The power ministries have been central to state building throughout Russia, but nowhere have their activities been more important than in the North Caucasus. The major reason for this is the war in Chechnya that began in 1994. Further, particularly since 1999, the conflict and political violence has spread to other parts of southern Russia. The North Caucasus, more than any other region in Russia, has been closest to what Guillermo O'Donnell calls a “brown area,” where the state not only does not function properly but is largely absent. Beyond the issues of state capacity and state quality, in the North Caucasus, post-Soviet Russia has faced a threat to state integrity, in which the soundness of its external borders was potentially at risk.

Vladimir Putin's meteoric rise to power was closely tied to the conflict in the North Caucasus. In some ways, a Putin presidency is unthinkable if not for the resumption of war between Russia and Chechnya in 1999. When he declared in early 2000 that resolving the situation in the region was his “historic mission,” he also stated that when he was named prime minister in August 1999, he figured that he only had a few months to “bang away at these bandits,” but that he was willing to sacrifice his political career to “stop the collapse of the country.”