In an analysis of the Georgia-Russia war published on August 7, 2013, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Robert Coalson cited the Regional Studies Center (RSC) was cited in the article, “Five Years After The War, South Caucasus Still Caught Between Russia, The West.”
Excerpts:
Azerbaijan is arming to the teeth. Armenia is growing increasingly disillusioned with Russia, its main protector. And the potential for armed conflict in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region appears higher than it has been in years.
.The increased tension……is indicative of how the volatile South Caucasus region has remained dangerously tense even five years after Russia's brief war with Georgia in August 2008. The five-day war, which was fought over Georgia's pro-Moscow separatist region of South Ossetia, was won decisively by Russia. But it also undermined Moscow's role as a powerbroker in a region fraught with ethnic tension. One important result of Russia's 2008 war victory is that it effectively displaced NATO -- and the United States -- from the region by putting Georgia's ambitions to join the alliance on hold.
Since the war, and especially under U.S. President Barack Obama, U.S. policies in the South Caucasus have been viewed "as a subset of U.S.-Russia relations," says analyst Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Center in Yerevan.
At the same time, the conflict paved the way for significantly stepped-up engagement in the region by the European Union. It was the EU that brokered the cease-fire that ended the 2008 war, and the EU monitoring mission along the administrative lines between Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the rest of Georgia has played a visible role in the ensuing years. More importantly, in 2009, the bloc launched its Eastern Partnership program, an intense effort to engage with six post-Soviet countries -- Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and the three South Caucasus nations of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.
Giragosian says the program was launched to help the EU "stabilize its periphery," but its success has been driven by its soft-power attraction. “What makes this especially more successful and effective as a policy instrument has been the willingness by the states themselves to actually engage in seizing the opportunity with the European Union," Giragosian says. "And in this way, the EU -- through, but beyond, the Eastern Partnership -- has become more of a transformative power in terms of both a values-based approach and also offering true economic incentives that were previously missing or simply ignored by the states themselves."
www.rferl.org/content/russia-georgia-war-fifth-anniversary-/25068841.html