Assistant Professor of Political Science Egor Lazarev has received several additional awards recently for his book State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press)
In addition to the 2024 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for best first book by a Yale ladder faculty member , Professor Lazarev has been awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, 2024, ASEEES, for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences.
He has received Honorable Mention for Davis Center Book Prize, 2024, ASEEES, for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography and Honorable mention for Gregory Luebbert Prize, APSA, Comparative Politics Section, 2024
His research focuses on law and state-building in the former Soviet Union. The prize committee noted that Lazarev’s work “reflects extraordinary scholarship as the author draws on many sources including surveys, interviews, court room documents and observations, and informal conversations with a diverse array of individuals.” They further commended the book’s “contemporary relevance in relation to gender issues, the impact of war on the state and society at large, and the integration of religion, tradition, government, and international law.”
Abstract:
State-Building as Lawfare explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives? The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.