Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

After Hungary’s accession to the European Union in 2002, LEADER became a key model for rural development, thus providing the tools to local action groups (LAGs) to define the targets for local development (See alo Csurgó and Kovách in Chapter 4 of this volume). FA LEADER,[1] founded in 2008, is based on a consortium of 44 resource-poor, small to larger size municipalities in the areas surrounding an industrial city in northeast Hungary. The strategy of the FA LEADER is to strengthen the position of municipalities and the citizens by increasing their energy self-sufficiency and decreasing their dependency on large-scale suppliers of energy in monopoly positions through the utilisation of renewable energy sources. Further, the FA LEADER’s energy villages are to utilise ‘clean’, renewable energy sources, including agricultural waste, warm sources, wind, kitchen waste, manure, water streams and thermo energy from mines for the production of energy and heat. These energy sources are not being utilised at the moment and getting rid of the waste is an expense for the communities. Thirdly, the project aims to develop the communities through the creation of new workplaces for inhabitants with low levels of education and those who are qualified but currently unemployed. Fourthly, FA LEADER aims to increase the quality of life of the inhabitants through cleaning the communities of garbage and improving slum areas where inhabitants had no resources or a previous willingness to engage in such activities. This would also improve the possibilities for developing village tourism.

Romafa is a specific sub-project of FA LEADER targeting marginalised Roma enclaves aiming at ‘promoting the energy production of small communities for decreasing their dependency on social benefits and creating a self-sufficient source of income’ by the joint utilisation of renewable energy sources, the development of the traditional, hierarchical system of representation, the support of Romani traditions, religion, morality, culture, arts, education and the support of self-sufficient production among Romani households.

Three concrete goals were identified targeting Romani communities through the development of 15 municipal and small regional ecological waste collection and processing ‘eco-units’ for concrete waste according to EU standards:

1.      Biogas generators could be operated by deliveries of biomass gathered by resource-poor Romani (and non-Romani), who could either be compensated with cash payments or energy coupons. The compensation model would increase the self-interest, self-respect and autonomous agency of those participating to increase the maximisation of their inputs. Meanwhile, they could promote their respectability as citizens.

2.      Another plan would initiate the creation of a waste-management system. In this plan, low educated, unemployed Romani (and non-Romani) could find employment by selecting waste under controlled working conditions. The products could be sold to aggregates, which would then reutilise diverse waste such as pet bottles, rubber, etc. in order to generate energy. Additionally, a reparation workshop could contribute to the reutilisation of repairable tools found in the waste.

3.      Finally, under the leadership of local Romani leaders, marginalised Romani village communities could be upgraded and hygienic standards increased and maintained, similar to the clean and established villages and small towns of the region. This would be achieved by the self-organising of Romani communities.

The sub-projects for Renewable energy systems (RES) technology-based municipal energy plants were the first to be realised. On the contrary, the realisation of the Romafa was still waiting for resource-strong stakeholders, at the time of this research (Febuary 2012 to May 2013). No municipalities or private entrepreneurs seemed ready to support the Romani Minority Self-government (RMS or in Hungarian CKÖ) initiatives. Instead, the municipalities asked were satisfied with the current arrangement for waste management. Three biogas aggregators were in the phase of ‘projectification’. Two of these planned units were to be arranged in collaboration with several municipalities and they planned to introduce a coupon system, though none of the planned plants were envisioned to be connected to the electricity supply of marginalised housing areas and were not to be placed adjacent to Romani settlements.

By focusing on the Romafa project’s efforts to incorporate social aspects into the utilisation of renewable energy, this chapter will contribute to our understanding of how different interests influence the targeting and realisation of developmental goals, aimed at improving the living conditions of marginalised groups, and whether and under which conditions the new model of governance can work, on the local level, for the benefit of those with the least resources.

[1] FA LEADER is one of Hungary’s regional leader groups. It is a pseudo-name, as are the names used for sub-projects and persons in this chapter in order to keep them anonymous.

Through the analysis of two life stories of former peasants who had experienced collectivization in the early sixties in Hungary the paper sets focus on personal strategies of handling the trauma of societal transitions. Firstly, with help of social and cultural capital theories the importance of what Bourdieu named the transubstantiation of immaterial assets is explored in the process of adaptation from one system to the other. Secondly, the paper elucidates how these survival strategies constitute key elements of self-representations and which kind of meanings are attached to the collectivization experience in the personal life story. Following Gergen's distinction between the plot and the story, the paper elaborates narrative constructions of the representations of self. Emphasis is placed on how the representations allow the narrator to reinstate self-respect through positioning the self in the traumatic event of collectivization. Realistic and constructivist approaches are combined utilizing life story analysis. The two cases represent gender- and class-specific polarities characterizing diversities of the collectivization experience.

I will focus on the ways that agents of NGOs engaged with Roma and/or women’s recognition struggles can be classified, and how these constructions make sense of the conditions forming the lives of Roma women and furthermore how Roma women’s interests are positioned. Detacting the intersecting aspects of ethnic-, gender-, and class-based relations that constitute Roma women’s position, I seek to identify which segments of the complex of relations different NGOs articulate as central. I aim to explore whether Roma women’s NGOs can be seen as more reflexive of the intersectional complexity of Roma women’s relations compared to Roma and women’s organizations.

This paper intends to shed light on the shifting patterns of the intergenerational transfer of assets in family farms that experienced collectivization in Hungary. Although household-based production maintained its importance after collectivization, only some of the rural households could be considered as entrepreneurial and lead to extended reproduction. The traditional patterns of handing over the farm were abruptly halted, with the immaterial forms of transferring capital subsequently gaining in importance. In addition, considerations for securing care provided in old age became more clearly addressed, and were weighed against the previously dominant emphasis given on handing over the farm to the most suitable son.Through the analysis of the life stories of two families, the paper explores the emerging patterns of generation transfer along the following dimensions: 1) Has the relationship between caring for the elderly and handing over the family farm/enterprise changed? 2) Have different patterns of capital transfer emerged that are dependent on the ability of a family to initiate entrepreneurial household production during state socialism? 3) Since caring evoked the labour of women as either daughters or daughter-in-laws, can we detect shifts in the gender patterns of transfer and women’s ability to convert their caring labour into material assets and status within the family?

Family farm enterprises emerged in the transition to capitalism following the reprivatization and decollectivization of agriculture in Hungary. This paper explores the generative processes of capital accumulation. It focuses on the intergenerational transfer as well as the life time generation of material and immaterial resources that were mobilized for the creation of the family farm enterprise. The life stories of six family members belonging to three generations of a successful enterprise of low peasant origin were selected from fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 exploring the specificities of the genesis of farms with small peasant roots. Immaterial capital assets were the most important for the expanded reproduction of the farm, while reprivatized land had mostly symbolic importance. The farm relied on traditional peasant cultural heritage, such as striving for autonomy, self-sacrificing work mentality and traditional forms of bonding social capital, in the form of kin and local community reciprocal work relations. Meanwhile, the farm needed nontraditional cultural capital, such as entrepreneurial mentality and bridging social capital to find suitable markets for the products. These later emerged through education, by learning from experience, establishing trust relationships and with the help of mentors.

Globalization and the transition to a service society, together with a strengthening of neoliberalism in governance, led to a changing balance between capital and welfare and the growth of what Guy Standing (2011) has named the precariat. This implied declining labour security and labour costs and the increased flexibilization of labour. Grounds for eligibility to social rights weakened, and an increasing section of the labour force became excluded from these rights, while a rising proportion of the population found themselves unemployable and part of a growing underclass (Castells, 2010).

There is a need for further research concerning Central and Eastern European (CEE)[SPi1]  countries, which provide a specific context for the formation of the precariat due to their roots in state socialist regimes prior to the neoliberal turn. In addition, the impact of stratifying forces such as gender, ethnicity, and religion on the development of the precariat has been more neglected. Furthermore, the focus has been on processes generating precariousness and marginalization. Less attention has been paid to resilience and forces that can potentially counteract precarization. This chapter is intended to contribute to research concerning the three areas above. It will focus on the example of CEE Roma following post-socialist transition – a group identified as an ethnified/racialized underclass (Ladányi and Szelényi, 2004) – with special consideration given to dynamics of resilience and change.

Precariousness refers to a human condition threatened by falling outside. Roma communities, throughout their history, have been composed of groups that have suffered from exclusion and persecution. Their precariousness prevailed even during the state socialist period’s materialistically conceived social integration project, since the Roma constituted the unskilled reserve army of state socialist industrialization and they were constrained in their freedom of ethnic identity construction and association.

Post-socialist economic transition resulted in mass exclusion from the labour force, where the precarization of Roma intensified, since the shutting down of former heavy industries and mines led to the loss of unskilled jobs (Kemény et al., 2004; Kovács, 2008; Vajda and Dupcsik, 2008; Váradi, 2010; Bodrogi and Kádár, 2013). The period following the major epoch of transition has not led to the creation of work opportunities, allowing the integration of those who became marginalized in the first phase. Those Roma who live in peripheral rural communities can be seen as multiply marginalized, due to lower levels of education compared to majority society, higher levels of exclusion from the labour market, and geographic isolation from labour opportunities. Neoliberal and neoconservative turns in welfare policies displaced the state socialist models, in which work was both a right and a duty, opening for social rights (Szalai, 2007). The state transferred the task of poverty management to municipalities and to the civil sphere. These efforts to a large degree became conditional on local welfare regimes (Szalai, 2007; Asztalos Morell, 2011). Needs-based rights opened for moralizing between deserving and undeserving poor, where Romanness and undeservingness often unhappily associated in discourses concerning eligibility (Schwartz, 2012). Kligman (2001) argues that ‘“Roma” as a category has been expanded, in certain contexts, to essentialize a purported relationship between “race” and “poverty”’ (Kligman, 2001, p. 63). Thus in CEE, poverty obtained a ‘Roma face’ (p. 64) and Roma were accused of being poor due to their allegedly essentialist features.

Experiences of social and economic exclusion are often coupled with internal syndromes of social deprivation and anomy. One explanation for this anomy complementary to structural and discriminatory explanations is its association with a culture of poverty characterized by lack of long-term perspective and lack of trust both within the community and outwards (Ladányi and Szelényi, 2004).

Bourdieu (1986) explained the reproduction of social inequalities to be related to the differential accumulation and transfer between material and immaterial assets. This study focuses on the dynamic relation between the material and immaterial aspects of precariousness and approaches the role of norms as links of mediation between these spheres. From this perspective, religious beliefs can also be understood to rest on norms regulating conducts of life (Weber, 2003). Within this controlled and repressed sphere of religiosity of state socialism, non-established religious congregations occupied a specifically precarious situation. These religious movements were not only treated as sects and deviants by politics but were also resisted by the established churches. The Roma were typically deprived of religious practice and spiritual identity during this period, due to the unwelcoming attitude of main traditional churches. Conversely, missionizing among the Roma emerged among the non-established, so-called Free Christian congregations (Kopasz, 2011). During the post-socialist transition, most of the Roma continue to live under spiritual deprivation. Although most historical denominations have initiated specific Roma pastorations, Free Christian churches continue to be the most engaged in addressing Roma as subjects of religious transformation, offering them subjectivity and salvation through confession and religious revival according to the norms of the true believers (Bartl, 2013). The paramount role of free churches for the spiritual wakening of Roma communities has been internationally observed (Thurfjell and Marsh, 2014).

Research that questions the portrayal of women as victims of state socialism and patriarchy or views them as a simple means utilised by state socialism to achieve its goals addresses the issue of women’s identities as sources for agency. There is a growing interest in exploring women’s life experiences as formed in socially as well as time and space-bound citizenship. Women’s experiences have been elucidated in intersecting class and ethnic positions. Although collectivisation transformed agrarian society more than was seen in any other sphere of Hungarian life, rural women’s understandings of the changing context have been underrepresented. While domestic labour and motherhood have been identified as central to women’s subordination, recent research has raised the question of whether self-sacrificing motherhood can be the source of historical agency. This chapter explores how understandings of good motherhood were formed in the context of changing life conditions related to collectivisation in Hungary; and what was the importance of understandings of ‘self-sacrificing motherhood’ in the constructions of these women’s self-identities and for their agency. This chapter also problematizes the ethical concerns arising during fieldwork and analysis, and examines recollections of former traumatizing experiences in later life.

This paper is to set focus on innovative ways to combat food poverty in rural Hungary. Food poverty is associated with malnutrition which can refer both to the lack of food and its dissatisfying quality. Food poverty in the post-socialist rural context does not emerge as a consequence of natural catastrophes or lacking accessibility to food. Rather, it is the outcome of the unequal distribution of incomes and resources. Methods of overcoming food-poverty emerge primarily in the interplay between post-socialist welfare institutions and civil society initiatives, even if market agents occupy an increasing role in neo-neoliberal regimes as donators of charity and resources or as collaborators in poverty alleviation projects. Municipalities work within the paradigms of the welfare state and its social benefit system as redistributors of state resources, in contrast civil society agents represent partial interests and work from principles independent of the state redistributive logic.

Therefore, it is of interest to explore in which way poverty relief programmes put emphasis on the importance of community development and participation of marginalized groups in the development of individual and group resources necessary for overcoming their exclusion. The paper explores municipality versus civil organization approaches along the dimensions of agency; whether and if so in which way these social food projects worked for the empowerment of marginalized groups. In this pursuit I focus on immaterial aspects of empowerment, where, as argued above, the development of social resources constitutes a central role. Furthermore, the paper explores the differences and potential synergies between municipality and civil organization based social agriculture projects aiming to combat marginalization welfare dependency.

The paper explores how the complexity of Roma women’s status is addressed in Szines Gyöngyök (SZGY) a Roma women’s NGO in Hungary:

Firstly, by analysing the ways in which Roma women’s multiple marginalities are constructed within their own communities and the broader society as well as in the public and private spheres. This approach highlights the workings of gender and ethnic discrimination and reveals the importance of maternalism as a counterhegemonic perspective for Roma women.

Secondly by investigating to what degree Roma women’s NGOs elaborate their programmes and initiatives in reference to broader gender equality frameworks. What are the economic dynamisms and dependencies behind NGO-isation and how do dependencies influence the processes of ideation of gender equality? Most importantly, the paper explores whether the ideation processes are empowering, participatory, bottom-up processes growing out of the culturally and socially specific conditions of the NGOs’ constituencies or are donor driven.

Public work is currently the major national tool for the reintegration of the long-term unemployed into the world of labour in Hungary. As a result of the expansion of resources the government allotted to facilitate public work employment, labour statistics improved substantially. Nonetheless, public labour as an institution is objected to intense criticism. Since employment as public worker is not bound to citizenship rights, local municipalities have a large degree of discretion about selecting whom they hire. Criticism most often focuses on employment discrimination. In contrast, this research takes a progressive municipality, with anti-discriminatory profile as an example, where public work was adapted as a welfare, rather than purely workfare praxis. Uszka, a rural small-sized municipality, is characterized by high ethnified unemployment. Its politicians and administrators adapted varied strategies to help combat poverty and unemployment. The paper explores the place of public work in the context of social policy instruments and poverty reduction strategies applied and the degrees of freedom and limitations municipalities have in adapting state instruments.

This research investigates life strategies of physical worker Russian men, belonging to the generation of people who were the most active group in the late Soviet period, went through the collapse of USSR and the transformation to capitalism. The historical biographic perspective allows reproducing common social experiences which have formed this generation. The in depth biographical interviews were conducted with six men of age 46-63, single, with officially low income, who started their working lives in the public sector. The research shows the diversity of men's alternative life strategies to adjust to the neoliberal economy established after the collapse of the USSR. The paper explores the biographies as representations of diverse forms of masculinities formed along gender, age, social position and marital status based marginalization processes emerging in the transition context.

Gender equality is important for a country´s development. Turkey want to be a full member of the EU, gender equality is therefore an important factor to investigate. This research paper aims to address the reasons for women´s low representation in the decision-making positions, mainly in the Turkish Parliament. The purpose is to understand what casual mechanisms that impact the women representation at the national level in the Turkish Parliament.  The research methods is carried out with in-depth interviews namely, semi-structured interviews in Turkey with four Members of Parliament, a gender-expert lawyer and three women´s organizations namely, Kadin Adaylari Destekleme Dernegi and Ucan Süpürge, while the interview with Türk Üniversiteli Kadinlar Dernegi consists of group interview. Furthermore relevant literature was used in order to complement the interviews. The overreaching theoretical framework used in the thesis consists of gender theory and complementary different concept definitions, namely, Culture Matters, Low representation of Women, Modernization and Patriarchy. These concepts have been the foundation of the analysis and have added understanding of the reasons for women´s low representation in the Turkish Parliament. The common perception of the interviewees to solutions were quotas, increase the education, to start with democracy first in the family, make the society aware of the problem of gender inequality. The main conclusions drawn from this research were that the government and the NGOs are aware of the problems on gender equality; they are working together to combat the inequality between sexes. The government is also aware of that they have reached a certain level of gender equality in the Parliament compared to the last decades. The process of gender equality is slowly developing but there is a will to achieve gender equality in the Turkish Parliament. 

A manuscript album, known as Kungsboken, contains various documents of military relevance assembled during the rule of the Swedish kings Charles XI and Charles XII. Among them is a watercolour depicting a stranded sperm whale. The painting is not signed or dated but is believed to have been done around 1675. It may be an illustration of a whale that was stranded on the north German coast, then part of the Swedish empire. The painting is an interesting example of anamorphosis.

On October 9 presidential elections were held in Azerbaijan. As a result of the criticized 2009 amendment to the constitution the two-term limit for the presidency was removedand the incumbent, President Ilham Aliyev, could stand as candidate fora third time. Nobody was surprised when he won again. To the contrary it seemed the well-documented ‘political apathy’ of the Azerbaijani people had spread outside the country as well as.All through the election period foreign and national analysts alike were very careful to point out that everybody already knew who would win. This caution is of course a natural reactiontothe electoral authoritarianism that characterizes the Azerbaijani regime. Under electoral authoritarianism the state provides an ”illusion of multi-party democracy at the local and national levels while effectively stripping elections of efficacy. The result known in advance, elections can be held frequently”. Nevertheless,such an approach to the election is not only depressing; it also tends to relegate the efforts of the often very harshly critiqued democratic opposition in Azerbaijan. This time a coalition, the National Council for Democratic Forces (Milli Şura), managed to nominate one mutual candidate to represent the ‘oppositionists’, something that is basically unprecedented in this context. Sure, their efforts could be seen as too little too late and IlhamAliyev still won a landslide victory getting 85% of the votes. Nevertheless, short of a color revolution, the determination of the opposition forces did contribute to making this election as exciting as it getsunder electoral authoritarianism.

In order to set the stage for the chapters that follow in the book this introduction is an attempt, of sorts, to deconstruct the famous ‘crossroads’ concept. This is done by a brief outline of certain themes re-occurring throughout the chapters of this book, and as such appear to be the building blocks of Azerbaijan’s ‘crossroad national identity.’ I discuss their dynamic character trying to show how they contribute to the complicated identity situation. It should be noted that even if these crossroad aspects, for the sake of simplicity, are presented under different headings the reality is, of course that they are more or less naturally intertwined, interlinked, and inter-dependent, all contributing to the complexity of identity formation. 

A wave of public protests rocked Azerbaijan at the beginning of 2013. The first protest event of the year was inspired by the disputed death of a young conscript in the Azerbaijani army. While the official cause of death was heart attack, the family insisted he was beaten to death. The result was a fierce debate about the difficulties facing newly recruited soldiers and the conditions under which they serve. Some activists initiated a Facebook group and called for a demonstration in Baku on January 12. Twenty thousand people joined the group, an impressive number by Azerbaijani standards, given that support for anti-establishment manifestations can be dangerous. Later as many as 1,000 protesters, also a large number for Azerbaijan, joined the actual event in support of the dead soldiers’ family, demanding the defense minister's resignation. Just a week later shopkeepers at Baku's largest shopping mall, Bina, protested against increased rents. The demonstrators blocked a major highway and 5,000 shopkeepers kept their businesses closed in support of the protest. This was shortly followed by another spontaneous outbreak of dissent in Ismayili, 150 km northwest of Baku, where community members set fire to cars and buildings and called for the governor's resignation after a controversial car accident. Riot police finally managed to disperse the protesters, many of whom were injured and/or imprisoned. The harsh treatment brought about another rally in the capital in support of the Ismayili protesters. The outbreak of civic unrest in Ismayili can be seen as particularly important since it indicates discontent with the government, not only in Baku, but outside the capital as well.

In 2004 the Azerbaijani authorities decided to evict the Juma mosque community from the mosque in Baku’s old town where they had been conducting prayers since 1992; under the auspices they lacked the proper registration and the facilities were state property. As the community resisted eviction, police entered the mosque during prayertime, physically removed the worshippers and closed it down. Preceding this, the popular imam of the Juma Mosque had been arrested during a political demonstration and sentenced to a five year suspended sentence for violating Azerbaijani law by engaging politically despite being a religious leader. These episodes rendered a lot of attention at the time as they highlighted a conflict between a religious group and the state in Azerbaijan, a country generallydescribed as one of the more secular in the former Soviet Union. Almost 10 years after the Juma incidents the relationship between the Azerbaijani authorities and certain parts of the Islamic community is still tense and doesfrom time to time manifest itself in open controversies. In order to shed lighton how some Muslim groups in Azerbaijan became perceived as oppositional, this chapter focuses on colliding discourses that become societal and intensified as the authorities with all means try to control discursive as well as social practices.

The article explains how some mosque communities function as a political opposition in the authoritarian Azerbaijani context.

 Elections without content are characteristic of electoral authoritarianism. This article illustrates how the “election game” featuring “elections for the sake of elections” can contribute to the consolidation of an authoritarian regime. It analyzes how Belarusian authorities’ “menu of manipulation” shaped both the discourse and “practice” of “politics” in favor of the current system. Using selective repression – targeting mainly those openly wanting to change the status quo, while allowing some controlled openness for individuals, as long as they refrain from “doing politics” – discouraged political activism and contributed to a negative perception of the “opposition” as a noisy sub-group of the population. Such developments reinforced a perception of organized politics in general, and elections in particular, as abstract, unattractive and irrelevant to most.

Elections pose a dilemma for the democratic opposition in electoral authoritarian states. On the one hand, the election campaign is often their only opportunity to get sanctioned access to the public, on the other, through their participation in an election where the outcome is known beforehand they appear to support a democratic charade. This article focuses on the ways in which oppositional actors in Azerbaijan choose to tackle this predicament in relation to the recent parliamentary elections. The analysis and comparison of respective electoral strategies (boycott, campaigning, statements and monitoring) tell us about the roles elections, despite their predictable outcome, play in this type of context. Even though no one in the opposition is ‘in it to win it’ the Republican Alternative (REAL) movement stands out. Fully aware of their marginalization in society, as representatives of an extremely unpopular ‘opposition’, their electoral work focused on selling themselves to the public as ‘something new,’ which is, of course, easier said than done. Nevertheless, their approach and campaign could be interpreted as an attempt to actually convert this into practice.

This chapter is set to provide a more thorough understanding of what made ‘Turkish Islam’ the preferred choice for the political leaders of independent Azerbaijan as well as highlight and attempt to explain the fact that this amicable reception of Turkish religious representatives seems gradually to be coming to an end. It is argued that even though the religious aspect has never been the most significant in Turkish-Azerbaijani relations, the dynamics within the religious terrain underlying the interaction between the two states can be viewed as a function of the ‘politicization’ of the issue. Put differently, because the embrace of Turkish Islam on the elite level came as a political decision, transformation of and change in the political parameters underlying bilateral relations—both intra-state parameters within Turkey and Azerbaijan respectively and, to some extent, the nature of political dynamics between the latter two states—prompted change in the official status of Turkish Islam in Azerbaijan.

Electoral autocracies have become the world’s most common form of non-democratic rule. In hegemonic autocracies in particular, where the president, or his party, always wins by more than 70 percent of the vote, the electoral process comes across as mere window-dressing. Still, both the regime and the opposition take elections seriously. Why? What role do elections play? The article deals with this question while focusing on the Azerbaijani 2013 presidential election, and consists of three parts. The first is a theoretical introduction dedicated to electoral autocracies and authoritarian stability. The next summarizes the election, stressing its purpose for the opposition. The third part analyses whether and how the election contributed to strengthening the authoritarian regime. The study concludes that developments during and after the election year are an illustration of what in previous research is sometimes referred to as the politics of insecurity. Even though the opposition “lost”, the relative success of their campaign indicated that change might, after all, be possible. The regime, depending on regular multi-party elections for its democratic alibi, did not appreciate the uncertainty and tried to minimize it by using the “three pillars” on which authoritarian states’ stability can be said to rest: legitimacy, repression and cooptation.

Der Islam ist im Kaukasus in unterschiedlichen Formen verbreitet. Der Nordostkaukasus ist von sunnitischen Sufi-Bruderschaften geprägt. Dort betrachten Eliten und Laien die Religion als Quelle politischer Legitimität. Im Nordwestkaukasus ist der sunnitische Islam der hanafitischen Rechtsschule verbreitet. In Aserbaidschan dominiert die von der iranischen Safawiden-Dynastie verbreitete Zwölfer-Schia, und der Islam ist – wie auch im Nordwestkaukasus – weitgehend auf den Bereich der Spiritualität beschränkt. Doch auch dort stellen Salafisten die Autorität des offiziellen Islam in Frage.

In the Caucasus, Islam is represented in various forms. The Northern Caucasus is marked by Sunni Sufi-brotherhoods. Elites and laymen there see religion as the source of political legitimacy. The Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence is present in the Northwest Caucasus. In Azerbaijan, the Twelver Shia Islam spread by the Iranian Safavid dynasty predominates, and, as in the Northwest Caucasus, Islam is largely limited to the realm of spirituality. But there, too, Salafis are calling into question the authority of official Islam.