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A Political Sociology Approach to the Diffusion of Conflict from Chechnya to Dagestan and Ingushetia
Abstract
This article seeks to foster a better understanding of the diffusion of conflict in the North Caucasus. We argue that diffusion of conflict is a dynamic and adaptive process in which outcomes are shaped by the intersection of three social mechanisms—attribution of similarity, brokerage, and outbidding—and the political, social, and religious contexts. We suggest that a distinction should be made between horizontal and vertical processes of diffusion. We also approach the empirical diffusion of conflict from a different perspective, showing that non-Chechen actors have played a key role in both the diffusion process and its outcomes.
... Even if Chechnya saw signs of stabilization, the Islamist and nationalist insurgency has transformed into a more diffuse network of groups engaged in a campaign of violence with the bases in the neighboring republics (Moore 2007;Dannreuther 2010;Kim and Blank 2013). Ingushetia became the center of gravity of terrorist violence in 2007 with Dagestan bearing the brunt of the majority of attacks in the North Caucasus during 2008(O'Laughlin et al. 2011Campana and Ratelle 2014). Second, in 2007, the various militant groups of the North Caucasus were integrated into the loosely connected Caucasus Emirate, which was a result of the growing fragmentation of the regional insurgency along ethnic, religious, and ideological lines (Campana and Ratelle 2014). ...
... Ingushetia became the center of gravity of terrorist violence in 2007 with Dagestan bearing the brunt of the majority of attacks in the North Caucasus during 2008(O'Laughlin et al. 2011Campana and Ratelle 2014). Second, in 2007, the various militant groups of the North Caucasus were integrated into the loosely connected Caucasus Emirate, which was a result of the growing fragmentation of the regional insurgency along ethnic, religious, and ideological lines (Campana and Ratelle 2014). Lastly, by the late 2000s, the Kremlin moved away from a counterterrorism approach, relying more heavily on the use of force. ...
... As a result, these investments not only failed to mitigate the tensions among the disparate networks of violent actors, but even contributed to the appearance of new centers of conflict, as resource-related conflict arises. Despite its efforts at consolidating the insurgency and gaining support from the global jihadist organizations, the Caucasus Emirate has also remained a fragmented and local project plagued by divisions between the religious and the nationalist factions and between religious and ethnic modes of identification (Campana and Ratelle 2014;Youngman 2016 from North Caucasus and the dwindling foreign support of the insurgency in the region. Despite all efforts at centralizing the terrorist campaign, the organizational structure of the insurgency became increasingly loose, made up of largely autonomous cells competing over formal and informal authority and control over resources in their respective territories. ...
What are the conditions that obstruct the formation of a crime-terror nexus? To answer this question we carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Russia's North Caucasus (2008–2016) where no durable crime-terror nexus materialized despite the presence of conditions conducive to the emergence of linkages between criminals and militants. We demonstrate how the sheer diversity and fluidity of violent actors, with some deeply immersed in the political, economic, and security institutions of the Russian state, fragmented the elements of a crime-terror nexus to such a degree that collaboration among them proved too difficult and costly. Our argument makes several contributions to analyses of the crime-terror nexus. First, our study illuminates the various actors within a purported nexus, demonstrating how cooperation between them may not be forthcoming. Second, our framework demonstrates how a multiplicity of the centers and agents of state power, both formal and informal, is intimately interwoven into the fragmented security landscape. Third, the diversity of the so-called terrorist and militant groups that are competing for power and resources call for rethinking and reconceptualization of what we call a “terrorist group” and the data that we use to study terrorist violence.
... Desde entonces, la organización armada con mayor relevancia en la región, la yihadista Emirato del Cáucaso (EC), ha ido perdiendo efectividad debido a diversas razones. Sus atentados se han ido reduciendo en número y en víctimas, a excepción de un repunte en Daguestán, en 2011, provocado por el desplazamiento de militantes que encontraron refugio allí ante la presión policial (Campana y Ratelle 2014), y un tímido ascenso en Chechenia, en 2017, por causas aún debatibles. ...
... Si bien el conflicto regular se dio por terminado, las fuerzas rusas siguieron desplegadas sobre el terreno y las guerrillas yihadistas, cobijadas bajo el paraguas del EC, se extendieron a territorios como Ingusetia y, sobre todo, Daguestán (Sagramoso 2012). Lo último se debió, en parte, a una estrategia para involucrar en el conflicto a todos los musulmanes del Cáucaso, con el objetivo de dividir al bando ruso y que disminuyese la presión sobre Chechenia (Campana y Ratelle 2014). Pero también, a que se desplazó a la frontera el foco de las actividades ilícitas y criminales asociadas con la guerra (secuestros, corrupción, violaciones y contrabando), lo cual provocó un aumento significativo en el enrolamiento en la insurgencia (Ibragimov y Matsuzato 2014). ...
Este artículo tiene como objetivo aportar datos complementarios, fiables y replicables sobre el conteo de víctimas provocadas por las guerrillas del Cáucaso norte, para explicar su actual debilidad. La metodología empleada es el análisis de contenido de todas las publicaciones realizadas entre 2010 y 2019 en su órgano oficial de propaganda, Kavkaz Center. Esto se complementa con un análisis del contexto histórico. Se concluye que existe una coincidencia general en el aumento y la disminución de las variables producción propagandística y víctimas causadas a lo largo del tiempo. Por tanto, el escrutinio de la propaganda de las guerrillas ayuda a conocer su vigor con mayor certidumbre que si solo se tiene en cuenta el número de ataques perpetrados. Replicar el análisis en otros contextos permitiría conocer si puede establecerse una norma en ese sentido.
... Moreover, the conflict's diffuse nature, occupying the conceptual space between a simmering war and isolated terrorist attacks, hampers attempts to establish a coherent narrative strand (Moore, 2012). Despite this, a stream of literature that broadly agrees on the concept of supra-regional jihad, inspired by interwoven anti-Russian grievances and the globalisation of jihad, transpired (Campana & Ratelle, 2014;Notte, 2016;Souleimanov, 2014;Toft & Zhukov, 2015). Overall, the core PIs have become common currency among scholars. ...
... Youngman (2019) and Wilhelmesen and Youngman (2020) comprehensively explain how North Caucasian fighters, many of whom had already resided outside of the Caucasus and had at times become members of different communities (Youngman, 2016), formed a plurality of warring factions. Some driven by collective survival and more local imperatives (Campana & Ratelle, 2014), and others inspired by strategic objectives of ultimately establishing an Islamic State (Sagramoso, 2012). Nevertheless, as Ratelle (2013) illustrates, taken together, the North Caucasian fighters sought to collectively resist the Russian state and its local proxies. ...
The study of the Chechen wars that shaped the North Caucasus following the Soviet Union’s demise is much ploughed terrain. While the first Chechen war (1994–1996) received a secular narrative, seeking national self-determination, the second war (1999–2009) propelled a religious narrative. One critical question remains unanswered. Challenging established interpretations, a third wave of Russo-Chechen violence emerged, manifested in increasing numbers of Chechens fighting Russian forces and their allies in the ongoing Syrian conflict. The latest wave begs the question how a secular independence movement evolved in such a way as to develop first regional and subsequently supra-regional religious overtones? Examining the temporal phases of Chechnya’s conflicts as a continuum, rather than piecemeal, identifies an underlying structure that explains the development of the conflicts’ key issues and changes. Fundamentally, within-case process tracing demonstrates that horizontal inequalities ( H I s ) between Russians and Chechens, i.e. unequal access to economic assets as well as political, social and cultural participation explain the violence ( V ). Accounting for the ubiquity of H I s and the conflict’s political environment, I expand the chain of causality that turns H I s into V by so-called power ideas ( P I s ), i.e. ideas about how political power should be organised, such as nationalism or Islamism. Departing from the causal role of H I s , I examine the role of P I s in transforming secular nationalism into regional and supra-regional jihad. The mechanism of transition has thus far confounded strategists and planners. My study will establish a clear historical narrative that illuminates this previously elusive metamorphosis and present a sharper, clearly defined picture of the causes of a conflict transiting multiple stages and just as many interpretations. Ultimately it offers potential to yield schematic findings with conceivably significant implications for other contemporary conflicts.
... In a more balanced contribution, Sagramoso (2012, 593) has asserted that the IK is guided by "similar, if not identical" beliefs and shares AQ's "strategic objectivesthe establishment of an Islamic state in the Caucasus, to be ruled by Islamic Shari'ah law". By contrast, Campana and Ratelle (2014) have argued that recruitment and targeting are determined principally by "local imperatives", with groups focused on survival and short-term goals rather than implementing a grand strategy. Separately, Campana and Ducol (2015) have shown local references to dominate IK websites, while Ratelle (2013, 5) has argued that the IK's leadership has "always remained focused on the Russian state and its local proxies" and displays indifference to the West. ...
... This, together with the apparently decentralized nature of the defections, cautions against treating the group as a unitary actor that will simply reflect the ideology of IS itself, which in turn suggests that analysis of the statements and actions of IS proper may not yield many insights into the behaviour of its North Caucasian branch. Thirdly, the focus on internal audiences offers a means of interpreting IS/CW's lack of activity and suggests that, as Campana and Ratelle (2014) have previously found, the insurgency is, in the short term at least, focused on survival rather than implementing a grand strategy. Finally, the evidence of debates outside the public domainincluding by actors in Turkeyand the intransigence of IK loyalists, including Shebzukhov and IK website administrators, cautions against viewing the IK as dead. ...
In December 2014, several high-ranking field commanders from the Caucasus Emirate (Imarat Kavkaz, IK), an insurgent and designated terrorist group in Russia’s North Caucasus, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). Following the subsequent defection of many of the IK’s surviving commanders, IS consolidated its regional presence with the establishment of a formal branch, the Caucasus Wilayah (IS/CW). This paper uses Social Movement Theory’s concept of framing to interpret North Caucasus insurgent leaders’ response to the Syrian conflict and identify the differences in the competing factions’ articulated ideologies. It finds that IS/CW leaders have sought to draw on the emotional appeal of the “caliphate” and redirect it back into the local insurgency, while neglecting to articulate alternative tactics or goals. Those leaders who remained loyal to the IK, by contrast, rooted their opposition in jihadi scholarship and rejected the legitimacy of the “caliphate”. However, apparent ideological dif...
... There is plenty to dislike about Russia's "solution" to the problem of Chechen separatist terrorism. The Chechenization (or more accurately, "Ramzanization,") process has provoked searing criticism from many observers from a human rights perspective, 14 but also from critics who argue that the crackdown in Chechnya has merely served to disperse the insurgency across the territory of the North Caucasus, thus making it potentially more dangerous (Schaefer 2011: 6-7;Campana and Ratelle 2014;Wood 2007;Hughes 2007;Dannreuther & March 2008), and others who stress the inherent fragility of a solution that lives or dies based on the quality of relationship between two unpredictable, egotistical individuals (Hughes 2007;Wood 2007;Bulloch 2015;Yaffa 2016. Each of these criticisms has validity. ...
... Campana and Ratelle, for example, argued that recruitment and targeting are determined principally by "local imperatives," with groups focused on survival rather than implementing a grand strategy, while Campana and Ducol show that, although IK websites utilise "global jihadi rhetoric," they predominantly "reflect local dynamics" and, critically, define their enemies in local terms. 22 A satisfactory resolution of this debate has been hampered by several shortcomings. Firstly, primary sources have been under-utilised, with many studies drawing on Russian and Western media reporting and databases thereof. ...
In October 2007, veteran Chechen field commander Dokka Umarov proclaimed the formation of the Caucasus Emirate (IK), formalising the victory of the North Caucasus insurgency’s Islamist wing over its nationalist-separatists. During Umarov’s time as leader, the North Caucasus experienced sustained violence and the IK claimed responsibility for multiple terrorist attacks in and beyond the region. However, despite the importance of ideology in understanding insurgent behaviour, the IK’s ideology and Umarov’s role in shaping it remain understudied. Using Social Movement Theory’s concept of framing to analyse Umarov’s communiqués throughout his lengthy tenure (June 2006–September 2013), this article identifies three distinct phases in Umarov’s ideological positioning of the insurgency: nationalist-jihadist (June 2006–October 2007); Khattabist (October 2007–late 2010); and partially hybridised (late 2010–September 2013). The article contributes to debates over typologies of jihadist actors by highlighting the difficulties in applying them to the North Caucasus and provides a clearer understanding of the IK’s ideological transformation and the limits to its engagement with external actors. The article also illustrates that weakness was a key factor in explaining that transformation and identifies several avenues for research that could further enhance our understanding of the IK’s ideology and the role it plays.
How can researchers obtain reliable responses on sensitive issues in dangerous settings? This Element elucidates ways for researchers to use unobtrusive experimental methods to elicit answers to risky, taboo, and threatening questions in dangerous social environments. The methods discussed in this Element help social scientists to encourage respondents to express their true preferences and to reduce bias, while protecting them, local survey organizations, and researchers. The Element is grounded in an original study of civilian support for the jihadi insurgency in the Russian North Caucasus in Dagestan that assesses theories about wartime attitudes toward militant groups. We argue that sticky identities, security threats, and economic dependence curb the ability of civilians to switch loyalties.
Bu çalışma fikir ve ideoloji açısından Çeçen milliyetçiliği ve Kafkas Emirliği
arasındaki ilişkilere odaklanarak günümüzdeki Çeçenistan’da Çeçen milliyetçiliğinin
hangi konumda yer aldığını analiz etmiştir. Bu makale, Çeçen milliyetçileri ve
Çeçenistan’daki Radikal İslamcı hareketin birbirlerine yakın olduğu varsayımına
karşı, gerçekte Çeçen milliyetçileri ile Radikal İslamcıların arasında gerginliğin
mevcut olduğunu, Çeçen milliyetçilerinin, Rusya Federasyonu ve Radikal İslamcılar
arasında kaldığını öne sürmektedir. Çeçenler arasında geleneksel olarak Müslüman
kimliği ve kabile kimliği önemli rol oynarken özellikle Sovyet döneminden sonra
seküler Çeçen milliyetçiliği geliştirilmiştir. Birinci Çeçen Savaşı (Aralık 1994 –
Ağustos 1996) sırasında tasavvuf ve seküler Çeçen milliyetçilik direniş hareketinin
temelini oluştururken daha sonra ise radikal İslamcılık-Vahhabiliğin etkisi artmış ve
sonunda Kafkas Emirliği 2007’de ortaya çıkmıştır. Seküler Çeçen milliyetçiliğine
karşın, radikal İslamcılık-Vahhabilik ise etnisite-ulus çerçevesini reddetmektedir. Bu
yüzden teorik açıdan Kafkas Emirliği ve seküler Çeçen milliyetçiler arasında çelişki
mevcuttur. Ayrıca uygulamada da seküler Çeçen milliyetçileri-Sufiler ve Vahhabiler
arasında sıkça çatışmalar yaşanmıştır ve günümüzde de ikisi arasında ciddi gerginlik
mevcuttur. Kafkas Emirliği’nin IŞİD gibi küresel terörizme destek vermesi iki grup
arasındaki mesafeyi daha da açmıştır. Diğer yandan, Rusya yanlısı Kadirov rejimi ise
Vahhabilerle şiddetli mücadeleye devam ederken seküler Çeçen milliyetçilerine ise
daha ılımlı tutum sergilemektedir. Bu durumda hem teorik olarak hem de uygulamada
seküler Çeçen milliyetçiliği günümüzde Rusya’ya nazaran Vahhabilik ile daha
sıkıntılı bir ilişkidedir. Böylece günümüzde seküler Çeçen milliyetçiliği Rusya ve
Vahhabiler arasında sıkışmış veya Rusya ile uzlaşmak ya da yurt dışına kaçmayı
tercih etmeye mecbur bırakılmıştır.
In circumstances of extremism, outbidding is a concept that explains competition among groups with shared religion, ideology, politics, and/or ethnicity in order to impress their existing or potential constituency. In circumstances of terrorism, outbidding is a rational strategy used by a terrorist group to maximize its potential by competing with other terrorist groups. Academics and practitioners alike have long accepted the argument that competition among terrorist groups increases the degree of violence used by the participants.
Introduction and overview over violent mobilization in the North Caucasus: Recent developments and context, conflicting identities, state and sub-state violence, causes and limits of violent mobilization in the region.
The article explores the broad social and relational drivers behind mobilization of Chechens into armed jihad in the Levant. It suggests that the core mobilizing tool in a process toward violent (re-)action is a narrative that projects the Other as so different from, and so dangerous to the Self that the use of violence is legitimized. Moreover, the shift to more radical representations of the other group occurs in a mutual pattern of imagining and interaction between groups. The mobilization of Chechens into armed jihad is explained with reference to the physical and social exclusion of Chechens in Russia and how these experiences have been interpreted and narrated on the one hand and the attempted inclusion of Chechnya/North Caucasus by the global jihadi milieu on the other hand.
This paper focuses on foreign fighter mobilization in the North Caucasus within the context of the similar motivations stemming from the Russian-Chechen wars and the Syrian Civil War. This paper seeks answers to the questions of what the conditions that facilitate the flow of the North Caucasian foreign fighters into Syria are and what the role of Russian-Chechen wars and other historical and social factors in this process is. This study proposes and applies an analytical framework of historical legacy, existing networks, and radicalized identity on the North Caucasian case. The empirical analysis is based on the examination of the expressions made by three North Caucasian fighters in Syria: Abdulhakim Shishani, Muslim Shishani, Salakhuddin Shishani. This study concludes that there is a historical continuity in the codes of radicalization and insurgency in the region from the past to present and same motivations may prompt foreign fighter mobilization in future conflicts.
The article discusses the map of youth cultural scenes in Makhachkala, the capital of the Republic of Dagestan, and the third largest city in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation. The uniqueness of Makhachkala’s youth space is associated with the specific geopolitical and cultural circumstances of the history of the republic. This is set against the context of post-Soviet transformation: rising unemployment and severe inequality; the revival of Islam; radical changes in the gender regime, the ethnic and religious composition of Dagestanis; and a complicated political agenda involving the struggle with radicalization, and the growth of a terrorist threat. Thus, we consider it important and timely to study the local youth socialities, which exist in such a contradictory context. The research that underpins the article is focused on two opposing youth scenes in Makhachkala: street workout (inscribed in the context of the local patriarchal regime), and the anime community (symbolically resisting the pressure of social ‘normativity’). Using the theoretical concept of cultural scenes and a case-study approach (in-depth interviews, participant observation, community mapping), the potential to categorize youth that are not centred (that is, who are outside the ‘core’ of the capitalist world-system) is critically considered through the opposition between subcultural and mainstream groups. The key aim of the article is to demonstrate the importance of using the construct of the ‘other’ (that which is alien or dangerous) as the main way to define the more subtle (often latent) structure of group identity and cultural capital of a community. This also describes the intra- and inter-group solidarities and the value conflicts of youth in a complex and contradictory local urban environment. In this case, the process of growing up and the socialization of youth involve the selection of different strategies of acceptance and resistance to the social order, the structure of normativity and images of success.
Following the collapse of the USSR, a violent jihadist organization called the Caucasus Emirate emerged in Russia, before subsequently splitting up in 2015 when most of its members swore allegiance to the Islamic State. The root causes of violent radicalization are complex but, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), there are certain universal “push factors”: perceptions of injustice, human rights violations, lack of rule of law, social-political exclusion and widespread corruption. Since all the factors coincide in the North Caucasus, the hypothesis of this study is that the lack of rule of law has been one of the main push factors leading to violent extremism in the specific case of the Republic of Ingushetia.
This chapter intends to provide the reader with an ethnographic and historical background of the armed conflict in Chechnya. The chapter consists of three major parts. Its first part casts light on the key elements relating to the ethnography of the Chechens and to the milestones of their national history. It focuses on the social organization – the importance of families, clans, and tribes – and on the persisting local tradition enshrined in the customary law, adat. This part pays particular attention to the three socio-cultural codes: of blood revenge or retaliation, of hospitality, and of silence. The second part of the chapter traces the modern history of the armed conflict in Chechnya.
This article assesses the successes and setbacks of Moscow’s policy of counterinsurgency and beyond. It challenges the general consensus in scholarship positing that military successes associated with Chechenisation have been obtained against the backdrop of Chechnya’s increasingly autonomous status within Russia, considered by some as a case of ‘systemic separatism’. The article tracks how four key mechanisms (Chechnya’s institutional design, internal opposition to the Kadyrov clan, the tradition of blood feud among kadyrovtsy—initially Chechen paramilitary forces named after both Kadyrovs, gradually transformed into seemingly regular Ministry of Interior (MVD) units—and Chechnya’s economic dependency on Moscow) have enabled Moscow to maintain control over Chechnya while simultaneously allowing its elites to consolidate power within the republic.
This article looks into the dangers posed by the return of the North Caucasus militants in Syria and Iraq to the security of the Russian Federation. The article first divides the recruitment of North Caucasian foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq into two distinct waves. I argue that the first wave of North Caucasus foreign fighters (2011–2013) chose Syria because they could not fight in the North Caucasus. By contrast, the second wave (2014–2016) openly decided not to fight in their own region, preferring to join an international jihadist front. I then build on the literature about the impact of foreign fighters on domestic insurgencies to analyse the potential impact of these returnees on the regional insurgency in the North Caucasus. I identify four factors conditioning the motivations to return and returnee impact on domestic insurgency: a favourable context for return, an existing network in the region, resonance of the militants’ ideology with the local population, and the will to return to the region. I argue that the greater threat will come from the field commanders from the Second Chechen war exiled in Syria, rather than the more numerous second wave foreign fighters integrated into ISIS.
This article provides an empirical account of connections between the Islamic State (IS) and jihadi networks in Azerbaijan. Prior to the Syrian civil war, jihadist groups in Azerbaijan were primarily connected to the insurgency in the North Caucasus. However, the crackdown on Salafi groups after the 2008 Abu Bakr mosque bombing and the re-established Forest Brothers in 2012 led to the departure of many jihadists. Drawing on primary online and social media sources, the article traces how these individuals became the vanguard of Azerbaijani groups in Syria. While initially holding some high-level positions in foreign fighter groups in Syria, Azerbaijanis have suffered hardships as part of the IS. Many of their leaders appear to have been executed by the IS and many fighters were used as cannon fodder during the battles of Kobane and Tel Abyad. Despite a possible early policy of allowing jihadist aspirants to leave the country, the Azerbaijani government has stepped up efforts against returnees. Overall, the IS does not appear to be a major threat to Azerbaijan in the near to midterm.
This article focuses on a challenge in the current terrorism literature, namely the methodological justification concerning the collection and analysis of empirical data. Lack of detailed methodological accounts of the collection and analysis of the data makes it difficult to evaluate presented findings, especially if these data are confidential or focused on specific aspects of the phenomenon. This article offers an extensive overview of the methodological procedures conducted in a large empirical research project on jihadist networks based on confidential police files (2000–2013), interviews, and trial observations. The article illustrates how grounded theory–based methods can be used to collect and analyze such data and to develop and test new theories in this research field.
While terrorist and insurgent groups have often combined anti-state subversion with ‘purely‘ criminal activities in order to obtain the financial means to wage their ideological struggle, little is known about the transformation of such groups into non-ideological organised crime groups (OCG) with close links to authorities. This holds particularly for jihadist groups that have on ideological grounds ruled out collaboration with their archenemies – ‘infidels’ and ‘apostates’. Using unique ethnographic data from Russia’s Dagestan, this article explores the causes and contexts of the gradual transformation of some of Dagestan’s jihadist units – jamaats – into organised crime groups collaborating with local authorities.
Jihadist groups often select for attack targets such as brothels and casinos, which Salafi ideology considers places of sin. However, they adjust to the expectations of the local population. In doing so, they seek to boost their standing and secure the solidarity of other Salafists. Wherever they cannot assume that fatal attacks on "sinful" (haram) targets will meet with acceptance, they put greater emphasis on "re-education" than retribution. Weaker terrorist cells in particular avoid attacks where a massive response from security forces can be expected. Therefore, at their core, jihadist groups behave rationally, as the example of Dagestan shows.
Cet article porte sur les dynamiques propres aux politiques russes antiterroristes au Caucase du Nord et analyse leurs impacts sur le conflit. Pour ce faire, il s’appuie sur le concept de configuration tel que développé par N. Elias. Il se propose de déconstruire les interdépendances qui lient les acteurs de l’antiterrorisme et d’en examiner la nature et les logiques. Il montre qu’il existe non seulement un décalage entre les discours et les pratiques, mais également une divergence d’intérêts et de croyances, que la prédominance du clanisme, du localisme et du clientélisme, comme modes d’interactions et principes organisationnels, ne fait qu’enraciner. Il explique les échecs des politiques antiterroristes par les jeux de pouvoir, qui à Moscou et au Nord-Caucase, entravent leur bonne mise en oeuvre, par l’absence de coordination et la compétition inter-agences et par le détournement de la violence à des fins privées. Il montre ainsi que loin de contenir le conflit, ces pratiques imputables aux différents acteurs impliqués dans la lutte anti-terroriste participent à la montée des violences et entretiennent un conflit aux logiques multiples.
This article provides an in-depth literature review of the different trends and debates in the English academic literature on the violent conflicts in the North Caucasus during the post-Soviet period. This literature review is separated into three major debates and focused on four major themes that consistently appear in the study of violent conflicts in the North Caucasus: nationalism and identity (grievance), criminality and opportunism (greed), repression (revenge and trauma), and religion (radicalization). The first debate concentrates on the structural factors explaining mass mobilization in the North Caucasus following the end of the Soviet Union. The second debate underscores the role of religious radicalization in mobilization patterns in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, as well as its potential links with other conflicts (Afghanistan and Syria) and the importance of suicide bombings. Finally, the third debate focuses on the study of counter-insurgency and counterterrorism, the development of the Caucasus Emirate, and the diffusion of insurgent violence across the region. The article concludes by underlining the need to engage on a larger theorization of violent mobilization in the North Caucasus seeking to integrate structural, organizational and individual variables linking the global dynamics and local specificities of the region.
This article examines foreign fighters and the insurgency in the North Caucasus. The first part of the article addresses conceptual issues concerning the ways that foreign fighters are analysed, posing this more widely in terms of transnational activism. Here I examine the importance of kin and relatedness. I develop this argument in the second part of the article, which examines pan-Islamism and transnational activism in the post-Soviet period. The third section draws attention to the different groups of foreign fighters, as part of a wider activist movement in the North Caucasus. Here I show that a complex group of transnational activists from the Greater Middle East, North Africa, parts of Europe, and Central Asia participated in the conflicts in the North Caucasus. Finally, the article turns to examine volunteers from the North Caucasus who travelled to fight in Syria, concluding with some considerations about the reintegration of returnees and former activists.
This article looks at Internet use by insurgent groups in the North Caucasus in the context of a regional diffusion of violence. Using a mixed methods research design that combines hyperlink network analysis and micro-discourse analysis, it examines the online characteristics of the Caucasus Emirate and the main frames conveyed by the websites affiliated with the Emirate. It demonstrates the existence of a network of cross-referencing websites that, collectively, articulate the Emirate's political agenda online and allow for the dissemination of frames across the Web. It also shows that while jihadism provides a cultural resource that fosters a global sense of community, the jihadization of discourse does not eradicate local references as the local dynamics of the conflict have a strong impact on online communicative strategies. Finally, although based on a specific case study, this article highlights the potential of a mixed methods research design as applied to an analysis of virtual insurgent networks.
Diffusion is often conceptualized as a random, voluntary, almost “natural” process, which is reflected in synonyms such as “contagion,” “spread,” or “flow.” In this chapter, instead, I want to draw attention to diffusion as a strategic process and highlight the crucial role of “framing” in this. In line with Schneiberg and Soule (2004), I see diffusion as a political process in which actors at different levels (strategically) adopt and adapt foreign examples to make national and transnational claims and to change institutional and legal settings, build alliances, and exert pressure. Institutional encounters affect the framing of social movements (see Tarrow, Chapter 11). To get their message across, social movements must adapt their frames and align them to the dominant frames of other relevant actors. Strategic framing efforts are thus central in shaping this political process and, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, are crucial in allocating power and positions in this process. In recent decades, social scientists have been paying increasing attention to the central role of diffusion in shaping social movements, policies, and institutions (see also Chapter 1 of this volume). Examples of these are studies of democratization, the globalization of the human rights discourse, and transnational mobilizations that demonstrate convergence not only of strategies, ideas, and slogans, but also of policies and legislation. These studies, however, provide us with little insight into how these processes occur and into the intracountry dynamics.
Three U.S. geographers analyze the temporal and spatial trends of 17,438 violent events in Russia's North Caucasus region from August 1999 to July 2011, demonstrating that the diffusion of conflict away from Chechnya intensified during the period 2007-2011, as levels of violence rose in neighboring republics. An increasing number of casualties are civilians in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, the three republics that are the focus of the paper. Employing multiple methods of spatial pattern analysis and geographically sensitive regression models, the authors examine the spatial fragmentation of violence from the perspective of rebel groups operating in the three republics. The analysis documents how the incidence of violence varies dramatically over space (i.e., reflecting the influence of urbanization, strategic location, and physical geographic factors such as elevation and extent of forest cover). Although violence in the North Caucasus region as a whole has declined in absolute terms over the past four years, the authors show how new geographies of violence are developing in the region, underscoring the emergence of republic-based insurgent operations against the various organs of the Russian state. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H560, H770, O180. 9 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix, 103 references:
In this article, the authors focus attention on a poorly understood aspect of contentious politics: the interaction between the transnational diffusion of new forms of protest behavior and police practices in response to them. Studies of diffusion are usually limited to the diffusion of one kind of innovation by one set of actors to another, as in the diffusion of technical innovations from innovators to adopters. But collective action diffusion also produces a parallel and interactive sequence of “public order” reactions. Using the transnational countersummits that emerged around the turn of the century as their source of evidence, the authors focus on the coevolution of protester and police innovations across national boundaries. The authors’ major finding is that the mechanisms that cause protester and police innovations to diffuse are remarkably similar, even though they can combine in different ways at different moments: promotion, the proactive intervention by a sender actor aimed at deliberate diffusion of an innovation; assessment, the analysis of information on past events and their definition as successes or failures, which leads to adaption of the innovation to new sites and situations; and theorization, the location of technical innovations within broader normative and cognitive frameworks. The authors close with a speculative application of their findings to the recent diffusion of protester tactics and regime responses in the Middle East and North Africa.
This article examines the expansion of Russia's emerging Chechen-led revolutionary Islamist terrorist network into the central-western North Caucasian republic of Kabardino-Balkariya (the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria or KBR), which in many ways is the geopolitical and ethnopolitical gateway to the western North Caucasus. The network's expansion into the region demonstrates the ability of Chechen-based Islamism to "travel" across geography and ethnicity among Russia's Muslims. This article argues for a comprehensive, multicausal explanation of communal mobilization that includes international, institutional, and economic factors in addition to communal-political ones, especially in cases of extremist terrorist groups, such as those in Russia's growing revolutionary Islamist network. It also shows that in Russia, as elsewhere, the international jihadist movement, inspired and funded by al Qaeda, has made some progress in coopting local nationalist movements among Muslim peoples to the Islamist cause.
A political scientist reviews the vicissitudes of the Caucasus jihadi insurgency and Russia's counterinsurgency efforts since 2005, drawing on the press, jihadist websites, and scholarship on insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. The development of jihadi-oriented fighting units, the rise and decline of Maskhadov's supremacy, the rise of Islamist elements, the Chechen separatist movement and the expansion of the jihad, Moscow's counter-jihadi successes, the jihadi network after the death of Basayev, and the rise and career of Ramzan Kadyrov are examined. These events are analyzed in terms of the dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency conflict.
The conflict in Chenchnya and its consequences are among the most serious challenges currently facing Russia - draining the country of valuable human and material resources, impeding democratic development and contributing to stall military reform. The most dramatic consequence of the nearly ten-year conflict is perhaps the radicalisation and Islamisation of parts of the separatist movement, with international Islamist organisations apparently gaining a foothold on Russian territory. One can get the impression that Islam in itself is the key conflict-generating factor in Chechnya. This article argues against that notion. Although there was a religious revival in Chechnya at the time, Islam initially played a marginal role in the ideology of Chechen separatists. After nearly ten years of conflict and chaos both Political Islam and Radical Islam, trends quite alien to the Sufi Chechens, have become part of the ideology and working method of many Chechen fighters and politicians. This article aims to address two different but closely related questions. First, how did Radical Islam gain a foothold in the Chechen separatist movement? Second, why are the moderates in the separatist movement losing ground to the radicals? To answer these questions three developments that run parallel intime and mutually influence each other are analysed.
This article exposits and contrasts the roles of two diasporas in ethnic conflict waged in their homelands, namely the Sikh diaspora's involvement in the Punjab insurgency in north India and the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora's role in Sri Lanka's Tamil insurgency. It draws out the various similarities and distinctions between the two in their use of technology, means of mobilization and identity production, and the geographical and political reach of their institutional arrangements. The article argues that the varying means by which these diasporas came into being affected the ways in which they mobilized and the positions they espoused towards homeland politics. It finds that the abilities of the two diasporas to contribute to events “back home” differed in part because of the scope of their respective institutional arrangements.
The second Chechen war, starting in the North Caucasus in August 1999, shows few signs of a ceasefire after eleven years, although the level of violence has declined from the peaks of the war's first two years. Initially framed by both sides as a war of separatists versus the federal center, the situation is now complicated by the installation of a Moscow ally into power in Chechnya and by the splintering of the opposition into groups with diverse aims and theaters of operation. The main rebel movement has declared the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in all the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus as its ultimate goal. Fears of regional destabilization of the entire North Caucasus of Russia are propelled by reports of increased militant activism in republics adjoining Chechnya due to possible contagion effects of violence in these poor areas. Temporal and spatial descriptive statistics of a large database of 14,177 violent events, geocoded by precise location, from August 1999 to August 2007, provide evidence of the conflict's diffusion into the republics bordering Chechnya. “Hot spots” of violence are identified using Kulldorff's SaTScan statistics. A geographically weighted regression predictive model of violence indicates that locations in Chechnya and forested areas have more violence, whereas areas with high Russian populations and communities geographically removed from the main federal highway through the region see less violence.
There has been rapid growth in the study of diffusion across organizations and social movements in recent years, fueled by interest in institutional arguments and in network and dynamic analysis. This research develops a sociologically grounded account of change emphasizing the channels along which practices flow. Our review focuses on characteristic lines of argument, emphasizing the structural and cultural logic of diffusion processes. We argue for closer theoretical attention to why practices diffuse at different rates and via different pathways in different settings. Three strategies for further development are proposed: broader comparative research designs, closer inspection of the content of social relations between collective actors, and more attention to diffusion industries run by the media and communities of experts.
The paper calls for more attention to be paid to the heterogeneous character of new Islamic groups, including the need to avoid assumptions about the origins of radicalism, extremism and recourse to violence adopted by some of them. By focusing on a new movement of young Muslims in the Northern Caucasian Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria in the period from the 1990s to the early 2000s, we suggest that conceptualising some new Islamic groups as New Religious Movements (NRMs) can sharpen our understanding of the tensions, conflicts and violence often associated with them. This, in turn, can encourage us to take fuller account of factors including their social provenance, the appeal of their beliefs and practices, the demographic characteristics of their membership and the dynamics of their internal and external interactions with the wider society.
One of the most important developments over the past three decades has been the spread of liberal economic ideas and policies throughout the world. These policies have affected the lives of millions of people, yet our most sophisticated political economy models do not adequately capture influences on these policy choices. Evidence suggests that the adoption of liberal economic practices is highly clustered both temporally and spatially. We hypothesize that this clustering might be due to processes of policy diffusion. We think of diffusion as resulting from one of two broad sets of forces: one in which mounting adoptions of a policy alter the benefits of adopting for others and another in which adoptions provide policy relevant information about the benefits of adopting. We develop arguments within these broad classes of mechanisms, construct appropriate measures of the relevant concepts, and test their effects on liberalization and restriction of the current account, the capital account, and the exchange rate regime. Our findings suggest that domestic models of foreign economic policy making are insufficient. The evidence shows that policy transitions are influenced by international economic competition as well as the policies of a country's sociocultural peers. We interpret the latter influence as a form of channeled learning reflecting governments' search for appropriate models for economic policy.
This article makes a conceptual and theoretical contribution to the study of clustered political and economic reforms. Conceptually, we review the use and meaning of the concept of diffusion as well as its related terms. We suggest that the concept be reserved for processes (not outcomes) characterized by a certain uncoordinated interdependence. Theoretically, we identify the principal sources of clustered policy reforms. We then clarify the characteristics specific to diffusion mechanisms and introduce a categorization of such processes. In particular, we make a distinction between two types of diffusion: adaptation and learning. We argue that this categorization adds conceptual clarity and distinguishes mechanisms with distinct substantive consequences.
Certain regions of the world experience more conflict than others. Previous analyses have shown that a civil war in one country significantly increases the likelihood that neighboring states will experience conflict. This finding, however, still remains largely unexplained. We argue that population movements are an important mechanism by which conflict spreads across regions. Refugee flows are not only the consequence of political turmoil - the presence of refugees and displaced populations can also increase the risk of subsequent conflict in host and origin countries. Refugees expand rebel social networks and constitute a negative externality of civil war. Although the vast majority of refugees never directly engage in violence, refugee flows may facilitate the transnational spread of arms, combatants, and ideologies conducive to conflict; they alter the ethnic composition of the state; and they can exacerbate economic competition. We conduct an empirical analysis of the link between refugees and civil conflict since the mid-twentieth century, and we find that the presence of refugees from neighboring countries leads to an increased probability of violence, suggesting that refugees are one important source of conflict diffusion.
In this book we offer an approach to understanding the internationalization of ethnic conflict in different regional contexts that integrates international relations and comparative analysis. We examine four core explanatory frameworks that contribute to the diffusion and the escalation of ethnic conflicts in divided states and societies. These explanations are at the nexus of comparative and international understandings of conflict. Much of the literature on ethnic conflict focuses on the origins of ethnic identity (instrumentalists versus constructivists; Smith 1986, 1993; Kaplan 1993; Connor 1994; Arfi 1998) or on the sources of ethnic conflict (Lake and Rothchild 1998).1 We focus on the link between ethnic and interstate conflict, and specifically, on the internationalization of ethnic conflicts. We recognize the internationalization of ethnic conflict as requiring an under-standing of “intermestic” structures and processes.2
It is widely recognized that social movements may spread – or “diffuse” – from one site to another. Such diffusion, however, is a complex and multidimensional process that involves different actors, networks, and mechanisms. This complexity has spawned a large body of literature on different aspects of the diffusion process, yet a comprehensive framework remains an elusive target. This book is a response to that need, and its framework focuses on three basic analytical questions. First, what is being diffused? This question directs attention to both the protest repertoires and interpretive frames that actors construct to define issues and mobilize political claims. Second, how does diffusion occur? This book focuses attention on the activist networks and communication channels that facilitate diffusion, including dialogue, rumors, the mass media, the internet, NGOs, and organizational brokers. Finally, what is the impact of diffusion on organizational development and shifts in the scale of contentious politics? This volume suggests that diffusion is not a simple matter of political contagion or imitation; rather, it is a creative and strategic process marked by political learning, adaptation, and innovation.
Spatial organization interacts significantly with contentious politics, but figures uncertainly in current theories of the subject. A review of writing on the subject permits a rough distinction among bare space analyses using location and time-distance for non-spatial effects, textured space analyses introducing location and time-distance as explicit causes and effects, and place analyses treating interaction among location, time-distance, and representations of spaces as explicit causes and effects. Drawing chiefly on examples from England and France between 1750 and 1900, observations on four varieties of space-contention interaction—the geography of policing, safe spaces, spatial claim making, and control of places as stakes of contention—illustrate the promise of place analyses for new investigations. An ample bibliography displays the range of resources available to students of contention.
From labor organizers to immigrant activists, from environmentalists to human rights campaigners, from global justice protesters to Islamic militants, this book shows how ordinary people gain new perspectives, experiment with new forms of action, and sometimes emerge with new identities through their contacts across borders. It asks to what extent transnational activism changes domestic actors, their forms of claim making, and their prevailing strategies. Does it simply project the conflicts and alignments familiar from domestic politics onto a broader stage, or does it create a new political arena in which domestic and international contentions fuse? And if the latter, how will this development affect internationalization and the traditional division between domestic and international politics?
What are the pathways through which a new form of collective action, a new collective action frame, or a new social movement spreads? Do such collective phenomena diffuse autonomously, or in response to the institutional practices to which they are directed? Under what conditions does the horizontal diffusion of contention give way to broader configurations of conflict – what Doug McAdam and this author have called “upward scale shift” (Tarrow and McAdam 2005; Tarrow 2005)? These are the questions I will take up in this chapter. Research in the past has focused centrally on the “fact” of diffusion (e.g., does an act of contention diffuse or doesn’t it?); it has often traced the pathways of diffusion across geographic and social space; and it has tried to show how, and under what circumstances, diffusion produces new organizations and transmits new collective action frames. These are all important contributions to our understanding of contentious politics. But in each respect, existing research leaves lacunae in our understanding of the dynamics of contention: First, the “fact” of diffusion can be easily confused with the simultaneous or near-simultaneous emergence of contention in structurally similar situations. Second, although diffusion always involves emulation, contention can diffuse across geographic or social space through a combination of mechanisms with different outcomes and valences. Third, as Andrews and Biggs show in their contribution to this volume, when preexisting organizational ecology is taken into account, the diffusion of a new form of contention may have no discernable effect on subsequent organizational expansion (Chapter 10).
This study concerns the analysis of diffusion and contagion processes using a lognormal model of overdispersion phenomena. The urban disorders of the past decade are examined and two processes are found to exist in the 1966-67 period. One is a classic diffusion effect in which disorders are precipitated by events which are independent of each other, but lead to outcomes such as numbers of arrests which are proportional to previous disorders. The second process is a contagious one in which disturbances occur as a consequence of smaller cities imitating the behavior of large ones experiencing a disorder. It was found that the explanatory power of the interaction effect between police and black city residents tended to increase as city size increased. Concomitantly, the effects of environmental variables tended to decrease in explanatory power as city size decreased.
This essay analyses Chechen-related suicide attacks, locating them within the historical and political context of the anti-Russian insurgency in the North Caucasus and the different factions of the anti-Russian armed resistance movement in the period between the first and second Russo-Chechen wars. The core of the essay is an analysis of the different character of two waves of suicide operations, (2000–2002) and (2002–2004). The first wave was linked to nominally Islamist groups, whereas the second set of attacks were linked to Operation Boomerang devised by Shamil Basaev. Finally, the essay considers other attacks that do not fit into either of these two waves of terrorism.
Although previous research has established the diffusion of interstate military conflict as a rare event, few in-depth studies have been made. This article is a modest attempt to specify some of the interaction processes and regional contexts through which interstate conflict diffusion occurs. For this purpose a comparative analysis of individual cases is undertaken with each case consisting of a military conflict and a dispute in its vicinity. An examination is made of the sequence of events related to whether, and how, the military conflict might affect the dispute, transforming it to a new military conflict. The cases are drawn from the same region, Central and South-East Europe, for two different periods, 1919-20 and 1991-92, displaying an extremely high incidence of interstate conflicts. Comparing two hypotheses, one derived from a realpolitik perspective and the other from a linkage approach, it was found that the linkage-related hypothesis is supported in all cases across both periods, whereas the realpolitik-related hypothesis is supported only in a few cases pertaining to one of the periods. The theoretical implication is a linkage perspective which may offer new insights about conflict diffusion among neighboring countries, as it turns attention from their security concerns to the interplay of intra- and interstate relations transcending national boundaries.
How does insurgency spread? Existing research on the diffusion of violence at the local level of civil war tends to under-specify the theoretical mechanisms by which conflict can be expanded, relocated or sustained, and overlooks the real-world logistical constraints that combatants face on a daily basis. This paper attempts to address both problems by taking a closer look at the role of road networks in the diffusion of insurgent activity. By explicating the logic of diffusion in a simple epidemic model and exploiting new disaggregated data on violence and road networks in the North Caucasus, this analysis challenges the conventional view that insurgent logistics are either self-sufficient or highly flexible. Roads shape the costs of sustaining and expanding operations, which facilitates the transmission of violence to new locations, but can also intensify competition for limited military resources between nearby battlefronts. At the local level, this dynamic makes the relocation of insurgent activity more likely than its expansion. Methodologically, this paper demonstrates that a failure to account for logistical constraints in the empirical study of civil war can underestimate costs of diffusion and overpredict the transmissibility of violence between neighboring locations. The use of road network distances can yield more conservative inferences and more accurate predictions of how violence spreads.
This essay shows how the various Islamic communities or jamaats that emerged in the Muslim republics of the Russian North Caucasus during the early 1990s have evolved since then. Originally conceived as peaceful religious organisations embracing strict Islamic Salafi principles, many of these communities have transformed themselves into fighting units sharing many of the traits of jihadist Islamic movements worldwide. By analysing the radical Islamic discourse and the strategies of leading jihadist fighters in the Russian North Caucasus, this essay also illustrates how their views, ideas and tactics have become similar, if not identical, to the beliefs that are being held and thepractices that are being conducted by fighters of global and regional jihadist movements worldwide.
Le concept de repertoire d’action propose par Charles Tilly a connu une immense fortune, au risque d’une dilution et d’une perte de sens. Michel Offerle s’attache dans ce texte, a partir d’un retour aux propositions tilliyennes, a une evaluation critique du concept. A partir ensuite de ses usages par les sociologues et les historiens, il montre ce que son utilisation peut nous apprendre quant aux terrains auxquels elle est appliquee et souligne dans quelle mesure on peut encore en user de maniere productive. Il propose egalement des pistes permettant de penser ensemble ce que la notion tend trop souvent a separer – les actions collectives protestataires, les actions collectives non protestataires et les actions individuelles – pour reintroduire l’idee d’une pluralite de registres d'action « disponibles », dans le temps et dans les espaces sociaux et territoriaux.
In the literature on civil war onset, several empirical results are not robust or replicable across studies. Studies use different definitions of civil war and analyze different time periods, so readers cannot easily determine if differences in empirical results are due to those factors or if most empirical results are just not robust. The authors apply a methodology for organized specification tests to check the robustness of empirical results. They isolate causes of variation in empirical results by using the same definition of civil war and analyzing the same time period while systematically exploring the sensitivity of eighty-eight variables used to explain civil war in the literature. Several relationships with the onset of civil wars prove robust: large population and low income levels, low rates of economic growth, recent political instability and inconsistent democratic institutions, small military establishments and rough terrain, and war-prone and undemocratic neighbors. Variables representing ethnic difference in the population are robust only in relation to lower level armed conflict.
This discussion attempts to explore the concepts of diffusion and contagion as well as the nature of diffusion/contagion effects, and to suggest how they might operate. Using a series of logical analyses to continue the exercise of unpacking the concept of diffusion, which was initially presented in Most and Starr (1980), we are led to the conclusion that such processes are both less mystical and troublesome than they have often appeared in the literature. We argue that spatial diffusion processes may be disaggregated. Rather than being unique, diffusion/contagion processes may be seen as one subfield of `linkage' politics; with direct diffusion relationships as specialized extra-societal (general linkage) phenomena.
The aim of this article is to explore and analyze the role of foreign fighters in the recent episodes of Russo–Chechen violence in the North Caucasus. The article begins by offering a preliminary theoretical consideration of foreign fighters, indicating how the events in Afghanistan combined with the development of a Salafi-Jihadist movement that would shape subsequent conflicts in the North Caucasus throughout the 1990s. The article will then move on to identify the role of Arab foreign fighters in Chechnya, demonstrating how a complex local and global social networks enable and motivate volunteers.
Existing research has related civil war primarily to country-specific factors or processes that take place within individual states experiencing conflict. Many contemporary civil wars, however, display a trans- national character, where actors, resources, and events span national boundaries. This article challenges the 'closed polity' approach to the study of civil war, where individual states are treated as independent entities, and posits that transnational factors and linkages between states can exert strong influences on the risk of violent civil conflict. Previous research has shown that conflicts in a state's regional context can increase the risk of conflict, but the research has not distinguished between different varieties of transnational linkages that may underlie geographic contagion, and it has failed to consider the poten- tial influences of domestic attributes. The article develops and evaluates a series of hypotheses on how transnational factors can influence the risk of conflict and the prospects for maintaining peace in a con- ditional autologistic model, including country-specific factors often associated with civil wars. The results suggest that transnational linkages between states and regional factors strongly influence the risk of civil conflict. This, in turn, implies that the risk of civil war is not determined just by a country's internal or domestic characteristics, but differs fundamentally, depending on a country's linkages to other states.
Stuart J. Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky.
The author would like to thank Leokadia Drobizheva, Airat Aklaev, Nicholas Dima, Stephen Bowers, and Vasile Nedelciuc for their help in organizing this research. This research was supported by funds from the University of Kentucky, and by grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State (Title VIII) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Valuable suggestions and advice were provided by Jeff Chinn, Charles Davis, Pal Kolsto, Karen Mingst, and Stephen Saideman. None of these people or organizations is responsible for the views expressed.
1. See, e.g., Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin's, 1993). Some more sophisticated approaches including this argument are Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); and Elizabeth Crighton and Martha Abele MacIver, "The Evolution of Protracted Ethnic Conflict: Group Dominance and Political Underdevelopment in Northern Ireland and Lebanon," Comparative Politics, Vol. 23, No. 2 (January 1991), pp. 127-142.
2. Among the first to publish this insight was Barry R. Posen in "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 27-47.
3. The most sophisticated mobilization theory of political violence is Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978). The competing theory is from Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict. On diversionary theories of war, see Jack S. Levy, "The Diversionary Theory of War: A Critique," in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed., Handbook of War Studies (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). The classic exposition of the spiral model is Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).
4. This process is described and defined in Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1972).
5. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict."
6. Carol Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 91.
7. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976 [1832]), pp. 137-138 and passim.
8. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
9. Jack L. Snyder, "Perceptions of the Security Dilemma in 1914," in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, eds. Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
10. Donald Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay: The Comparative Politics of Ethnic Conflict Management," in Joseph V. Montville, ed., Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1990).
11. Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay."
12. Stephen Van Evera, "Hypotheses on Nationalism and War," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Spring 1994), pp. 5-39.
13. Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay."
14. Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay."
15. I show the presence of these factors in Yugoslavia and Azerbaijan in Stuart J. Kaufman, "An 'International' Theory of Interethnic War," Review of International Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (April 1996), pp. 149-171. On Georgia, see Stephen S. Jones, "Populism in Georgia: the Gamsakhurdia Phenomenon," in Donald Schwartz and Razmik Panossian, eds., Nationalism and History: The Politics of Nation Building in Post-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 127-149. On Sri Lanka, see K.M. de Silva, Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Societies: Sri Lanka 1880-1985 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986).
16. This process is noted in Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay"; and Rabushka and Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies, among others.
17. For more detail, see Kaufman, "An 'International' Theory of Interethnic War."
18. Jones, "Populism in Georgia."
19. See Michael E. Brown, "The Causes and Regional Dimensions of Internal Conflict," in Michael E. Brown, ed., The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 586.
20. See V.P. Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Winter 1994/95), pp. 130-166.
21. Stuart J. Kaufman, "The Irresistible...
Assesses the limitations of the structural paradigm for the investigation of the networkparticipation link, and invokes a greater role for cultural analysis in the identification of recruitment and mobilization mechanisms. This general point is illustrated with reference to three specific 'facts' regarding the origins of protest and contention, conventionally associated with the standard structuralist argument: prior social ties as a basis for movement recruitment; established social settings as the locus of movement emergence; the spread of movements along existing lines of interaction. For each of these cases, the author identifies social mechanisms, which combine structural and cultural elements. Rather than rejecting the formalization and the quest for systematic patterns, to which network concepts and methods have so much contributed in recent years, the author calls for a more dynamic integration of cultural analysis and structuralist research strategies.
The study of civil war ranks among the most notable developments in political science during the last decade. Several important papers have been published in this period and the field has witnessed an important shift toward cross-national, large-N econometric studies (e.g. Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Fearon and Laitin 2003), following a previous shift from the case-study format to that of theoretically informed studies (Wickham-Crowley 1992; Skocpol 1979; Scott 1976; Eckstein 1965). However, despite these advances much remains to be understood. On the one hand, the conceptual foundations of our understanding of civil wars are still weak (Kalyvas 2001; 2003; Cramer 2002); on the other hand, econometric studies have produced very little in terms of robust results - the main one being that, like autocratic regimes (Przeworski et al. 2000), civil wars are more likely to occur in poor countries. The problems of econometric studies are well known: their main findings are incredibly sensitive to coding and measurement procedures (Hegre and Sambanis 2006; Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2005; Sambanis 2004b); they entail a considerable distance between theoretical constructs and proxies (Cederman and Girardin 2007; Fearon et al. 2007) as well as multiple observationally equivalent pathways (Kalyvas 2007; Humphreys 2005; Kocher 2004; Sambanis 2004a); they suffer from endogeneity (Miguel et al. 2004); they lack clear microfoundations or are based on erroneous ones (Cramer 2007; Kalyvas and Kocher 2007b; Gutiérrez Sanín 2004); and, finally, they are subject to narrow (and untheorized) scope conditions (Wimmer and Min 2006).
The article provides a critical reading of various related discourses, depicting the political motives behind the conflict in Chechnya as a battlefield of the global jihad. These narratives have sought to present the involvement of external Islamist groups as a major factor in the conflict, and to portray many of the main groups within Chechnya as subscribing to a jihadist ideology. The authors suggest an alternative narrative focusing on the significance of the blood feud in the societies of the North Caucasus. It is argued that it is necessary to differentiate between the radicalisation of the resistance as such and the strengthening of the ideology of jihad. It is concluded that the resistance currently assumes a supranational character, yet one which is delimited regionally rather than globally.
This study assesses the fruitfulness of applying network analysis to diffusion of interstate military conflict. Specifically, the network position approach is applied in a statistical analysis, using a new global dataset of interstate military interventions in conflict systems, 1945-1991. We find that the network position approach is consistently supported, whereas competing or complementary approaches are less empirically successful. The findings reported in the present study can be utilized to refine the results of previous studies. While these show that interstate conflict diffusion tends to occur among contiguous states, the network position approach is able to identify which of the contiguous states are most likely to become targets of diffusion.
The specific geographical and ethnocultural characteristics of the North Caucasus predetermined a primary role for Sufism in its societal and political evolution. Despite a century-long suppression, by the Tsarist and then Soviet regimes, Sufi Islam has survived and continued to influence the everyday life and politics of the region. However, Sufism as a religious and sociopolitical phenomenon has been largely overlooked by researchers due to Soviet-era political and ideological constraints and to inertia following the demise of the communist system. This article examines the historical continuity of the Sufi tradition in the eastern part of the North Caucasus, which roughly corresponds to present-day Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia. The focus of the study is the political and ethnic dimensions of Sufism. The first part of the article studies the importance of the historic legacy linked to the Sufis' participation in the gazawat (the Islamic liberation war) against the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus in the nineteenth century and its impact on the evolution of North Caucasian Sufism. The second part examines the present-day doctrinal and sociopolitical characteristics of North Caucasian Sufism. It also considers the relations of Sufism with the political authorities, the Islamic establishment, nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists, or Wahhabis, as well as its position within the global Sufi context. The secretive nature of Sufi tariqas (orders) and the inaccessibility of the mystical essence of Sufism to all but the Sufis themselves have limited this research.
Civil wars cluster in space as well as time. In this study, we develop and evaluate empirically alternative explanations for this observed clustering. We consider whether the spatial pattern of intrastate conflict simply stems from a similar distribution of relevant country attributes or whether conflicts indeed constitute a threat to other proximate states. Our results strongly suggest that there is a genuine neighborhood effect of armed conflict, over and beyond what individual country characteristics can account for. We then examine whether the risk of contagion depends on the degree of exposure to proximate conflicts. Contrary to common expectations, this appears not to be the case. Rather, we find that conflict is more likely when there are ethnic ties to groups in a neighboring conflict and that contagion is primarily a feature of separatist conflicts. This suggests that transnational ethnic linkages constitute a central mechanism of conflict contagion.
Much of the current conflict literature attempts to explain the occurrence of violence as the result of determinants exogenous to the conflict process. This paper takes a different approach and analyzes how violence in civil wars spreads in space and time, drawing on earlier work on micro-diffusion of violence in criminology as well as high resolution conflict data. Two general scenarios are distinguished in our analysis: the relocation and the escalation of conflict. Relocation diffusion corresponds to a shift in the location of violence, whereas escalation diffusion refers to the spatial expansion of the conflict site. We argue that unconventional warfare in civil wars without demarcated front lines should primarily lead to the second type of pattern. We describe an extension to a joint count statistic to measure both diffusion types in conflict event data. Monte Carlo simulation allows for the establishment of a baseline for the frequency of contiguous conflict events under the assumption of independence, and thus provides a significance test for the observed patterns. Our results suggest that violence in civil wars exhibits patterns of diffusion, and in particular, that these patterns are primarily of the escalation type, driven by the dynamic expansion of the scope of the conflict.Highlights► The article analyzes how violence diffuses across space and time within civil wars. ► Provides a typology of diffusion scenarios that can be linked to conventional vs. unconventional war. ► Introduces a statistical method for measuring types of diffusion that is tailored to answering the research question. ► Shows that most fighting in a sample of four civil wars exhibits diffusion patterns that can be linked to unconventional warfare.
An implicit assumption of most policy analysts and some academics is that globalization leads to a convergence of traditionally national policies governing environmental regulation, consumer health and safety, the regulation of labor, and the ability to tax capital. Some claim that globalization leads to a race to the bottom, where concerns about the regulatory standards are sacrificed on the altar of commerce. Others argue that the growth of transnational governance structures leads to a negotiated convergence of ample regulation. This essay reviews the arguments and evidence for how globalization affects the convergence of regulatory policies, in particular the setting of labor and environmental standards. It argues that the theories of policy convergence, which rely on structural factors to induce policy convergence, are largely unsupported by the empirical evidence. Theories that grant agents autonomous decisionmaking power perform better but remain underspecified. Ironically, the realist paradigm, which has generally denigrated the globalization phenomenon, could prove a fruitful source for theories of improved policy convergence.
Much social scientific inquiry seeks to specify the conditions and mechanisms underpinning the flow of social practices among actors within some larger system. Sociology, rural sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, and communication studies all have rich traditions of diffusion research. 1 Virtually everything seems to diffuse: rumors, prescription practices, boiled drinking water, totems, hybrid corn, job classification systems, organizational structures, church attendance, national sovereignty. Whether viewed as a hindrance to structural-functional analysis, 2 the deposited trace of social structure, 3 or a fundamental source of social control and change, 4 diffusion seems critical to social analysis.
Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus is a gripping account of the developmental dynamics involved in the collapse of Soviet socialism. Fusing a narrative of human agency to his critical discussion of structural forces, Georgi M. Derluguian reconstructs from firsthand accounts the life story of Musa Shanibâwho from a small town in the Caucasus grew to be a prominent leader in the Chechen revolution. In his examination of Shanib and his keen interest in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Derluguian discerns how and why this dissident intellectual became a nationalist warlord. Exploring globalization, democratization, ethnic identity, and international terrorism, Derluguian contextualizes Shanib's personal trajectory from de-Stalinization through the nationalist rebellions of the 1990s, to the recent rise in Islamic militancy. He masterfully reveals not only how external economic and political forces affect the former Soviet republics but how those forces are in turn shaped by the individuals, institutions, ethnicities, and social networks that make up those societies. Drawing on the work of Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, and, of course, Bourdieu, Derluguian's explanation of the recent ethnic wars and terrorist acts in Russia succeeds in illuminating the role of human agency in shaping history.
Roads and the Diffusion of Insurgent Violence
- Zhukov
Zhukov, " Roads and the Diffusion of Insurgent Violence. "