Azerbaijan

Why Bother Researching Anything, Anyway

by Joshua Foust

Guess who wrote this: While there are no Starbucks or Crate and Barrels in Baku, the city’s 2-million-plus residents experience a life radically more American than Saudi. Soviet aesthetics and mannerisms still dominate, yet materialism rears its Bulgari-ed head. “Tropic Thunder” and “Hellboy II” play in the local multiplex down the promenade from Cafe Mozart, [...]

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Rashid Behbudov

by Marc W

I’m listening to a CD of Rashid Behbduov right now. Who, you ask? Don’t feel bad, I had never heard of him either. My boss just walked into my office and offered the CD to me, describing it as “old-timey Azeri music.” According to his entry on Wikipedia, Behbudov was born in Tblisi in 1915 [...]

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Freedom of the Press in Azerbaijan

by Marc W

I skimmed the Caucasus news today, and there are still several stories about Putin’s opposition to NATO enlargement (such as this one), but this one about an imprisoned Azeri journalist caught my eye. Eynulla Fatullayev, the editor-in-chief of the Gundalik Azerbaijan and Realniy Azerbaijan , has been in jail since 2004 for various charges. He [...]

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Hey, it’s that Caucasus Guy!

by Marc W

I’m back from a couple of weeks in England and Ireland. I have to say, I didn’t follow the news too much about the Caucasus. I did catch a decent amount of BBC, but their international coverage was primarily confined to Tibet and Zimbabwe. I did, however, have an interesting in-flight magazine on BMI. All [...]

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Azerbaijan and Oil

by Marc W

I had lunch on Monday with a former boss who currently works at a research institute here in DC. He’s currently working on energy security issues, and when I mentioned my recent involvement with the Caucasus (his response: I would have started with something a little less controversial, like Norway), he told me that he [...]

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The Orientalist

by Marc W

As I promised, today’s post has nothing to do with protests. Instead, I wanted to write about one of the books that got me interested in the Caucasus, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life. It’s the story of Essad Bey (nee Lev Nussimbaum), a man who was born Jewish in [...]

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Karabakh Update

by Marc W

The conflict in Nagorno Karabakh is all over the news today (do a quick google news search and you’ll see what I mean), so I’m just going to post a bunch of quick links. Before I do, I want to clarify a point in my previous post. As an astute reader pointed out (thanks Ari), [...]

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Trouble in Karabakh

by Marc W

Wow, I sure picked an exciting time to join Registan! My plan for today was to write a nice little follow-up post to yesterday’s long one, but the headline on RFE-RL caught my eye: Armenia/Azerbaijan: Deadly Fighting Erupts In Nagorno-Karabakh . According to RFE-RL, “skirmishes broke out in two separate districts of northwest Karabakh, with [...]

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Giant Robots In Industrial Wastelands

by Joshua Foust

In Sumgayit, Azerbaijan, old Soviet factories once belched clouds of toxic fog, making everything from lindane to DDT. It all went south, so to speak, with The Fall—the factories closed as unprofitable messes. But with the return of Azerbaijan’s oil wealth has come something of a miniature economic boom, and the return of the town’s [...]

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Solving Poverty Through Free Enterprise

by Joshua Foust

Many moons ago, I noted the efforts of Kiva, a clearing house of microfinance efforts around the globe. The majority of their activities are focused in Africa, but they also have thriving operations in Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan. They have also received a considerable amount of positive attention in the U.S.—from The Today Show, Oprah [...]

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