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This paper reviews the CNS Visiting Fellows program targeting young and mid-career professionals from the former Soviet Union and East Asia, including governmental officials, technical experts, researchers, and faculty. This program designed to enhance participants’ knowledge of various aspects of nonproliferation and arms control field provides research, training, dialogue, and networking opportunities that the fellows carry back to their home institutions. The paper describes main components of the training, which includes lectures and selected graduate-level courses, seminars, and independent research, explaining benefits of each component. Reflecting upon successful outcomes of such program, the paper investigates benefits of joint training of professionals from different countries with different backgrounds, and examines dynamics of their interactions between each other and CNS experts. The paper concludes with the importance of such training for the international community, emphasizes the need to expand this program to other regions of the world, and gives recommendations to policy-makers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a short-term burst of politically-motivated migration activity after the dissolution of the USSR, the current period is marked by the general contraction of the population territorial mobility in the region, the increasing importance of external emigration, and the growing role of the socio-economic factors in defining the character and intensity of the new migration flows. The expansion and substitution of temporary labor migration for the permanent politically motivated migration flows is particularly visible. Another important characteristic of the current situation is the disproportionate influence exercised by Russia on the formation of migration flows in the region. Russia remains the major recipient of migrants, increasingly plays a role of supplier of labor migrants to the West, and acts as a ?bridge? for those attempting to reach Western Europe. Relying on the data of the migrant households? surveys conducted in a number of post-Soviet states, the paper considers the reasons for the shift from the ethnic and political to the socio-economic factors of migration and discusses the major characteristics of the newly-forming labor migration flows. The major issues under consideration include the durability of the labor migration and the structural (professional and demographic) characteristics and the territorial orientation of the new migration flows. The authors conclude that labor migration serves as an effective mechanism of the market transition, providing for the economic survival of the population under the crisis conditions and formation of the middle class in the post-Soviet societies. Special attention in the paper is given to the policies of the countries of emigration and immigration towards the labor migrants and their impact on those countries? labor markets and welfare mechanisms. The authors see as one of the major problems the absence of an effective legislative base, institutional mechanisms, and political will for dealing with the new migration flows, preventing the effective incorporation of labor migrants by the societies of receiving states. This complicates the acquisition of legal status by many labor migrants, resulting in the criminalization of the spheres of economic activity in which they are employed and the growing corruption of state officials. Thus the solution of the problems associated with labor migration requires a comprehensive reform of the governmental policies and the labor and migrant legislation of the post-Soviet states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the disparate political regimes that emerged after the break-up of the Soviet Union that range from almost democratic to almost totalitarian. It seeks to answer the question of why despite similar starting conditions in several countri ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

15 years after the Soviet collapse the four secessionist regions (Karabakh, Abkhazia, S. Ossetia and Transdniester) remain internationally unrecognized and are a major obstacle to the political and economic development of thestates in the region. Why have these conflicts not been resolved, and why have these statelets managed to survive? This paper explores geopolitical and geoeconomic explanations for this situation, and asks what has tohappen before one can expect some substantial progress towards conflict resolution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]