2024 Recipient

Egor Lazarev

State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya

Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Egor Lazarev, State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press, 2023)  

Egor Lazarev’s State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya is timely, original, and exemplary. Its exploration of “lawfare”—the strategic choices politicians and the wider population make under conditions of legal pluralism—draws on extensive fieldwork in Chechnya and a wide, masterful reading of scholarship in multiple disciplines. Throughout, Lazarev effortlessly shifts vantage points and scales, at once analyzing how local elites have tolerated, manipulated, and reinvented customary law and Sharia and also showing how ordinary people have turned the resulting legal pluralism to their advantage. Women are central to this story; in Chechnya they often seek protection in state courts and strategically choose from among Sharia, Adat, and state laws. State-making, the book convincingly demonstrates, needs to be studied both “from above” and “from below,” and with close attention to the role of gender. Lazarev has crafted a superb book with the kind of breadth that allows it to speak to a wide readership in disciplines from ethnography to history to political science and in the subfields of war, conflict studies, state building, and political regimes. State-Building as Lawfare, in short, is an extraordinary accomplishment, offering a fine-grained analysis of Chechnya that has important implications for the study of regime maintenance, nested sovereignties, and the rule of law in Chechnya, the Russian Federation, and beyond. 

Honorable Mention: Gary Saul Morson

Prize Committee: Robert Nemes (chair), Tomila Lankina, Ana Hedberg Olenina, and Douglas Rogers