The aim of this thesis is to analyze the phenomenon of female suicide terrorism in Chechnya, particularly with the focus on motivation of individual terrorists and organizations. Besides these two levels of analysis, it looks for facilitating and necessary conditions in the specific socio-political environment of Chechnya.

This essay deals with the phenomenon of using football in order to exert influence over the domestic policy on the particular case of Russia after Vladimir Putin assumed the office of the president in 2000. Football in the Soviet Union and Russia developed in close interaction with politics almost through its entire history. However, the form of instrumentalization and the key players who had a chance to intervene into the football world were changing along with the changes of political and economic environment. The ascension of Vladimir Putin into the presidential office and his intervention into the existing power of oligarchs meant a major shift towards a stronger and active role of the Kremlin also in the process of using of football clubs. The analysis of particular cases along with the fact that most of the Russian professional clubs are currently owned directly by the state make the author of this essay to formulate the concluding thesis that after the consolidation of Putin's regime it is Kremlin who became the main player also in respect to the instrumentalization of football. This perspective means a shift in the research into the interaction of Russian football and the politics in which the stress was laid primarily on the role of oligarchs (process of "Berlusconization") so far. The...

Shortly after the February 2014 Euromaidan revolution which ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia orchestrated a rapid and mostly bloodless annexation of the Crimea. Following the removal of Ukrainian authority from the peninsula, the Kremlin focused simultaneously on legitimizing the annexation via an electoral reform in Crimea and fermenting political unrest in the Donbas. As violence broke out in the Donbas, anti-Ukrainian government militias were formed by defecting Ukrainian security forces members, local volunteers, and volunteers from Russia. The Kremlin provided extensive support for these militias which sometimes even came in the form of direct military intervention by conventional Russian forces. However, the use of state-sponsored militias by Russia is not a new phenomenon. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian Federation has been relying on militias to help stabilize local security environments, and more recently, achieve foreign security policy objectives in the Near Abroad. By tracking the history of Vostok (East) Battalion during its two distinctly different iterations, first as a militia for the Yamadayev family which operated primarily in Chechnya as well as briefly in South Ossetia and Lebanon and then as separatist formation in Eastern Ukraine, my thesis seeks to examine why Russia uses militias. Using the theoretical frameworks of principle-agent relations and organizational hierarchy, my thesis examines post-Soviet military reforms to contextualize the Kremlin's rationale for utilizing militia groups as well as analyzing the costs and benefits Moscow ultimately incurs when it leverages militias as force projection assets domestically and in the Near Abroad. / Master of Arts

Approved for public release; distribution in unlimited. / Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has attributed great importance to the development of cooperation with Russia. This thesis, first, evaluates the main developments in NATO - Russian relations since 1991. Although Moscow and the Alliance established a NATO - Russia Council (NRC) and asserted the initiation of a qualitatively new relationship, Russia still needs to fulfill some requirements for catching up the Western standards. Russia's external relations and political, economic and security factors internal to Russia will determine the future of the relationship. This thesis examines Russia's political development and transformation of its economic system, and establishes the problems in its political and economic systems. It also examines Russia's problematic external relations in the region, and their impact on the NATO - Russian relationship. It looks into Russia's National Security Concept, explores regional conflicts such as Chechnya and Georgia, and the U.S. - NATO presence in Central Asia. Then, it examines the oil and natural gas transportation problems created by the Russian monopoly, and evaluates Russian technology transfers to Iran, particularly in the nuclear sector. Consequently, it evaluates the internal and external interactions mentioned above and offers conclusions about the prospects for security and stability in Europe. / Lieutenant, Turkish Navy

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chechens fought against the Russians for independence. The focus in the literature available has been on the wars and the atrocities caused by the wars. The literature then hypothesizes that the insurgency of today is just a continuation of the past. They do not focus on a major event in Chechen history: the Soviet liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1944. It is this author’s assertion that the liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR forever changed the mindset of the people because it fractured a society that was once unified. This project will compare the Chechen insurgency from the beginnings until the deportation and after the deportation. This will allow me to show how the deportation changed the Chechen mindset and disprove the assertion that these two Chechen wars were just a continuation of the past.

This study considers the ontological value of metaphor as a site of ceaseless interaction among multiple (gendered) subjects, drawing on the theoretical work of Max Black, Victor Turner, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. Its focus is on the particular function of metaphor, locally and internationally, in three of the “new wars” of the twentieth century. The first chapter examines how the bridge metaphor, undergirded by cultural discourses on Mostar’s Old Bridge and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, shaped knowledge of gendered experiences in the Bosnian War. The second chapter historicizes the cockroach metaphor, which features in many representations of the Rwandan Genocide, and identifies how “the cockroach” is gendered by metaleptic reference to ubuhake, or pastoral clientship—which gained metaphoric significance through populist movements in the 1950s, when Saverio Naigiziki published The Optimist. The third chapter explores depictions of female civilians, combatants, and suicide-bombers as “prisoners,” considering this metaphor’s gendered variations from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” to discourses on the Chechen Wars. These three metaphors are of central importance to the production of knowledge about how and in what ways post-cold-war conflicts are gendered. Frequently, the international community objectifies “distant conflicts” through the same metaphors that, for local agents, articulate political self-identifications and enact gendered violence. Locally-initiated metaphors, thusly circulating among multiple discourses, produce interactive sites of semantic investment and imaginary exchange. Global and regional representations in metaphor of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars enter into common if asymmetrical networks of geopolitical and temporal interactions structured in part by human rights norms in the 1990s. By tracing the historical, cultural, and modal transformations of bridge, cockroach, and prisoner metaphors, this study investigates how fiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, testimony, film, and performance gender knowledge of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars.

This study considers the ontological value of metaphor as a site of ceaseless interaction among multiple (gendered) subjects, drawing on the theoretical work of Max Black, Victor Turner, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. Its focus is on the particular function of metaphor, locally and internationally, in three of the “new wars” of the twentieth century. The first chapter examines how the bridge metaphor, undergirded by cultural discourses on Mostar’s Old Bridge and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, shaped knowledge of gendered experiences in the Bosnian War. The second chapter historicizes the cockroach metaphor, which features in many representations of the Rwandan Genocide, and identifies how “the cockroach” is gendered by metaleptic reference to ubuhake, or pastoral clientship—which gained metaphoric significance through populist movements in the 1950s, when Saverio Naigiziki published The Optimist. The third chapter explores depictions of female civilians, combatants, and suicide-bombers as “prisoners,” considering this metaphor’s gendered variations from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” to discourses on the Chechen Wars. These three metaphors are of central importance to the production of knowledge about how and in what ways post-cold-war conflicts are gendered. Frequently, the international community objectifies “distant conflicts” through the same metaphors that, for local agents, articulate political self-identifications and enact gendered violence. Locally-initiated metaphors, thusly circulating among multiple discourses, produce interactive sites of semantic investment and imaginary exchange. Global and regional representations in metaphor of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars enter into common if asymmetrical networks of geopolitical and temporal interactions structured in part by human rights norms in the 1990s. By tracing the historical, cultural, and modal transformations of bridge, cockroach, and prisoner metaphors, this study investigates how fiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, testimony, film, and performance gender knowledge of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars.

This thesis finds that the term ‘terrorist financing’ is a misnomer in that much of the activity encompassed by that term involves neither terrorism nor money. Instead, terrorist financing more accurately refers either to the flow of economic and material value to ‘terrorist’ actors or specific material expressions of support to ‘terrorism,’ however that contested term is defined. This finding not only directly challenges the dominant ways terrorist finance is now conceptualized, but also provides the first unified coherent conceptual framework capable of supporting systematic analysis of the topic. This thesis arrives at this conclusion by first critically examining the various – and often contradictory or incoherent – normative, legal, and political contexts that dominate ‘orthodox’ thinking on terrorism and terrorist finance, and then relocating the financing of terrorism squarely in context of the everyday realities of how terrorism and terrorist actors interact with global and local political economies. This thesis goes beyond existing critical works on terrorist financing, and constructs the necessary conceptual foundation for a vastly more coherent, systematic, and ultimately useful understanding of the financial and economic dimensions of terrorism.

In the context of nationalism and sovereignty studies emerging since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this thesis provides an economic, rather than political, perspective of Tatarstan’s success in negotiating sovereignty claims with Russia, arguing that what lay behind Tatarstan’s demands for extensive political and economic rights was not mass nationalist mobilization, but the desire for control over natural resources by the Tatarstani elite dominated by former Soviet functionaries of indigenous nationality. In addition, this paper examines the importance of continuity among the local political elites, contrasting Tatarstan’s approach with that of Chechnya’s uncompromising separatist drive and the resulting years of civil conflict. Finally, the most recent page in the history of Russian-Tatarstani relations, the gradual reduction of the republic’s autonomy in connection with President Putin’s centralizing reforms, confirms my principal argument that control over resources is more important to the Tatarstani elites than political power as such.

民族主義和恐怖主義是近代歷史上最重要的兩種意識形態，而兩者根據切入角度不同而有許多的定義和類型。本文主要是透過政治系統理論來連結民族主義和恐怖主義的關係，並創造出由民族主義而來的恐怖主義類型－民族主義型恐怖主義。之後，再以車臣共和國在帝俄、蘇聯到俄羅斯聯邦統治下的這段歷史來作分析，來證明現今因車臣共和國所產生之恐怖主義屬於民族主義型恐怖主義。最後，從俄羅斯民族政策、聯邦改革政策和美國反恐政策等各種面向來探討俄羅斯如何利用政策和國際情勢來解決因民族主義運動所衍生而來的車臣恐怖主義。 / Nationalism and terrorism are the two most important ideologies in modern times, and the two also have many different definitions and types of variations according to the different angle. This text mainly links the relation between nationalism and terrorism through the political system theory and creates the terrorism type which comes through nationalism － nationalism of terrorism. And then the history of the Chechen Republic under the rules of tsarist Russia, Soviet Union and Russian Federation is analyzed in order to prove that the terrorism which was created by the current Chechen Republic is a kind of nationalism of terrorism. Finally, following the various aspects of Russian national policy, federal reform policy and United States' anti-terrorism policy is a discussion of how Russia utilizes the policies and international situation to solve terrorism which derived from nationalism.