This book aims to highlight the efforts by the international community to facilitate solutions to the conflicts in the South Caucasus, and focuses particularly on the existing challenges to these efforts. The South Caucasus region has long been roiled by the lingering ethno-national conflicts-Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and South Ossetia conflicts within Georgia-that continue to disrupt security and stability in the entire region. Throughout different phases of the conflicts the international community has shown varying degrees of activism in conflict resolution. For clarity purposes, it should be emphasized that the notion of "international community" will be confined to the relevant organizations that have palpable share in the process-the UN, the OSCE, and the EU-and the states that have the biggest impact on conflict resolution and the leverage on the conflicting parties-Russia, Turkey, and the United States.

This book aims to highlight the efforts by the international community to facilitate solutions to the conflicts in the South Caucasus, and focuses particularly on the existing challenges to these efforts. The South Caucasus region has long been roiled by the lingering ethno-national conflicts-Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and South Ossetia conflicts within Georgia-that continue to disrupt security and stability in the entire region. Throughout different phases of the conflicts the international community has shown varying degrees of activism in conflict resolution. For clarity purposes, it should be emphasized that the notion of "international community" will be confined to the relevant organizations that have palpable share in the process-the UN, the OSCE, and the EU-and the states that have the biggest impact on conflict resolution and the leverage on the conflicting parties-Russia, Turkey, and the United States.

This scholarly work focuses on the roles of four institutions - the UN, the CIS, the OSCE and the EU - in the process of conflict resolution in South Caucasus and analysis of their effectiveness in facilitating the achievement of final settlement. Although some scholarly works have been previously written on the subject, the originality to this work is added by virtue of the fact that it attempts to explore the effectiveness and evaluate the policies of these institutions by incorporating various assumptions of regime theory, theoretical approaches to international mediation and theoretical approaches to the study of European integration. Moreover, provided that the in scholarly literature, regime theory and its "effectiveness" concept were mostly researched and applied to international environmental regimes, and study on the effectiveness of non-environmental regimes from the perspective of the regime theory seems lagging behind (however, this is not to say that no work has been done), this work is one of the attempts to fill this gap. Regime theory constitutes the main theoretical scope of this work.

This work is one of the first attempts to analyze EU-South Caucasus relations. The work gives a short overview to the EU-South Caucasus relations in areas like trade, political and legal cooperation. Its main focus, however, is the explanation of the factors accounting for the increase of attention in the South Caucasus dimension of the EU in 2000-2001. This limitation also helped to shed light on EU policy towards the region in different periods: the period of 2000-2001, when the EU started to display more activism in the region, and period of 1994-2000, when the EU's economic and security interests in the region did not, however, trigger more attention towards the republics. The work is also original due to its incorporation of the assumptions of the mainstream International Relations theories in the analysis of the researched phenomenon. Thus, the author explains the increase of EU attention towards the South Caucasus region from the perspective of three theoretical approaches to International Relations: neoliberalism, realism and constructivism.