This chapter covers the turbulent period of the de facto independent Chechnya in the 1990s, characterized by the resurgence of traditionalism and religion. The war that broke out between Moscow and Chechen separatists in 1994 reduced state capacity to rubble and made the ideology of political Islam dominant among Chechen politicians. After the end of the First Chechen War in 1996, the victorious separatist leaders enacted Sharia. This chapter contends that promotion of Sharia in independent Chechnya was not driven by ideology or demand by the population. It shows that this strategy was used by incumbents to increase their legitimacy by association with religion and tradition, through distance from the Kremlin, and with concessions to the powerful constituency of former rebels. At the same time, the incumbents were wary of strengthening the non-state forums too much, because they were afraid that powerful legal systems based on tradition and religion would become arenas of political contestation and ultimately be hijacked by the opposition. The rulers turned to promotion of Sharia and custom only when they were directly challenged and needed to reinforce political control regardless of the costs.

This chapter presents ethnographic narratives on immersion in Chechen social life, 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 argument: legal pluralism, conflict, and the foundations of social and political orders in Chechnya. The chapter starts with one extraordinary Chechen woman’s family history, which illustrates life in Chechnya during the time of the Soviet Union, the troubled times of de facto Chechen independence in the 1990s, and during the Chechen wars. The chapter then explores the roles of outsider status, language, religion, and gender in the co-production of knowledge between the researcher and study participants. In the following part, the chapter presents a thick description of the functioning of legal pluralism and the traps of orientalist romanticization and essentialization in studying it. Next comes a description of extended family as the principal social organization in contemporary Chechnya, which debunks the stereotypes of the all-powerful Chechen clans. The chapter documents the lived experiences of dictatorship and violent conflict and then turns to a discussion of the ethics of the study under these conditions.

This chapter investigates the instrumental use of non-state legal systems in postwar Chechnya by the Kremlin-imposed ruler Ramzan Kadyrov. It argues that Kadyrov has been promoting legal pluralism in order to win legitimacy among segments of the population, increase his autonomy from the federal center, and better accommodate former rebels, who became state bureaucrats in the postwar period. This chapter casts doubt on alternative explanations. The evidence that Ramzan Kadyrov’s policy towards non-state legal systems is radically different from the policy of his father, who was a cleric and traditionalist, yet strengthened Russian state law and abstained from promoting Sharia and custom, is troubling for the path-dependence argument. Meanwhile, the narrative of how Ramzan Kadyrov was able to effectively “cancel” the customs of bride kidnapping and blood revenge – the most notorious Chechen customs – indicates that the state capacity explanation is also limited. The second part of the chapter compares lawfare in Kadyrov’s Chechnya with legal politics in the neighboring regions of Ingushetia and Dagestan. These comparisons further support the idea that local leaders in the North Caucasus promote non-state legal systems not because of ideological commitments, but as a way to ensure their political survival.

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.

This chapter provides a historical analysis of state-building in Chechnya through the lens of law. It gives an account of the formation and development of legal pluralism under the Russian colonial administration and Soviet rule. The chapter shows that the politics of the imperial and Soviet authorities regarding legal pluralism can be explained by state capacity and ideology. The Russian Empire institutionalized legal pluralism as part of a divide and rule strategy, a response to low state capacity, and an orientalist ideology. When the Empire collapsed in 1917, local actors attempted to mobilize Sharia for competing political projects. Even the Bolsheviks initially built a surprising coalition with religious leaders. Upon the consolidation of Soviet rule, the central government attempted to eliminate legal pluralism in the region. The Soviet drive to ensure legal centralism was fueled by the ideology of modernization and increased state capacity. However, the project ultimately failed because of Stalin’s forced deportation of the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia in 1944. State violence strengthened the Chechen national identity and alienated Chechens from state law. After the return to the Caucasus in 1957, Chechens remained marginalized in the Soviet state-building project and preserved customary and religious institutions.

Where does the Russian case or, rather, the two distinct periods of terrorism in Russia, stand vis-à-vis the world’s historical waves of terrorism, from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century? What are the key aspects specific to the main types of terrorism in post-Soviet Russia (i.e. terrorism by separatist-Islamist rebels in Chechnya and the broader North Caucasian region in the course of the first post-Soviet decades, and the more recent phenomenon of transnationalised, but home-grown, Islamist terrorism inspired by ‘global jihad’)? How specific are they, compared to typologically similar varieties of terrorism elsewhere? How does the rise and fall of terrorism in post-Soviet Russia relate to the factors of sociopolitical and socio-economic transition, regime type, functionality and legitimacy of state power, public perceptions and transnationalisation, in general and as compared to terrorism in the Russian Empire? How can very low levels of domestic terrorism during the Soviet period be explained? Finally, does history teach us anything? Can any lessons be gleaned from almost three decades of the more recent, contemporary history of terrorism in post-Soviet Russia? Have they been? If so, do they apply to Russia alone or more generally? These are just some of the questions that the angle taken in this volume raises in relation to Russia and that require both its main historical periods of terrorist activity to be addressed.