profile

Tracing Patterns

Each issue unpacks a major news story from the world of Russian security — tracing the relationships, trends, and deeper meaning behind it — so you can move beyond surface-level news and better understand the threats coming from Russia today.

Tracing Patterns logo
Featured Post

The consolidation of pockets of resistance

Hello and welcome back! Today, I want to wrap up my mini-series on ‘how to start an insurgency.’ This week, the focus is oriented towards how small groups can take advantage of state weakness and, over time, coalesce into a more sustained form of resistance. There will be some overlap with the dynamics already discussed in the series, but the macro processes are very different. And this time — no points for guessing! — it will be Dagestan that takes centre stage. As such, this week, I’ll look...

Tracing patterns logo

Happy Friday! Today, I'm continuing my mini-series on 'how to start an insurgency,' looking at lessons and mistakes from the North Caucasus' recent past. The theme this week is the radicalisation of movements – and it's Kabardino-Balkaria that provides our case study. With that in mind, here's what you can expect this week: The transformation from an overt to covert movement What happens when you cut off peaceful avenues of protest The lessons Russia refuses to learn View this post in your...

Tracing patterns logo

Welcome back! I hope this week has been a festival of joy for you. Or, at the very least, a small gathering of joy. If not, why not?! For my part, after a couple of slightly more relaxed weeks, I’m back on the metaphorical treadmill, working hard on client projects. And, in my spare time, I’ve been thinking a lot about Chechen state-building — as you do. More will follow on that in due course… This week, however, I want to continue my mini-series on ‘how to start an insurgency’, asking how...

Tracing patterns logo

Happy Friday! Whenever terrorist attacks occur, people want to know what they mean. Often, when the North Caucasus is involved, they want to know whether a particular event heralds a return to full-blown insurgency or something else that threatens Russia’s control over the region. Such questions are frustratingly hard to answer, even for someone who has spent as long studying the region as I have (see my earlier post about the folly of prediction). But one thing we can do is look back on...

Tracing patterns logo

Happy Friday! This week is book launch week: The Caucasus Emirate: Ideology, identity, and insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus hit the shelves on Tuesday! To mark the end of a very long journey to publication, today I've got one last post exploring some of the key ideas of the book (which you can buy here!). Then, next week, I should be kicking off a mini-series on how to start an insurgency, drawing lessons from Russia's past. With that in mind, here's what you can expect this week:...

Happy Friday! The North Caucasus has become, sadly, a byword for instability. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has witnessed two wars between Chechnya and the federal centre (1994-1996 and 1999-2001), two jihadist state-building projects (the Caucasus Emirate and the Islamic State’s Caucasus Wilayah), and plenty of violence in between. Although organised insurgency collapsed in late 2017, there has been no shortage of anti-state violence since then. But it has yet to coalesce into...

Happy Friday! Did you miss me last week? I was supposed to be on holiday, which made a newsletter unlikely — and then my holiday got cancelled, which ironically made it even less likely. But if you can’t take a week off every now and then, you’re doing life all wrong! Now I’m back, and an important date is approaching: The release of my first (and only?) book! The Caucasus Emirate: Ideology, identity, and insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus will be hitting bookshelves on 20 May. Dance, tiny...

I have not, to be honest, had much time to think about much of anything this week: All of my time has been consumed by an urgent client project. As a result, this week’s newsletter is coming to you a little late, and quite possibly a little undercooked. Nevertheless, the story of the week kind of picks itself: An attack on the police in Chechnya and the authorities’ reaction to it. So, with due apologies for haste, here’s what you’ll find this week: An explanation of what happened An outline...

Happy Friday! In January, I published an in-depth report on patterns in terrorism and state responses in the North Caucasus in 2024. That report drew on a unique, multi-source dataset of incidents that I compiled. If you’ve not read it already, you can dowload it here. It’s now the start of April, so it’s a good time to look at what has happened in the first quarter of the year and whether the trends are positive or negative. So that’s what I’m going to do in today’s newsletter! What I’ll...

Tracing patterns logo

Happy Friday! This week I’m going to provide a work-in-progress biography of Khuseyn Mezhidov, one of the Chechen commanders that Reuters identified as possibly involved in the Bucha massacre. There are a lot of unfilled gaps in his story — in part because I’ve mainly been focused on client work this week, and I’m taking a long weekend! — but some of the thus-far unanswered questions are interesting in and of themselves. What I’ll cover this week: Some background on who Mezhidov is Evidence...