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:...
7 days ago • 4 min read
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...
21 days ago • 5 min read
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...
28 days ago • 5 min read
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...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
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...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
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...
2 months ago • 4 min read
This week, I want to talk about a new side project I’m launching: An in-depth investigation into Chechen involvement in the Bucha massacre in March 2022. I’m going to be working on (and therefore talking about) this for a while, so I want to give you a little insight into the reasons behind it, and where I’m starting from. Full disclosure: I am NOT good at sharing work in progress. On the one hand, I’m too much of a perfectionist to let something out of the door unless I’ve dotted every i and...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Happy Friday! I hope your week has gone well. This week, I’ve been super busy working on evidence for a corporate raiding case and reworking an academic paper, so I’ve not had much time to think to devote to delving into the darkness of Russian security. However, one story has been bothering me all week. It concerns a recent counterterrorism operation in Dagestan, where the authorities claimed to have killed four suspected terrorists and arrested a fifth. The biggest problem with the incident...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Welcome to the very first issue of Tracing Patterns, the newsletter that takes a particular story from the world of security and unpacks it — examining the relationships of those involved, analysing the underlying trends, exploring the broader context, and explaining the meaning of it all. In case you missed the announcement on Wednesday, this is what will be replacing Threat Dissection/Threat Monitor, in an effort to bring even more value to your inbox! This week, I’ll be focusing on the...
3 months ago • 5 min read