Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. By Mathijs Pelkmans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 240p. $59.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Although much has been said for modern principles of self-determination, there is often comfort and security in established, even externally imposed, sources of self-identity. If the Soviet Union was a prison of nations, then it was—whether imperfectly, perniciously, or opportunistically—also an answer to national questions that might otherwise have been solved with more difficulty and less satisfaction. In the aftermath of the USSR efforts to ask and to answer those questions have sometimes been coupled with semicompulsory expectations of self-determination that have threatened to substitute one form of repressive identification for another. Nowhere has this led to greater problems than in the Caucasus.