Introduction

Abstract

Caspian oil diplomacy, post-Soviet geopolitics, and ethnopolitical conflicts are the three main factors that, since the end of the 1980s, have shaped the fate of the South Caucasus,¹ a multiethnic region which lies at the strategic crossroads of Europe and Asia: a region where Turkey, Russia, and Iran have historically striven for dominance. In the post-Soviet era, a host of the region’s unresolved domestic and interstate conflicts, coupled with the ambitious plans of some nations to tap the Caspian’s vast oil and natural gas resources and transport them to world markets — along with some other nations’ no less ambitious initiatives to hamper these plans — have condemned the South Caucasus region to the unenviable status of becoming one of the neuralgic hotspots of what Zbigniew Brzezinski has termed the “Eurasian Balkans.”