Sophie Hohmann

After the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the so-called ‘last empire’, the countries of Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan - and of the Caucasus - Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia - became independent nations. These countries, previously ‘production centres’ under the command economy system of the Soviet Union, have had to make enormous political and economic adjustments in order to develop along democratic and capitalist lines. Despite this, inequality in Central Asia and the Caucasus is widening as the Soviet systems of healthcare and education disappear. Rejecting the Cold War-era East/West paradigm often employed to analyse the development of this region, this book studies the phenomenon of skilled migration using the North-South model which has characterised the migration patterns and poverty levels of the rest of the developed world. Opening up new avenues of research, this illuminating book characterizes the region as a ‘new South’ and significantly expands our understanding of the Post-Soviet Caucasus.