Bourdieus Secret Admirer in the Caucasus:

A World-System Biography
Georgi M. Derluguian


Anna Jurkevics + Erin Pineda
Yale University, Spring 2010
The main question(s)


1. Why and how did the end of Soviet developmentalism
produce ethnic violence? (63)
Why ethnic conflicts in some post-Soviet states and not others?
What accounts for the different paths the conflicts took?
And why were these conflicts ethnic in the first place?

2. Does globalization cause ethnic conflict?
A refutation (and complication) of Samuel Huntington

3. A methodological question: How should social scientists
approach complex phenomena, methodologically and
theoretically? What is the role of the researcher?

Research methodology


1. A biography of Musa Shanib
uses his life to outline the drastic changes in the Soviet Union from the
1950s after the death of Stalin through the breakdown in 1989-1991
and finally through the various national revolutions, ethnic conflicts,
and civil wars that exploded throughout the Caucasus.

2. A subnational, historical case study with ethnographic field
work and interviews but with a dialectically-interwoven
world-system analysis

3. Self-reflexive sociology


and theoretical aims

1. Rejecting theoretical paradigms:
Teleology, reification, & essentialism historical determinism, identity
constructions, historical discontinuity
Democratic & market transitions, globalization, new security
challenges

2. Theoretical triangulation
Individual classes & agents:
Concepts of social capital, field, habitus, homology (Bourdieu)
State structure:
Anti-functionalist theorization of collective action, contentious
politics, state structures & institutions, and revolutions (Tilly, Skocpol,
Tarrow)
Global level:
Concepts of core & periphery from world-system analysis (Wallerstein)

The main argument(s)

The globalization of markets did not cause ethnic conflict in the
Caucasus.

1. Breakdown of the Soviet State
Breakdown of centre-peripheral ties unleashes national loyalties
institutionalized in systems of provincial governance and the Soviet
affirmative action
Fiscal crisis, ideological crisis

2. Social structure
Division of elites (reactionary vs. dissenting nomenklatura)
Dispossessed & frustrated segments of the proletariat (intelligentsia,
professionalized classes, specialists)
violent habitus of sub-proletarians who make up large portions of the
population

3. Historical contingency, agency & social time

A reconstruction based on Laitin (2006)


Breakdown of the Soviet centralized state
N redefine
themselves as
nationalist
intellectuals
nationalist
intellectuals ally
with strong SP
leaders cannot
control rowdy
habitus of SP
Chaos
but different kinds
depending on social
structure & social time

strong N
fearful of SPs
consolidated
autocracy
alliance with
relatively
weak I-P
e.g. Central Asia
pro-reform N
align with
strong I-P
weak SP
civilizing
effect
consolidated
democracy
e.g. Baltic states
1. Nomenklatura restoration
in Kabardino-Balkaria
2. Perpetual war
in Chechnya
3. Frozen war
in Abkhazia & Nagorny-Karabagh
Some strengths


1. Knows the terrain very well exemplary historical analysis
and familiarity with the field

2. Drawing theoretical insights from typically isolated areas of
study and appropriation of diverse theories

3. Relevant and interesting concepts

4. Narrative style and way of engaging with the material

5. Importance of his question(s) and relevance for real
politics

6. Great acknowledgements section!




Some critiques




Some (actual) critiques & questions


1. His use of some concepts e.g. violent habitus is
unsatisfying, and occasionally brushes up against a
culturalist argument

2. Where does the nationalism of the sub-proletariat come
from?

3. Engagement with world-system analysis does not really
explain it, and does not deeply engage with it

4. Tries to answer too many (big) questions e.g. why the
Soviet Union collapsed which are relevant to his study,
but not the center of it




Some (more) critiques & questions

5. Is the structure of his book helpful? Is Musa Shanibs
biography an edifying framework for his argument?

6. Does he really engage with alternative explanations? Is he
really able to reject the globalization argument on the
basis of the mechanisms he posits?

7. What about the research design? Why not make the book a
more disciplined comparative study?
Thin engagement with some other post-Soviet states that serve as
useful & interesting counterpoints (Baltic states the civilizing
effect on their secession from the USSR)
Focus on social structure, but without systematic empirical evidence
some data would be helpful, but at times too tied to a polemic against
political economy, formalization, and rational choice to provide it!