Lack of rule of law as a push factor leading to violent radicalization in the North Caucasus (2002–2015)

Abstract

Following the collapse of the USSR, a violent jihadist organization called the Caucasus Emirate emerged in Russia, before subsequently splitting up in 2015 when most of its members swore allegiance to the Islamic State. The root causes of violent radicalization are complex but, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), there are certain universal “push factors”: perceptions of injustice, human rights violations, lack of rule of law, social-political exclusion and widespread corruption. Since all the factors coincide in the North Caucasus, the hypothesis of this study is that the lack of rule of law has been one of the main push factors leading to violent extremism in the specific case of the Republic of Ingushetia.

Terrorist risk assessment in the regions of the Russian Federation

“…Political repression and the unjustified use of violence against individuals or certain groups leads to an increase in the sense of injustice on the part of the current political regime and the spread of the most radical methods of fighting it (Tarín-Sanz and Ter-Ferrer, 2018). It appears that in the case of Russia, the situation may be connected not so much with the state repressions themselves, but with the public perception of specific court decisions or harsh actions by law enforcement officers, cases that received the most publicity in the federal media, being qualified as unfair (Snetkov, 2007; Ratelle, 2014; Souilemanov et al , 2018).…”