A mountainous barrier that extends for nearly 1,200 km between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus is considered the southern border of Europe with Asia, but it is also an area of contact as well as friction between the Ottoman, Persian and Russian Empires. Integrated into the USSR from 1921, it is made up of two groups: the Greater Caucasus to the north and the Lesser Caucasus to the south, crossed by the borders of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
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Three states that became independent with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and which form Transcaucasia, while to the north, Ciscaucasia belongs to the Russian Federation. If the North Caucasus today seems pacified at the cost of tens of thousands of deaths since the last Chechen war, the South Caucasus remains an unstable area on the political and geopolitical levels that Moscow, currently mobilized on the Ukrainian front, still considers strategic. Unstable zone… This is what we are going to see in this edition in partnership with the magazine “INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS” devoted to the Geopolitics of the Caucasus. Among the points of attention, the parliamentary election on June 7 in Armenia which launched a process of accession to the European Union, while Georgia is aligning itself with the Russian model. And let the United States keep watch. JD Vance was in Armenia in February 2026 and it was in Washington that an agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia was signed in August 2025 following the last Nagorno-Karabakh war. Between frozen wars, changing alliances and European dreams, the South Caucasus is today more than ever at the heart of global tensions.
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Invited :
- Sylvia Serranopolitical scientist, professor at Sorbonne University and researcher at the Tbilisi (Georgia) branch of the French Institute for Research on Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and North Asia (IRECA)
- Sabine Janseneditor-in-chief of Questions Internationales, professor of International Relations at the CNAM and associate researcher at Paris Cité
- Thorniké Gordadzéteacher at Sciences Po and program manager for the Eastern Neighborhood and the Black Sea at the Jacques Delors Institute.
