El islam en Rusia: desafíos a la seguridad y respuestas estratégicas

Abstract

Islam has been part of Russian history and culture since the 7th century, actively collaborating in the process of building the State, developing relationships with other social groups, with whom it has shared spaces, history, and assimilation policies. However, the Muslim community has played an asymmetrical in the State, occupying a peripheral position in political, military, and economic affairs, for long historical periods. Throughout the 1990s, religion became an element of nationalist vindication against federal power, fueled by the entry of a radical transnational Islam imported from the predominantly Sunni Middle Eastern countries. The two Chechen wars and the subsequent management of the area by Moscow have favored the application of a new analysis scheme based on ethnicity-security, which generalizes a negative interpretation of Islam in Russia. The division of Muslim religious institutions has not facilitated inter-ethnic dialogue or relations with the Kremlin. The study of Russian strategies to face the challenge of Islam has traditionally been oriented to the analysis of the security dimension, focusing on the military responses of the security organs of the Russian State, since the dysfunctionality of the political system and the absence of Policies based on respect for individual rights have prevented the appearance of other initiatives that consider inter-ethnic and interreligious coexistence in a state declared secular. However, we can also consider the study of Russian initiatives applying the approach of the study of the foreign policy of states to analyze the use of religious diversity in the achievement of certain foreign policy objectives. In this sense, the work addresses the role of military groups from the Caucasus, integrated into Russian federal forces, within the Syrian conflict. Finally, the programs related to the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) in the Northern Caucasus, with their limitations, also show a certain change in the implementation and management of new methods to stop the regional insurgency.