Winner of the 2011 Lemkin Award, Institute for the Study of Genocide "Emma Gilligan's book chronicles Moscow's brutal response to the republic's demand for freedom, an onslaught that has shattered Chechen society, fuelled armed resistance across the Caucasus and bred a new generation of violent extremists. She focuses on the second Chechen war, started by Boris Yeltsin in autumn 1999 ... Read moreand pursued by Vladimir Putin when he stepped up from the prime minister's post to the Kremlin in 2000... Her thorough research is enlivened by testimony from Chechen victims of Russian troops and their local henchmen."
Irish Times "Gilligan provides the definitive history of Russian policies toward Chechnya in the period from 1999 to the present. Utilizing first-person interviews and documents from Russian, US, and international nongovernmental organizations, she narrates the events of the First and Second Chechen wars, the rise of Chechen terrorism, and the events at Beslan within a larger context of human rights, making comparisons to other 20th-century situations including those in Bosnia... She has created a history remarkably free of technical jargon and specialist vocabulary that should serve as a good introduction to the subject and region for students and scholars of history, political science, and international law."
Choice "Terror in Chechnya is perhaps the most important book about the Chechen war available in English today."
Anna Brodsky, Russian Review "[Gilligan's] book is an important contribution to the literature. Her multilayered approach, her ability to highlight competing perspectives, and her insights into the way future investigations of human rights abuses could be conducted make her work a valuable contribution to the study of human rights."
Maria Raquel Freire, Perspectives on Politics "[T]he Chechen conflict, as a research subject, should be more frequently addressed to from the various perspectives. Gilligan's book is a solid pioneering piece of work in this direction."
Kiryl Kascian, Central European Journal of International and Security Studies "Emma Gilligan's book is an invaluable guide to the tragic consequences for Chechnya
and Russia
of a twin dynamic that has dominated post-Soviet Russian politics: the use of violence to maintain the territorial dimensions of the state, and the resilience of authoritarian politics."
Simon Cosgrove, Europe-Asia Studies Show Less