When we are the violent: The Chechen Islamist guerrillas’ discourse on their own armed actions

Abstract

Over the last decades, the strategic profile of the discourse with which wars are narrated has been reinforced. This discourse has also varied in the light of a recent – and alleged – peace culture permeating Western societies. Whereas the war discourse in Russia during the Second Russian-Chechen War has been widely studied, this has not been the case of the rhetoric of the Chechen Islamist guerrillas. The aim of this paper is to contribute to bridging this gap in the academic literature on the North Caucasus, employing to this end a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a selection of texts posted by the Kavkaz Center (KC) news agency. On the basis of this analysis, it can be concluded that one of the main discursive strategies revolved around the construction of an “us” embodying the Chechen victims of the initial aggression in a conflict provoked by the Russian “other”.