Wars Make Laws and Laws Make States

Egor Lazarev has given his readers more of an epic story than a grand theory, and everyone who reads State Building as Lawfare will be the richer for it. The setting for this riveting tale is the war-torn Russian province of Chechnya. We quickly learn from Lazarev’s mise-en-scene that Chechnya’s famously mountainous terrain is as choppy and uneven legally as it is topographically. Three separate legal systems coexist and commingle in this single subnational domain: 1) customary law, or adat; 2) Islamic law, or Sharia; and almost as an afterthought, 3) state law, “courtesy” of Russian central authorities in Moscow.