The history of the Naqshbandi Sufi brotherhood in the North Caucasus Its impact on religious, social and political life of the area in the first half of the 19th century

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Chechnya: the causes of a protracted post-Soviet conflict

The conflict in Chechnya is one of the most protracted of all the post-Soviet conflicts and is the only violent secessionist conflict to have occurred within the Russia Federation. The article evaluates the main explanations for the conflict and challenges historicist and ‘ethnic’ war accounts. It presents an alternative analysis which focuses on the interrelationship and combined effect of history, contingency, the instrumentalization of conflict by political leaderships, intra-Chechen cleavages, political economy, sectional interests and international factors. The article views the 1994-6 and 1991-present wars as part of a continuum, and discusses how the dynamics of the conflict have changed over time, as new radicalising elements such as Islamic fundamentalism and Russian nationalism under Putin have become more salient

Kinship, ethnicity and religion in post-Communist societies:Russia's autonomous republic of Kabardino-Balkariya

International audienceAmong the consequences of and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been the rise of ethnic nationalism. In the non-Russian parts of the former USSR this process has been accompanied by the reactivation of clan and other primordial social networks which under Soviet Communism had been in abeyance. This article, based on extensive field research material, examines political and social transformation in post-Communist Kabardino-Balkariya, a Russian Muslim autonomy in the North Caucasus. In particular, it analyses the nature of the nation-building policies of the ruling regime, and its relationship with the clan system. It is also concerned with Islamic revival and Islamic radicalism in the region and their correlation with the Islam-related republican and wider federal policies. The article reveals some grey areas in the current academic debate on ethnicity and nationalism and injects more conceptual syncretism into the study of post-Communist societies

Shifting dynamics of the insurgency and counter-insurgency in the North Caucasus

This article seeks to provide an explanation of the shifts and trends in the insurgency and Russian counter-insurgency strategy in the North Caucasus. The first section identifies the multiple factors which initially contributed to the radicalisation and Islamisation of the conflict in Chechnya and how this fostered increased instability in the North Caucasus by the late 1990s, representing a serious threat to the security and integrity of the Russian state. The second section sets out how the incoming prime minister and then president Vladimir Putin seized on the growing crisis in the North Caucasus to develop and refine a new strategy which not only gained the support of the general Russian public, but also was a critical factor in cementing his personal popularity. The strategy also had some notable successes, not least in the relative pacification of Chechnya and the start of the reconstruction of the war-damaged republic. However, the strategy also had its less successful and more negative consequences, which have revived and changed the nature of the insurgency towards a more Islamist and diffuse character and presented new challenges for Russia’s counter-insurgency strategy. The final section makes a division between the social, economic and political factors and the religious and ideological factors which are driving the insurgency and argues that greater weight should be accorded to the religious and ideological factors than often accorded by analysts