93 ISSN 2334-3745 April 2020 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 14, Issue 2 Violence and the Dynamics of Political Settlements in Post-Soviet Kabardino-Balkaria by Jan Koehler, Alexey Gunya, Murat Shogenov and Asker Tumov Abstract With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the North Caucasus became, from the perspective of the Russian federal centre, a politically unstable and at times rather violent borderland. Tis article examines the political settlements emerging under the broader conditions of state formation in limited-access social orders, i.e. social orders negotiated between the central state and local elites with some violent potential. Analysing the developments in Kabardino- Balkaria (KBR) since the early 1990s, the authors fnd three types of political settlements that vary in terms of elite fguration, key resources used for rent distribution and the role of violence as a political resource. Tese political settlements have difering implications for the sustainability of local social order and shed light on the variations in state rule exercised by the federal centre in its political peripheries. Against the backdrop of changing violent challenges, the centre successfully tightened vertical elite control but at the cost of reducing the inclusiveness of political settlements within Kabardino-Balkaria.  Keywords: political violence, insurgency, political settlement, limited-access social order, subnational governance, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Caucasus. Introduction Te North Caucasus has been marked by outbreaks of violence since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Diferent studies elucidate time-varying reasons for this volatility: in the 1990s the upsurge in violence resulted from ethnically charged tensions, an upturn of political separatist and self-determination agendas, and grievances related to historic injustices committed by the state—repression and deportations of peoples. [1][2][3][4] Afer the turn of the millennium, academic scrutiny and public interest focused increasingly on violence along religious lines, caused by Islamist radicalization and the state’s response.[5][6][7][8] Observers drew attention to policies of violence by terrorist groups and the state’s counter-terrorist operations.[9] Other studies have explained the patterns and intensity of violence by focusing on incentive structures emerging from a specifc political economy of violence.[10][11][12] Similarly, an important segment of literature has studied the violent political situation in the region with a focus on the transformation of government and state institutions.[13][14] Less attention has been paid to latent forms of violent rule as part of strategies employed by political elites for maintaining their political and economic power.[15][16] Tat is the perspective taken in the present article. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, great changes have taken place in how violence is used as a means of directly projecting state power, as well as showing resistance against the state. Drawing on the example of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic (KBR) in the North Caucasus, this article analyzes the changing political role that violence has played in forging, keeping and transforming the local political order. Specifcally, we describe the re-emergence of vertical power afer the sudden disintegration of the centralised Soviet system, its transformation and the changing role violence played in sustaining as well as challenging local political settlements. Te analysis focuses on the transition from the nomenklatura-style regime of V.M. Kokov via the decade-long rule of the businessman A.B. Kanokov, followed by Yu.A. Kokov, a representative of the security establishment (siloviki), to K. Kokov, the incumbent head of the republic. Te aim of this article is explorative rather than deductive. As explained in the next section, the article investigates political processes in a North-Caucasian republic from a specifc, theory-informed perspective on the relationship between violence and political settlements in limited-access social orders.