Leadership Style and War and Peace Policies in the Context of Armed Conflict

Abstract

The purpose of the present article is to establish what links there may be between leadership styles and war and peace policies in the Russia–Chechen conflict. To do so, we analyze the styles of two unrecognized executive leaders, Aslan Maskhadov and Doku Umarov, both of whom were involved in the same conflict with different peace policies. The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we overview the literature on leadership styles in armed conflict situations and construct a theoretical framework. Second, we review the historical and biographical context. Third, we examine the interview content-analysis methodology for the measuring of leadership style. Fourth, we classify Maskhadov and Umarov on the basis of leadership styles, and compare policies implemented by these leaders with those of other leaders in a context of internal armed conflict. Finally, we present conclusions and future prospects.

Notes

1. The causal link between discourse and political decisions has been established in other works, such as those by Dyson (2006, 2009a), in which Tony Blair’s speech is measured according to the Leadership Trait Analysis method (LTA) to explain his decision to intervene in Iraq.

2. The Oxford dictionary defines leadership as “leading role.” The first meaning of leader, in the same dictionary, says: “The person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country.”

3. These individuals may have authority at all government levels (local, state, regional, national), in internationally recognized parallel or de facto governments, or within armed insurgent or guerrilla groups; and can achieve their position by popular election, appointment, revolution, war, or coup (Hermann 1977).

4. Three groups of children were organized who met after school to do their homework, and each group had a leader who had been prepared by the researchers to interpret different leadership styles; autocratic, liberal, and democratic. The groups alternated leaders with different styles. The autocratic one made ​​all decisions in the group, the liberal one gave complete freedom to the group to make decisions, and the democratic one encouraged and supported the group to make decisions and looked more effective.

5. Unlike interviews, speeches lack spontaneity as they are prepared in advance and, in most cases, are not even written ​​by the political leader but by his advisors or speechwriters (Hermann 1999).

6. The heads of modern states are usually commanders of the armed forces and often have the final say in matters of war and peace.

7. The decision to exclude Hermann’s first trait from the assessment of leadership styles is justified later in the article when we analyze the interview content.

8. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is used to assess leadership styles by taking account of motivational factors (see Winter 1991).

9. This version of the agreement and other related documents—such as the formalization of the principles that would lay the foundations for future relations between Russia and Chechnya, among which was the 2001 deadline to find a formula for the coexistence of both parties in accordance to international law—can be found in http://peacemaker.un.org/russia-khasavyourtdeclaration96.

10. See Kavkazcenter.com, September 6, 2011, at http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2011/09/06/15148.shtml, accessed August 5, 2015.

11. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), June 3, 2005. “Russia: New Chechen Resistance Leader Vows No More Hostage Takings,” at http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1059114.html, accessed August 5, 2015.

12. Kavkazcenter.com, September 6, 2011, at http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2011/09/06/15148.shtml#; accessed August 5, 2015.

13. “Chechen Rebel Leader ‘Steps Down,’” Al Jazeera, August 2, 2010, at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2010/08/201081225749844675.html; accessed August 5, 2015.

14. Kavkazcenter.com, August 4, 2010, at http://www.kavkazcenter.com/russ/content/2010/08/04/74303/amir-imarata-kavkaz-dokku-abu-usman-otmenil-svoyu-otstavku-nazvav-eyo-sfabrikovannoj-i-vystupil-po-etomu-povodu-so-spetsialnym-zayavleniem.shtml; accessed August 5, 2015.

15. “Internal Divisions Resolved, Claims Caucasus Emirate,” Long War Journal, July 25, 2011, at http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2011/07/caucasus_emirate_cla_1.php#ixzz1TKEnDQLI; accessed August 5, 2015.

16. “Insurgency Commanders Divulge Details of Umarov’s Death,” RFE/RL, July 23, 2014, at http://www.rferl.org/content/insurgency-commanders-divulge-of-umarovs-death/25467747.html; accessed August 5, 2015.

17. According to Hermann (1999), when comparing the leaders’ profiles obtained by this technique in some of his papers with profiles made ​​by journalists and former government officials who had interacted with and observed these same leaders, a high correlation of 0.84, was obtained.

18. The database includes leaders from all states (even unrecognized) and autonomous regions, with and without internal armed conflict: Gerry Adams (Northern Ireland); Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran); Patricio Aylwin and Sebastián Piñera (Chile); Virgilio Barco, Jaime Bateman, Belisario Betancur, Alfonso Cano, Álvaro Fayad, César Gaviria, Timoleón Jiménez, Iván Márquez, Manuel Marulanda, Antonio Navarro Wolf, Tanja Nijmeijer, Andrés Pastrana, Manuel Pérez, Gustavo Petro, Carlos Pizarro, Nicolás Rodríguez, Ernesto Samper, Juan Manuel Santos, Jesús Santrich, Julio César Turbay and Álvaro Uribe (Colombia); Shamil Basayev, Dzhokhar Dudayev, Aslan Maskhadov, and Doku Umarov (ChRI-CE); Tony Blair, David Cameron, and Margaret Tatcher (UK); George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama (USA); Che Shui-Bian and Ma Ying-Jeou (Taiwan); Rafael Correa (Ecuador); Susana Díaz (Andalusia); Mauricio Funes, Tony Saca and Shafik Haldal (El Salvador); Muammar Gaddafi (Libya); Mikhail Gorbachev (USSR); Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping (PRC); Juan José Ibarretxe and Arnaldo Otegi (Basque country); Pablo Iglesias, Mariano Rajoy, and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Spain); Lech Kaczynski (Poland); Ramzan Kadyrov (Chechnya); Salva Kiir Mayardit (South Sudan); Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (Brazil); Artur Mas and Jordi Pujol (Catalonia); Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma (South Africa); José Mújica (Uruguay); Vladimir Putin and Boris Yeltsin (Russia); Alex Salmond (Scotland); Arnold Schwarzenegger (California); Manmohan Singh (India); Horst Seehofer (Bavaria); Hashim Thaçi (Kosovo).

19. A stricter criterion is used here than in Hermann (1999), which recommends a minimum of 50 responses from interviews with at least 100 words. The criterion of three interviews of 7,000 to 12,000 words reinforces the reliability of the method in order to facilitate the comparison of leadership styles.

20. It is recognized that the use of translated interviews is a limitation of this study, although it has tried to take into account a large number of synonyms.

21. Thus, the two theories of content analysis are combined: the one on emphasis, which highlights the importance of the topic in the speech; and the theory of position, according to which the importance lies in the position that a particular topic has in speech (Alonso et al. 2012).

22. The majority of these works were published in prestigious journals.

23. In content analysis, the rules are advices on how to interpret the test outcomes while the regulations are requirements that must be met to achieve the expected results (Alonso et al. 2012, 65–66).

24. The following researchers took part in the reliability test: Juliana Galvis, Cristhian D. Gavilán, and Angélica M. Goelkel, members of the Research Group on Political Parties, National University of Colombia, directed by Dr. David Roll. Sara S. Galindo, Valentina Gaviria, and Camila N. Parra were designated as substitutes.

25. Umarov rates so high in the category identification with groups that, if he were excluded from the database, the average would drop from 0.33 to 0.27 and the standard deviation from 0.63 to 0.47. If Basayev were also excluded, the average would drop to 0.24 and the standard deviation to 0.33. Thus, some leaders such as Maskhadov, who did not score on identification with groups, would score with the current database.

26. “Peace Treaty and Principles of Interrelation Between Russian Federation and Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” Reliefweb, May 12, 1997, at http://reliefweb.int/report/russian-federation/peace-treaty-and-principles-interrelation-between-russian-federation-and; accessed August 8, 2015.

27. “Analysis: Is It Too Late For Peace Talks In Chechnya?” RFE/RL, February 11, 2005, at http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1057400.html; accessed August 8, 2015.

28. For this reason he is not considered a troubleshooter leader.

29. See “End the Chechen War,” The Moscow Times, March 14, 1995, at http://www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/1995/3/article/end-the-chechen-war/341727.html; accessed August 3, 2015.

30. The data without explicit references are obtained from the “Biographies of Political Leaders” database at the Barcelona Centre for Political Affairs (CIDOB), available at http://www.cidob.org/biografias_lideres_politicos.

31. A timeline of the peace process between Santos’s government and the FARC-EP can be found in https://www.pazfarc-ep.org/index.php/cronologia.

32. No results for the Colombians Virgilio Barco and Timoleón Jimenez were included because, although they developed at least four peace policies, we do not have enough interviews to assess their leadership styles in accordance with the rules and regulations contained in the codification manual.