Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 28, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 23-27
Political Geography

Commentary
The causes and consequences of Beslan: A commentary on Gerard Toal's placing blame: Making sense of Beslan

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.01.003Get rights and content

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.

Section snippets

The political context of Beslan

The first key theme that emerges from this article is the need to place the terrorist acts committed in Beslan in a political context. The initial rhetoric employed by President Putin and his administration sought to place Beslan outside of politics in much the same way the President Bush placed the 9/11 attacks outside of politics. The idea that Beslan was yet another in a series of terrorist attacks by Chechen rebels that began well after the Russian invasion of Chechnya was strongly resisted

Parallels to international reaction to terrorism

The second theme that emerges from this article is that Russian reaction to terrorism in general and to Beslan in particular is not unique. Many aspects of both Russian leaders' rhetoric and their actions in the aftermath of Beslan were borrowed, either consciously or unconsciously, from U.S. policies enacted after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Both countries ruled out efforts to negotiate with the leaders of organizations that stood behind the terrorist

Causes of Beslan

While Gerard Toal's article provides a rich analysis of the discourse used to justify actions taken both during Beslan and in its aftermath, it does not address one key issue: Why did Beslan happen? The explanations used by the various actors are, if anything diametrically opposed. The perpetrators and their allies claimed that the attack on innocent schoolchildren had its roots in the Chechen war and was justified as a response to similarly barbaric Russian attacks on innocent Chechen

Responding to terrorism

The Putin administration's initial response to Beslan was almost identical to its response to previous terrorist attacks and natural and man-made disasters. Government officials gave misleading information to the media, most significantly by underestimating the number of hostages by a factor of three. The editor of the newspaper Izvestia, which had been critical of the government's initial response, was pressured to resign for “excessively emotional coverage” of the attack. Government officials

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    Chaos in the North Caucasus and Russia's future

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    Russia confronts radical Islam

    Current History

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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