In a revision of his doctoral dissertation for the University of Southern California, Tsygankov (international relations and political science, San Francisco State U.) analyzes the foreign economic policies of successor states of the Soviet Union besides Russia. He finds that some have looked toward Russia and others away, and that the determining factor is the strength of the national identity of the new states. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The break-up of the Soviet Union is a key event of the twentieth century. The 39th IIS congress in Yerevan 2009 focused on causes and consequences of this event and on shifts in the world order that followed in its wake. This volume is an effort to chart these developments in empirical and conceptual terms. It has a focus on the lands of the former Soviet Union but also explores pathways and contexts in the Second World at large. The Soviet Union was a full scale experiment in creating an alternative modernity. The implosion of this union gave rise to new states in search of national identity. At a time when some observers heralded the end of history, there was a rediscovery of historical legacies and a search for new paths of development across the former Second World. In some parts of this world long-repressed legacies were rediscovered. They were sometimes, as in the case of countries in East Central Europe, built around memories of parliamentary democracy and its replacement by authoritarian rule during the interwar period. Some legacies referred to efforts at establishing statehood in the wake of the First World War, others to national upheavals in the nineteenth century and earlier. In Central Asia and many parts of the Caucasus the cultural heritage of Islam in its different varieties gave rise to new markers of identity but also to violent contestations. In South Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan have embarked upon distinctly different, but invariably contingent, paths of development. Analogously core components of the old union have gone through tumultuous, but until the last year and a half largely bloodless, transformations. The crystallization of divergent paths of development in the two largest republics of that union, i.e. Russia and Ukraine, has ushered in divergent national imaginations but also in series of bloody confrontations.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, fifteen newly independent states emerged, some more ready than others. Some states decided to remain in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and this book focuses primary attention on these cases.

This is a unique, systematic comparison of empires and of their consequences for sovereignty in the Middle East and Central Asia. It brings theory on empire and sovereignty to bear on empirical variation across the two regions.

The Revived Roman Empire and the European Union is a brief look at ancient history, present day events of the existing European Union vs, America, and prophecy of things to come. It leads the reader from Daniel's prophecy of the four great empires that appeared before the time of Christ, to the events of the modern day world we now live in, the expansion of the European Union, and beyond. This book shows the accuracy of Daniel's prophecies of time from the first to the sixty-nine week period spoken of before the Son of Man would appear on earth. It also speaks of the Seventieth Week of Daniel's prophecy concerning the rapture of the church and the following Tribulation Period, its events, and what lay beyond the tribulation period. It is a must read for every Christian and a highly interesting read for every non-Christian.

A concluding chapter discusses the policy implications of aspirational constructivism for Russia and other nations and a methodological appendix lays out a framework for testing the theory.

Throughout history, a large portion of the world's population has lived under imperial rule. Although scholars do not always agree on when and where the roots of imperialism lie, most would agree that imperial configurations have affected human history so profoundly that the legacy of ancient empires continues to structure the modern world in many ways. Empires are best described as heterogeneous and dynamic patchworks of imperial configurations in which imperial power was the outcome of the complex interaction between evolving colonial structures and various types of agents in highly contingent relationships. The goal of this volume is to harness the work of the "next generation" of empire scholars in order to foster new theoretical and methodological perspectives that are of relevance within and beyond archaeology and to foreground empires as a cross-cultural category. This book demonstrates how archaeological research can contribute to our conceptualization of empires across disciplinary boundaries.