The Caucasus Emirate's failed attempt to build a new identity
The North Caucasus insurgency devoted a lot of time to identity, but it ultimately failed to overcome the region’s ethnic divisions.
Happy Friday!
This week is book launch week: The Caucasus Emirate: Ideology, identity, and insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus hit the shelves on Tuesday! To mark the end of a very long journey to publication, today I've got one last post exploring some of the key ideas of the book (which you can buy here!). Then, next week, I should be kicking off a mini-series on how to start an insurgency, drawing lessons from Russia's past.
With that in mind, here's what you can expect this week:
- Insurgency as a struggle for identity
- How the Caucasus Emirate sought to balance identities
- The failure to construct a new identity – and what it means for the future
Insurgency as a struggle for identity
When we talk about terrorism and insurgency, there is a natural tendency to focus on the physical, the violence. But violence is only one part of insurgent life, and arguably not even the main one. Insurgents can spend as much time and energy justifying armed struggle as they expend on actually waging it. They can invest heavily in propaganda – sometimes to persuade others, sometimes to persuade themselves. Insurgents are also people, which means they like to think that they are good, that their cause is just, and that their struggles are worthwhile. Sustained activism requires alignment between self-perception and actions. Therefore, a lot of rhetorical material produced by insurgents touches upon questions of 'who are we'.
Questions of identity are equally implicated in considerations of ideology and its role in political violence. If ideology refers to interconnected and shared beliefs and attitudes, then identity plays a key role in establishing group boundaries and managing a group's internal and external relations. In other words, identity is central to establishing the framework in which beliefs and attitudes can be shared. Look across the post-Soviet space and you will see competing identities underpinning many conflicts. They certainly played a key role in the Chechen wars and the insurgency that emerged from them.
How the Caucasus Emirate sought to balance identities
The collapse of the Soviet Union did not just result in the dismantling of political and economic structures: It also left an ideological vacuum and identity crisis. Everywhere, individuals and groups searched for new (and old) identities and meaning to fill the gap. In the North Caucasus, the two main categories of identity that gained political traction were nationalism and religion. Although the Caucasus Emirate was first and foremost a religious project – one that supplanted the nationalist-separatist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria – it still had to contend with local ethnic identities. The differing ways in which insurgent leaders tackled this challenge reveals just how strong these ethnic identities can be.
Insurgent leaders in Ingushetia were perhaps most fortunate: There, the fault lines of ethnic and religious identities overlapped. The main 'ethnic' enemy was the Ossetian, who was also predominantly Christian and therefore easily cast as an 'infidel'. Ingush rebel leaders sometimes chose to emphasise ethnicity, but this did not produce any tensions with the religious framing of the conflict. The same is largely true in Chechnya, where leaders focused on infidel Russia as the main enemy and downplayed the relevance of its Chechen 'puppets'. Religious identities were supposed to be prioritised, but ethnic identity did not pose an obstacle: To be Chechen was to be Muslim. The main difficulty for a leader like Dokka Umarov, who led the Emirate for much of its existence, was that he was largely blind to non-Chechen concerns.
The situation was more complicated in Kabardino-Balkaria and Dagestan, where ethnic and religious divisions did not align. The leaders of these two republics, however, adopted very different approaches to the problem. In Kabardino-Balkaria, rebel leaders argued for the primacy of shared religious identity over a Kabardin/Circassian versus Balkar divide. This was similar to the Ingush approach of religion first, ethnicity second, but required greater subversion of the ethnic component. Dagestani leaders, by contrast, sought to overcome the many ethnic divides within the republic by emphasising a specifically Dagestani identity that was inherently Muslim. This superficially created a solution similar to that seen in Chechnya and Ingushetia, but came at the expense of regional unity: It limited the relevance of Dagestani leadership statements to anyone outside the republic.
The failure to construct a new identity – and what it means for the future
Many movements face the challenge of adapting globalised narratives and identities, such as those offered by jihadism, to pre-existing conceptions and imaginaries. There is, however, something deeply ironic in the situation that developed: The Caucasus Emirate wholeheartedly rejected the Russian political system, but remained fully wedded to it. Operationally, it did little to overcome the administrative boundaries of the existing system. For the most part, Dagestani insurgents fought in Dagestan, Chechens in Chechnya, and so on. The only place where boundaries were regularly traversed during the IK's lifetime was between Chechnya and Ingushetia.
Yet, more fundamentally, the IK completely failed to construct an overarching group identity – despite identity being central to its ideology. Leaders for the most part talked either to their co-ethnics or their co-republicans and made precious little effort to cross existing divides. There was no such thing as an 'Emirati', even in the IK's own propaganda. There were either Chechens, Ingush, etc., or there was the 'global community of Muslims'. In the absence of a well-defined political programme, this meant that there was very little ideationally to bind people to the Caucasus Emirate as a project. This did not matter so much when it was the only player in town, but it left it vulnerable when the Islamic State emerged – because every idea it articulated was easily transferable.
This, ultimately, points to a challenge facing any group looking to oust Russia from the region: How does one build a truly regional movement that can transcend both ethnic and administrative boundaries? Each republic is too weak to survive on its own, so a region-wide movement is really the only viable option. Part of the appeal of religion to insurgents came from its potential to unify groups. However, the story of the Caucasus Emirate is in part one of failed identity construction. Its leaders never solved the problem of how to subordinate ethnic identities into a new movement one. They never created a convincing answer to the question of 'who we are'. This is arguably a challenge any future insurgency would need to overcome if it wanted to sustain activism over the long-term.
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.