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The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and The International Relations Program Present:
Caucasus Caucasus: Understanding the Elections in Georgia and Azerbaijan
a lecture by Ronald Cluett
Tuesday, March 23, 4:30pm
John. M. Huntsman Hall, Room F55
The recent elections in Georgia and Azerbaijan are enormously important regionally and globally, in terms of both their processes and their outcomes. And yet these two ostensibly similar neighbors in the Caucasus experienced radically different electoral seasons, with radically different results. How can we account for this divergence of outcomes in the Caucasus?
Ronald Cluett is Assistant Professor of Classics and History at Pomona College. He holds a doctorate in Classics, and has published on the political culture of the late Roman Republic. In recent years, he has switched his focus to the Central Asian and Caspian republics of the former Soviet Union, studying Russian and Turkish and traveling to Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Turkmenistan. His essay about one such trip won Third Prize in the 2002 Economist Essay Competition. He plans to spend part of next year living in the region and working on a new project on the relationship between the Great Game and the Silk Road.