Conflict and peace in Central Eurasia: Towards explanations and understandings.

• Author: Rezvani, Babak
• Position: Book review

Conflict and Peace in Central Eurasia: Towards Explanations and Understandings tests a hypothesis that a mosaic type of ethno-geographic configuration in combination with other factors is an important condition in explaining the occurrence of ethno-territorial conflicts. Babak Rezvani analyzes a dataset of ethno-territorial encounters in the former Soviet Central Asia, the Caucasus and the region of Fereydan in central Iran during the period of perestroika and glasnost (p. 3). He accounts for these encounters with an array of features derived from social science theory and the geographical characteristics of regions thus making a contribution to the literature on international studies.

The main aim of the book is to answer two original research questions which are coherent with the hypothesis. The first one is which combinations of conditions may explain the emergence of an ethno-territorial conflict in post-Soviet Central Asia, the Caucasus and Fereydan, from the late 1980s onwards. The author maintains that this question is intertwined with the second one: to what extent is the ethno-geographic configuration an explanation for the conflicts mentioned in the first question (pp. 4; 300). Contrary to the author's statement, their subject fields are separate. Indeed, it would be advisable to rethink the relations between the research questions in order to avoid treating the distinct main research question as the specific one. Specific questions realize a supporting function to main research questions and enable exploring individual passages of a research field covered in full by main research questions. The methodological assumptions indicate that the subject fields of the research questions do not overlap. It means that the research questions are formulated properly because they explore different research fields but the author's remark on the relation between them should be revised.

Rezvani creates a database of 129 ethno-territorial encounters, the units of analysis, in order to answer the research questions. The encounters are identified as having a conflict or not (the dependent variable) and by features that match up with the explanatory conditions (the independent variables). The author describes the encounters distinguished as ethno-territorial conflicts on the basis of specialist literature, puts forward case studies and analyzes the database by qualitative comparative and statistical methods. Importantly, he presents the theoretical...