Memory – Mobilisation – War: the Case of Chechnya (1991 – 1999)

During the two decades that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Auton-omous Republic of Chechnya in the south of Russia has experienced two bloody armed conflicts (1994–1996; 1999–2009) (Tishkov 2001; Gammer 2006; Le Huérou et al. 2014). Using the example of the memory of the deportation of the Chechen people under Stalin (1944–1957) and its instrumentalisation during the periods of radicalisation that pre-ceded the outbreak of war, this paper explores the causal links between historical memory, radicalisation and conflict. It argues, that changes in the local, national and international context greatly impacted on the causal relationship between historical memory and conflict in Chechnya: while in the context of state-collapse and decolonisation after 1991, the unifying myth surrounding the traumatic memory of deportation may be regarded as an important factor contributing to the first Chechen war, the same memory was pushed to the background in the run-up to the second war, in a context that was dominated by an increasingly influencial movement of international Islamism and by socio-political fragmentation at a local level. Drawing on data collected from interviews, diaries and local and national newspapers, and departing from a relational approach to conflict analysis (della Porta 2018; Alimi, Bosi, and Demetriou 2012; Tilly and Tarrow 2015; Hughes and Sasse 2016), the paper focuses on actions (i.e. the instrumentalisation of the past) as a result of the larger socio-political context (i.e. the collapse of the Soviet Union, nationalist mobilisation, state collapse) and of local and international interactions and alliances of the actors involved. Located at the intersection between conflict- and memory studies, the paper thus adds valuable insights to the study of the pre-war period in post-Soviet Chechnya, and in general to the conceptual discussion about the link between historical memory and conflict