Lessons unlearned: How Russia’s extremism strategy misses the mark
As 2024 came to an end, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed off on a new Strategy for Combatting Extremism in the Russian Federation. The document aims to chart a comprehensive approach to addressing key threats and challenges. In reality, its shortcomings will rehash familiar narratives and repeat previous mistakes.
The strategy recycles familiar narratives that paint Russia as a country surrounded by external enemies and threatened by internal saboteurs. More troublingly, it replicates the mistakes of the early 2000s, when loose definitions and poorly defined priorities contributed to a deteriorating security situation.
Threats and enemies everywhere
The Strategy is a direct replacement for a similarly named document, published in 2020 and due to expire this year. It aspires to determine “the goals, tasks, and main directions of state policy in the sphere of combatting extremism.” It also claims to add specifics to other key documents, such as the 2022 National Security Strategy and the 2023 Foreign Policy Concept. At 39 pages, it is twice as long as its predecessor.
Its complementarity with those other strategic documents explains the familiarity of many of its themes. Russia is portrayed as a country surrounded by enemies and infiltrated by saboteurs. The list of threats includes colour revolutions, hybrid warfare, Russophobia, migrants, the falsification of history, Neonazis, religious radicals trained abroad and, implicitly, the West. Novaya Gazeta aptly characterised the Strategy as a “manifesto of a besieged fortress.”
A strategy without focus
The list of threats and challenges facing Russia articulated by the document is a long one, and this points to one of the core problems with the strategy: It lacks a clear focus. It treats anything and everything undesirable as extremism, and it continually blurs the lines between actors, tools, and motives. It is difficult to differentiate between phenomena and threats are not clearly prioritised. It is a strategy against everything and everyone.
Another core flaw lies in the way that some key concepts are defined so loosely as to make the application of the law automatically arbitrary. To take just one of the examples highlighted by Novaya Gazeta: the document defines “manifestations of extremism” as “socially dangerous illegal actions committed on the grounds of hatred or enmity.” Such actions may be oriented against any social groups or — a key innovation in this new strategy — against “representatives of the public authorities” and threaten the constitutional order, unity, territorial integrity, and sovereignty of the Russian Federation. Yet what makes an action socially dangerous? What constitutes a threat against Russia’s sovereignty? To all intents and purposes, whatever the authorities say.
Ambiguities abound in the document. And they are, of course, the point: they provide a facade of legality that allows the state to take action against whoever it pleases.
Repeating the mistakes of the early 2000s
Yet one does not need to look to far into history to see where catch-all legislation and strategies can prove counterproductive. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, counter-extremism and counterterrorism were a top priority given the situation in Chechnya and the wider North Caucasus. In Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria, the local authorities adopted laws banning “Wahhabism,” the all-encompassing (and incorrect) term applied to Salafism and other manifestations of non-traditional and non-sanctioned Islam.
These laws were notable for their failure to define what Wahhabism actually was — which meant the law could be applied to whomever the local authorities deemed to be undesirable.
This approach had (at least) two major consequences. First, it meant that efforts to combat actual extremism — then, as now, a genuine problem — were misdirected. If a problem is poorly defined, then it is inevitable that the solution will be too, and that was certainly the case in Dagestan, where the state’s efforts against radical actors floundered. The fight against extremism instead merged with the struggle against all forms of political opposition.
Second, not only did counter-extremism efforts not resolve the problem of extremism, they contributed significantly to making it worse. By failing to differentiate between violent and non-violent opposition to the state, the authorities fuelled support for radical actors and contributed to the emergence of a local insurgency. Apolitical Muslims ended up alienated.
A strategy for state power, not solutions
The current Strategy replicates the same issues and, as so often, fails to learn the lessons from Russia’s own history. It is a strategy for justifying state power, not for combatting extremism. It has very little of value to offer in terms of tackling genuine problems.
The first phase of the strategy is the development of a strategy for implementing the strategy; this will be followed by an implementation of the strategy’s strategy and then a discussion of the degree to which the strategy’s strategy has been implemented and proposals for a new strategy. A starker illustration of the preference for slow, overly bureaucratic responses over agile solutions would be hard to find.
The document calls for yet more legislation, despite counter-extremism legislation proliferating like mushrooms after the rain. It calls for increased patriotism and propaganda, despite there being no shortage of efforts to saturate the information space with the state’s preferred narratives. It has no new ideas to offer and no new solutions to longstanding problems.
Ultimately, Russia’s counter-extremism strategy falls short of addressing longstanding and serious problems of radicalisation and terrorism. Without clear definitions or actionable solutions, the challenges posed by genuine extremism will likely persist.