In Nordisk Østforum 04/2015 The South Caucasus beyond Borders, Boundaries and Division Lines: Conflicts, Cooperation and Development Edited by Mikko Palonkorpi. Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute/Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland 2015, is reviewed by Märta-Lisa Magnusson (in Swedish, s. 428-431)
Available online at the journal’s website Link
The journal Sport in Society. Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics has recently published the special issue When the party is over: developments in Sochi and Russia after the Olympics 2014, edited by Bo Petersson (Malmö University), Karina Vamling (Malmö University) and Alexandra Yatsyk (Kazan Federal University).
Contributions include:
Lars Funch Hansen, senior lecturer at Caucasus Studies, has recently published the article iCircassia digital capitalism and new transnational identities in the first volume of the new Journal of Caucasian Studies.
What is iCircassia? As Lars Funch Hansen sees it “The significantly increased production of Circassian content on the Internet could be labelled as a form of virtual re-territorialisation of Circassia – especially considering the strong focus on identity and history. I apply the label ‘iCircassia’ as an addition to the classical understanding of the Circassian World as consisting of Circassians of the homeland and the diaspora.”
More information at: http://www.jocas.net/index.php/jocasen/article/view/4
New publication in Slavic Review. Interdisciplinary Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. (73, 2)
Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen: Void Pasts and Marginal Presents: On Nostalgia and Obsolete Futures in the Republic of Georgia
Abstract
In contemporary Georgia and beyond, nostalgia for the Soviet past is often ridiculed and dismissed as a reactionary wish to turn back time. In this article, however, I explore generational nostalgia as temporal displacement of present political struggles. Drawing on life story interviews with middle-aged and elderly people in the provincial town of Gori, I argue that nostalgic longings may be understood as active attempts to presence personal pasts and futures that have publicly been rendered absent by an official rhetoric and practice that explicitly rejects the Soviet past. From this perspective, post-Soviet generational nostalgia temporally connects several dimensions of absence: the experience of one’s personal past being publicly cast as void; a perceived lack of social security, influence, and significance in the present; and a dynamic whereby these two dimensions render former dreams and visions for the future obsolete.
http://www.slavicreview.illinois.edu/current/abstracts732/index.html#gotfredsen
In the first number of Nordisk Østforum (2014) Bjørn Harvig’s book “Kaukasus og Kildevand. Historier fr en rejse til fods” (The Caucasus and Spring water. Stories from a journey by foot) is reviewed by Karina Vamling (pp. 83-85).
Available online at the Journal’s website, link.
Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
“For a variety of political, climatic, ecological, security-related and other reasons, the Russian summer resort of Sochi by the Black Sea would seem a most unlikely candidate for the Olympic Winter Games. Despite this, the Games will be held there in February 2014, and the Russian leaders regard the Games as a highly prestigious project underlining Russia’s return to a status of great power in the contemporary world. This book conducts a thorough inventory of the contexts, characteristics and challenges facing the Sochi Games. It deals with the problems from Russian, Georgian, Abkhazian and Circassian perspectives and makes in-depth analyses of profound challenges related to matters such as identity, security, and ethnic relations. The book brings together an international group of eminent scholars representing different disciplinary perspectives, including political science, sports science, ethics, ethnology, and Caucasian studies.”
Karina Vamling is the co-editor together with Bo Petersson. Lars Funch Hansen and Revaz Tchantouria, both lecturers at Caucasus Studies, are the authors of two of the chapters.
Introduction
The Sochi Winter Olympics: Walking Tightrope?
– Bo Petersson and Karina Vamling
Part I: Olympic Perspectives
1 Snow, Ice, and Vertical Drops: What is Different about the Sochi Olympics?
– Raymond Taras
2 The Sochi Winter Games: Marketing and Sustainable Development—Or Neither Nor?
– Karin Book
3 Environmental Ethics and the Olympics: On the Reconstruction of Nature for Sport
– Kutte Jönsson
Part II: Identity Matters
4 Olympism and Empire: The Olympic Myth in the Contestation of the Caucasus
– Emil Persson
5 Sochi as a Site of Circassian Long-Distance Memorialisation
– Lars Funch Hansen
6 The Sympols of Sochi 2014: Searching for the Visual Signs of New Russian Political Identity
– Sergei Akopov and Vitalii Volkov
Part III: Internal Order and Security
7 Russia’s Olympic Discourses: Effects of Unification and Diversification
– Andrei Makarychev
8 Securitization in the North Caucasus on the Eve of the Sochi Games
– Uliana Hellberg
9 The Terrorist Threat Against Sochi 2014
– Jakob Hedenskog
Part IV: Caucasian Knots
10 Security of the Winter Olympics in Sochi from a Georgian Perspective
– Alexandre Kukhianidze
11 Abkhazia and the Preparations for the Sochi Games
– Revaz Tchantouria
12 Disputed Frontiers: Abkhazia in Russia’s Sochi 2014 Project
– Helena Rytövuouri-Apunen
Language, History and Cultural Identities in the Caucasus, Caucasus Studies 2, Vamling, Karina (ed.) is a new publication from Caucasus Studies at Malmö University.
Contents
Kevin Tuite: The Autocrat of the Banquet Table: the political and social significance of the
Georgian supra
Andrea Kuzmich: Continuity of a Tradition: A Survey of the Performance Practices of Traditional Polyphonic Songs in Tbilisi
Marine Beridze and Manana Kobaidze: An Attempt to Create an Ethnic Group: Identity Change Dynamics of Muslimized Meskhetians
Tinatin Bolkvadze: The Georgian Language and Cultural Identity in Old Georgia: An Examination of Some Conceptual Foundations
Manana Tabidze: The Modern Language Situation in Georgia: Issues Regarding the Linguistic Affiliation of the Population
Karina Vamling and Revaz Tchantouria: Language Use and Attitudes among Megrelians in Georgia
Rune Westerlund: The Present-day Situation of the Minority Ethno-Linguistic Peoples within the Avaric Region in the Republic of Dagestan
Ib Faurby: Human Rights, Terrorism, and the Destruction of Chechnya
Märta-Lisa Magnusson: Why No Settlement in the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict?
– Which are the obstacles to a negotiated solution?
Nino Amiridze: Discrepancies between Form and Meaning: Reanalyzing Wish Formulae
in Georgian
Kojima Yasuhiro: Two Types of Relative Clauses in Modern Georgian
