Ethno-Nationalism, Islam and the State in the Caucasus: Post-Soviet Disorder

Moshe Gammer

oct 2007 · Routledge

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With the region of the Caucasus with its ongoing, and even deteriorating, crisis and instability and its strategic and economic importance increasingly at the front of the world's attention, this volume presents and discusses some of the complexities and problems arising in the region such as Islamic terrorists and al-Qaida.

Scholars from different disciplines who specialise in the Caucasus analyze key topics such as:

• discussions of grass root perceptions
• the influence of informal power structures on ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus
• Russian policies towards Islam and their destabilising influence
• the influence of Islamic revival on the legal and social situations
• nationalism and the revival of pre- and sub-national identities
• shifts in identity as reflected in demography
• reasons for the Chechen victory in the first Chechen war
• the involvement of Islamic volunteers in Chechnya.

With the situation in Chechnia likely to spread across the entire North Caucasus, this cutting edge work will be of great value in the near future and will interest political scientists and regional experts of Russia, Central Asia, Caucasus, Middle East and Turkey, as well as NGOs, government agencies and think tanks.

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Moshe Gammer is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Muslim Resistance to the Tsar (1994) and of The Lone Wolf and the Baer (2005) and the editor of these books, also published by Routledge: Political Thought and Political History (2003), The Caspian Region. Vol. I: A Re-emerging Region; Vol.II: The Caucasus (2004) and Community, Identity and the State (2004).