REVIEW: A new war in the Caucasus? Shanibov and the Circassians. (timesonline.co.uk)

Georgi M. Derluguian
BOURDIEU’S SECRET ADMIRER IN THE CAUCASUS
A world-system biography406pp. Chicago University Press, distributed in the UK by Wiley.
Paperback, £17.50.0 226 14283 3

source (timesonline.co.uk) >>>

There is a new war brewing in the North Caucasus, but so far few people seem to have noticed. It will involve places that rarely make it onto the front page of major newspapers, yet it could be as bloody and intractable as the guerrilla conflict in Chechnya, which has dragged on now, with a brief hiatus, since 1994. Over the past several months, the Prime Minister of Ingushetia, which neighbours Chechnya to the west, barely survived an assassination attempt. Bombs and attacks on local police have become weekly occurrences in the eastern republic of Dagestan. In the west, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachaevo-Cherkessia are beset by interethnic tensions. In Chechnya, the unrecognized secessionist government recently named Shamil Basaev – the architect of last year’s 2004 school siege in Beslan, North Ossetia, which left over 300 children and adults dead – as deputy leader. Basaev’s boss, the Islamic scholar Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev, has announced a policy of widening the holy war against “unbelievers”. Fuelled by local authoritarianism, clan politics, religious fervour and Vladimir Putin’s own intransigence, violence in the North Caucasus is likely to escalate. One is reminded of the old saw about pessimists and optimists: the former believe things could not get worse; the latter know they could.

Making sense of the Caucasus has never been easy. The ethnic complexity of the region, its situation at the intersection of competing states and empires, and the volatile mix of poverty, religion, and the covetousness of geopolitical neighbours – for slaves in one era, for oil in another – have long made it a troubled borderland. Georgi M. Derluguian’s curiously titled Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus is, without a doubt, the most engaging and deeply analytical guide to this knotty region to have been produced in the past decade. It is even more than that, however, for Derluguian is concerned with answering three gigantic questions about East European and Eurasian affairs. Why did the Soviet Empire collapse? Why did it do so violently in some areas but relatively peacefully in others? And what accounts for the diversity of new polities – from rigid sultanates to consolidated democracies – that now stand on its ruins?

Derluguian’s answers to these questions are unconventional. The collapse of the Soviet system was part of the broader crisis of “developmental states” in the 1980s and 90s, states that had arrogated to themselves a whole host of responsibilities that they were increasingly unable to fulfil. In the context of a collapsing political order, mid-level bureaucrats in these states scrambled for ways of securing their livelihoods; the most resourceful of them turned to nationalism and ethnic exclusivism as alternative sources of legitimacy. The masses, however, were not simply duped by thesenew elites; they, too, found ethnic linkages to be crucial sources of social capital at a time when alternatives – class, for example – suddenly disappeared.

People at all levels of society grasped what they could in the chaotic politics that attended the end of Soviet-style socialism. It is thus no coincidence, as Derluguian points out, that developmental states such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke up not along lines of ethnicity, but along lines of turf: the mini-republics and provinces where local elites could carve out some degree of authority. If such internal units happened to bear the name of a distinct ethnic group – Kazakhstan for the Kazakhs, Croatia for the Croatians – all the better. Second-rank bureaucrats and third-rate poets could then refashion themselves as fathers of the nation.

The centrepiece of Derluguian’s story is a Circassian by the name of Musa Shanib, known in his earlier Soviet life as Iurii Shanibov. Although the Chechens get all the press today, for much of the nineteenth century it was the Circassians who presented the gravest challenge to the Russian Empire. Their homeland was in the North-West Caucasus, in the plains and hills along the Kuban River and the uplands along the Black Sea. They were within easy reach of the Ottomans, who assisted them from time to time in their resistance to Russian encroachments, and of the British spies and gun runners who saw an independent Circassia as a bulwark against further Russian moves towards Persia and India. The highland resistance in the North-East Caucasus was effectively extinguished in 1859, but the Circassians in the North-West held out for another five years. It took what today would be called ethnic cleansing – the systematic emptying of villages by Russian soldiers and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Circassians to the Ottoman Empire – to end the conflict there.

In the late 1980s, Shanibov became the leader of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, “a latter-day Garibaldi”, as Derluguian calls him, who dreamed of a union of Caucasus mountaineers that would at last wriggle free of Russia’s clutches. Shanibov’s was an unlikely career path. He had been a party functionary, a prominent local intellectual, and a passionate student of the Sociology of the French thinker Pierre Bourdieu (hence Derluguian’s title). But the concatenation of the waning of hyperdevelopmentalism as a state strategy and the persistent survivalism of Shanibov’s class of intellectual bureaucrats led him to embrace the national cause.

There is nothing more universally modern than purveyors of ancient identities. The key difference with his counterparts in Chechnya, Bosnia, or elsewhere, though, was that Shanibov turned out to be a rather poor nationalist. He was never beyond using violence, but he soon found himself literally outgunned by a new generation of leaders willing to do the unthinkable, from laying siege to a hospital to bombing passenger trains. In any revolution, resolve is the highest virtue, and Shanibov’s ultimately failed him, especially against terrorists like Shamil Basaev and entrenchedauthoritarians like Valerii Kokov, the President of Shanibov’s own republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. Eurasia is not exactly filled with people like Shanibov. He was such an oddity, in fact, that Bourdieu was known to keep a photo of his Circassian adept hanging above his desk. But there were plenty of people who followed a trajectory only slightly different from his. They have now beaten a well-worn path from their homes in the early Soviet dissident movements or the provincial bureaucracy, towards the highest offices of the post-Soviet Eurasian regimes. Today, their power rests on a combination of violence, resource control and a talent for securing the blessings of outsiders, from Saudi zealots to Western governments interested in prosecuting the “war on terror”.

Georgi Derluguian tells how much of Eurasia, in only a decade and a half, traded the promise of liberty and democracy for a political and moral captivity that will be difficult to escape. Clever, original and at times downright funny, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus is both an intimate biography of an unusualCircassian sociologist and an epic account of an entire generation’s trek through modernity. It uncovers the hidden logic behind the tragedies and horrors of the Caucasus – indeed, of the entire late twentieth-century world – and shows how seemingly senseless acts of violence have discernible, and often rather pedestrian, causes.

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ABSTRACT: Placing blame: Making sense of Beslan (sciencedirect.com)

Gearóid Ó Tuathail

School of Public & International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Alexandria, VA 22314, USA

Available online 12 March 2009.

Abstract

The aftermaths of terrorist spectacles are intensely consequential moments in the making of geopolitical meaning. This paper develops a critical geopolitical account of the ways in which key actors involved in the terrorist incident at School Number 1 in Beslan North Ossetia constructed its meaning and justified their actions. The event is examined from three perspectives: the terrorist's Beslan, the Kremlin's Beslan and the contested meaning of Beslan among Ossetians and others in the North Caucasus. Multiple sources are utilized in the construction of the account: an English language archive of Russian reporting on the event, accounts of the siege, statements by key protagonists, elite interviews in North Ossetia, and the results of a survey question in North Ossetia and the North Caucasus on Beslan. The paper examines the construction of blame by the various actors and relates it to indiscriminate geographies, sweeping acts of abstraction whose homogenizing effects make (counter)terrorist violence possible.

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Article Outline

Historical geopolitical contextualization

The terrorist's Beslan

The Kremlin's Beslan

North Ossetia's Beslan

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

NEWS: 29 Nov 07 | Caucasus Reporting Service 421

Beslan Surgeon in Legal Fight
Doctor says his detention and suspension followed criticism of North Ossetian authorities. By Anton Zurabov in Beslan (CRS No. 421 29-Nov-07)
TV at Heart of Georgian Crisis
Fate of opposition television station is subject of intense political haggling. By Eka Kvesitadze in Tbilisi (CRS No. 421 29-Nov-07)
Azeri Defence Spending Under Fire
Big increase in defence expenditure allegedly failed to lift soldiers out of poverty. By Rashid Suleimanov in Baku (CRS No. 421 29-Nov-07)

South Ossetia Mission: Travel Notes
To be honest, I thought personal reasons would prevent me from taking part in this trip to South Ossetia. But things turned out right after all, and there I was freezing at Minvody airport together with Olga Metreveli, waiting for our plane, which had been delayed. Marshenkulova Marina, 27-Nov-07
Outcry at Azerbaijani Editor Arrest
Observers say hooliganism charge against opposition editor is politically motivated. Abbasov Idrak, 22-Nov-07
Saakashvili Woos the People
Embattled Georgian president appoints new prime minister and promises social welfare reforms. Avaliani Dimitry, 22-Nov-07
Black Sea News Blackout in Ajaria
Deprived of proper information, Ajaria is rife with rumour and suspicion.Turadze Eteri, 15-Nov-07

POLITIC:

10 May 07 Caucasus Reporting Service 391

Armenia: Claims of Official Harassment Mar Ballot
Opposition activists see arrest of anti-government campaigner as culmination of campaign to cow them before the election.
By Karine Asatryan in Yerevan (CRS No. 391 10-May-07)
Fear Stalks Armenian District on Eve of Poll
Regional governor accused of intimidating opponents, leaving voters with few choices in assembly ballot.
By Gayane Mkrtchian in Syunik (CRS No. 391 10-May-07)
Beslan School a New Source of Grief
Local residents argue over how to commemorate those who perished in the tragic siege nearly three years ago.
By Elizaveta Valieva in Beslan and Vladikavkaz (CRS No. 391 10-May-07)