Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus

In a chance encounter with the author, Musa Shanib--a prominent figure in Chechnya's revolution and commander of volunteer brigades in Abkhazia's war of independence from Georgia--confided that Pierre Bourdieu's sociology was the second major influence in his life after the Qur'an. How did a dissident intellectual become a nationalist warlord rather than a liberal reformer like Vaclav Havel? In attempting to answer this question, Georgi Derluguian both contextualizes and interprets Shanib's personal trajectory from de-Stalinization after 1956, through the nationalist rebellions of the 1990s, to the most recent rise in Islamic militancy. Offering an inventive combination of conceptual tools developed by Wallerstein, Tilly, and Bourdieu, Derluguian successfully challenges the prevalent picture of globalization and terrorist reaction by analysing, in substantive empirical detail, the actual patterns of neo-patrimonial capitalism and ethnic networks that have emerged in the ruins of the Soviet state.