Happy Monday!
Time is an arbitrary concept, but I thought I’d experiment with a different release schedule — to see both whether it fits better into my schedule and whether it leads to more people reading. It’s always hard to tell, but life is all about variety. So, happy Monday it is!
This week, I’ll be picking up from last week’s discussion of Proyekt Media’s efforts to map nepotism in the regime of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov (read that one here). Having already discussed the strengths and weaknesses, I now want to focus on what the network actually looks like and how accurate a picture the investigation paints.
With that in mind, here’s what you can expect this week:
- What nepotism in the Kadyrov regime looks like
- The challenges of systematically mapping family ties
- Distorted impressions of the Kadyrov regime
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What nepotism in the Kadyrov regime looks like
I played around with several different ways of visualising Proyekt Media’s investigation. Proper network maps that show all the connections between actors are great when they are interactive (I plan to include one in the Russian Security Research Lab when or shortly after it launches next year), but as static visualisations, they are somewhat challenging. They risk overloading you with information and making it hard to discern who is who and which ties matter. The investigation mentions close to 100 names that need to be included, and there’s no way this would be clear on an image.
As such, I instead opted to visualise the regime through structural categories: spouses, immediate relatives (parents, offspring, siblings), other relatives, and non-relatives. The entries are marked in red if a strong case can be made for their removal, and green if the case for inclusion or the position on the map is more ambiguous. I’ll discuss this more below.
The challenges of systematically mapping family ties
This visualisation, of course, requires some explanation. Categorising family ties poses particular difficulties. First, there are questions of definition. Spouses could, of course, be considered as a form of immediate family. However, merging these two categories would obscure the role of marriage as a strategic political tool. The Kadyrovs have used marriage in much the same way that medieval royal houses did, as a means of consolidating key relationships (see the July newsletter for more on this). What constitutes ‘immediate’ family is also far from clear-cut: there is a reasonable case to be made that uncles and nephews, for example, belong in this category and should be distinguished from more distant relatives. This, however, is more likely to affect the visualisation than the analysis that flows from it.
Second, it is important to acknowledge that many actors could be placed in more than one category, which affects who is included if the basis for inclusion is a set number of steps from the primary actor, namely Ramzan. This is a crucial distinction in network analysis, because adding too many steps renders the analysis meaningless, since it doesn’t take that many before you can establish a link between any two actors (Google ‘the six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ to find a more entertaining rendition of this theory). My brother’s son is also my nephew; my uncle’s son is my first cousin; and so on. In other words, they may be considered one or two steps removed from me, depending on how I classify them. I’ve tried to be consistent and focus on the primary relationship, partly to avoid the problematic tendency to use ‘relative’ with no concern for familial proximity.
Distorted impressions of the Kadyrov regime
I now want to highlight the ways in which a lack of definitional clarity and a tendency to stretch the margins in Proyekt Media’s data distort our view of nepotism in the Kadyrov regime.
So, who doesn’t belong (marked in red)? Akhmat Kadyrov senior is a long time dead and thus belongs in the background discussion, not as part of the analysis of nepotism in the contemporary regime. Someone like Mansur Abdullayev (top, centre-right) is so far removed from Ramzan that his inclusion is hard to defend: he is the nephew of Turpalali Abdullayev, who in turn is the brother of Ali Abdullayev, who in turn is the father of Ubayd Abdullayev, who in turn is the husband of Zarema Abdullayev, who in turn is daughter of Ramzan’s sister Zargan Kadyrova. Even if we compress some of those ties, that hardly constitutes a strong direct tie to Ramzan, the focus of the investigation. Ali Kadyrov (far left) is the son of Ramzan’s second cousin Khasayn Kadyrov — again, hardly a close blood tie — and the main case for his inclusion is arguably holding the family name, which can be problematic when family names are widely held. Some, like Khozh-Baudi Daayev (centre left), can be excluded because we have no information on the nature of the familial tie, and thus whether it can be considered relevant. If there are strong ties between these actors and Ramzan, they’re likely to be based on something else than any sense of familial obligation — they are elective ties. And that’s without dealing with people like Magomed Daudov (bottom), who have no place on a map of family ties because they are not, in any sense or meaning of the word, family.
What about the ambiguous cases? For some — take, for example, Ramzan’s cousin, Odes Baysultanov (centre-left) — it will depend on how far down the family tree we can go before a familial relationship ceases to be significant. Many of these are more likely to be included than not, but the case for inclusion should be explicitly articulated and (just as important) consistently followed. Others are misplaced: Suleyman Geremeyev (bottom) actually occupies the same structural position as Abuzayd Vismuradov (top left) due to marriages between the children of the different clans: Abuzayd’s son, Ramzan, is married to Kadyrov’s daughter Tabarik, while Suleyman’s daughter, Medni, is married to Ramzan’s son Adam. If marriage ties were consistently rather than haphazardly extended, Adam Delimkhanov (bottom) would also appear in a different position: His granddaughter (first name unconfirmed) is married to another of Ramzan’s sons, Eli.
And it is this, arguably, that highlights the bigger problem with Proyekt Media’s network mapping: It is not wrong so much as incomplete. The Kadyrov regime is more than Ramzan Kadyrov — it is a complex network of blood and marriage ties binding, in particular, the Kadyrovs, the Delimkhanovs, the Vismuradovs, and the Geremeyevs. If one were to map the familial ties around each of the key figures in those clans (Ramzan, Adam, Abuzayd, and Suleyman, respectively), both the nepotism and the complexity of the system would become much more apparent.
Equally, if the point is to understand how these clans have captured the state, then arguably the state should be the starting point. First, determine which institutions matter and then show where these clans have concentrated their influence and where this influence is lacking. We already knew that the Kadyrov regime is extremely nepotistic. But, by focusing only on the evidence that supports this claim and ignoring all other information, we lose the ability to ask more sophisticated questions about the consequences of that nepotism.
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