Power ideas and conflict: ideology, linkage and leverage in Crimea and Chechnya

ABSTRACT

In this article, we not only extend the concept of linkages and leverage to the realm of conflict studies, we also add an important linkage – ideas about political power which we call power ideas – and we expand on the causal mechanisms that turns linkages into leverage in a conflict situation. We examine the impact of the power ideas of nationalism and Islamism in the cases of two major conflicts in the region: Crimea and Chechnya. Within-case comparison of episodes of conflict-prevention vs. annexation (Crimea in the 1990s vs. 2014) and violent conflict vs. cooptation in Chechnya (1990s and 1999 onwards) provides the empirical basis to assess the scope and limitations of the international context allowing for the activation of power ideas and their transformation into leverage.

KEYWORDS:

• Linkages
• leverage
• ideas
• conflict
• Crimea
• Chechnya

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

James Hughes is Professor of Comparative Politics at LSE and Director of its Conflict Research Group. His recent work includes EU Conflict Management (editor), London: Routledge 2010, and Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Gwendolyn Sasse is Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations and the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at the University of Oxford. She is also a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research interests include post-communist transitions, comparative democratisation, ethnic conflict, and the political behaviour of migrants. She is the author of The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Notes

1. These are the figures reported by Mikhail Malyshev, the head of the referendum commission in Crimea on the day after the referendum, 17 March 2014. These were reported as the “official” figures, but they do not currently appear on the Crimean Election Commission website.

2. The cultural linkage of the Crimean Tatars to Turkey, and more specifically to the Crimean Tatar diaspora living there, had been somewhat more relevant politically in the 1990s.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [Knowledge Exchange Grant/RES-192-22-0146].