Diasporas and secessionist conflicts : the mobilization of the Armenian, Albanian and Chechen diasporas

This article examines the impact of diasporas on secessionist conflicts, focusing on the Albanian, Armenian and Chechen diasporas and the conflicts in Kosovo, Karabakh and Chechnya during the 1990s. How do diasporas radicalize these conflicts? I argue that despite differences in diaspora communal characteristics and the types of the secessionist conflicts, a common pattern of mobilization develops. Large-scale diasporic support for secessionism emerges only after independence is proclaimed by the local elites. From that point onwards diasporas become engaged in a conflict spiral, and transnational coalitions are formed between local secessionist and diaspora groups. Depending on the organizational strength of the local strategic centre and the diasporic institutions, these coalitions endure or dissipate. Diasporas exert radicalization influences on the conflict spiral on two specific junctures – when grave violations of human rights occur in the homeland and when local moderate elites start losing credibility that they can achieve the secessionist goal

Against the rhetoric of complaint: the anthropology of the transformations in Russia

This article is an X-ray of present-day Russian society whose point of departure are the changes experienced over the last 10 years from demography and population movements to changes in everyday life, civic identity and a description of the ruling class to norms of behavior and world views. The author concludes that while life in Russia hasimproved, it has also become more complicated

Forget the © nation© : post-nationalist understanding of nationalism 1

Abstract There is a great failure and mental morass concerning theory and political practice of nation and nationalism, including not only traditional approaches but late nationalism studies as well. The reason is a long-standing and widely shared quest for adequate de nition of what does not exist, in reality, as a collective body. Nation is a powerful metaphor which two forms of social groupings -polity (state) and ethnic entity (the people) -are ghting to have as their exclusive property. In its latest manifestation, it is an argument for geopolitical engineering and for questioning the legitimacy of weaker collective actors on the part of the winners. There is no sense in de ning states and ethnic groups by the category of a nation. The latter is a ghost word, escalated to a level of meta-category through historic accident and inertia of intellectual prescription. A suggested 'hard scenario' for breaking the methodological impasse is a 'zero option', when both major clients for being a nation will be deprived of a luxury called by that label. The process of dismantling the non-operational category should be started with the intellectual courage to forget the nation as an academic de nition and extend this logic into the domain of politics and everyday discourse

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