Ideological does not mean intellectual

Happy Friday!

Did you miss me last week? I was supposed to be on holiday, which made a newsletter unlikely — and then my holiday got cancelled, which ironically made it even less likely. But if you can’t take a week off every now and then, you’re doing life all wrong!

Now I’m back, and an important date is approaching: The release of my first (and only?) book! The Caucasus Emirate: Ideology, identity, and insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus will be hitting bookshelves on 20 May. Dance, tiny little man, dance: 🕺

To celebrate, I’m going to dedicate a few issues of the newsletter to some of the most interesting things from this masterpiece. With that in mind, here’s what I’ll cover this week:

• What I mean when I say ideology
• The problem with conflating the intellectual with the ideological
• The shallowness of the Caucasus Emirate’s political project — and why it was still an ideological one

What even is ideology

If we want to have a detailed discussion about ideology and its role in political violence, it helps to know what ideology is. After all, there are dozens of definitions and approaches, and which one you pick has major implications for the conversation that will follow. Define ideology as a mechanism for reinforcing existing power structures (as Marxists do), and it’s difficult to use the concept to analyse challenges to power structures. Assign it a socialisation or integration role (as some scholars of civil war and terrorism do), and it becomes tautological to argue that the primary role of ideology is to socialise people into armed groups.

Unfortunately, many a study of political violence falls at this first hurdle. They either fail to explain what they mean by ideology, or they define it so vaguely that you couldn’t possibly use it in any kind of empirical study. Ideology is in the eye of the beholder. As a result, when people discuss ideology, it’s far from clear they are talking about the same thing. Throw in the fact that the word is used to describe things operating at very different levels — a system of philosophical thought (e.g. jihadism), a description for a political system (e.g. that of China), or a description of a group or individual (e.g. the Red Brigades or Osama bin Laden) — and you have a recipe for confusion.

Do I try to resolve these definitional debates and offer the one definition to rule them all? No. I doubt its possible or worth the effort. Plus, I’m not delusional enough to think anyone would listen to me if I did. Instead, I simply plant my flag in the ground. I use a robust definition that encompasses key aspects of the term, which you can find in the book. But, to be honest, I have always found my translation of the definition to be more helpful in actually thinking about ideology: Ideologies set out a vision of the way the world is, how it should be, and how adherents should act to bridge the divide between the two.

The problematic conflation of the ideological with the intellectual

No less pervasive that a lack of clarity over what the term means is the persistent conflation of the ideological with the intellectual. Many scholars treat the two as synonymous, and therefore view ideology as something doctrinal, rooted in a core body of texts. A lack of intellectual coherence, or ignorance of these texts, can then be used as proof that ideology is irrelevant (which can be a neat shortcut, because it’s much easier to find someone who hasn’t read a book than it is to analyse the book itself!).

Can ideology be doctrinal? Sure. But you don’t have to go far into the world of political violence to find the limits of this view. The Provisional IRA (probably the world’s most-studied terrorist group) was hardly a movement of scholars. The Islamic State explicitly mobilised against the jihadist scholarship of Al-Qaeda. Men of action, not letters, are in fact quite common among those with a predilection for shooting things and blowing them up.

At the same time, both of these groups had a very clear conception of the problem they faced, how it could be addressed, and how they expected people to behave — even if that vision was often shallowly defined and poorly articulated. If you think the Islamic State was a non-ideological movement, then the problem lies with how you understand ideology, not the group. To square this particular circle, scholars often have to introduce other terms (worldview, beliefs, traditions) to account for the ideas behind the violence.

The shallowness of the IK’s political project — and why it was still deeply ideological

All of this matters deeply to our efforts to understand a political project like the Caucasus Emirate (IK) — a movement that represented the main domestic security threat to the Russian state for eight years — or its successors.

The IK was not, to put it mildly, a movement of intellectuals. Its ideas often lacked sophistication, as I demonstrate in some detail in the book. Although the discussion of ‘root causes’ of the conflict in the North Caucasus rightly gets a lot of attention, the IK’s leaders often neglected any detailed discussion of the political situation. And this problem became more pronounced as time went by, such that, by the end, you would be hard pressed to work out from their statements what the IK was fighting against (although the IK’s websites picked up some of the slack).

The same is true of the vision of the future that they offered. Although leaders united around the idea of establishing a sharia state as a general goal, only one of them (Anzor Astemirov, definitely my favourite insurgent leader) offered any details on what this actually meant. The picture they painted of what their desired Islamic state would look like lacked depth and sophistication. Instead, sharia functioned as a trope and a blank canvas, and audiences were expected to bring their own visions of the future to the table.

The political programme of the IK, then — its doctrinal elements — was underdeveloped. But this does not mean that the IK wasn’t ideological. The basics for the IK's leaders were clear: The problem was Russia, and what was needed was to drive it from the region and install a sharia-governed state in its place. The simplicity of this idea found enough traction among a section of the population that the IK was able to sustain its armed struggle for years. What the IK’s leaders weren’t particularly concerned about, however, was spending much time debating the finer details. Instead, they devoted much more attention to the question of who should populate this future world — something I’ll look at in a separate newsletter.

If we fail to decouple the intellectual from the ideological, we're liable to misunderstand what the IK was, and why it lasted as long as it did. It offered an identity-based ideology, not an intellectual one. And it was really only that ideology and project that brought various groups under one umbrella and allow us to talk of a North Caucasus insurgency. Strip away the ideology, and you're left with disparate movements with little to tie them together.

Want to learn more about the ideology of the Caucasus Emirate? Then please buy the book! Or, even better, persuade your library, institution, or rich relative to buy it – I'll admit, it's overpriced at the moment, but it should come down over time (and, if you can't afford it, I'll do a giveaway once I've got my hands on it, so stay tuned).