Between hearts and minds: The relevance of the British colonial experience to contemporary Russian counter-insurgencies in the North Caucasus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although Russian authorities point to the supposed success of Britain’s late colonial counter-insurgency campaigns as a model even in the 21st century, their grasp of the historical lessons is partial at best. This article considers the applicability and relevance of the counter-insurgency experience of the late British colonial state to present-day ethno-religious conflicts in the North Caucasus. The article suggests that the flexibility of British arrangements for counter-insurgency was a major factor in achieving long-term stability for the gradual transition to indigenous self-rule. The key practice was to devolve responsibility and power to indigenous elites operating with a high degree of autonomy. The article then proposes guidelines relevant to the conditions of the present and the near future that will affect prospects both for full-fledged democratization of Russia and for effective state-building, also vitally important for the development of the North Caucasus. The article concludes that the most relevant factor in the British counter-insurgency experience is to win the hearts and minds of the population. However, this cannot be achieved without a legitimate indigenous administration capable of taking full responsibility and ownership of the campaign. Otherwise, diminished political access and accountability create propitious conditions for adherents of radical movements, who are increasingly capable of and prepared to use violence and who are the only de facto rival political forces within the Russian Federation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".