Book Reviews
Russia’s Islamic Threat, Gordon M. Hahn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
368 pp. $35.00
G
ordon Hahn’s study of the rise of radical Islam in the northern Caucasus, Russia’s
Islamic Threat, provides an important reference for understanding the changing political dynamics of the Caucasus since the Soviet Union’s collapse. Like the valuable contributions of Matthew Evangelista, John Dunlop, and Moshe Gammer, this book significantly
deepens our understanding of radical Islam’s spread across the region. Hahn claims that
Russia is experiencing the beginning of an Islamist jihad that has spread from Chechnya to
five Russian Muslim republics—Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkariya, KarachaevoCherkessiya, and Adygeya (with possible extensions into Tatarstan and Bashkortostan).
The factors that caused combat organizations, called jamaats, to proliferate originated
from several sources, including the two separatist wars in Chechnya, rising nationalism,
Putin’s federalist counterattack on the nationalist insurgencies, regional poverty, and the
spread of radical wahhabism in the region. This book argues that this burgeoning movement poses a significant threat to Russia’s territorial integrity and, given the terrorist
groups’ close proximity to weapons of mass destruction, to the international community.
In Hahn’s view, this threat should be taken seriously as a major policy issue.
The book is divided into seven chapters. The first two chapters emphasize the Muslim
and Islamist challenge in the Russian Federation, the Chechen wars, and their consequences
for the spread of radical Islam across the region. Chapter 3 concentrates on the development
of a jihadist network more broadly in Russia, with chapters 4, 5, and 6 offering case studies included to elaborate this point: jihadism’s rise in Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkariya, the
western North Caucasus, and Tatarstan. The final chapter is devoted to some conclusions and
suggestions for international policymakers on the basis of the case studies provided.
Hahn offers the reader a far more comprehensive and elaborate picture of the
Islamist jihad’s spread to other regions of the Northern Caucasus and the Volga. The
book elaborates the ways in which al Qaeda’s operative strategies, based on the “freescale network” (59), were adopted in the region and provides very effective primary
source citations from Internet sources to illustrate the anti-American, anti-Israel, and
anti-Western sentiments held by radicalized Chechen separatists and their supporters.
The political agenda of the jihad movement to establish a Eurasian Islamist caliphate
across the region does, as Hahn argues, diminish as it spreads further outward from
Chechnya—but it is difficult to ascertain whether this agenda will strengthen in the
future. Determining the degree of indigenous support and structural capabilities of the
jamaats remains largely elusive and unpredictable.
The reader may question Hahn’s assumptions that Russia remains a weak state and
risks becoming a failed one, however. I would argue that Russia risks becoming an
increasingly authoritarian state, as the counterfederalism initiative and the formation of a
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DEMOKRATIZATSIYA
largely corporatist state under the control of the silovki (politicians from the old security
and military services who gained power under Putin’s presidency) has demonstrated. The
renewed assertion of the power ministries and the Federal Security Service and the transfer of power to Ramzan Kadyrov’s forces in Chechnya, with their inside intelligence and
brutal methods similar to those adopted by Russian forces, are all sympotmatic of these
trends. I would therefore dispute Hahn’s alarmist claim that “one or more of Russia’s
ethnic Muslim groups could spark a successful secessionist movement, or a Russia-wide
Islamist terrorist network could so weaken Russia through war as to precipitate Russia’s
overall collapse” (226).
Where the threat looms large is with the security challenge of nuclear weapons. Recent
research and monitoring trips have exposed, as Hahn rightly argues, the grossly insufficient
security at Russia’s military weapon of mass destruction sites. He alerts us also to the
frequent transportation of nuclear weapons across Russia by rail that could also provide
ample opportunity for seizure of military weapons of mass destruction by terrorist groups.
Although controlling the expansion of jamaats remains essential to the security of the Russian Federation, it is the security around these weapon sites that remains one of the most
vital policy issues for both the Russian government and the near abroad. Hahn’s book does
well to remind us of the absolute urgency of this matter.
Emma Gilligan
University of Connecticut
Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications
Russia and Globalization: Identity, Security, and Society in an Era of Change, Douglas W.
Blum, ed. Washington, DC/Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008. 383 pp. $60.00
R
ussia and Globalization: Identity, Security, and Society in an Era of Change,
edited by Douglas W. Blum, a professor at Providence College and an adjunct
professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International Studies, assembles
an impressive array of scholars specializing in fields as far ranging as demography,
human rights, and geopolitics. This breadth is one of the book’s great strengths, but
also one of its biggest weaknesses, as it prevents the authors from adopting a consistent
understanding of globalization.
The book is divided into two sections, one covering domestic policy and the other foreign policy. Both sections feature contributions from leading scholars at universities in the
United States, the European Union, and Russia, with Russian scholars penning seven of the
book’s thirteen substantive chapters. The individual chapters are generally of high quality,
and some, such as Alla Kassianova’s essay (chap. 6) on the Russian defense industry or
Eduard Solovyev’s examination (chap. 11) of the “geopolitical” school of thought, make
real contributions to our understanding of how different segments of the Russian elite have
coped with having globalization thrust on them at a moment when they were still sorting
out the transition from Communism.
Nonetheless, because the book suffers from a haphazard selection of themes and
conceptual confusion, it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. Any edited
volume, especially one with over a dozen separate chapters, runs the risk of being
Book Reviews
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unfocused. However, this problem is compounded by the book’s failure to clearly
explain what “globalization” means and its inability to ensure that all of the chapters
were written specifically with the aim of charting globalization’s impact on Russia. In
the introduction, Blum and Ulf Hedetoft initially define globalization as “a process of
intensifying transnational flows, leading to changed spatial and social relations” (2). They
then supplement that fairly neutral definition by adding that globalization is also “an
increasingly controlled and politically engineered process of neo-imperial design” (ibid.).
Needless to say, the Chinese, South Koreans, and many other beneficiaries of globalization
might beg to differ with this rather tendentious definition.
The contributors to this volume largely refuse to take up this somewhat tendentious
definition of globalization; instead, they adopt widely varying understandings of what
globalization actually means and in the process deprive the book of conceptual unity.
Some chapters, including Andrey Korotayev and Darya Khaltourina’s otherwise very
interesting analysis (chap. 2) of the Russian demographic crisis (which, they argue,
is almost entirely attributable to high rates of alcohol consumption), address issues
rooted principally in the specifics of Russia’s post-Communist transition rather than in
responses to global dynamics. Others, including Gennady N. Konstantinov and Sergey
R. Filonovich’s chapter (chap. 5) on educational reform and Rick Fawn’s discussion
(chap. 10) of Russia’s relationship to the Council of Europe in the context of the wars
in Chechnya equate globalization with European integration.
Given the importance of transnational economic flows as a driver of globalization, it
is also surprising that a work of this nature does not include more articles on business
and finance. Kassianova’s chapter (chap. 6) on the defense industry is the only one in
the entire book addressing how Russian firms have coped with the emergence of a global
economy. Given the defense industry’s importance as a source of revenue for the state
and as a lever of foreign policy, it is in many ways sui generis, and the book would have
benefited significantly from more attention to energy, civil aviation, and other sectors of
the Russian economy that have a significant transnational presence. Other quintessentially
global phenomena, including international terrorism and cross-border investment, also
receive short shrift.
The level of scholarship evident in Russia and Globalization is undoubtedly high.
However, as might be expected from a large collected volume, the work’s accessibility is
not uniform. Although only the demographics chapter (chap. 2) employs (relatively accessible) statistical analysis, several chapters are on the textually dense side. For that reason,
the book’s primary audience should be academics, social science graduate students, and
some advanced undergraduates.
On the whole, Russia and Globalization assembles an impressive array of intellectual
talent, but in a needlessly haphazard manner. Instructors would be better served picking
and choosing some of the stronger individual chapters, rather than assigning the book
as a whole.
Jeffrey Mankoff
Yale University and Council on Foreign Relations
Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications
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