Abstract
Hybrid warfare, or whichever nomenclature one chooses to use, has emerged as one of the most innovative and popular instruments in contemporary international politics and is in no way limited to post-Soviet spaces. This special issue offers a multi-layered account of interstate and intrastate dynamics with respect to insurgent violence in the former Soviet Union over an extended period of time. The contributors explore both internal dynamics with respect to insurgencies and civil wars and the roles of external constituencies – whether through the use of hard power (for example in directly supporting insurgent groups) or soft power (through the power of international aid and strategic communications). Most importantly, however, they provide an insight into the complicated and diverse range of conflict-related situations and experiences relevant to Russia’s ‘near abroad’. This collection also offers nuance to accounts that seek to explain complicated dynamics in the former Soviet space with a single overarching realist or neorealist metanarrative that can occlude important insights to be derived from more multi-layered perspectives.
Keywords:
The March 2014 events in Crimea have made a major impact on Europe and sparked a variety of contradictory popular opinions. Most of the Western world maintains that Russia has violated customary international law, in addition to a number of specific international treaties to which it is a party (e.g. the Budapest Memorandum of 1994) and consequently, has engaged in a series of illegal actions. For their part, the Kremlin has publicly presented itself as the aggrieved and virtuous party, working to preserve the rights of Russian minorities abroad, protecting the principle of national self-determination, and welcoming the attempts of the Crimean, Abkhaz, and South Ossetian people to opt for closer relations with Russia.
Academic debates differ too with respect to the causes and dynamics of current events in Ukraine and Russia’s ‘near abroad’ more generally. While Andrew Wilson maintains that Russia has subverted all possible international rules and may be out of control,Footnote1 Richard Sakwa suggests that Moscow’s behaviour and attitudes are largely influenced by the Kremlin’s desire for international recognition. In other words, Sakwa maintains that this may be seen as Putin’s reaction to Russia’s consistent relegation of Russia to the level of a second level power by the US and the EU.Footnote2 The debate has also continued in non-academic circles with alternative views proposed,Footnote3 allegations of incomplete or inaccurate views – at leastFootnote4 and misinformation – at most.Footnote5 What seems undeniable here is that, whatever way we look at it, insurgency has played a major role in most post-Soviet conflicts. From the August 1991 attempt to oust Gorbachev, to civil war in Tajikistan and separatist struggles in Gagauzia, Transnistria, Crimea, and Nagorno-Karabakh, insurgents have opposed (and sometimes toppled) governing authorities or have attempted (and sometimes succeeded) in carving out a form of insurgent-governance in areas they control. Some of these efforts have led to frozen conflicts, while others have been resolved with the reintegration of insurgents into internationally recognised structures, through either political agreement or military defeat, as documented in Table . Remarkably, in the past decade such conflicts have intensified as has Russia’s role as an actor, instigator, intervener, supporter, and mediator in them.
Table 1. Overview of major insurgency attempts in post-Soviet spaces.
Our starting question is: what is the relationship between Russia and insurgency in the former Soviet Union? The most alarming, and possibly alarmist, analysts see the Kremlin, in one way or another, behind most, not to say all, territorial disputes and their resolution, which often coincidently favours Russian interests. While we acknowledge that it is possible to find a Russian position on all major conflicts and tensions in the region, the authors in this special edition also argue that several conflicts and potential conflicts in the region since the break-up of the USSR cannot be ascribed to Moscow’s direct action or strategic considerations. A second controversy that this special issue considers is whether the Kremlin’s involvement in conflicts and tensions is part of an overarching diplomatic and military strategy that follows a theoretically predestined pattern (in essence, privileging a neorealist structural view of its actions), or does Russia’s involvement depend on decisions made on a case by case basis in response to external stimulations and relations (in essence, reflecting a more constructivist framework to Russia’s interstate relations with respect to its ‘Near Abroad’). While some analysts ascribe most of Putin’s actions to a postmodern imperial plan that can be regarded as consistent and, to a certain extent, effective, the schizophrenic nature of Russia’s activities in the region, and its apparent incapacity to maintain a coherent position, suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of Kremlin policy. Not all actions are pre-planned, let alone well coordinated, in Russia’s bureaucracy.
We attempt to answer the questions posed above through seven articles that seek to establish a dialogue centred on internal and external factors that help better understand insurgencies in the former USSR.
The first two articles deal directly with domestic factors and dynamics of insurgency and counter-insurgency within Russia itself, providing a better understanding of conditions and implications of insurgency-induced governance in post-Soviet Russia. Jan Koehler, Alexey Gunya, and Magomed Alkhazurov analyse the dynamics of the insurgencies and corresponding counter-insurgency measures in the North Caucasus over the past quarter century. The article compares three cases – Chechnya, Dagestan, and Kabardino-Balkaria – to illustrate the way insurgencies and counter-insurgency measures influence governance in the region.
The second article seeks to identify factors conducive to the (in)efficacy of indigenous forces (IF) in counter-insurgency (COIN) operations in Russia’s republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. To do this, Emil Souleimanov and Huseyn Aliyev empirically examine the deployment of IF in the North Caucasus-based COIN and emphasise that the effectiveness of COIN in Chechnya, unlike Dagestan, is conditioned by a number of factors pertaining to the structural and organisational characteristics of IF. Of these, the IF’s experience as former insurgents, their access to insider information, and their loyalty to incumbents – often maintained by the threat of collective punishment – have proven decisive for a relatively successful COIN in Chechnya.
The third article shifts our focus towards Central Asia to show the limits of Russia’s ability to ignite insurgency movements and groups. In his account of the elements prompting insurgency and violence within Central Asian republics, Rob Kevlihan emphasises the role of indigenous factors, and in particular contestations over national power, with Islamist insurgents playing an important role, suggesting that the major actual or putative threat of violence has not emanated from a disgruntled Russian state supporting local separatist forces.
The fourth article is a further attempt to explore internal dynamics, factors, and actors contributing to internally generated insurgency forces and movements. While acknowledging the role of Russia in the creation and maintenance of de facto entities, Donnacha Ó Beacháin, Giorgio Comai, and Ann Tsurtsumia-Zurabashvili provide a rich empirical analysis of the way the unrecognised states that emerged in post-Soviet space have tried to establish themselves domestically and internationally, and of the efforts of base states designed to counter these initiatives.
It would be wrong, however, to downplay Russia’s role in supporting insurgency. In his account of the Crimea crisis, Thomas Ambrosio illustrates the efforts leading Russia to initiate an irredentist intervention to annex the Crimean peninsula. Accounts of the events in Crimea have largely concentrated on the use of military forces without national or unit insignia (the ‘little green men’ of irregular, or hybrid, warfare). However, a crucial part of this operation involved a complex and multi-layered perception management campaign to advance a self-interested narrative, which defined the contours of debate, justified their actions at home and abroad, and provided those actions with legal and normative legitimacy, showing the high degree of sophistication the Kremlin has attained in its insurgency-igniting strategy.
The following article also deals with the Ukrainian crisis but seeks to provide a broader picture. Through her analysis of Russia’s role in the Ukrainian crisis, Licinia Simão investigates the Kremlin’s explicitly interventionist agenda and the manner in which this compels Moscow to use a mixed strategy to pursuit its goals.
One of the goals of this special issue is to deal comprehensively with conflict in the post-Soviet space. The protracted Transnistrian imbroglio, while far from being resolved, has been nudged out of the public spotlight by events in Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014). Moldova’s geopolitical significance given its location at the edge of the European Union has inspired different ways of dealing with insurgency. As Ryan Kennedy illustrates, the application of soft power has done little to change the incentives for separatist leaders or their Russian backers. They do, however, augment Moldova’s ability to adapt to the challenges posed by the conflict and provide a paper wall against more aggressive Russian ambitions in the region.
Taken together, these articles offer a multi-layered account of interstate and intrastate dynamics with respect to insurgent violence in the former Soviet Union over an extended period of time. They explore both internal dynamics with respect to insurgencies and civil wars and the roles of external constituencies – whether through the use of hard power (for example in directly supporting insurgent groups) or soft power (through the power of international aid and strategic communications). Most importantly, however, they provide an insight into the complicated and diverse range of conflict-related situations and experiences relevant to Russia’s ‘near abroad’. This collection also offers nuance to accounts that seek to explain complicated dynamics in the former Soviet space with a single overarching realist or neorealist metanarrative that can occlude important insights to be derived from more multi-layered perspectives.
In a context that some see as illustrative of a rejection of the post-Cold War political settlement,Footnote6 hybrid warfare, or whichever nomenclature one chooses to use, has emerged as one of the most innovative and popular instruments in contemporary international politics and is in no way limited to post-Soviet spaces. Hybrid warfare is now used in a systematic, subtle, and refined way, backed by an official state discourse that denies it and supports it at the same time and to which the international community seems unable to respond (as demonstrated once again by Russia’s intervention in Syria in October 2015). We argue that a better understanding of this phenomenon should begin with an analysis of its operations in a single region, rather than immediately reaching for a global theory of hybrid warfare. We have collected these essays with the goal of providing the journal’s readers with elements facilitating a better appreciation of Russian policy and Moscow’s use of insurgency and counter-insurgency that is country- and region-specific. This collection of works, taken together, will, we hope, provide a greater awareness of insurgencies/counter-insurgencies specificities in the former Soviet Union today, and perhaps in the future.
Funding
The publication of this special issue was possible thanks to a generous grant of the European Commission under the Marie Curie scheme FP7-PEOPLE-2012-ITN Grant no. 316825.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Wilson, Ukraine Crisis.
2. Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine.
3. Steele, ‘Frontline Ukraine’.
4. Kudelia, ‘Book review: Richard Sakwa’, ‘Book review: Andrew Wilson’.
5. Oliver, ‘The Dissemination of Misinformation’.
6. Wilson, Ukraine Crisis.
References
- Kudelia, Serhiy. ‘Book review: Richard Sakwa, “Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands”’, 2015. https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/serhiy-kudelia/book-review-richard-sakwa-’frontline-ukraine-crisis-in-borderlands (accessed 19 December 2015).
- Kudelia, Serhiy. ‘Book review: Andrew Wilson, “Ukraine Crisis”’, 2014. https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/serhiy-kudelia/review-andrew-wilson-%E2%80%98ukraine-crisis (accessed 19 December 2015).
- Oliver, James. ‘The Dissemination of Misinformation: A Review of a Guardian Newspaper review of a bad book’. Euromaidanpress, 27 April 2015. http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/04/27/the-dissemination-of-misinformation-a-review-of-a-guardian-newspaper-review-of-a-bad-book/.
- Sakwa, Richard. Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. London: I.B. Tauris.
- Steele, Jonathan. “Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands by Richard Sakwa review – an unrivalled account.” The Guardian 19 (February 2015).
- Wilson, Andrew. Ukraine Crisis: What the West Needs to Know. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.