Rebellion in search of a leader

Insurgents need someone to follow — and they don’t have it right now

Happy Friday!

The North Caucasus has become, sadly, a byword for instability. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has witnessed two wars between Chechnya and the federal centre (1994-1996 and 1999-2001), two jihadist state-building projects (the Caucasus Emirate and the Islamic State’s Caucasus Wilayah), and plenty of violence in between. Although organised insurgency collapsed in late 2017, there has been no shortage of anti-state violence since then. But it has yet to coalesce into anything sustained. This begs the question: Why?

In this week’s newsletter, I want to unpack just one of the answers to this question: the lack of leadership among anti-state groups. With that in mind, here’s what to expect this week:

• The role of sculptors and actors
• The inspiration behind the Emirate
• The demise of anyone worth following

The role of sculptors and actors

In my forthcoming book, The Caucasus Emirate: Ideology, Identity, and Insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus (did I mention I have a book coming out? 🤣 ), I use three metaphors for helping to understand ideology:

Ideology as a bridge: A vision of how the world is, how it should be, and what needs to be done to bridge the divide between the two. This is an idea I unpacked in last week’s newsletter.

Ideology as the sculptor’s material: This is a way of tackling the age-old debates about structure, agency, and causation. Ideologies don’t do anything on their own — they don’t have causal power or agency. But nor are they simply background conditions. Instead, just as a sculptor’s material will affect what the sculptor can produce, so too will ideological material influence the efforts of the ideologue.

Ideology as script: Overlapping with the previous, ideological content, like the script of a play, is only one factor that determines the success of that play. No less important are whether the ideas in that script resonate with the audience or the zeitgeist, and the ability of the actor to work with and shape the material.

It is the latter two metaphors that illustrate one role played by insurgent leaders — whether they occupy a formal organisational role or not. Skilled leaders are the sculptors who can craft the material in a way that will resonate with their audiences. Skilled leaders are the actors who can bring a script to life.

And skilled leaders are precisely what anti-state groups in the North Caucasus have lacked for a very long time.

The inspiration behind the Emirate

In its early days, the Caucasus Emirate (IK) possessed two truly inspirational leaders: Anzor Astemirov in Kabardino-Balkaria and Aleksandr Tikhomirov, better known as Said Buryatskiy, an ethnic Buryat who joined the IK’s Chechen-Ingushetia branch. They were as different from one another as Robin Williams and Al Pacino or [insert the names of two famous but different sculptors here — that’s two more sculptors than I can name!]. But both were, I would argue, key to the IK’s efforts at mobilisation.

Astemirov was one of the IK’s intellectual architects. While his religious credentials shouldn’t be exaggerated, they certainly surpassed those of the local state-affiliated imams who sought to craft a counter-narrative. Of all the IK’s leaders, it was Astemirov who articulated the most sophisticated critique of the status quo and the most detailed vision of the sharia state that should be installed. And he was a skilled speaker, able to move back and forth between the general ideas of jihad and their application to the Caucasus at that time. He was one of the few able to not merely rehash cliched phrases, but play with and adapt the ideas behind them. He did not merely read someone else's script, he improvised his own.

Tikhomirov was a very different type of ideologue, but no less skilled in his trade. Indeed, his popularity eventually surpassed that of Astemirov. What he was, first and foremost, was a story teller and performer who could bring characters to life and inspire his audience. Listen to some of his speeches and it was easy to forget that jihad was a violent phenomenon impacting real lives. His was a story of good versus evil, of the brave against the cowardly, and of redemption through armed struggle. There was a timelessness to his narrative — he rarely mentioned specific people and events — that helped explain why his speeches remained popular well after his death.

The demise of anyone worth following

Astemirov and Tikhomirov both died in March 2010. Throughout 2010 and 2011, the IK also lost a host of experienced intellectual and military leaders. And arguably it never recovered. Although it survived for many more years, there was a slow but marked decline in the quality of its cadres. Moreover, it’s notable that many of the final wave of IK leaders joined the insurgency years before, when the better leaders were still around.

Take the post-Astemirov insurgency in Kabardino-Balkaria as an example. Astemirov’s immediate successor was his deputy, Asker Dzhappuyev. He articulated many of the same ideas as Astemirov, but he lacked his charisma and depth and struggled to direct the group he led. His successor, Alim Zankishiyev, could charitably be described as inept, barely able to string together a coherent sentence. Timur Tatchayev and Ruslan Batyrbekov didn’t even manage to produce any material or offer any kind of ideological leadership. And Khasanbi Fakov had actually been removed from a lower-ranking post for being basically shit at insurgency, but nevertheless assumed the top role by simple virtue of still being alive. All of them formed part of the same, ever-shrinking circle of insurgents. They made the British Conservative Party — one of whose leaders was, lest we forget, famously outdone by a lettuce — appear positively vibrant by comparison.

The same degradation could be seen across the region. Rustam Asilderov, the Dagestani rebel leader who arguably did the most to bury the IK and take the insurgency fully global, was also a man whose political vision quite literally did not extend beyond his line of sight. Later generations of insurgent leaders were unable to respond to the political realities of their time. And when they too were killed, the insurgency was unable to replace them and the movement collapsed as an organised phenomenon.

Fast forward to today and there are arguably no shortage of grievances for ideological violent entrepreneurs to exploit. The general idea of armed struggle probably doesn’t enjoy any less support now than it did a decade ago: It was never a broad-based movement, and it doesn’t take many to sustain low-level instability. And vague political projects, from the Islamic State to an independent Ichkeria, lie scattered across the digital landscape. Yet, for the most part, these give every impression of tattered scripts and tired performances. No one has yet emerged who is capable of crafting them into something fresh and compelling. It’s not the only reason for the lack of organised insurgency, but it is surely one. Because when the next Robin Williams of rebellion emerges, he will have plenty of material to work with.

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).