Registan.net

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 […]

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), […]

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 gunfire […]

I’m a new contributor to this blog. I volunteered to contribute coverage of the south Caucasus, and hope to provide a nice digest of events there.
The big news from the Caucasus these days is the recent presidential election in Armenia. The election was held on February 19th, and the two primary candidates were Prime Minister […]

The Heritage Foundation’s 2007 Index of Economic Freedom is out, and the rankings of the Central Asian states are about what one would expect.

Kazakhstan leads the region ranked 75th in the world and is the only “moderately free” economy in the region.
Kyrgyzstan is close behind at 79.
Tajikistan is 98.
Uzbekistan is 132.
Turkmenistan is one of […]

While Nathan’s traveling, I volunteered to help out with the most frivilous section on Registan: Central Asian music video clips.
From the Mongolian Coolio, Lumino, and his ladyfriend with some weird English dialogue:

And some other after the jump.

Here’s some fun ones:
Audi commercial or celebration of Tajik dinner tables? (Singing starts late, but it is worth the […]

If you caught my nasty remark about Armenian blogs below, here’s a big part of the reason. Onnik is accusing me of improprieties and sending emails to my employers at Global Voices accusing me of being ethically unfit for the role of Regional Editor for Central Asia and the Caucasus. Since I’m being libelled, I […]

Tim Russo, the democracy guy, has been posting the manuscript of his book on his “adventures in democracy from Ohio to Armenia and back again, and the cosmic relevance of it all.” He’s up to Armenia’s 1998 coup in his latest installment for those who might be interested in jumping into the story.
Since the Armenian […]

As part of my duties over at Global Voices Online, I read a few hundred blogs from across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe every day. Usually this is the kind of thing I’d just ignore, but it’s bugging me every single day lately, so I might as well come out with it…
With a […]

Because it’s nice to take a break from current affairs every now and then and because I don’t seem to do it enough myself, let me draw your attention to this post at Coming Anarchy showing the borders of Armenia throughout history.