Perceptions of governance: state and non-state governance in the North Caucasus

How do residents perceive governance in Russia’s North Caucasus? Using original interviews and household survey data collected over nine months of fieldwork, this article offers a nuanced and empirically driven comparative account of governance in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia. Mitigating between accounts of a hegemonic state that has saturated public space or strong non-state actors that consistently organize parallel systems of governance, I demonstrate that residents identify a role for both state and ostensibly non-state authorities in governance. Devoting particular attention to the relationships between state and non-state actors, this paper finds that despite similarities in governance of extraction and coercion across the three cases, there are also important differences in dispute resolution, goods provision, and regulation of symbolic practices. This multidimensional approach to governance reveals the limitations of accounts, both in the region and in general, that fail to attend to variations across governance domains.