Introduction

Summary

The introduction opens the book with two puzzles. The first is that the government of the Chechen Republic, which is formally in charge of implementing Russian state law, openly promotes customary law and Sharia. The second is that despite a history of state violence and strong social norms against going to court, state law is nevertheless actively used by some segments of the Chechen population. The chapter argues that state-building in places like Chechnya can be understood as lawfare – the use of state and non-state legal systems to achieve political goals. The chapter discusses how this approach enriches scholarly understanding of state-building. It also outlines the book’s methods of inquiry. It previews the historical analysis that traces transformations of legal pluralism in Chechnya under different incarnations of nested sovereignty: the Russian Empire, the Soviet state, de facto independence, and post-Soviet federation. Then it explains the rationale of comparative analysis that contrasts state-building lawfare in Chechnya with the neighboring Muslim-majority regions of Russia. Finally, it introduces evidence – fieldwork observations, ethnographic interviews, original survey data, official judicial reports, and the corpus of court hearings.