...This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the aestheticization of violence in the vernacular literatures of the Caucasus from the nineteenth century to the Soviet period through the framework of transgressive sanctity. It then lays the groundwork for the tours...

... law in the nineteenth-century Caucasus. This dialectic is further complicated by the plurality of local legal norms, which oscillated between indigenous law (ʿādīt) and Islamic jurisprudence (sharīʿa). Rooted in precolonial traditions, the abrek functioned...

...The South Caucasus and Central Asia remained on the periphery of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The Soviet collapse left a vacuum in the South Caucasus and Central Asia that other powers sought to fill. Today, Moscow seeks to maintain the South Caucasus and Central Asia as a buffer...

... historical links to the Arabian Peninsula, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. Under the AKP, Turkish foreign policy became less Western-centric, with Ankara aspiring to the role of regional leader and pivot state, encapsulated in the notion of “strategic depth,” popularized by former Foreign Minister and Prime...

...Belief in the existence of a Greater Iran (Iranshahr or Iranzamin), which includes not only Mesopotamia but also the Caucasus and much of Central and South Asia, is often linked to nostalgia for the pre-Islamic age, and is used as a justification for Iran’s claims to regional-power status. Only...

...This chapter compares Leo Tolstoy's writings on the Caucasus, beginning in his early short stories and culminating in his posthumously published masterpiece Hadji Murad (1912), with Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze's poems on Imam Shamil, the most striking among which is “Gunib” (1928...

... the collapse of the Soviet Union, these ethnic republics, above all in the North Caucasus, have experienced struggles between demands for local autonomy and the Kremlin’s interest in strengthening the “power vertical.” Russia held onto the North Caucasus thanks to two brutal wars in Chechnya and, more recently...

... sources as well as from prose, poetry, and oral narratives to assess the impact of Tsarist and Soviet rule in the Islamic Caucasus. Examining literary representations of social banditry to tell the story of Russian colonialism from the vantage point of its subjects, among numerous other themes, the book...