| This research project focuses on the states with emerging/transitional democracy from authoritarian governments in the Post-Cold War periphery world, namely, Andean South America (Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) and the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan). The study limits its time frame from the 1970s to 2006 in order to cover the emergence and the recent situation of popular demands for more open and democratic decision-making, excluding the longitudinal historical development of these states' governments. I have employed comprehensive and qualitative analysis method for a holistic study of the sociopolitical development of these states, cultural phenomena that have contributed to the democratic mobilization and the changing political culture in the states.;The collapse of the Cold War system, started in 1991, has influenced nearly every state in various manners not only in terms with "high politics" for the governing body but also popular understanding of governance and the renewed sense of "self-determination," the term coined by Woodrow Wilson to reaffirm the fundamental framework of the Westphalian state of ethno-territorial integrity. With the changing international relations without one of the superpower, the Soviet Union, it appeared as if what Francis Fukuyama called "the End of History" were to be the new reality; however, the closer focus through this study revealed that there is no "end" but the new beginning of history of what Nietzsche called "national neurosis" - fragmentation of states by the ethnic and sociopolitical lines rather than democratic cohesion based on solidarity within the existing frame of the state. |
