Fereydani Georgians are the only Georgian-speaking ethnic group in Iran. Despite being all that is left of the once vast and important Georgian-speaking community in Iran, this ethnic group is still largely unknown, both inside and outside Iran. There is a general consensus that Georgians have played a pivotal role in Iran's history since the seventeenth century. Despite this, the Fereydani Georgians are also still relatively unknown within Iran itself. Also in Georgia there is some (popular) knowledge about them. Nevertheless, even this knowledge is rudimentary and is plagued by a large number of misconceptions. The Fereydani Georgians are virtually unknown outside Iran and Georgia.

The words people use reflect their view of the world. In totalitarian societies the primary goal of a regime's language is to influence public opinion. A closer inspection of the most exploited phrases in Serbian public discourse in the period of the late 1980s until 2000 reveals a strong presence of propagandistic language. Thus, it can be argued that the consequences of Slobodan Milošević's politics are visible not only in the devastation of the people and the country but also in the sphere of Serbian public discourse. It is not only that his politics influenced the language. Rather, it is precisely because of the rich and diversified propaganda language of the regime that Slobodan Milošević's was able to maintain his firm grip on power in Serbia for 13 years.

Official government educational pronouncements and policy in the Kyrgyz Republic have called for wider access and participation in higher education as an essential part of the general strategy to build democracy and a market economy. The number of higher education institutions (vuzy) has increased from approximately 10 at the end of the Soviet period to 50 institutions, with over 200,000 students now in attendance. Various international statistical sources show that higher education enrollments peaked above 70% of secondary school graduates in the early 1990s. For the past decade, these figures are lower yet still substantial. UNDP reports between 53% and 63%, while the World Bank and UNESCO report between 41% and 45%. In any of these calculations, however, higher education enrollments in Kyrgyzstan have at least trebled since independence, which is even more remarkable considering that the Kyrgyz system of higher education has become almost entirely paid for by students and parents rather than by the national government.

On 15 February 2007 Vladimir Putin accepted the resignation of Alu Alkhanov as President of Chechnya and nominated the Chechen prime minister—Ramzan Kadyrov—to act as his successor. This appointment, duly rubber-stamped by Chechnya's parliament, brought to an end to more than four months of speculation since 5 October 2006, when Kadyrov attained the age of 30 and thus became eligible for the post of Chechnya's head of state. Kadyrov's elevation to de jure rather than de facto supremacy in Chechen society not only completed the final stage of the remarkably rapid transformation of this one-time rebel, juvenile thug and political ingénue but also put Putin's policy of Chechenization firmly back on track, which had been effectively derailed since the assassination of Chechnya's first pro-Russian president—Akhmad Kadyrov—Ramzan's father, in May 2004.

The wave of Colour Revolutions, which started in Serbia in the year 2000, and spread to Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, has changed the existing concepts on how transformation would take form in countries exiting from “really existing socialism.” In the early years following the collapse of the Soviet state, the dominant concepts were that of “transition” or slow, top-down reforms that would transform the existing political systems from ruling-party dictatorships to parliamentary democracies, and planned economies to market-based ones. Yet in the late 1990s there was a growing fatigue and pessimism towards the basic thesis of transition: the transition paradigm was formulated as a reaction to the perceived causes of the Soviet failure: a totalitarian state which monopolized the political space proved itself unable to provide either economic well-being or political legitimacy. The task in the early 1990s was to shrink the state apparatus, to make space for a multi-party political pluralism. Even though some argued that the main objective of transition was to achieve democracy,1 for transition theories and even more so for its translation into actual political choices the economic aspect of transition was perceived to be more immediate than the political one. Democracy needed a certain material context, and here too decreasing the role of the state was thought to liberate the market and provide material stability to the new democracies. It was necessary to create a new middle class by way of mass privatization of the former state properties to create a social demand for democracy. Those ideas reflected not only an ideological victory of the one side of the Cold War over the Eastern camp, but also very practical needs: the huge Soviet state sector was neither sustainable nor necessary after the fall of one-party rule, and it had to be radically transformed. At the time, this transition was thought to be an easy task: to take off the oppressing lid of the party-state and let democracy and market economies emerge naturally. Yet in the conception of transition there was a certain tension between the economic and political sides of the imagined reforms, between mass privatization with its dire social consequences of unemployment and fall in the standard of living, and the political goals of democratization where people who were being “restructured” were simultaneously promised to receive the right to change their rulers by casting their ballots. Would people who are threatened with job loss and lower living standards vote for the reformers? And in the event of a negative answer, how would the reforms proceed? Should economic reforms come before political ones; that is, first privatization and in a second stage freedom of political choice through parliamentary elections? These are some of the dilemma that the new republics of the Soviet Union and the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe were facing in the early 1990s. At the time, the answer was clear: the economy came first; it was more important to reform the economic sector, to privatize massively, and stabilize the economy as soon as possible. The economy came before politics, in the sense that restructuring of the property structure through mass privatization was supposed to create the material means for the creation of democracy. It was believed that once the middle class was created as a result of mass privatization, the democratic institutions, such as free elections, multi-party system, independent media, an active civil society, in a word, all the attributes of democracy, would evolve naturally.

The downfall of communist Yugoslavia and the democratization process that followed at the end of the 1980s have led to the fragmentation of the country, which was accompanied by several wars of different intensity and duration (1991–1999). From the ashes of what once was the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia raised six independent states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia. The situation relating to the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, after its unilateral declaration of independence at the beginning of 2008, and subsequent recognition by parts of the international community, remains unclear. Slovenia is already in the EU, while the rest of the former Yugoslav republics, within the framework of the Stabilization and Association Process of the European Union, have the status of EU Candidate or Potential Candidate countries and are slowly moving towards EU membership.

In 2006 the Croatian singer Severina Vučković attempted to represent Croatia at the Eurovision Song Contest with a song arranged by Goran Bregović, the ex-Yugoslav musician from Sarajevo. Before the song “Moja štikla” [My Stiletto] had even been released, the Croatian (and Serbian) mass media had questioned its “Croatianness” in an escalating sequence of claims and counter-claims to authenticity. Its use of musical elements based on folk song and dance left it open to allegations that it had compromised folk music's authenticity; those elements’ regional associations (especially ganga and rera singing from Lika and Herzegovina) connoted spaces which had been marginalized as “eastern” or “Balkan” in comparison to privileged inland and coastal traditions; the involvement of Bregović (represented as Serbian throughout the Croatian mass media) enabled suggestions that the song presented “Serbian folklore” or belonged to the Serbian genre of “turbofolk”—and all this in the particularly sensitive context of a competition which was supposed to symbolize Croatia's full European membership.