The causes and consequences of Beslan: A commentary on Gerard Toalʹs placing blame: Making sense of Beslan

Gerard Toal has written a very important work placing the terrorist attack in Beslan into a geopolitical context. Toalʹs analysis emphasizes two themes, the need to place Beslan in a political context and the parallels between the Russian governmentʹs reaction to the attack and the Bush administrationʹs reaction to the September 11 attacks. In this response, I seek to make these two themes more explicit and also to focus on one area that is somewhat neglected in Toalʹs analysis: namely, the factors that made the terrorist attack in Beslan possible. In doing so, I turn away from focusing exclusively on geopolitics by bringing in some of the socio-economic and ideological factors that made the North Caucasus ripe for the explosion of terrorist attacks that occurred in the first half of this decade. I also show how changes in government policies eventually brought about the decline of large-scale terrorist attacks in the region. In doing so, I hope to make the point that any analysis of a spectacular terrorist attack such as Beslan has to take into account not just geopolitics, but also the socio-economic conditions that made it possible and the government policies that allowed it to happen.