The conclusion situates the politics of legal pluralism within a comparative perspective by contrasting Chechnya with other Russian regions and other contexts of postcolonial and post-conflict political development. The concluding chapter discusses the broader implications of this study for our understanding of the “dark side” of legal pluralism as an instrument of domination and of state law as a “weapon of the weak.” It outlines a future research agenda on the role of international law in legally pluralist environments and legal pluralism in diasporas. Finally, the chapter reflects on the implications of the findings for post-Soviet Russian politics and asks why the Kremlin allows Kadyrov’s lawfare.

This chapter covers the turbulent period of the de facto independent Chechnya in the 1990s, characterized by the resurgence of traditionalism and religion. The war that broke out between Moscow and Chechen separatists in 1994 reduced state capacity to rubble and made the ideology of political Islam dominant among Chechen politicians. After the end of the First Chechen War in 1996, the victorious separatist leaders enacted Sharia. This chapter contends that promotion of Sharia in independent Chechnya was not driven by ideology or demand by the population. It shows that this strategy was used by incumbents to increase their legitimacy by association with religion and tradition, through distance from the Kremlin, and with concessions to the powerful constituency of former rebels. At the same time, the incumbents were wary of strengthening the non-state forums too much, because they were afraid that powerful legal systems based on tradition and religion would become arenas of political contestation and ultimately be hijacked by the opposition. The rulers turned to promotion of Sharia and custom only when they were directly challenged and needed to reinforce political control regardless of the costs.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of peripheral state-building: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. Legal pluralism is an issue of fragmented social control. State–society struggles for social control are complicated because both the state and society are internally divided. The concept of nested sovereignty captures how the state is divided in imperial and federal settings. The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. Building on this foundation, the chapter then theorizes state-building lawfare from above. In particular, it outlines when and why central and peripheral authorities promote non-state legal systems, as well as how conflict changes the political rationale of promoting legal pluralism. After that, the chapter interrogates state-building lawfare from below – focusing on individual choices between state and non-state legal systems. It also speculates about how conflict transforms the driving forces behind these choices – in identities and social norms – as well as resources, interests, and hierarchies, with a special focus on gender relations.

This chapter presents ethnographic narratives on immersion in Chechen social life, reflections on the role of positionality and subjectivity in shaping the research, the ethics of the study, and grounded perspectives on the key elements of the argument: legal pluralism, conflict, and the foundations of social and political orders in Chechnya. The chapter starts with one extraordinary Chechen woman’s family history, which illustrates life in Chechnya during the time of the Soviet Union, the troubled times of de facto Chechen independence in the 1990s, and during the Chechen wars. The chapter then explores the roles of outsider status, language, religion, and gender in the co-production of knowledge between the researcher and study participants. In the following part, the chapter presents a thick description of the functioning of legal pluralism and the traps of orientalist romanticization and essentialization in studying it. Next comes a description of extended family as the principal social organization in contemporary Chechnya, which debunks the stereotypes of the all-powerful Chechen clans. The chapter documents the lived experiences of dictatorship and violent conflict and then turns to a discussion of the ethics of the study under these conditions.

This chapter investigates the instrumental use of non-state legal systems in postwar Chechnya by the Kremlin-imposed ruler Ramzan Kadyrov. It argues that Kadyrov has been promoting legal pluralism in order to win legitimacy among segments of the population, increase his autonomy from the federal center, and better accommodate former rebels, who became state bureaucrats in the postwar period. This chapter casts doubt on alternative explanations. The evidence that Ramzan Kadyrov’s policy towards non-state legal systems is radically different from the policy of his father, who was a cleric and traditionalist, yet strengthened Russian state law and abstained from promoting Sharia and custom, is troubling for the path-dependence argument. Meanwhile, the narrative of how Ramzan Kadyrov was able to effectively “cancel” the customs of bride kidnapping and blood revenge – the most notorious Chechen customs – indicates that the state capacity explanation is also limited. The second part of the chapter compares lawfare in Kadyrov’s Chechnya with legal politics in the neighboring regions of Ingushetia and Dagestan. These comparisons further support the idea that local leaders in the North Caucasus promote non-state legal systems not because of ideological commitments, but as a way to ensure their political survival.

The introduction opens the book with two puzzles. The first is that the government of the Chechen Republic, which is formally in charge of implementing Russian state law, openly promotes customary law and Sharia. The second is that despite a history of state violence and strong social norms against going to court, state law is nevertheless actively used by some segments of the Chechen population. The chapter argues that state-building in places like Chechnya can be understood as lawfare – the use of state and non-state legal systems to achieve political goals. The chapter discusses how this approach enriches scholarly understanding of state-building. It also outlines the book’s methods of inquiry. It previews the historical analysis that traces transformations of legal pluralism in Chechnya under different incarnations of nested sovereignty: the Russian Empire, the Soviet state, de facto independence, and post-Soviet federation. Then it explains the rationale of comparative analysis that contrasts state-building lawfare in Chechnya with the neighboring Muslim-majority regions of Russia. Finally, it introduces evidence – fieldwork observations, ethnographic interviews, original survey data, official judicial reports, and the corpus of court hearings.

This chapter presents a descriptive account of legal pluralism in contemporary Chechnya. It describes the actors in charge of dispute resolution – the elders and religious authorities, as well as judges, prosecutors, and lawyers – and the most common disputes, and their forms of resolution. This chapter shows that an alternative legal system has evolved into a hybrid legal order, one characterized by judges in state courts sometimes implementing customary and religious norms, while imams and elders participate in state court hearings as witnesses or experts. Relying on original survey evidence, the chapter explores the factors that drive individual preferences for alternative legal systems. This analysis uncovers the role of gender, generational divides, education and social class, and ethnic and religious identities. Finally, the chapter outlines the political topography of Chechnya: uneven patterns of the use of state law across cleavages between urban and rural areas, the Russified northern region and mountainous areas in the south, and finally between the eastern region, which constitutes the core of Kadyrov’s regime, and the less tightly controlled western Chechnya.

This chapter explores the legacies of the wartime disruption of gender hierarchies. It shows that after the Second War a sizable share of Chechen women began using the Russian state legal system, which formally acknowledges gender equality. The chapter suggests that the disruption of gender hierarchies can be attributed to several interrelated mechanisms. The most significant cultural change was that the conflict forced women to enter the public sphere. Women became representatives of their families and communities. At the same time, conflict gave rise to militarized masculinity and neo-traditionalism among Chechen men. This divergence was multiplied by changes in bargaining power within families due to transformations of gender positions in the labor market: many women became their families’ breadwinners. Furthermore, the effect of the disruption of gender hierarchies was exacerbated by the process of community disintegration, which diminished the ability of the extended family to apply pressure against women who used state courts. In addition, after the war, many of the NGOs refocused on gender problems and served as support structures for women’s legal mobilization. The last part of the chapter shows that women’s legal mobilization in Chechnya faced strong backlash from the Chechen regional government.

This chapter provides a historical analysis of state-building in Chechnya through the lens of law. It gives an account of the formation and development of legal pluralism under the Russian colonial administration and Soviet rule. The chapter shows that the politics of the imperial and Soviet authorities regarding legal pluralism can be explained by state capacity and ideology. The Russian Empire institutionalized legal pluralism as part of a divide and rule strategy, a response to low state capacity, and an orientalist ideology. When the Empire collapsed in 1917, local actors attempted to mobilize Sharia for competing political projects. Even the Bolsheviks initially built a surprising coalition with religious leaders. Upon the consolidation of Soviet rule, the central government attempted to eliminate legal pluralism in the region. The Soviet drive to ensure legal centralism was fueled by the ideology of modernization and increased state capacity. However, the project ultimately failed because of Stalin’s forced deportation of the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia in 1944. State violence strengthened the Chechen national identity and alienated Chechens from state law. After the return to the Caucasus in 1957, Chechens remained marginalized in the Soviet state-building project and preserved customary and religious institutions.

This chapter presents an analysis of the legacies of armed conflict in legal preferences and behavior at the individual, community, and societal levels. After a brief description of civilian experiences of conflict, the chapter reports a surprising finding: the indicators of individual-level victimization that have been used in numerous recent studies on the consequences of conflict were found to be poor predictors of legal choices in Chechnya. The analysis proceeds at the community level and uncovers the fact that while collective violence during the First War led to alienation from Russia, the Second War led to an increased demand for state law. The Second War was more brutal, longer, and characterized by massive inter-Chechen violence. As a result, it diminished the role of elders and extended families, led to mass migration, and weakened the legitimacy of Sharia, which was associated with the Islamist rebels. These patterns are illustrated with case studies of three communities: one that is emblematic of civilian suffering during the First War, another that underwent sustained collective violence during the Second War, and a third community that largely avoided victimization. Finally, the chapter analyzes the macro-level effects of conflict by comparing legal preferences in Chechnya with those in the neighboring region of Ingushetia.