Turpal-Ali, a young man, and Deshi, a young woman from one of the villages in Chechnya, were in love and wanted to get married.Footnote 1 But Deshi’s parents were strongly against their marriage. The issue was that Turpal-Ali and Deshi were distant relatives and according to Chechen customary law, known as adat, a bride and a groom cannot be related within seven generations. Turpal-Ali then decided to arrange a bride-kidnapping, a practice also justified by references to custom. Turpal-Ali and his friends kidnapped Deshi from the street and brought her to his family home, hoping that this act would change her parents’ decision. Families of women kidnapped this way often force them to stay and get married to avoid potential rumors and ultimately protect family honor. However, Deshi’s parents remained firm. They took their daughter back. Then they appealed for religious arbitration – a Sharia trial – against Turpal-Ali. Unlike adat, Sharia sees bride-kidnapping as a gross transgression. Deshi was apparently complicit in the kidnapping, but she denied it during the Sharia arbitration. A local qadi, an Islamic judge, heard the case and ruled that Turpal-Ali should be punished with flogging, forty strokes. According to custom, any corporal punishment is a serious offense against one’s honor and Turpal-Ali’s family became very angry at Deshi and her family.
Some time later, the elders of the village were drinking vodka at the river bank. Alcohol is effectively banned in Chechnya, but some Chechens who belong to the older “Soviet” generation still manage to get liquor. During this gathering, Musa, Turpal-Ali’s family patriarch, publicly offended Deshi’s honor by calling her a slut. In response, Said, Deshi’s family patriarch, punched Musa in the face. When Musa came home, he told his three sons that he had been beaten by Said. The sons took baseball bats and knives and went to Said’s house to avenge the offense. Despite the fact that Said was much older than the attackers, he was able to fight back. In fact, he was a master of wrestling, and during the fight he took a knife away from one of Musa’s sons and killed him with it. The murder trial that I attended in a district court judged Said according to Russian state law. In parallel, the two families were negotiating to avoid blood revenge, another major customary institution, in response to the murder of Musa’s son. The fact that Said killed the man in an act of self-defense mattered little. According to adat, blood must be avenged with blood. As a part of the informal resolution between the two feuding sides, Said’s family was banished from the village. The details of the events that led to the murder and the negotiations regarding blood revenge were not heard in the courtroom – I learned them in the corridors of the court.
This anecdote illustrates the state of legal pluralism in contemporary Chechnya. Even though there is only one de jure legal system – Russian statutory law – there are also powerful parallel systems of de facto law: one based on customary law (adat) and another based on Islamic law (Sharia). Individuals have to navigate the complex interrelationships between these legal systems and sometimes have to choose which forum to bring their disputes to.
The presence of multiple alternative legal systems also has a tremendous political significance. References to adat and Sharia have become commonplace in media reports on Chechnya. For example, after the large-scale insurgent attack on Chechnya’s capital Grozny on December 4, 2014, the Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov proclaimed through his Instagram account that relatives of people who killed police officers would be expelled from the region “without the right to return, and their houses will be razed to the ground.” A few days later, unidentified militias burned the houses of the alleged terrorists’ families. The government referred to the principle of collective punishment, which is one of the core principles of the Chechen customary law, but which violates Russian state law. Magomed Daudov, the Speaker of the Chechen Parliament and Kadyrov’s closest associate, went even further. Once he called for Sharia arbitration against a politician from the neighboring Republic of Ingushetia. Another time, he announced blood revenge against a popular anti-government blogger. Both Kadyrov and Daudov are high-level Russian state officials in charge of implementing Russian state law. Yet they publicly appealed to non-state legal systems rooted in tradition and religion. On the institutional level, the government of Chechnya semi-formally introduced qadi courts (a Sharia forum) and councils of elders (a customary forum) all across the region, even though these institutions are not compatible with Russian law.
The Puzzles
The persistence and power of non-state legal systems in Chechnya should not be surprising, especially given the long history of resistance to Russian rule and state repression in the region. In the post-Soviet period, resistance and repression culminated in two bloody wars (1994–1996 and 1999–2009).Footnote 2 In the mid-1990s, Chechnya was a de facto independent state where Sharia law was implemented. During the wars, many Chechens mobilized to fight the Russian army. In turn, the Russian army used brutal violence against the population. Thus, the long history of the conflict can potentially explain why many Chechens reject state-sponsored justice and turn to religious and customary authorities to solve their disputes.
But not all Chechens reject state law. Consider the case of Seda, a woman who lived in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Seda was kicked out of her home by her husband and his relatives when she was seven months pregnant. She returned to her parents’ home, where she gave birth to a girl. A few months later, the relatives of her former husband arrived at her parents’ house and demanded that she return “their child.” According to Chechen customary law, children belong to their paternal family. Seda’s male relatives agreed with the reasoning of her former husband’s family and gave the baby away. Despite social pressure to accept her fate, Seda filed a lawsuit in a state court. The court ruled in her favor and returned Seda’s daughter to her.
Seda’s behavior is not an anomaly. From 2009, when the Second Chechen War officially ended, to 2016, when I finished my field research, Russian state courts in Chechnya, which were literally reestablished on the war’s ruins, heard more than half a million cases.Footnote 3 The vast majority of them – around 70 percent – were civil disputes. Given that Russian state law was considered the “law of the enemy” during the war, and that reliance on it can be penalized by family and community ostracism, the fact that state law is nevertheless utilized in dispute resolution in postwar Chechnya is striking. No less striking is that the government of the Chechen Republic, which is formally in charge of implementing state law, openly promotes customary law and Sharia, as the anecdotes above indicate. In this book, I address these two interrelated puzzles. First, I study government policies towards non-state legal systems – the legal politics of state-building from above. Second, I explore the individual legal preferences and behavior that constitute state-building from below.
The Argument
This book argues that state-building can be productively explored through the lens of lawfare – the use of state and non-state legal systems to achieve political, social, or economic goals.Footnote 4 I employ the notion of lawfare to capture the agency of politicians and lay individuals within the structural conditions of legal pluralism, a situation when state law co-exists with non-state legal systems. I contend that legal pluralism is not just an artifact of a weak state or underdevelopment. Nor is it simply a reflection of a ruler’s ideology or an aspect of local culture. Politicians sometimes suppress non-state legal systems and often ignore them, but in other political configurations they strategically promote legal pluralism. Individuals sometimes attach strong normative commitments to justice systems based on tradition and religion, but in other situations strategically “shop” between state and non-state forums. Top-down legal politics and individual legal beliefs and behaviors together shape the particular form of state-building.
The keys to the puzzles of state-building lawfare in places like Chechnya – i.e., conflict-ridden peripheries where the local population is culturally distinct from the core group of the state – are found in the political and social cleavages that exist within these regions. The major political cleavage that arises is from conditions of nested sovereignty – empires in the past and federalism now. Almost all of the peripheries of postcolonial states are characterized by acute problem of fragmented social control. Aceh in Indonesia, Mindanao in the Philippines, each of the seven ethnic states in Myanmar, Kashmir in India, the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, the Anglophone regions of Cameroon, the Tuareg regions in Mali, the Mexican state of Chiapas, and many other “rogue” peripheries illustrate this point. Communities living in these peripheries have their own systems of justice that are often rooted in tradition and religion. Under the conditions of nested sovereignty, both central and peripheral rulers in these peripheries may pursue their own state-building projects and lawfare based on manipulation of the plural systems of justice.
The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Family life, and in particular the regulation of female sexuality is a major arena for struggles over social control. Questions about who can marry and/or divorce whom as well as how; who inherits property; and notions of honor and shame are crucial for national, ethnic, and religious boundary-making. Consequently, the state and social forces expend special effort to control these spheres. Deshi’s and Seda’s stories exemplify the critical role that gender plays in peripheral state-building lawfare.
Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. The canonical theoretical approach associated with Charles Tilly links state-building to external warfare.Footnote 5 The account presented in this book changes the focus to internal conflict, in particular the separatist armed struggle that fractures nested sovereignty and leads to competitive state-building. Studying the interrelationship between warfare and lawfare has an important analytical advantage. Legal pluralism is deeply embedded in history and culture. Conflict serves as a shock that destabilizes societies and presents an opportunity to explore the micro-foundations of individual behavior and government policies under legal pluralism. In this book, I understand conflict as a process: the radical rupture of “normal” social life as a result of experiences of violence that leave profound social and political legacies.
Conflict and political violence accompanied state-building lawfare throughout Chechen history. Legal pluralism developed in Chechnya in the nineteenth century as a result of Russian colonization and anticolonial armed struggle. I argue that when the metropole’s grip on the periphery is firm, legal politics is dictated by center’s ideology and state capacity. The Russian Empire institutionalized legal pluralism in Chechnya in the nineteenth century as a part of its divide-and-rule strategy and as a response to low state capacity and the orientalist vision of the local society. The Soviet authorities, driven by their high-modernist ideology of legal centralism and relying on soaring state capacity, attempted to eradicate custom and Sharia in Chechnya. However, the project ultimately failed because of Stalin’s forced deportation of the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia in 1944. This brute use of state violence strengthened Chechen national identity and alienated Chechens from state law. Yet when the metropole’s power falters as a result of political crisis or conflict, local rulers turn legal pluralism into an arena for lawfare aimed at ensuring their political survival.
The book documents how in postwar Chechnya the regional government headed by Kremlin-imposed ruler Ramzan Kadyrov promotes customary law and Sharia to facilitate local political control. First, this policy allows the local ruler to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, which both have great appeal among the Chechen population and especially among men. Second, it increases the autonomy of the regional authorities from Moscow, the metropole. Third, it follows the rationale of coalition-building: the local government incorporates the traditional authorities and ideological supporters of non-state legal systems into its coalition.
The decade-long separatist armed conflict transformed the nature of coalition-formation through the militarization of authority. The war brought men who used to carry guns into government offices. Even though many of them now wear suits rather than uniforms, their governance practices differ fundamentally from those of the ideal type of Weberian bureaucrat. These rebels-turned-bureaucrats are strong ideological supporters of custom and Sharia. Promotion of non-state legal systems in postwar Chechnya can be interpreted as a concession to this powerful constituency.
At the same time, the conflict paradoxically created demand for state law from below. I document how the experiences of state violence during the First Chechen War led to an alienation from the Russian state among the local population. However, everything changed during the Second War. Collective state violence during the Second War led to deep structural transformations. It ruined traditional hierarchies and spurred the penetration of state law into Chechen family and community life. What was distinct about the Second War? It was more brutal, longer in time, and involved massive inter-Chechen violence. The effects of these conflict-induced structural transformations overshadowed the strengthening of ethnic and religious identities in response to state violence.
The Second Chechen War was a blow to all hierarchies – whether generational, clan, or class, but especially in gender relations. As a result, after the war, a sizable share of Chechen women started using the Russian state legal system, a system that, in contrast to customary law and Sharia, at least formally acknowledges gender equality. State law is corrupt, inefficient, slow, and its use is associated with community and family ostracism. Yet, many Chechen women prefer to use state law.
My study suggests that the disruption of gender hierarchies can be attributed to several interrelated mechanisms. Perhaps the most significant cultural change was that the conflict forced women to enter the public sphere. Women became the representatives of their families and communities and as such interacted with military and civilian administrations. Even women who remained traditionalists at heart had to learn the bureaucratic practices of the Russian state. At the same time, conflict gave rise to militarized masculinity and neotraditionalism among Chechen men. This divergence was multiplied by changes in bargaining power within families due to wartime transformations of gender positions in the labor market. Simply put, the war left many men unemployed and many women became the breadwinners in their families. Furthermore, the effect of the disruption of gender hierarchies was exacerbated by the more general process of community disintegration. Extended families and communities became substantially less powerful as a result of the killings of influential leaders, mass migration, and intracommunal feuds. This change diminished the ability of the extended family and community to apply social pressure against women who used state courts. Finally, after the war, many of the NGOs created during wartime refocused on gender problems and served as support structures for women’s legal mobilization.
This book shows that women’s legal mobilization in Chechnya faced a strong backlash from the Chechen regional government. The most notorious manifestations of the neotraditionalist policies of the Chechen government have been the semiformal introduction of polygamy, support for the practice of honor killings, and the imposition of a restrictive women’s dress code. Furthermore, the men in charge of state law actively disrupt its functioning. For instance, law enforcement agencies often do not enforce child custody decisions in favor of mothers who, like Seda, won their cases in court. This backlash can be interpreted as an attempt to build a political order on the re-traditionalization of social order.
Thus, this book reverses the classic story of state-building. In contrast to the dominant narrative, in which the government attempts to penetrate a strong society, and the society resists these attempts, this book shows how local agents of the government can undermine state justice systems by promoting non-state institutions, and how some segments of the population can voluntarily use formal state law that might seem foreign to them. The book shows that legal pluralism is an inherently political phenomenon, an arena of contestation between individuals, social groups, and political actors.
Significance of the Study
This book is about Chechnya, a tiny region approximately the size of Connecticut or Northern Ireland. However, its role in post-Soviet Russian politics has been inversely proportional to its size. For instance, Vladimir Putin’s rise to power from relative obscurity has often been attributed to his initiation of the Second Chechen War. Speculations about Chechnya abound in Russian and Western media, but academic studies on the ground have been rare. This book provides an account that incorporates both the notorious Chechen warlords and ordinary Chechens, with a particular focus on their everyday life, disputes, worldviews, and narratives about history. The book deals with the politicized and controversial issues of Sharia law, armed conflict, and gender relations. It de-exoticizes these phenomena by relating them to state-building under legal pluralism.
The issue of legal pluralism is relevant well beyond Chechnya. In his grand account of the formation of Western law, historian Harold Berman observed that “the coexistence and competition within the same community of diverse jurisdictions and diverse legal systems” was “perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Western legal tradition.”Footnote 6 Some degree of legal pluralism is present in all contemporary societies. Even in places with a strong rule of law, formal state laws coexist and interact with alternative dispute resolution forums, adjudication among religious minorities, university codes of honor, and internal corporate statutes.
Legal pluralism is particularly pervasive, however, in postcolonial societies and so-called fragile or weak states, where formal state institutions compete for jurisdiction with powerful legal systems that are rooted in religion and tradition. According to some scholarly estimates, as many as sixty-one countries explicitly recognize some form of traditional governance and customary law.Footnote 7 In many other countries and regions, non-state legal systems operate without being formally recognized. For example, in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, the formal state legal system coexisted with Taliban courts, which operated according to Sharia, as well as with arbitration through a myriad of customary organizations.Footnote 8 In sub-Saharan Africa, many countries grant substantial de jure powers to customary leaders or informally guarantee these chiefs nonintervention in their jurisdiction.Footnote 9 Recently, there has been a resurgence of traditional governance in Latin America.Footnote 10 Quite often, legal systems based on tradition and religion are promoted at the subnational level. For example, some provinces in Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Pakistan have recently adopted Sharia regulations, and states in Mexico have recognized traditional governance. These places are characterized by nested sovereignty – a political arrangement that allows for local rulers’ political autonomy and thus approximates the imperial setup of indirect rule, which was a fertile ground for legal pluralism in the past.
Legal pluralism is a fascinating phenomenon in itself: how does a society function when there are multiple alternative rules of the game? Political theorists and legal scholars have long been writing about its normative implications for sovereignty, secularism, understanding of law and violence, legitimacy, minority rights, etc. – the list goes on.Footnote 11 This book looks at legal pluralism to rethink state-building.
State-building, understood as the institutionalization of the long-term domination of state organizations and personnel in society, has three major dimensions: coercive, extractive, and regulatory, or to put it simply, violence, taxes, and justice. Academic literature focuses primarily on the coercive and extractive dimensions. In this book, I shift attention to the regulatory dimension, that is, the use of state law vis-à-vis alternative forms of social control.Footnote 12 The issue of social control is essential because its distribution reflects the relationship among the state, religion, and tradition as competing sources of authority.
This book disaggregates the state by acknowledging the presence of multiple sources of social control and multiple layers of political authority where actors have different interests in the pace and scope of implementation of state-building. It questions the perspective that state rulers always seek to monopolize social control and attempt to suppress alternative non-state legal institutions. That view is based on the idealized Westphalian picture of sovereignty. The reality of state-building is often quite different. Scholars have highlighted that there is a variety of state-building forms, from centralized rational-legal states to the loose conglomerates of local notables, chiefs, and religious elites, and even local bandits and warlords.Footnote 13 Often there is also drastic variation in state penetration within countries. As a result, in many states, legitimate use of force and lawmaking and enforcement have never been fully monopolized and social control has remained fragmented. In this light, promotion of non-state legal systems should be considered not an anomaly, but a viable strategy of state-building, especially if we recognize that the main aim for state-building is often the political survival of those who are in charge of the state.
I show how legal pluralism might directly strengthen local rulers in situations of nested sovereignty. For them, the promotion of non-state legal systems can be a viable strategy for establishing authoritarian enclaves by ensuring autonomy from the center, incorporating communal elites, and legitimizing their rule. Thus, this book opens a new perspective on the politicization of law and the judicialization of politics, especially in authoritarian contexts.Footnote 14 My study also shows that rulers turn to law not only to prosecute potential political challengers, build appealing legal conditions to attract investment, and strengthen discipline within the bureaucracy. They also care about such mundane cases as divorce, car accidents, or small debt, because the ways these cases are resolved affect the ruler’s legitimacy and their coalitions of support. Even petty disputes affect high politics.
By looking at state-building from below, this book reformulates the classic question of “Why people obey the law” into the issue of “Which law people obey.” Most studies of state-building have treated it as a top-down, government-driven process. However, state-building can also occur from the bottom-up. It is expressed in the choices of state institutions over non-state ones. For centuries, many people actively sought to avoid the state – James Scott described this phenomenon as “the art of not being governed.”Footnote 15 Social scientists have also shown that individuals are able to govern themselves without intervention from the state; examples include the diamond market of New York City; the cattle industry in Shasta County, California; medieval long-distance Jewish traders; fishermen in Alanya, Turkey; brokers in the trading markets of early post-Soviet Moscow; and many more.Footnote 16 When individuals are unable to govern themselves and do not trust the state, they often turn for justice to mafias, gangs, warlords, or vigilantes.Footnote 17 In many situations, informal non-state institutions compete with the state; however, despite recognition of the importance of this competition between institutions, there has been little systematic research on individuals’ preferences for the state versus its alternatives.Footnote 18
A legal pluralism framework highlights the crucial role of gender in state-building. Scholarship on state-building has focused primarily on class cleavage. However, gender conflicts also order state–society relations. For instance, Gregory Massell has shown that in the absence of class conflict, the Bolshevik state in Central Asia provoked gender conflict in order to penetrate its dense society.Footnote 19 In fact, gender is especially likely to become the central cleavage of state-building under legal pluralism. Customary law as a cornerstone of clan-based governance is often explicitly discriminatory toward women. Although religious law, and Sharia in particular, can promote women’s rights under certain circumstances, secular laws in the twenty-first century generally provide more protections for women against discrimination, at least on paper.Footnote 20 As a result, issues related to control of sexuality, honor, and shame become an important arena of boundary-making between the state and society.
The book also contributes to the exploration of state-building and the rule of law in the aftermath of violent conflict. Evidence from Colombia to Sudan and from Guatemala to Iraq, demonstrates that violent conflict increases the need for dispute resolution and also exacerbates the complexity of the presence of multiple legal systems by politicizing the authorities in charge of the competing legal systems.Footnote 21 Recent studies have shown as well that the dismissal and misunderstanding of non-state legal systems in conflict-ridden environments can lead to narrow-minded rule of law policymaking that is bound to fail.Footnote 22 Some studies argue that state recognition and promotion of non-state authorities helps to maintain peace, while others paint non-state legal authorities as potential spoilers of state-building projects.Footnote 23 Given that the establishment of the rule of law is a primary concern in post-conflict settings, this line of research is urgent in terms of both theoretical and policy implications.
I do not claim that the prevalence of state law over informal dispute resolution systems is a normatively desirable outcome. In the end, even in advanced post-industrial democratic societies, people settle the majority of their disputes through informal mechanisms rather than courts.Footnote 24 Legal anthropology and sociolegal studies have consistently shown that taking a dispute to court is very much the exception in all societies – it is the nuclear option.Footnote 25 Another consideration is that state and non-state authorities are not always strict alternatives, but often complements.Footnote 26 However, where non-state legal systems directly contradict or challenge state law, their relative prevalence is a crucial indicator of the particular path toward state-building that is being pursued.
Evidence
No book about legal matters can skip a discussion of evidence. My analysis explores the case of postwar Chechnya and places it in historical and comparative perspectives. The historical analysis traces transformations in state-building and legal pluralism in Chechnya under different reincarnations of nested sovereignty: imperial polity, high-modernist Soviet state, and post-Soviet federation. This comparison allows me to explore the impact of different configurations of state capacity and ideology, and different forms of state violence. The comparison of the legacies of two post-Soviet wars which were separated by just a few years highlights the drastically different social and political effects of the two conflicts. The recent history of these conflicts allows me to reconstruct state-building efforts by talking to people who experienced this period, rather than simply relying on historical sources, which tend to better preserve the perspective of the rulers and the elites.
My comparative analysis contrasts state-building lawfare in Chechnya with the neighboring Muslim-majority regions of Russia, namely, Ingushetia and Dagestan.Footnote 27 Ingushetia is almost an ideal comparison point for the post-Soviet political developments in Chechnya. The Ingush people live under the same constellation of legal systems as Chechnya’s population: Russian state law, Sharia, and custom. Like the Chechens, the Ingush people belong to the Vainakh ethnic group; they share customs and social structure. Until 1992, Checheno-Ingushetia was a single federal unit within the USSR and subsequently Russia, but in 1992 they separated: Chechnya proclaimed independence from Russia while Ingushetia remained within the Russian Federation. As a result, Ingushetia was not directly affected by the Chechen wars. Thus, Ingushetia can provide insight into how the interrelationship between state and non-state legal systems pans out in the absence of armed conflict. Dagestan is Chechnya’s neighbor to the east. It is a gem for comparative political research because it exhibits high levels of ethnolinguistic diversity. Dagestan has a distinguished Islamic legal tradition. It shares with Chechnya a history of resistance to Russian colonization, Soviet rule, and of post-Soviet turbulence. Unlike Chechnya, however, Dagestan did not experience large-scale armed conflict and has a highly fragmented and competitive political field. Within Chechnya, I also leverage variation in legal beliefs and behavior across communities and individuals. This allows me to explore state-building lawfare at several levels of analysis: macro, meso, and micro.
The fieldwork for this study consisted of seven research trips to Chechnya that took place in 2014–2016 and lasted for approximately seven months, as well as additional trips to the neighboring regions and trips to interview Chechen diasporas in Europe. I was mostly based in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, but also extensively travelled to other towns and villages. The locations were selected to represent different geographic regions and to capture the variation in experiences of collective violence.
Throughout my fieldwork, I conducted semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and observations. In particular, I rely on interviews with seventy-eight key interlocutors. I interviewed authorities in charge of all three alternative legal systems: judges, prosecutors and police officers (Russian state law), imams and qadis (Sharia), and elders (adat). I also interviewed state officials, lawyers, members of NGOs, as well as Chechen intelligentsia – university professors, ethnographers, historians, and journalists. In addition to individual interviews, I organized group discussions, including discussions with the councils of elders in two locations. During the interviews with legal authorities, I asked my respondents about the most common disputes, how these disputes were usually resolved (actual practices), and how they believed the disputes should be resolved (normative beliefs). Another set of interviews was primarily focused on conflict experiences. I interviewed former politicians and former fighters; present-day government officials; local members of different NGOs, who helped displaced Chechens in Ingushetia and victimized families in Chechnya throughout the Second War and counterinsurgency campaign; and local academics and journalists, who covered the conflict. The interviewees represented different political sides during the war, different regions, and different wartime roles. Through these interviews, I aimed to reconstruct the history of individual and community victimization, wartime governance, and politics.
In addition to the interviews, another principal method of the study was observation. Most importantly, I attended several hearings at the state federal court in one of the Chechen towns that allowed me to observe cases like the trial of Said. I also observed several Sharia arbitrations conducted by district qadis. Other observations were of the behavior of government officials, the work of the NGOs, classes at local universities, academic conferences, prayers at mosques, weddings, funerals, and even conversations in cafés.
Based on these qualitative materials, I identified the most common disputes in Chechnya, traced their resolution practices, and reconstructed justifications for choices between alternative systems. This analysis allowed me to form a rich descriptive account of legal pluralism in Chechnya. To further investigate legal beliefs and behaviors, I relied on the quantitative analysis of original surveys and data of court cases in postwar Chechnya.
To analyze preferences for state law versus alternative legal systems based on religion and custom, I conducted a survey of Chechnya’s population. No major Russian or international polling firms work in Chechnya. Lev Gudkov, the head of Levada Center, the most authoritative survey research firm in Russia even said in an interview:
We do not conduct surveys in Chechnya, because it is meaningless … The levels of fear and terror makes it meaningless … Survey research in Chechnya is like survey research under Stalin: you’ll get only positive responses.Footnote 28
Originally, I was also skeptical about the possibility of survey research in Chechnya, but a successful pilot survey proved me wrong. One of the key features of the survey was the use of local enumerators. My consultations with local researchers suggested that many people in Chechnya would not talk to outsiders. Therefore, I hired and trained a team of interviewers who were either students at local universities or junior research fellows at the Chechen branch of the Academy of Sciences. Employing local enumerators helped me to obtain a high response rate as well as trust from the respondents.Footnote 29 Another principal feature of my survey was that it was grounded in my immersive qualitative research. The main survey questions aimed to reveal preferences for alternative legal systems and were based on a set of vignettes – scenarios of disputes – uncovered in my interviews and observations.
In addition to the attitudinal survey data, I also collected behavioral data from state courts. The North Caucasus is infamous for the difficulty of accessing any administrative data and for the poor quality of data that is found. Even the actual population of the Chechen Republic is unclear. Officially, it is 1.4 million people, but my conversations with local officials usually converged at a number around one million. Perhaps the most telling example of the unreliability of administrative data from Chechnya is found in an article that shows how the fabrication of official statistics led to a remote mountainous Chechen district, Sharoy, being declared the wealthiest territory in all of Russia.Footnote 30 However, quite miraculously, I was able to obtain official reports on the number of cases heard in the Justice-of-the-Peace Courts in Chechnya from 2011 to 2014 and assemble a massive record of court hearings in these courts from the government webpages. Analysis of these different types of data and data from different sources allows me to draw a rich picture of social reality in Chechnya and triangulate the evidence.
The empirical focus on Chechnya, no doubt a unique place, imposes scope conditions for this study. Chechnya is not an independent country, but a part of the Russian Federation. I do not attempt to explore the influence of the Chechen conflict on state–society relations in the rest of Russia.Footnote 31 Russia is a federation and federalism creates a formal framework for indirect rule by allowing regional governments to implement their own politics of state-building to some degree. Thus, federalism or more broadly, nested sovereignty, is a key scope condition. Nontrivial also is that Chechnya was a part of the Soviet Union, a system of government that has had lasting social and political legacies.Footnote 32 To sum up, Chechnya is a postcolonial, post-conflict, post-Soviet society that is a part of a federation. Imposing all these scope conditions simultaneously leaves us with a rather narrow focus. Instead, I use each of these conditions as analytical bridges to other cases. I hope that this deep analysis of the Chechen case enables better understanding of other manifestations of indirect rule, peripheral state-building, federalism, post-Soviet, postcolonial, and post-conflict political developments, both historical and contemporary.
Organization of the Book
The rest of the book is organized in three parts. Part I includes two chapters very different from each other – on theory and ethnography. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of state-building at the periphery: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. The rest of the chapter is divided between the reasoning about political order – government policies towards legal pluralism, and about social order – individual choices among different legal systems that, in aggregate, amount to state-building from below. Chapter 2 presents ethnographic narratives on my immersion in Chechen social life, my reflections on the role of positionality and subjectivity in shaping the research, the ethics of the study, and grounded perspectives on the key elements of the story: legal pluralism, conflict, and the foundations of social and political orders in Chechnya.
Part II analyzes the politics of legal pluralism. Chapter 3 provides a historical analysis of state-building in Chechnya through the lens of legal pluralism. There, I give an account of the formation and development of legal pluralism under the Russian imperial administration and the Soviet rule. The chapter shows that the politics of the imperial and Soviet authorities toward legal pluralism can be explained by state capacity and ideology. Chapter 4 covers the post-Soviet period of de facto independent Chechen statehood and the armed conflict in the 1990s. The chapter shows that when peripheral authorities acquire room to maneuver vis-à-vis the metropole, their policies toward legal pluralism are dictated by the struggles for political survival. Chapter 5 further develops the political logic of legal pluralism promotion by investigating the political order established by Ramzan Kadyrov in postwar Chechnya. The chapter documents the widespread instrumental use of non-state legal systems. It then shows that Ramzan Kadyrov promoted non-state legal systems in order to win legitimacy, increase his autonomy from the federal center, and build a coalition of support from non-state authorities and former rebels.
Chapters 6–8, which constitute Part III, explore legal politics from below. Chapter 6 is a descriptive account of legal pluralism in contemporary Chechnya. I describe the actors in charge of dispute resolution, the most common disputes, their forms of resolution, and the legal consciousness of the population. I then explore the factors that drive individual preferences for alternative legal systems and spatial variations in legal behavior. Chapter 7 presents an analysis of the legacies of conflict in legal preferences and behavior at the individual, community, and societal levels. The analysis shows that while collective violence during the First War led to alienation from the Russian state among the Chechen population, the Second War led to community fragmentation and the demand for state law. Chapter 8 explores the legacy of the wartime disruption of gender hierarchies and women’s mobilization through state law. It presents a general picture of gender relations in Chechnya and its evolution over time. Special attention is paid to the role of women during the conflict. The analysis shows that conflict, and in particular the Second War, created conditions for women to mobilize state law to advance their interests. The chapter also brings attention to the backlash against war-induced transformations of gender roles and women’s legal mobilization.
The Conclusion situates the politics of legal pluralism in a comparative perspective by contrasting Chechnya with other Russian regions and other contexts of postcolonial and post-conflict political development. I also discuss the implications of this study for our understanding of legal pluralism as an instrument of domination and of law as the “weapon of the weak,” as well as reflect on the implications of my findings for post-Soviet Russian politics.
