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Perm, Ufa, Penza, and elsewhere. More than 80 percent plan to continue studies, including Arabic, the rules of reading the Koran, Islamic law, history of Islam, Islamic ethics, etc. Some of them would also like to receive knowledge about secular disciplines: psychology, rhetoric, linguistics, philosophy, history of Tatarstan, interreligious relations, etc. About 90 percent of those polled pointed out that they were quite satisfied with the quality of teaching.
The material of the sociological survey, as the authors of this article conclude, demonstrates a whole range of views and assessments of imams concerning the problem of upgrading their educational level. These data can be used for improving the work of Muslim educational institutions, public organizations and religions associations.
Author of the abstract - Valentina Schensnovich
2018.01.008. OLGA TSVETKOVA. TRANSFORMATION OF SUBNATIONAL POLITICAL AREA OF THE CAUCASIAN REGION// "Vestnik Rossiiskoi natsii," Moscow, 2016, P. 116-131.
Keywords: multinational country, Caucasian region, regional factors, geopolitical position, administrative-territorial system, territorial conflicts.
Olga Tsvetkova,
PhD (Politics), Assistant Professor, Moscow State University
The author emphasizes that the transformation of the subnational political area in such multinational country as Russia can bring about a threat to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. The North Caucasus is distinguished by a great variety of natural-geographic conditions, as well as by the multinational and polyconfessional composition of the population. It is inhabited with people of many nationalities and on its territory different
cultures come into contact with one another and territorial identity is distinctly pronounced. At the same time the individual parts of the Russian Federation (republics) come across territorial disputes and conflicts caused by possible changes of their subnational borders.
The North Caucasus occupies a special geopolitical position. The 20th century was marked with more than forty territorial repartitions. Each one of them, while solving one problem, invariably gave birth to another. Changes in the ethno-territorial composition took place horizontally, as it were (border changes), and vertically (change in the status of nationalterritorial units). After the disintegration of the Soviet Union a tendency emerged toward politicization of ethno-national relations, when the ethnic self-identification of most peoples of Russia has acquired a more pronounced political character.
The Caucasus is viewed as one of the most important geostrategic regions. Geopolitically, it is divided into two parts: the North Caucasus and the Trans-Caucasus. The former is part of the Russian Federation and included Rostov region, Stavropol and Krasnodar territories and republics of Adygeya, Daghestan, Ingushetiya, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Circassia, North Ossetia and Chechnya.
The territory of the Trans-Caucasus is divided into three independent national republics - Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Besides, the Caucasian region has not only national, but also subnational borders.
In accordance with serious geopolitical changes at the present stage a crucial question arises of protecting the state borders between Russia and the Trans-Caucasus (especially in Russian-Georgian relations). The model of the political behavior of Russia in the South Caucasus up to the middle of the 1990s was aimed at maintaining the Russian dominant position. It was during that period that the basis of the relations was laid, which is now a serious obstacle to the implementation of an efficient and balanced policy in the South Caucasus at the present time.
The foreign geopolitical regional factors include:
The trends of the formation of the Southern Caucasian region and complex mutual relations between the three main states; the subjects of international relations, primarily the United States, which has an interest in the North Caucasian region, as well as in other ethnic groups living in the North Caucasia Federal region; the growing interest of NATO in the region. Strategic control over the Caucasus would give an outlet to the United States to the Central Asian region.
The internal geopolitical regional factors which influence the policy of Russia in bilateral and multilateral relations include: different levels of democratic development in the three states of the South Caucasus; different political interests and the different scale of threats and risks (conflict of Azerbaijan's interests on the one hand and Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, on the other; Georgia and Abkhazia, Georgia and South Ossetia); diametrically opposite approaches of the South Caucasian states to the problem of a settlement of the ethnopolitical conflicts of the region.
The creation of national-territorial units (Union autonomous republics and regions) in the 1920s - 1930s, their frequent reorganizations throughout the Soviet period have provoked claims of some ethnic groups to others, which resulted in ethnic and territorial conflicts. The threat and risks to stability exist in the entire region to this day. The socio-political situation in the North Caucasus shows traces of destabilization. The ethnic-clan system of power in national republics gives birth to mistrust of the population in the authorities and leads to ethnic segregation. Small peoples and ethnic groups have set up, on permission of the official authorities, their own bodies of power, national municipalities, which has led to the fragmentation of the North Caucasian population by national-territorial features and cultivation of seats of ethnic tension. Many national-territorial units in the North Caucasus become a source of a prolonged ethno-territorial conflict.
On the whole, the researcher notes, the North Caucasus, due to its geopolitical position, will always be drawn in large-
scale and contradictory interethnic relations (for example, relations between the Trans-Caucasian states and the Russian Federation in the 1990s). In the South Caucasus the process of disintegration was accompanied with bloody ethnopolitical conflicts in which all three Trans-Caucasian republics were involved. A negative role is played by the influence of a number of foreign countries (the United States, Saudi Arabia, and others), which pursue their own geopolitical aims in this region. The population of the North Caucasus is drawn in Oriental cultural area and in the zone of interests of the traditional centers of Muslim culture.
The author of the article examines the historical stages of the national-territorial construction in the North Caucasus. The process of the administrative development of the North Caucasus began in the 18th - 19th centuries, when a considerable part of the territory of the region joined the Russian Empire. During the Soviet period the integration processes in the region were going on with account of the specific features of the local population. The national-state construction of the 1920s not only realized the people's right to self-determination, but also mapped out the problem of the economic solvency of the national autonomous units being set up. The administrative-territorial transformations taking place in the 1920s - 1930s led to the frequent changing of the status of these units. The next stage of transformations took place in the 1940s - 1950s. During that period serious changes were introduced in the administrative-territorial system of the North Caucasus. Deportation processes were going on at the time, which led to the disbandment of certain national autonomous units. After 1953 the eliminated national autonomous units were reinstated. At the same time new subnational borders sealed ethnopolitical contradictions which became the breeding ground for discord and future conflicts.
From the latter half of the 1950s and up to the 1980s the administrative-territorial system and subnational borders have not been subjected to changes, and corrections have only been
made at the municipal level. The reason for administrative-territorial conflicts was the restoration of the abolished autonomous units of the deported peoples. Researchers connect the negative phenomena in the sphere of interethnic relations and reasons for interethnic conflicts in the territory of the Russian Federation in the past decades with the nationalities policy carried on in the conditions of the "socialist experiment."
A crisis in the administrative-territorial system in the North Caucasus took place at the end of the 1980s - beginning of the 1990s and was caused by a sharp deterioration of the socioeconomic and ethnopolitical situation in the country and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. All this contributed to the growing national self-consciousness and raising the status of some parts of Russia (withdrawal of autonomous regions from territories, transformation of autonomous regions and republics into republics as parts of the Russian Federation). Legislative acts adopted there fixed their sovereignty as state units. However, these tendencies gave rise to serious apprehension of "non-titular" peoples who feared that in the new conditions they might be subjected to discrimination. The most radical forms of protest were expresses in demands to withdraw from the new republics and create their own new state units (republics). The Balkars and Kabardians began to demand the division of the Kabardino-Balkarian republic into two independent parts (Kabarda and Balkaria).The Karachais and Circassians, Abazins and Nogais, as well as the Terek Cossacks also expressed their desire to form autonomous regions, and some time later republics of their own.
The problem became quite acute in the 1990s when power in Chechnya was seized by illegal armed units, and the Federal Center virtually ignored the situation in the republic for quite some time. It was only in 2003 that the Constitution was adopted as a result of a referendum, which proclaimed the Chechen Republic part of the Russian Federation. Apart from that, in other parts of the Russian Federation in the North Caucasus premises about their sovereignty were deleted from their constitutional acts.
The indetermination of the subnational borders of parts of the Russian Federation is of special significance in the internal geopolitical area of the North Caucasus. The frontiers of the Caucasian border region with former republics of the U.S.S.R. do not have natural, historical and ethnic-areal limit. The state borders of the Russian Federation coinciding with the subnational borders of parts of the Russian Federation in this region have not been demarcated, which gives ground for new territorial conflicts (for example, the events of the August of 2008 in South Ossetia). One of the specific features of the Caucasian region is the predominance of conventional borders, for instance, between Azerbaijan and Georgia. The main problems of border demarcation are connected with the ethnic groups living on a given territory, which were divided by a state border, which tends to increase ethnic-territorial tension.
The author of the article pays special attention to the Ossetian-Ingush conflict because it is an inner territorial conflict which arose between parts of the Russian Federation on the problem of the restoration of the territorial rights of the deported peoples and the drawing of subnational borders of part of the Russian Federation. The Ossetian-Ingush conflict of the autumn of 1992 was the most acute phase of a prolonged and unresolved confrontation between the two neighboring North Caucasian republics - parts of the Russian Federation - concerning one district and one part of the city of Vladikavkaz. To date, the exacerbation of interethnic relations is connected with the repartition of the subnational border district between Chechnya and Ingushetia. The problems emerge due to the absence of the demarcation line of the subnational border between the Chechen Republic and the Republic of Ingushetia.
The author of the article makes a conclusion that the specific nature of territorial conflicts on the problem of subnational borders lies in the problem of divided peoples, which has a high conflict potential. There are three groups of these peoples. The first group is the peoples divided by the
administrative borders of the Union republics, which became state borders after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. The second group includes peoples which became divided by administrative borders as a result of the policy of mass deportations, changes of ethnic territories, mass migrations during the pre-revolutionary period and in Soviet time. The third group is represented by the divided peoples who were subjected to division not by territorial borders, but by cultural and civilizational ones, because the Caucasus is increasingly turning into a zone of civilizational breaks, which increases ethnopolitical tension in the region.
Author of the abstract - Elena Dmitrieva
2018.01.009. SURHAI GALBATSEV. CHALLENGES AND RISKS OF STABLE DEVELOPMENT IN REPUBLIC OF DAGHESTAN (ETHNOPOLITICAL ASPECT) // "Caspian region: politics, economics, culture." Astrakhan, 2016, № 2(47), P. 123-128.
Keywords: Republic of Daghestan, stable development, ethnic rivalry, identity, ethnic minorities, territorial dispute.
Surhai Galbatsev,
South Russian Institute of Management,
at Russian Academy of Economics and Government Service
under the President of the Russian Federation (Rostov-on-Don).
The stable development of the Republic of Daghestan, the author notes, is threatened by numerous challenges and risks due to a host of problems, the most pressing and specific of them being the presence of a great many ethnic groups living side by side with one another with their own interests and claims. The intertwining of the local poly-ethnic elements and the geopolitical factor increases the threat to a stable development. Due to the fact that local conflicts are used as a geopolitical instrument and tend to aggravate vulnerable ethnic and religious problems the
