This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of peripheral state-building: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. Legal pluralism is an issue of fragmented social control. State–society struggles for social control are complicated because both the state and society are internally divided. The concept of nested sovereignty captures how the state is divided in imperial and federal settings. The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. Building on this foundation, the chapter then theorizes state-building lawfare from above. In particular, it outlines when and why central and peripheral authorities promote non-state legal systems, as well as how conflict changes the political rationale of promoting legal pluralism. After that, the chapter interrogates state-building lawfare from below – focusing on individual choices between state and non-state legal systems. It also speculates about how conflict transforms the driving forces behind these choices – in identities and social norms – as well as resources, interests, and hierarchies, with a special focus on gender relations.

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.