its ethnic, linguistic, historical, geographic, and administrative boundaries overlap without ever fully converging.

Maya Ivanova reviews Narine Abgaryan’s "To Go On Living", revealing the human cost of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War beyond headlines and statistics.

Diego Benning Wang reviews "Bride and Groom" by Alisa Ganieva - a book about marriage, corruption, radicalism, and constrained freedom in urban Dagestan.

Maya Ivanova reviews Banine’s "Days in the Caucasus", a book about the vanished world of oil-boom Baku before Soviet rule.

Juja (originally published in 2010) fell into my hands as the second of Nino Haratischvili’s books I have read, following My Soul Twin (originally published in 2011). On the hunt for Georgian [...]

Maya Ivanova explores how Narine Abgaryan’s “Three Apples Fell from the Sky” illuminates the enduring spirit of rural Armenia.

Diego Benning Wang examines how WWII commemoration in North and South Ossetia has normalized Stalin’s image and integrated contested claims of his Ossetian identity into regional memory politics.

Diego Benning Wang shows how Georgian-Ossetian ties shaped a national football identity that politics later fractured.

Diego Benning Wang examines the fragile survival of Abkhazia’s last Jewish community and the fading legacy of a once diverse Black Sea society.