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The principle of national self-determination proclaimed by the American president Woodrow Wilson many years ago is still topical today. The main threat to this principle is the policy built on the tenet "one ethnos - one state", which provokes numerous bloody ethnic conflicts that are often burdened by confessional factor. Two world largest federations Russia and India faced similar problems. Events in the Chechen Republic and in the states of Jammu and Kashmir clearly show that the Russian and the Indian authorities were not ready for a massive invasion of Islam into political life, when it was discovered that the traditional forms of interaction with religion could not provide the state´s interests in the face of political Islam. This monograph should help to shed some light on the problems of sovereignty of the Islamic minorities in Chechnya and Kashmir, and should be especially useful to anyone who is interested in modern ethnic and confessional relations.

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Dmitry Foryy, Ph.D. student in Political Science at Siegen University (Germany), M.A. in Public Policy (Erfurt University, Germany) and in Sociology of Law (International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain), B.A. in International Relations (Krasnodar, Russia).

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