The Eastern Partnership is a culturally diverse grouping of five states that have found themselves locked in a contest between European and Russian influence. Given the EaP initiative’s political nature, divisions within these countries are often framed as simply pro-Russian vs. pro-European, which are often viewed as culturally uniform and distinct from each other.

The FINANCIAL -- Rashmi Shankar, is the World Bank’s Lead Economist for the South Caucasus, and Sector Leader for the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network in the Europe and Central Asia Region. She supervises a program that spans governance and public sector management, poverty and gender, and economic policy.

The FIANNCIAL -- As often discussed on his page, seasonal dynamics of the Khachapuri Index are mainly driven by extremely sharp fluctuates in the supply of fresh milk, which directly affects the prices of traditional dairy products such as Imeretian cheese.

The FINANCIAL -- There are clear expectations in many cultures to marry somebody from theirown group, and not living up to these expectations will at least cause a loss in reputation. This is nicely displayed in the movie Late Marriage by Dover Kosashvili, humorously depicting a young Georgian Jew in Israel whose parents want him to marry the “right” woman (the movie features extensive dialogues in Judeao-Georgian, another endangered language). 

The FINANCIAL -- The Estonian-Georgian film, Tangerines, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014. While the film was shot in Guria, the story takes place in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia during the war in the early 1990s.