After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre and the Peace That Followed

In 2004, a school in Beslan, a small town in the Russian republic of North Ossetia, became the scene of a horrendous terrorist attack by Chechen militants in which over 1,100 people were taken hostage. The attack was followed by a bungled rescue operation that saw over 330 people killed, most of them children. Javeline, a political scientist, explains how, despite credible predictions that Ossetians might take part in retaliatory anti-Chechen ethnic violence, Beslan’s survivors engaged instead in tenacious, if mostly futile, political activism. In her meticulous research, based on an original survey of over 1,000 survivors and their families, as well as focus groups, media accounts, activists’ reports, and much more, Javeline studied the emotions and actions of people in the wake of the tragedy in order to determine which emotions made people receptive to the prospect of retaliatory violence and which drove people toward peaceful political activism. Unlike earlier research, her rigorous analysis shows that feelings of anger and hatred did not produce support for violence. Instead, and perhaps paradoxically, those emotions generated political participation, as did a sense of alienation from the Russian government.