On November 9, 1989, Vazken I addressed the members of the Armenian National Movement at Etchmiadzin, Armenia, illuminating the evolving nature of church-state relations.

The year of 1948 was one of the most critical ones of the postwar period. The presence of the Cold War could no longer be denied. Berlin was under Soviet blockade; Yugoslavia had broken with the Cominform; in elections in Italy it was feared that the Italian Communist party would be widely successful; France was in the grip of Communist-inspired workers’ strikes; Mao Tse-Tung was triumphing in China. Above all, Czechoslovakia, a country which had enjoyed real democracy from its birth in 1918, until the tragic Munich Agreement in 1938, where its people treasured political and personal freedom above everything else, and at the same time entertained the friendliest possible feelings towards the Russians, lost its democracy and became a Soviet satellite with the connivance of Moscow. Dr. Eduard Beneš, who had returned to his country, via Moscow, as President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and who had been promised by Stalin and Molotov, on several occasions, that they would not interfere with the internal affairs of his country, lost his power to Gottwald and his communist group while Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Zorin, who “happened” to be in Prague at the critical moment on a trade mission, supervised the transfer of power to the new masters of Czechoslovakia.

In early 2003, President George W. Bush touted the prospects for democratization in Iraq, as well as in adjacent countries of the Middle East, following a U. S.-led invasion. He neglected to explain, however, how a country home to Kurds, Arab Sunnis, and Arab Shi'a—groups that historically have not co-existed harmoniously—would adjust to new and imposed political arrangements. Both the Shi'a, who constitute a majority, and the Kurds seek to escape Sunni oppression, omnipresent since the creation of Iraq in the 1920s. Although democracy may end Sunni privilege, Washington's commitment to the territorial integrity of Iraq will likely dissatisfy some if not many Kurds and Shi'a, who, presumably, not only expect improved representation within an Iraqi parliament but also enhanced political and cultural autonomy. Nearly a century ago, similar yearnings manifested themselves only to remain unfulfilled. This theme of dashed expectations pervades Aviel Roshwald's superb book, Ethnic Nationalism & the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia & the Middle East, 1914–1923.

The striking affinities that have developed between radical-conservative movements in Western Europe and Russia since the end of the Cold War have been widely noted. This essay considers these affinities through the example of the Soviet historian and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992). It argues that Gumilev and the European New Right developed perspectives that were highly comparable, founded on similar principles, and articulated through similar images and allusions. Yet despite the powerful resonances in terms of basic concepts and theoretical orientation, there were nonetheless deep differences in terms of the conclusions regarding the practical implications for their respective societies that Gumilev and the Europeans deduced from these principles.

I am not entirely satisfied with the term “informal groups.” The terminology is borrowed from the Soviets; it is the term they use most frequently. Many of these informal groups are in fact very formal, they are very sophisticated with committees and subcommittees, agendas, charters, mechanisms for leadership turnover, for membership selection, and in a few cases, some of them are even registered with the State as officially registered unofficial informal groups. I tend to use the terms “social groups” or “social action groups.” Perhaps “unofficial groups” would be a better term.

Over the past several decades the discipline of political science has, perhaps, degraded its competence and hence its eligibility for handling this issue by saddling itself with a flawed language, or, rather, flawed use of language for doing so. At any rate, that is true of political science as written and taught in English. Not that the other social-science disciplines are in better shape (perhaps History is). Still, political scientists have, for example, committed the following intellectual offenses:

In Galicia in 1848, petitions as to whether the province should be divided in two with a Polish and a Ruthenian region moved thousands of people to action. Although the petitions were among the largest in the history of the Habsburg monarchy, the petition lists have never been researched in detail. Whereas the initiators of the petition for the partition were anxious to present a narrative of national and confessional unity for a “Ruthenian” Eastern Galicia suppressed by “Poles,” the counter-petitionists disputed the very existence of a Ruthenian nationality and chose a narrative of peaceful, conflict-free living together. A close reading of the petition lists reveals both conflict and co-existence. The lists with a checkered contrast of Cyrillic, Latin, and Hebrew scripts bear witness to what was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional society. More than that, these sources prove impressively that the three large religious and ethnic communities – Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews – were in continuous day-to-day contact with each other. While the history of emerging nationalism has so far been in the foreground in historiography of the revolutionary events in Galicia in 1848, the petitions' sources tell another story of everyday social interaction and of practices of social ambiguity in the Galician village and market communities.

In May 1992 an international conference examining the fate of minorities in the former Soviet Union was organized jointly by the Kennan Institute (DC) and Michigan State University. Fourteen speakers were invited from Moscow, St. Petersburgh, the north Caucasus, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Lithuania; among them was Dr Ramazan Abdulatipov, Chairman of the Chamber of Nationalities of the Russian Parliament. The immediate impetus for the conference was a national survey of 6,500 Russians in 16 non-Russian regions of the former Soviet Union. The survey was conducted in August and September of 1991 by the Center of Public Opinion Studies in Moscow on the basis of a program prepared by Vladimir Shlapentokh and Lev Gudkov.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Georgian village and supplemented by a range of interviews and observations from different parts of Georgia, this paper explores the creative presence of religion in public schools. In 2005 and in line with the strong secularization and modernization discourse, the Georgian parliament passed a new law on education, restricting the teaching of religion in public schools and separating religious organizations and public schools; nevertheless, mainstream Orthodox Christianity is widely practiced in schools. The paper aims to show how Georgians use religious spaces in secular institutions to practice their identity, to perform being “true Georgians.” At the same time, they are adopting a strong secularization and modernization discourse. By doing so they create a new space, a third space, marked by in-betweenness. The study uses the theoretical lens of Thirdspace for analyzing the hybridity, the in-betweenness of practices and attitudes inherent for politics, religion, and everyday life of Georgians.