« In the middle of major international crisis: Georgia as a bargain coin or a battlefield for new cold war?”, in Central Asia and Caucasus, n°3 (57), 2009 Thornike GORDADZE Head of the Caucasian Laboratory at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies, IFEA (Istanbul-Baku) At the beginning of the 19th century Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war is a continuation of political activity by other means. The Russian-Georgian war of 2008 fully corroborates this hypothesis. The hostilities, which lasted for only a few days, were just one episode in the Russian-Georgian confrontation that began long before August 2008 and still has a long way to go. Nevertheless, this short war can be considered the most important occurrence of the year

Imperial servant at the head of the state: Eduard Shevardnadze’s uneasy relations with Russia in Cornell Svante and Starr Fredrick (eds.), “Guns of August, Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008”, New-York, ME Sharpe, 2009 Thornike Gordadze French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA), Caucasus observatory head. Associated researcher at the CERI “Four centuries of resistance!” – so proclaimed thousands of leaflets distributed in Tbilisi by young Georgian activists during the August 2008 war with Russia. Analyzing Georgian-Russian relations solely in terms of resistance is understandable when Russian tanks were 40 km away from the country’s capital, but a more balanced assessment requires a more nuanced understanding of the question. The relationship between a local polity and an external center of power

L’Empire contre l’Etat-nation. L’Ossétie du Sud au cœur du conflit russo-géorgien (1922-2008) Thorniké Gordadzé (IFEA) Le 9 octobre 2008, le ministère du développement économique de la Fédération de Russie envoyait à toutes les structures étatiques du pays une missive officielle intitulée « Au sujet des changements sur la carte du monde »1. La lettre annonçait aux fonctionnaires publics que deux nouveaux Etats souverains – l’Abkhazie et l’Ossétie du Sud – étaient apparus sur la scène internationale et que désormais toutes les administrations du pays devaient tenir compte de cette réalité. Cette modification de la carte du monde, pour l’heure reconnue seulement par la Russie, le Nicaragua et l’organisation palestinienne Hamas, est la conséquence de la guerre russo-géorgienne d’août 2008. Le conflit se