Violence and the Dynamics of Political Settlements in Post-Soviet Kabardino-Balkaria

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the North Caucasus became, from the perspective of the Russian federal centre, a politically unstable and at times rather violent borderland. This article examines the political settlements emerging under the broader conditions of state formation in limited-access social orders, i.e. social orders negotiated between the central state and local elites with some violent potential. Analysing the developments in KabardinoBalkaria (KBR) since the early 1990s, the authors find three types of political settlements that vary in terms of elite figuration, key resources used for rent distribution and the role of violence as a political resource. These political settlements have differing implications for the sustainability of local social order and shed light on the variations in state rule exercised by the federal centre in its political peripheries. Against the backdrop of changing violent challenges, the centre successfully tightened vertical elite control but at the cost of reducing the inclusiveness of political settlements within Kabardino-Balkaria.