How Governments Ensure the Loyalty of Pro-Government Militias: Evidence from Chechnya

Although the existing literature on Pro-Government Militias (PGMs) is rife with studies on various aspects of government-militia relations, not much is known about specific approaches that governments employ to ensure loyalty of their semi-formal proxies. Lessons from recent civil war in Sudan and other cases of PGMs turning their arms against their former patrons further enhance the importance of understanding which mechanisms (if any) incumbents deploy to prevent militias from “going rogue”. In this study, we examine three mechanisms employed by governments to guarantee loyalty of their militia allies. We emphasize the importance of personal, sectarian and other ideological fractionalization within rebel groups; deployment of extreme violence by PGMs against co-ethnic civilians; and formation of rival militias as the most effective PGM loyalty assurance tools available to the incumbents. We test these theoretical assumptions on the case study of the Second Chechen War to elucidate how each of these mechanisms was implemented in practice during the decades-long counterinsurgency campaign waged by Moscow.