State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya

The Moynihan Institute’s newest series, Law in World Affairs, presents Egor Lazarev from Yale University for a virtual book talk. This event is open to Syracuse University faculty, students and staff. Please use your syr.edu email when registering. 

The book explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. It addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives?

The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.  

Egor Lazarev is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and a scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His research focuses on law and state-building in the former Soviet Union. His first book “State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Egor’s other research has been published in World Politics, World Development, and Political Science Research & Methods. Currently, he conducts field research on legal reforms and politicized criminal cases in post-Soviet Armenia.