Why Study Legal Pluralism?

Legal pluralism has been recognized as an important topic in legal anthropology, sociology, history, and economics.Footnote ¹⁷ The political science literature focuses on normative aspects of legal pluralism in relation to sovereignty and secularism,Footnote ¹⁸ but empirical studies have been rare.Footnote ¹⁹ I argue that this is an unfortunate omission because legal pluralism provides a useful analytical framework for understanding many questions of critical importance to political science.

In particular, I argue that reformulation of the classic question, Why obey the law? Footnote ²⁰ into Which law should be obeyed? provides a novel perspective on state building and legitimacy. The existing literature focuses mostly on the coercive and extractive dimensions of state-building, that is, taxation.Footnote ²¹ I shift attention to the regulatory dimension that sees state law as one of several alternative forms of social control.

A focus on legal pluralism is especially useful for studying the demand side of state-building. Most studies of state-building have treated it as a top-down, government-driven process.Footnote ²² But state-building can also occur from the bottom up. A demand for state building is expressed in the preference for state institutions over nonstate ones.

The legal pluralism framework highlights the understudied role of gender in state-building. Prior scholarship focuses primarily on center-periphery and class cleavages,Footnote ²³ but as anthropological research shows, gender conflict can also order state-society relations. For instance, scholars document that in the absence of class conflict, the Bolshevik state provoked gender conflict in Central Asia to penetrate its dense society.Footnote ²⁴ Gender is quite likely to become an important political cleavage under legal pluralism.Footnote ²⁵ Customary law and religious legal orders are typically discriminatory against women. In contrast, state law typically assumes formal gender equality.Footnote ²⁶ Subsequently, issues related to control of sexuality, honor, and shame become an important arena of contestation for social control between state and alternative normative orders.

The problem of legal pluralism is especially important for understanding state-building amid conflict and in postconflict settings, where it is often characterized by fractured sovereignty.Footnote ²⁷ In addition to policy relevance, studying the interrelationship between conflict and legal pluralism has an important analytical advantage. Legal pluralism is deeply embedded in history and culture and is therefore difficult to explore in terms of causal relationships. Conflict is an exogenous shock that shifts society out of equilibrium and presents researchers with an opportunity to explore the microfoundations of individual behavior under legal pluralism.

How Conflict May Affect Legal Pluralism: A Theory

My theoretical framework builds on the state-in-society approach, which views state-building through the lens of competition between state and nonstate orders for social control.Footnote ²⁸ The problem of social control is reflected in a fundamental question: Who has the right and the ability to make the rules that regulate personal behavior?

The prevalence of state law over nonstate dispute resolution systems is not necessarily normatively desirable. Even in advanced democratic societies, people settle most disputes through informal mechanisms rather than in the courts,Footnote ²⁹ and legal anthropology and sociolegal studies have consistently shown that taking a dispute to court is very much the exception in all societies—it is a nuclear option.Footnote ³⁰ Furthermore, state intervention in society can be oppressive and prompt resistance among the population,Footnote ³¹ but in areas where nonstate legal orders directly contradict or challenge state legal systems, their relative prevalence is an important indicator of state capacity.

How do people choose among multiple alternative legal orders? I assume these choices are motivated by normative and instrumental considerations.Footnote ³² Normative choices—what ought to be done—are driven by beliefs about legitimacy. These beliefs, in turn, are mediated by the salience of national, religious, or ethnic identities.Footnote ³³ Attachments to tradition and religion can be particularly strong when they are contrasted with a state authority that is viewed as alien, that is, as representing either a colonial power or an occupation force.Footnote ³⁴

By contrast, instrumental logic assumes that if alternative legal systems lead to divergent outcomes, individuals should be inclined to engage in forum shopping. Individuals may be motivated by personal or group interests. Arguably, the most important group interest under legal pluralism is related to gender. Customary law, a cornerstone of clan-based governance, is often explicitly discriminatory toward women.Footnote ³⁵ Religious legal orders also tend to disfavor women, although they generally give women some agency for protecting their rights.Footnote ³⁶ By contrast, state law, if based on Western standards, typically assumes formal gender equality and therefore is relatively more beneficial for women.Footnote ³⁷

The pursuit of self and group interests is constrained not only by normative considerations but also by social pressure. Families and communities led by power holders who are the beneficiaries of customary and religious norms impose severe social sanctions, including ostracism, on individuals who use state law. Community cohesion determines the effectiveness of social pressure.

I hypothesize that exposure to conflict might raise the salience of ethnic and religious identities, but at the same time, it might actualize group interests through wartime transformation of social roles, especially in gender relations, and diminish the effectiveness of social pressure by disintegrating communities.

This logic flows from the disruption of gender hierarchies due to conflict.Footnote ³⁸ Historical research shows that both world wars spurred the transformation of gender roles in advanced industrial countries, such as the US and the UK, in economic and political spheres.Footnote ³⁹ Contemporary civil wars also have disrupted and reordered gender relations and spurred women’s political representation.Footnote ⁴⁰ For example, Aili Mari Tripp shows that the largest increase in women’s political representation has occurred in the African countries with the most durable and intensive exposure to conflict.Footnote ⁴¹

As a consequence of war, women often become the principal bread-winners in their families and interlocutors between their families and communities and military actors. These positions give them a sense of agency and bring about a change in bargaining power within the household, and in turn may change women’s understandings of their group interests and shift their preferences toward state law.

I hypothesize further that disruption of gender hierarchies is facilitated through the more general processes of community disintegration that result from war. Violence, displacement, and the polarization of political identities diminish community and family social control and generational and clan hierarchies. Consequently, families and communities are less able to force their members, particularly women, to rely on customary and religious justice systems. This logic allows me to formulate the women’s empowerment hypothesis:

An alternative hypothesis states that victimization by the state is likely to harden ethnic and religious identities and therefore to increase the prevalence of reliance on religious and customary law.Footnote ⁴² This reasoning allows me to formulate the alienation hypothesis:

I assume that the alienation hypothesis operates at the individual level and is psychological in its nature. By contrast, the women’s empowerment hypothesis operates at the societal and community levels. Before I turn to the systematic test of my hypotheses, in the next two sections I describe in detail the main dependent and independent variables—choices under legal pluralism and conflict—relying on secondary sources and my qualitative research.Footnote ⁴³

Legal Pluralism in Chechnya

Legal pluralism emerged in Chechnya as a result of Russian colonization in the nineteenth century. Before colonization, Chechens did not have a centralized state; clans and villages were the principal social organizations and were governed by customary law known as adat.Footnote ⁴⁴ As in other societies of agnatic kinship, Chechen adat assumes the subject of the law is the family and clan (teip) rather than the individual. Adat norms are transmitted through early childhood socialization.

Sharia law was brought to Chechnya as a tool of resistance against the Russian conquest.Footnote ⁴⁵ After the resistance was defeated in 1859, the Russian state introduced a division of jurisdictions: personal law issues—marriage, divorce, and inheritance, as well as religious property —were under Sharia jurisdiction; petty crime and property disputes were regulated by adat; and criminal cases went to the Russian courts. After the October Revolution, the Bolshevik government in the North Caucasus initially built a surprising coalition with Islamic clerics and established “Red” Sharia courts. But upon consolidation of its rule in the mid-1920s, the Soviet government eliminated Sharia courts and attempted to suppress adat, although it never fully succeeded in doing so.Footnote ⁴⁶

In the early post-Soviet period, Chechnya attempted to secede from Russia. The Russian government responded with a military operation that escalated into two bloody wars. During the wars, the alternative legal systems became extremely politicized and represented different political forces within Chechnya. An Islamist faction within the rebels actively promoted Sharia. From 1996 to 1999, these Islamists successfully pressured the government of Chechnya to adopt Sharia law.

After the rebels were defeated in 2000, the Kremlin abolished Sharia courts and reintroduced Russian law in Chechnya, but for a long period, Chechnya operated under de facto military rule, which was characterized by severe human rights violations. Gradually, the federal center transferred power to Ramzan Kadyrov, who became president of Chechnya in 2007. Kadyrov’s government has actively promoted the semiformal institutions of adat and Sharia and introduced councils of elders and qadi (Sharia) courts across Chechnya. The status of these institutions is ambiguous. De jure, only Russian state law applies in Chechnya, but de facto Sharia and adat function as very powerful legal systems.Footnote ⁴⁷

Enforcement by adat and Sharia is based on social pressure. Families and communities in Chechnya push individuals to rely on customary and religious institutions for dispute resolution and to ostracize individuals who take their disputes to the police and courts. For instance, a businessman from the town of Urus-Martan stated, “Those who go to Russian court are outcasts. And they are a tiny minority because everyone knows that if a person goes to a Russian court, he does not want justice, he just wants to win. Such people receive very low respect.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Overall, there is informal coordination between the three legal systems: high-cost economic cases and criminal cases are mostly resolved through state law, and family disputes are mostly left for Sharia and adat. There also is an informal hierarchy of legal orders: people usually start dispute resolution through adat; if that does not work, they go to a religious forum; and if that also does not work, they go to state authorities. Furthermore, adat, Sharia, as it is practiced in Chechnya, and even state law are interconnected and profoundly influence each other, but the informal coordination and hierarchy are both quite weak, and in many situations, alternative legal orders contradict each other and lead to drastically different dispute resolution outcomes.

Importantly, the dominant interpretations of adat and Sharia impose disadvantages on women. For example, according to adat, children must stay with their father after divorce, and divorcees and widows do not inherit any of their former husband’s property. Sharia norms are used to justify polygamy and restrictions on women’s mobility. By contrast, Russian state law assumes gender equality, but the state legal system is corrupt, slow, and complicated. Moreover, the officials in charge of it are Chechens who often implement norms from custom and religion in their practice.

Consequently, almost all my interviews suggest that the severest conflicts of laws in Chechnya are related to gender issues. The most common disputes are related to divorce and child custody, domestic violence, inheritance, and polygamy. Local customs of honor killings and bride kidnappings also inevitably involve conflicts between alternative normative orders. According to my interviews with qadis (Islamic judges) from three Chechen districts, family disputes constitute up to 80 percent of all cases they adjudicate.Footnote ⁴⁹ The mufti of Chechnya (the government-appointed supreme religious authority) said it is “easier for him to reconcile blood enemies in feud than to reach a solution in a child custody case.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The proliferation of family disputes is surprising because Chechnya has always been a conservative, patriarchal society. Patriarchal social order was preserved in Chechnya despite seven decades of Soviet rule. Upon the consolidation of Soviet rule in Chechnya in the mid-1920s, the government tried to impose gender equality and “liberate” Chechen women in accordance with socialist principles. The government introduced universal mass education and employed many Chechen women outside their homes—on collective farms and in other economic sectors. The government actively combated the so-called rudiments of the past, such as bride kidnappings, bride prices, and polygamy (which was almost entirely abolished). The government also banned wearing headscarves. But the forced deportation of Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia in 1944 and the subsequent marginalization of Chechens upon their return to the North Caucasus in 1957 undermined the effects of Soviet egalitarian policies. Soviet authorities were barely present within Chechen society. The majority of Chechens were not allowed to live in Grozny, which remained a largely Russian city. Rural areas of Chechnya largely preserved the traditional division of gender roles. Very few Chechen women worked in the industrial sector. In the mid-1980s, “close to 60 percent of adult [Chechen] women had no formal employment at all.”Footnote ⁵¹ The majority of employed women worked on collective farms and in sales and services. Many Chechen girls did not receive higher education. The gender gap in education in the Checheno-Ingush Soviet Republic was significantly higher among Chechens than among other ethnic groups.Footnote ⁵² There were, of course, exceptions. Some Chechen women became party cadres, engineers, and professors, but these exceptions do not disprove the general pattern. The Soviet egalitarian agenda in gender relations did not succeed in Chechnya. Overall, the culture remained highly conservative and patriarchal. I argue that the fundamental transformation of gender relations in Chechnya, which in turn changed the dispute resolution processes, came with the prolonged military conflict of the post-Soviet period. In the next section, I briefly describe the conflict and its legacy.

The Chechen Conflict

The history of the Chechen wars is extensively documented.Footnote ⁵³ Therefore, I only briefly outline the dimensions relevant to my analysis: wartime civilian victimization and women’s roles during the conflict.

The First Chechen War (1994–1996) ended in a peace agreement between the Russian state and Chechen rebels after the de facto military victory by the rebels, who employed guerrilla warfare strategies. In the interwar period, 1996–1999, Chechnya was a de facto independent state. The active military phase of the Second Chechen War (1999–2000) ended in the rebels’ defeat and reintegration of Chechnya into the Russian state. It was followed by a long insurgency and brutal counterinsurgency campaign. The second war and counterin-surgency were characterized by especially severe victimization of civilians. Although estimates vary dramatically, conservatively the two wars resulted in more than fifty thousand dead or missing.Footnote ⁵⁴ More than two hundred thousand people became refugees or were internally displaced.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 2003, the United Nations called Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, the most destroyed city on Earth. Many other towns and villages were also destroyed. Violence against civilians was often indiscriminate.Footnote ⁵⁶ Importantly, the Russian military was not the only source of civilian victimization. During the course of the second war, a large number of the rebels switched sides and joined the Kremlin in its counterinsurgency campaign against former brothers in arms, causing inter-Chechen violence. The rebels targeted civilians whom they suspected to have collaborated with Russians.

A notable feature of the Chechen conflicts is their gendered nature. During the First Chechen War, women were crucial in sustaining the insurgency: they provided food, shelter, and intelligence to the rebels.Footnote ⁵⁷ Some women participated in military actions.Footnote ⁵⁸ During the second war, insurgents used female suicide bombers, known as “black widows,” for terrorist attacks,Footnote ⁵⁹ but the vast majority of Chechen women were civilians who tried to sustain the basic livelihood of their families. Several of my female respondents emphasized that during the war, while men were fighting in the mountains or hiding in the basements and bomb shelters of Grozny, women earned a living by trading basic goods in the local markets. Women also sold provisions to Russian soldiers. Most important, women became the principal interlocutors between families and communities and military actors. For Chechen men, any contact with the Russian army presented a very high risk of being arrested or killed, so it was women who crossed military checkpoints and went to the Russians to sell goods or bargain for ransom for their abducted relatives. Chechen women were also actively involved in political collective action: they organized mass protests and pickets against indiscriminate killings, abductions, and torture.

A number of women described the war-induced gender-role reversal in Chechnya to the Czech journalist and human rights activist Petra Procházková. For example, Elza Duguyevova said, “Most of the husbands sit at home. I’m so frightened to let mine out in the streets on his own. When he has no choice but to go, I prefer to accompany him. I protect him, not him me.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Another woman, Liza Ibragimova, concluded that during the war Chechen women “discovered that we can manage without men.”Footnote ⁶¹

At the same time, the war also revived neotraditionalism in Chechen society and gave rise to militarized forms of masculinity. Aggression became the norm in society and women often suffered from it in the form of domestic violence.Footnote ⁶² Psychological stress led to a high rate of divorce, which was previously uncommon in Chechnya. Despite these negative effects, the cumulative effect of the wartime experiences of earning money, living without men, and engaging in collective action increased women’s opportunities to pursue their rights.

Analysis of Survey Data

To analyze the demand for state law versus alternative legal orders based on religion and custom, I conducted an original, face-to-face survey of Chechnya’s population. To build a sample frame, I relied on the available administrative records. I implemented a multistage sampling protocol.Footnote ⁶³ The spatial distribution of the sample is mapped in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Map of the Survey Sample

The main outcome variable is preferences for alternative legal forums, which is revealed through answering the questions that follow the vignettes. Based on my qualitative research, I designed ten vignettes involving the following issues: (1) child custody, (2) domestic violence, (3) bride kidnapping, (4) honor killing, (5) polygamy, (6) inheritance, (7) property, (8) car accident, (9) debt, and (10) murder. Each vignette is a composite of multiple actual cases.Footnote ⁶⁴ Each dispute is modeled to provide the respondent a conflict between the legal systems: all three alternative legal systems would be expected to lead to divergent out-comes. The questions that follow the vignettes asked respondents to choose the best forum for dispute resolution: state law, Sharia, or adat. The vignettes are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Vignettes

Responses to the vignettes are presented in Figure 2. The figure clearly shows a wide variation in preferences for alternative legal orders in Chechnya. It also shows that people prefer Sharia in the majority of hypothetical disputes, especially in family matters. Demand for state law is particularly high for a property dispute over an apartment, a car accident, and in the case of murder. Adat is the most common choice in a situation of bride kidnapping, which is not surprising given that it is a practice that is often associated with the customary norm. I aggregated responses across all ten vignettes into indices of preferences for state law, Sharia, and adat by calculating the number of times respondents selected each forum or chose the “don’t know” option, and normalized these variables so they take values from 0 to 1. Descriptive statistics show that the likelihood of choosing state law in a dispute is approximately 33 percent; Sharia, 36 percent; and adat, 21 percent; the rest are “don’t know.” I used these indices as the dependent variables in my analysis.

Figure 2 Preferences for Alternative Legal Systems in Different Vignettes

The survey also measures the actual experience with using institutions across all three alternative legal orders. Descriptive statistics show that 15 percent of the sample reported going to the police or to court to solve their disputes at least once during the past three years, 19 percent appealed to an imam or qadi for adjudication, and another 19 percent asked elders to solve their dispute.Footnote ⁶⁵

To test the alienation hypothesis, I measured individual victimization during the conflict. The survey records indicators of a family member killed, a family member wounded, a family displaced during the conflict for a prolonged period, and property damaged or destroyed.Footnote ⁶⁶ Descriptive statistics show that there is considerable variation in individual victimization in my sample. Approximately 50 percent of the sample reported a family member being killed and the same proportion reported a family member being wounded. The majority of the sample reported some form of property damage. About a third of the sample reported being displaced for more than a year.Footnote ⁶⁷

The survey also records basic sociodemographic characteristics. Descriptive statistics show that 52 percent of my respondents were women. The average age of the sample was thirty-five years old; 47 percent lived in urban areas.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indicators of education and income show considerable variation in these parameters.Footnote ⁶⁹

Individual-Level Analysis

I started my analysis by testing the premise of the women’s empowerment hypothesis that women prefer state law to alternative legal orders, and the observable implication from the alienation hypothesis that individuals victimized during the conflict should be less inclined to rely on state law.

Figure 3 shows that women were much more likely than men to choose state law: the predicted value of choosing state law in a dispute among women is approximately 9 percentage points higher than for men.Footnote ⁷⁰ Moreover, I find that women were more likely than men to choose state law in all ten dispute categories, that is, both in gendered disputes and in conflicts unrelated to gender, such as car accidents or murder.Footnote ⁷¹ These results are confirmed by multivariate regression analysis (Table 2).

Figure 3 Gender Differences in Preferences for Alternative Legal Systems

Table 2 OLS Regression Analysis of the Effect of Individual-Level Victimization on Legal Preferences

*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

In contrast to the alienation hypothesis, multivariate regression analysis shows that among indicators of victimization, only the experience of prolonged displacement has a statistically significant association with preferences for a particular order. Displacement is positively related to demand for Sharia. My interviews with people who spent a long time in the refugee camps and with members of nongovernmental organizations who worked with Chechen refugees, suggest that this effect may be driven by the fact that displacement disrupted traditional social networks because families were intermixed in the camps.Footnote ⁷² The state was not present in the camps. By contrast, all camps had a small mosque and many people brought their disputes to their camp’s imam; therefore, the finding on the role of displacement may not reflect its psychological effect but an induced social habit.

In turn, indicators of family members killed, family members wounded, and property damage have no predictive power. There are several explanations for this counterintuitive result. First, the indicators of victimization lack information about the identity of the per-petrator of violence. Specifying this information within the survey is very sensitive in contemporary Chechnya. Even though the Russian army perpetrated the vast majority of civilian victimization during the Chechen conflict, other actors in the conflict also inflicted violence.

Relatedly, the survey does not contain information about whether the respondents blame Russia for their victimization even when they were victimized by the Russian army. This question also would have been very sensitive. On several occasions during my fieldwork, I encountered people who spoke about their personal or family history of victimization by the Russian army, then blamed some external actors for what happened. Conspiracy theories proliferated in postwar Chechnya and complicated the process of blame attribution.

In addition, the responses to the questions regarding family victimization might suffer from biases. Even without identifying the side responsible for violence, questions about the war are sensitive in Chechnya, where under Kadyrov, all mentions of war are strictly regulated. As a result, 20 percent of the sample avoided responding to the battery of questions on victimization. Thus, in the main specifications of the analysis, I relied on community (meso) and society (macro) indicators of victimization.

Community-Level Analysis

My theory and research design distinguish the effects of victimization at the individual and community levels. I argue that victimization at the community level is not just an aggregation of victimization at the individual level. As a consequence of killings and induced displacement, community victimization affects the structural composition of communities; in other words, community victimization affects not only individuals but also the relations between them (social structure and networks).

The main empirical specification of my analysis estimates the effect of the interaction between community victimization and gender on the choice of state law, which allowed me to compare gender gaps in victimized and nonvictimized communities. To identify victimized communities, I relied on the coding of the reports of violent events during the Chechen wars compiled by the Human Rights Center Memorial.Footnote ⁷³ I coded a community as victimized if it experienced at least one event of indiscriminate or collective targeting of the civilian population. The most common types of civilian victimization were indiscriminate bombings and sweep operations. I triangulated the original coding with the interviews on wartime violence with eighteen informants, who represented both sides of the conflict, and also included members of ngos who documented war atrocities. Two different data-generating processes largely converged in identifying communities that were exposed to large-scale indiscriminate violence. I identified sixteen communities in my survey sample that were collectively or indiscriminately targeted during the First or the Second Chechen War and twenty-three communities that were not. The spatial distribution of the data is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 Victimization among Sampled Communities

Exposure to violence in wars is not randomly assigned, so using victimization as an independent variable faces the problem of endogeneity. What explains variation in exposure to conflict across Chechnya? The principal goal of the army in both wars was to establish control over the capital, Grozny, Chechnya’s largest city; the heaviest battles, therefore, concerned that city. Rebels took advantage of mountainous terrain; much of fighting occurred in those areas of southern Chechnya and on the roads leading to them. Thus, geography and strategic interaction between the two fighting sides largely determined the exposure of different communities to violence. There were also some haphazard factors. For example, a community was much more likely to be targeted by the Russian army if a famous rebel commander was from it. In my analysis, I controlled for the relevant geographic factors and community characteristics to partially mitigate the issue of endogeneity.

To adjust for remoteness, I included the distance from Grozny. I also included a measure for altitude because both the likelihood of victimization and legal practices may differ between the mountainous area of Chechnya and the lowlands. To control for the possibility that informal dispute resolution is stronger in smaller communities, I measured community size. In addition, because legal practices may be influenced by cultural contact, I added a measure for the share of the Russian population in each location according to the 1989 census. Because there is a spatial clustering of victimized communities, I used district-level fixed effects.

I ran ordinary least squares regression models with standard errors clustered at the community level. Table 3 provides support for the women’s empowerment hypothesis by showing the positive effect of interacting variables on community victimization with an indicator for female gender. The effect is statistically significant and substantially large. To make sense of these results, I present them in the form of predicted values of choosing state law for men and women in victimized versus nonvictimized communities. The results follow: men in nonvictimized communities choose state law in approximately 29 percent of cases; for men in victimized communities, this probability is about the same—30 percent; there is no statistically significant difference. Women in nonvictimized communities choose state law is approximately 35 percent of cases, which means that in nonvictimized communities, the gender gap is approximately 6 percentage points. On average, women in victimized communities choose state law in 42 percent of cases. Thus, in victimized communities the gender gap is 12 percentage points, twice as large as in nonvictimized communities. Figure 5 plots the results. This analysis demonstrates that the gender gap is driven by changes in women’s support for law in the victimized communities, not male alienation from it.

Table 3 OLS Regression Analysis of the Effect of Community Victimization and Gender on Legal Preferences

*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

Figure 5 Interaction Plot for the Effects of Community Victimization and Gender on Support for State Law

Analysis of Court Data

In this section, I explore the correspondence of my survey results with behavioral data on all civil cases heard in the magistrates’ courts—the lowest level of the court system in Russia. This analysis has important limitations, the most crucial being that there is no matching behavioral data on the use of Sharia and adat.Footnote ⁷⁴ But the data provide an important addition to my analysis because they allow us to understand whether attitudes translate into behavior and overcome the potential problem of dishonest or inaccurate responses. In particular, are women in more-victimized communities indeed more likely to use state courts?

Magistrates’ courts were established in Chechnya in 2010. Overall, there are sixty-six courts in the republic. Using web scraping, I collected data on all civil cases adjudicated in magistrates’ courts in Chechnya from 2010 to 2016.Footnote ⁷⁵ I identified the legal personality of the plaintiffs in the cases by distinguishing cases in which a plaintiff is a natural person. I also identified the gender of the natural person plaintiffs to test my hypothesis of women’s use of state law. I used the structure of last names in Russian: a last name that ends in a signals that a plaintiff is female; for example, Magomedov is male and Magomedova is female.

Overall, there were 106,263 civil cases heard in magistrates’ courts in Chechnya from 2010 to 2016. The most common ones were labor disputes (approximately 32 percent), and cases related to taxes and tariffs (27 and 8 percent, respectively). Family disputes constituted approximately 7 percent, and property disputes constituted approximately 1 percent. I restricted the sample to civil cases in which a plaintiff is a natural person, which leaves 9,359 observations. More than 60 percent of these cases were related to family disputes. Among natural person plaintiffs in all civil cases, the majority were women (57 percent).

Court cases are the units of the analysis. I used an indicator of a female plaintiff as the dependent variable. To measure exposure to conflict, I relied on the same indicators of community-level victimization used in the main specification of the analysis of the survey data. I aggregated data on violence at the court-district level. Because Chechen towns have multiple court districts and because the data on violence are not disaggregated within towns, I merged data for each of these towns across court districts. I identified seventeen districts as severely victimized and twenty-seven as less victimized. Control variables include the presence of Russian population (prewar), mountainous terrain, and urban or rural status. In addition, to rule out a mechanical link between sex ratio change as a result of war and women’s legal behavior, I calculated the share of women in a court district population based on 2010 census. I also included year fixed effects. I first analyzed the entire collection of disputes and then divided the data set into family disputes and disputes in other legal domains (mostly labor and property disputes). I ran a set of bivariate logistic regressions that aim to predict the gender of plaintiffs. Standard errors are clustered at the district level. The results are presented in Table 4.

Table 4 Predicting Female Plaintiff in Civil Disputes: Binary Logistic Regression

*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

In line with the women’s empowerment hypothesis, the analysis shows that all else being equal, in more-victimized communities, the likelihood of having a female plaintiff is significantly higher than in less-victimized ones. Transformation of the logistic regression coefficient suggests that the difference is approximately 12 percentage points, which is substantially large. Importantly, this relationship is present only for the family disputes. Another key finding is that the demographic variable for sex ratio does not have predictive power, which can be interpreted as evidence against a simple demographic explanation of the results. Thus, analysis of the behavioral data confirms the positive relationship between community-level victimization and subsequent use of state law among women.

Comparing Chechnya and Ingushetia

I also analyzed the effect of conflict on legal pluralism in Chechen society as a whole by comparing Chechnya and Ingushetia, rather than by exploring only variation among communities and individuals. The motivation for this analysis was that the war in Chechnya affected the entire society, so to estimate its effect on legal pluralism in general, one needs a meaningful comparison. Ingushetia fills this role. Ingush people live under the same constellation of legal orders as Chechnya’s population: Russian state law, Sharia, and adat. Together with Chechens, the Ingush people belong to the Vainakh ethnic group, sharing customs and social structure. Until 1992, Checheno-Ingushetia was a single federal subject within the USSR and subsequently Russia, but in 1992, they separated: Chechnya proclaimed independence from Russia while Ingushetia remained within the Russian Federation. Consequently, Ingushetia was not directly affected by the Russo-Chechen wars.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, I treat Ingushetia as a controlled comparative case for Chechnya, showcasing how the interrelationship between alternative orders evolved in the absence of prolonged conflict.

This analysis tests the women’s empowerment hypothesis by comparing differences between male and female legal attitudes in Chechnya and Ingushetia. I conducted an original face-to-face survey of a subset of Ingushetia’s population (n = 400), similar to the one I conducted in Chechnya. The sampling was random and proportional to the most populous settlements in Ingushetia. Descriptive statistics of the survey show that the Ingushetia sample is comparable to the Chechen one.Footnote ⁷⁷ Most important, it shows that Ingushetia, like Chechnya, has pervasive legal pluralism: 12 percent reported experience in dispute resolution through the courts or police, 16 percent through religious authorities, and 15 percent through elders.

The main outcome variables were measured with the same set of vignettes as in Chechnya. Aggregation of the responses to the vignettes shows that the likelihood of choosing state law in a dispute is 42 percent; Sharia, 31 percent; and adat, 15 percent. The comparison of means shows that that preference for state law in Ingushetia is significantly higher than in Chechnya (42 versus 33 percent), and support for both Sharia (31 versus 36 percent) and adat (15 versus 21 percent) are higher in Chechnya.

The analysis shows that in line with the women’s empowerment hypothesis, there is no gender gap in legal preferences in Ingushetia. Figure 6 compares preferences of male and female respondents in the two regions for state law. The figure shows that while Chechen women are only slightly less likely than Ingush women to choose Russian state law, Chechen men are dramatically less likely than In-gush men to choose state law. This finding shows that at the macro level, the gender gap in legal preferences is largely driven by men.

Figure 6 Gender Gaps in Support for State Law in Chechnya and Ingushetia

Mechanisms of Women’s Legal Empowerment

Why does exposure to conflict lead to differential demand for state law among women and men? From a theoretical perspective, there are several potential channels that can link exposure to conflict to women’s legal empowerment. For example, Marie Berry highlights three principal mechanisms: (1) a demographic shift due to the disproportionate death of men, (2) an economic shift resulting from the destruction of the prewar economy, and (3) a cultural shift owing to the reconceptualization of women as legitimate political and social actors.Footnote ⁷⁸ Tripp emphasizes the role of (4) institutional shift due to implementation of legislation, such as quotas, that aimed to improve women’s power.Footnote ⁷⁹ In addition to these mechanisms, in the theory section, I outlined the role of (5) societal shift, which was the result of the weakening of clans and elders. In this section, I scrutinize the plausibility of these mechanisms.

First, the analysis of court-case data finds no support for the demographic shift hypothesis. The variable for sex ratio is not a statistically significant predictor of the share of female plaintiffs in a district. More-over, the aggregate results of the 2010 all-Russia census show little gender imbalance in Chechnya, which is similar to or even smaller than for Ingushetia or Russia in general.Footnote ⁸⁰ Demographic change also cannot explain the difference in preferences between men and women in Chechnya.

Second, I do not find direct support for the cultural shift mechanism. The rationale behind it is that due to having experienced agency during the war, women might become more aware of their rights and acquire more egalitarian views. Most of my interviewees, even those whose views I would classify as feminist, said that most women in Chechnya are deeply entrenched in the patriarchal culture. But the absence of evidence in support of the values mechanism should not be taken as evidence of its absence.

The third mechanism—economic shift—finds strong support in my interviews. The women and the men with whom I spoke acknowledged a profound transformation of the labor market roles in Chechnya as a consequence of war. In several interviews the respondents referred to “a husband who lies on a sofa all day and does nothing and his wife who works on several jobs and also fulfills all housewife duties” as a common family type in postwar Chechnya.Footnote ⁸¹ During the war and early postconflict period, men were excluded from labor market for security reasons. As I highlighted in the description of the conflict, any contact with the Russian army presented a threat to the Chechen men, who were indiscriminately treated as enemy combatants. Under such circumstances, many men hid in the mountains, left Chechnya, or stayed at home. I met two men who said that in the early 2000s they did not leave their houses for years; mothers and wives prohibited their sons and husbands from leaving the house as a security measure. In turn, besides employment in the bureaucracy, markets, schools, and hospitals, women started to open small-scale businesses like restaurants, beauty salons, and pharmacies. Given that the majority of men remained unemployed or employed part-time in seasonal work, women’s advances in the labor market changed the bargaining power within families. Women received access to material resources—resources incredibly important for allowing women to access state law. Navigating state law is costly due to formal fees, compensation paid to the lawyers, and especially informal payments—the bribes that are necessary to make the system work in one’s favor. Thus, that conflict dramatically increased women’s share in the workforce is a very important facilitator of women’s legal mobilization through state law. In addition, their status as breadwinners in their families might have ultimately shifted cultural roles in Chechnya and led to realization of agency among women, even if they do not explicitly acknowledge this change.

Fourth, I test the institutional channel behind war-induced women’s empowerment. In the aftermath of some conflicts, the government, often with the encouragement and assistance of the Western powers, introduced legislation that aimed to protect women’s rights. In Chechnya, no such government-sponsored institutional changes occurred, which is not surprising given that the West had no say in postwar political development in Chechnya. But there was another channel of profound change in the institutional structure in Chechnya that was a direct product of conflict. During the conflict, especially during the Second Chechen War, Chechnya witnessed a proliferation of ngos.Footnote ⁸² They documented war crimes and human rights violations, supported Chechens detained by the law enforcement agencies, provided food and medical help to the population, and helped Chechen refugees. Many of these organizations remained in Chechnya for more than a decade. By working at these organizations, local Chechen women and men received unique administrative experience that helped them to develop legal consciousness.Footnote ⁸³ After the war, ngos that started with a broad-based human rights agenda changed their orientation and refocused on gender issues. At the time of my field research (2014–2016) there were sixteen ngos operating in Chechnya that were focused on women rights and women’s empowerment. The existence of this vibrant and professional ngo community amid the repressive dictatorship is striking. The ngos in Chechnya provide psychological help, educational programs, and training in different fields for women. Most important for the legal mobilization, these organizations provide legal education, legal aid, and legal representation to women free of charge. Given that navigating state law is quite complicated, access to legal representation plays a tremendously important role for transforming women’s grievances into actual legal cases.

Last, I find support for the community fragmentation mechanism due to the diminished authority of elders and clans. The logic here is that legal choices are largely determined by social pressure from families and communities who strongly prefer dispute resolution through custom and religion and use ostracism against those who go to state courts. Women are especially vulnerable to social pressure not to use state courts. The qualitative data indicate that the effect of the disruption of gender hierarchies is indeed multiplied by the more general process of community disintegration, most notably disruption of generational hierarchies. Clans and family elders became substantially less powerful in the victimized communities because of the killing of community leaders, mass migration, and intracommunal feuds. One of my respondents from a severely victimized village in Chechnya said, “There are no real elders left in our village. There are state appointed so-called ‘elders,’ but they don’t have the respect of the community.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In another interview, a woman in her forties from a victimized community in the western part of Chechnya said that when she had a dispute with her husband over child custody, her husband sent his relatives to the elder of her clan. “Then they came to the elder of my clan and asked him to force me to withdraw the claim from court. But the elder told them: ‘I have no power over that woman.’ They responded, ‘In that case, you have to kill her if you are a real man.’ Our elder responded, ‘Are you insane? Do you want me to go to jail because of your stupid child custody dispute? No way.’”Footnote ⁸⁵ This interview suggests that in these victimized communities, elders do not have absolute power over their female relatives and cannot effectively prohibit them from using state courts. In contrast, traditional institutions in less-victimized communities remained powerful and thus more able to preclude women from relying on state law.

The Backlash

My work shows that the conflict in Chechnya created the conditions for women to pursue their interests through state law. At the same time, my qualitative research shows that war-induced women’s empowerment in Chechnya was met by a strong backlash from the Chechen government.Footnote ⁸⁶ The most notorious manifestations of the neotraditionalist policies of the Chechen government are the semiformal introduction of polygamy, support for the practice of honor killings, and restrictions on women’s dress.Footnote ⁸⁷

My field observations and interviews provide numerous examples of this backlash. Khasan, a man in his thirties who belongs to the Chechen intelligentsia, said, “After the war … and before Ramzan [Kadyrov took power in 2007], we had a feminist rule here. All government jobs below ministers were occupied by women. Men were simply unemployed. Now things changed. Ramzan brought back the order.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Support for Kadyrov’s government cannot be systematically measured due to the high political sensitivity of the issue, but my interviews suggest that many men support Kadyrov at least in part because of his reinforcement of a patriarchal social order through the promotion of Sharia and adat and through implementing gendered policies like making headscarves obligatory for women.

The backlash manifests itself in the work of government agencies. For example, no police officers with whom I spoke considered domestic violence to be a crime, and none thought that a police officer had an obligation to intervene in a case of wife beating.Footnote ⁸⁹ Other interviewees emphasized how Chechen men in charge of law enforcement sabotage their responsibilities in gender-related cases if the law contradicts their beliefs. For instance, despite the presence of state court rulings in favor of the mother in child custody cases, enforcement agents often do nothing to return the children to their mothers.Footnote ⁹⁰ Another telling example comes from an interview with Marha, a thirty-five-year-old lawyer. She said that one time a male judge who was hearing a child custody case suddenly switched from speaking Russian to Chechen and asked a female plaintiff, “Why do you violate our traditions? Do you have any shame? How dare you claim your husband’s child?”Footnote ⁹¹ Most notoriously, one village head, a man in his thirties, said that in his village over the past year there had been three honor killings and that he “fully supports this.”Footnote ⁹²

Records of state court hearings provide additional evidence. For example, in the spring of 2015, Chechnya witnessed a rare court hearing on a case of so-called honor killing.Footnote ⁹³ The court heard the case of Sultan Daurbekov, who killed his thirty-eight-year-old daughter Zarema Daurbekova. Daurbekov killed his daughter because “she put shame on his family.”(He had heard rumors that she had “misbehaved.”) Daurbekov did not deny that he killed Zarema, so in theory the case should have been very easy. But the records of the process show the complexity and high-stakes politics of legal pluralism in gender-related matters. Ilyas Timishev, Daurbekov’s lawyer, emphasized in court that his client had done nothing criminal, because Zarema had lived an amoral life: “Daurbekov did not kill his daughter. It is better to say that he helped her to stop shaming herself, her father, and her relatives.” The prosecutor stated, “As a Chechen, [I] understand the lawyer,” but that he was speaking as a representative of the state. In the end, Daurbekov was found guilty of murdering his daughter and was sentenced to seven years in prison.

This case shows that despite the strong influence of customary and religious norms on the functioning of state law in Chechnya, and despite active official attempts to sabotage state law in gender-related cases, the state legal system has some autonomy and can be used to defend women’s rights. This perspective fits well with the concept of the dual state,Footnote ⁹⁴ which highlights that even under dictatorships, most aspects of the courts operate in a fairly normal, routine way and thus allow weak and marginalized individuals to advance their rights.