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Abstract
This dissertation explains the heterogeneous effects of armed conflict on sub-national governance in the North Caucasus. While acknowledging the role of inherited institutions, my multimethod investigation shows how they were strategically transformed during the breakup of the Soviet Union, creating unintended consequences and the basis for governance today.
My main argument is that divergent patterns of violence changed civilian preferences, collective action capacities, and the pattern of integration of local and ostensibly informal authorities, altering which domains became the purview of state control and which remained governed by non-state authorities. Comparing goods provision, dispute resolution, and symbolic practices alongside conventionally studied governance dimensions like coercion and extraction reveals that communities consistently rely on state institutions for coercion and extraction but exhibit significant variation in how they regulate disputes, provide public welfare goods, and enforce social order. Tracing the interaction between government policies and civilian demands, I identify three governance trajectories: centralized (Chechnya), polycentric (Dagestan), and mediated (Ingushetia).
The project provides several contributions. First, instead of privileging the state as the provider of governance, my research analyzes what communities are able to provide locally and where states interject. Second, the project moves beyond conventional proxies of state-building like extraction or coercion and the post-conflict focus on power-sharing institutions, to examine the reconstitution of goods provision, dispute resolution, and symbolic governance, contributing to recent scholarship that disaggregates governance and statehood. Third, by examining different patterns of violence in a case of civil war, a case of collective violence, and a case of fragmented criminal violence, my research adds to ongoing conversations about the legacies of violence. Finally, the project provides original empirical qualitative and quantitative data on violence and governance in the North Caucasus based on 9 months of fieldwork.
While most studies of governance focus on periods of conflict or areas of “limited statehood,” this project suggests such a framework also captures variation in societies emerging from conflict. I demonstrate that a framework centered on post-conflict governance most accurately captures variation in who governs, over which dimensions, and where, offering a way to trace the way in which conflict does and does not impact governance. The dissertation provides more general insights into the processes of rebuilding authority after the collapse of previously entrenched regimes. The reconstruction of governance in the North Caucasus shows, for example, how highly bureaucratized authoritarian regimes can give way to new strategies of governance that rely much more extensively on informal societally-based authority structures to monitor and regulate citizens. Since these post-collapse modes of governance relies more extensively on informal and indirect means of rule, my work also locates the heretofore hidden mechanisms of control and the different points at which individuals and communities are able to insulate and assert their own distinct interests.
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