The causes and consequences of Beslan: A commentary on Gerard Toal's placing blame: Making sense of Beslan |
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Authors: | Dmitry Gorenburg |
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Institution: | 1. DCU Business School, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland;2. Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, CA, United States;3. Trinity Business School, Aras an Phiarsaigh, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland |
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Abstract: | Gerard Toal has written a very important work placing the terrorist attack in Beslan into a geopolitical context. Toal's analysis emphasizes two themes, the need to place Beslan in a political context and the parallels between the Russian government's reaction to the attack and the Bush administration's reaction to the September 11 attacks. In this response, I seek to make these two themes more explicit and also to focus on one area that is somewhat neglected in Toal's analysis: namely, the factors that made the terrorist attack in Beslan possible. In doing so, I turn away from focusing exclusively on geopolitics by bringing in some of the socio-economic and ideological factors that made the North Caucasus ripe for the explosion of terrorist attacks that occurred in the first half of this decade. I also show how changes in government policies eventually brought about the decline of large-scale terrorist attacks in the region. In doing so, I hope to make the point that any analysis of a spectacular terrorist attack such as Beslan has to take into account not just geopolitics, but also the socio-economic conditions that made it possible and the government policies that allowed it to happen. |
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