Perceptions of governance: state and non-state governance in the North Caucasus

ABSTRACT

How do residents perceive governance in Russia’s North Caucasus? Using original interviews and household survey data collected over nine months of fieldwork, this article offers a nuanced and empirically driven comparative account of governance in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia. Mitigating between accounts of a hegemonic state that has saturated public space or strong non-state actors that consistently organize parallel systems of governance, I demonstrate that residents identify a role for both state and ostensibly non-state authorities in governance. Devoting particular attention to the relationships between state and non-state actors, this paper finds that despite similarities in governance of extraction and coercion across the three cases, there are also important differences in dispute resolution, goods provision, and regulation of symbolic practices. This multidimensional approach to governance reveals the limitations of accounts, both in the region and in general, that fail to attend to variations across governance domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• non-state authority
• North Caucasus
• mixed methods

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to my communities at Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Pittsburgh whose advice and support made this fieldwork and writing possible. I owe special thanks to Will Reno, Rachel Beatty Riedl, Ana Arjona, Jennifer Murtazashvili, Milli Lake, Yoshiko Herrera, Ted Gerber, Scott Straus, Rana Khoury, and Laura García. Generous anonymous reviewers provided feedback that greatly improved this article. I am indebted to my interviewees and survey participants, and to my research collaborators and interlocutors whose names are not listed to maintain confidentiality.

Notes

1. See Bobrovnikov (2002) and (Sokirianskaia 2009) for detailed accounts of governance before and during Soviet rule.

2. Evidenced, for example, by Moscow’s 2010 “Strategy for the Socioeconomic Development of the North Caucasus Federal District until 2025.”

3. See Lyall (2009, 2010), Toft and Zhukov (2015), Souleimanov and Aliyev (2015), and Souleimanov (2015).

4. A part of the larger project focused on the armed conflicts in the 1990s. I do not delve into that data here, but it likely impacted my overall conversations. Since I organized the interviews across time periods, I mostly asked if there was violence in the community during that time period, and asked follow-up questions if the interviewee seemed comfortable discussing it.

5. I do not provide the exact locations of the survey in line with the IRB protocol, in order to avoid the possibility of the collective punishment of villages that participated in the survey.

6. Having an established network also helped in implementation of the survey, since many enumerators only felt comfortable within their districts.

7. Thus, federal authorities are not relevant in these cases. Though there is an organization at the level of the North Caucasus, it has minimal power and Dagestan’s SBM officially withdrew its membership in 2017.

8. I adopt a more narrow focus than many of these works by focusing on the physical manifestations of authorities’ regulations rather than on culture or all of the ways in which authorities seek to establish legitimacy.

9. Falling at the intersection of this and the symbolic dimension.

10. Zakat is a religious donation given by each Muslim for charitable purposes.

11. In Dagestan the census overestimates the rural population. After consulting with local experts, I oversampled urban areas such that roughly half of the sample was urban.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Carnegie/Harriman Institute of Columbia University; Buffett Institute for Global Studies; Kellogg Dispute Resolution Research Center; ZEIT-Stiftung’s Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius.