Azerbaijan first came onto my radar when I was looking into joining the PeaceCorps, and looking for a Central Asian country that fit the cultural criteria I wanted (at the crossroads of cosmopolitan Europe, Russia, China, and the Middle East), and it stuck out because according to what I read, it doesn’t get brutally cold there in the winter. So I’ve been doing some more reading, and found out it is a Shi’ite Muslim country with little sense of nationalism but a strong regionalism and sense of religion (despite the fact that some of the more strict Muslim social codes are not observed). Apparently oil money has flooded Baku, but is not trickling down to the countryside, which is widening the gap between economic classes as the nouveau riches westernize, at least superficially, and the peasants long for their Communist pensions. Perhaps the one thing going for the country, aside from oil (which could work both for and against Azerbaijan, depending on how it’s managed), is that Turkey has significant influence here…if only because the Azeris are a Turkic people with a similar language.