This essay explains why recognition of the Circassian genocide is not only a question of historical memory, but also part of wider debates on international law, genocide responsibility, colonial violence, collective memory, and contemporary Russia policy. It situates the Circassian case within scholarly discussions of genocide recognition, state responsibility, Indigenous dispossession, and post-2022 European debates on Russian imperialism.
Recognition of the Circassian genocide belongs to more than one field of debate. It is a question of historical justice for Circassians, a problem of genocide memory and responsibility, and an increasingly relevant issue in contemporary Russia policy. At its centre is a simple but politically difficult claim: the destruction and mass expulsion of Circassians in the nineteenth century should not be treated as an obscure regional tragedy or as an unavoidable side effect of imperial warfare. It should be understood as part of the history of Russian imperial violence, Indigenous dispossession, forced displacement, and the attempted destruction of a people as a political and territorial community.
The politics of recognition is not the same as the writing of history, but it depends on historical argument. Recognition does not create the past. It gives public and institutional form to a judgment about the past. In the Circassian case, the demand for recognition draws on scholarly work, primary-source evidence, diasporic memory, and public commemoration. Russian military correspondence, Ottoman refugee records, British consular reports, memoirs, and contemporary observer accounts document the conquest of Circassia, the destruction of villages, forced movement toward the Black Sea coast, mass death, and the expulsion of Circassian communities into Ottoman territory. Modern scholarship, including Walter Richmond’s The Circassian Genocide and Stephen Shenfield’s earlier essay “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?”, has helped frame these events in relation to genocide studies, colonial violence, and ethnic cleansing. Richmond’s study is widely cited in contemporary discussions of the Circassian genocide and presents the final Russian campaign as a genocidal destruction of Circassian society in the north-western Caucasus. (Adiga.com)
Recognition also intersects with international law, though not in a simple way. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide through specific acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Modern international-law scholarship stresses that genocide is a narrow legal category requiring proof of special intent, and that states parties have duties to prevent and punish genocide. (cambridge.org) The Circassian case predates the Genocide Convention, which means that recognition today is not usually framed as a direct criminal proceeding against nineteenth-century individuals. Rather, it is a historical, legal-political, and moral act of naming. It asks whether the historical record supports the conclusion that Russian imperial policy aimed at the destruction of Circassians as a people rooted in their homeland.
This distinction matters. Recognition is not the same as judicial conviction. A parliament may recognise a historical genocide without conducting a criminal trial. Such recognition belongs to the wider field of historical responsibility: acknowledging the character of the violence, identifying the perpetrating state or empire, resisting denial, and giving public status to the memory of victims and descendants. In that sense, Circassian genocide recognition resembles other retrospective recognition processes involving colonial violence, mass deportation, and crimes committed before contemporary international criminal institutions existed. It is a demand for historical truth, not only legal remedy.
At the same time, recognition has legal and political implications. It can shape public education, memorialisation, asylum and refugee debates, diaspora rights, access to archives, and discussions of return or cultural restoration. It may also raise questions of state responsibility, even when direct criminal accountability is unavailable. International law distinguishes between individual criminal responsibility and state responsibility; the Genocide Convention itself has generated extensive debate over prevention, punishment, and the responsibility of states. (cambridge.org) For Circassians, the legal question is not only whether nineteenth-century Russian commanders can be judged by later law, but whether the modern Russian state continues to deny, minimise, or benefit from the territorial and demographic consequences of imperial destruction.
Recognition is therefore also a politics of collective memory. Meliha B. Catic’s article on Circassians and the politics of genocide recognition argues that the recognition initiative is deeply connected to identity, vulnerability, and the memory of massacres, deportations, exile, and fragmentation. This is crucial. Circassian recognition activism does not come from abstract historical interest alone. It comes from a dispersed people whose modern demographic condition was produced by violence. Most Circassians live outside the North Caucasus because of the nineteenth-century catastrophe. Recognition is thus tied to the survival of memory across diaspora communities.
The intersection of memory and politics is especially visible around 21 May, the Circassian Day of Mourning. Annual commemorations transform a historical date into a shared transnational ritual. They connect Circassians in the Caucasus, Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Europe, North America, and elsewhere through a common calendar of loss. Memory here is not simply private mourning; it is a form of political continuity. It preserves the relationship between a dispersed people and a homeland transformed by conquest, resettlement, and renaming. Recognition gives this memory institutional acknowledgment.
For contemporary Russia policy, the Circassian case has become more important after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. European and Ukrainian debates increasingly describe Russia not only as an aggressive state but as an imperial formation with a long history of conquest, deportation, Russification, and denial of non-Russian peoples’ sovereignty. The Circassian genocide is central to this wider framework because it reveals the colonial foundations of Russian rule in the North Caucasus. Recent policy analysis on Russia as a colonial power in the Caucasus has argued that Russia’s relationship to the region should be understood through imperial and colonial structures, not merely through security management or federal administration.
Recognition can therefore change the analytical vocabulary of Russia policy. If the Circassian case is taken seriously, the North Caucasus cannot be treated only as a “security problem,” an “internal Russian region,” or a terrain of extremism and counterinsurgency. It must also be understood as a region shaped by conquest, demographic engineering, Indigenous dispossession, and historical erasure. That shift matters for think tanks, foreign ministries, parliaments, and civil society institutions. It invites policymakers to ask how Russian state power has historically treated non-Russian peoples, how imperial narratives survive in contemporary Russian politics, and how memory of past violence shapes present political claims.
Ukraine’s recognition of the Circassian genocide in January 2025 illustrates this connection between historical justice and Russia policy. Ukrainian parliamentary recognition placed the Circassian case inside a broader anti-imperial critique of Russian power. Analysis by the Caspian Policy Center described Ukraine’s recognition as part of a wider post-colonial approach to Russia and engagement with Indigenous and colonised peoples affected by Russian rule. Jamestown similarly framed Ukraine’s policy toward Indigenous peoples colonised by Russia as involving recognition of historical injustices, including the Circassian genocide.
This does not mean recognition should be reduced to geopolitical usefulness. That would weaken the moral and historical basis of the claim. The Circassian genocide should be recognised because the historical record warrants serious acknowledgment of mass destruction, expulsion, and the dismantling of Circassian life in the homeland. But recognition also has policy relevance because historical denial is not politically neutral. States that deny or glorify imperial conquest often reproduce imperial categories in the present. Russia’s official narratives about the Caucasus tend to emphasise integration, security, civilisation, development, or victory, while marginalising the violence through which that integration was achieved.
Recognition challenges that narrative. It insists that the history of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus cannot be told only from the perspective of state expansion. It must also be told from the perspective of those who were conquered, expelled, and dispersed. In this sense, recognition is not merely a demand addressed to the past. It is a demand for a different political language in the present.
For European states, the question is how to engage the Circassian case responsibly. Recognition should not be improvised as a symbolic anti-Russian gesture. It should be grounded in scholarship, primary-source documentation, survivor-descendant memory, and careful legal-political language. It should distinguish between historical recognition and criminal adjudication, between state recognition and civil society advocacy, and between genocide as a legal category and genocide as a historical-analytical framework. Precision strengthens the case.
The Circassian recognition movement also raises broader questions about whose suffering becomes visible in international memory. Some genocides and mass atrocities enter global consciousness; others remain marginal, especially when they involve peoples without states or diasporas dispersed across multiple countries. The Circassian case shows how collective memory can persist without strong institutional support, and how recognition can emerge from the interaction of scholarship, diaspora activism, parliamentary initiative, and changing geopolitical context. Georgia’s 2011 recognition, Ukraine’s 2025 recognition, and current initiatives in Lithuania demonstrate that the issue is moving from community memory into wider policy debate.
Recognition, then, should be understood as a bridge between historical justice and contemporary analysis. It honours the dead, acknowledges the displaced, and gives public form to Circassian memory. It also helps identify Russian imperialism as a structure, not a series of disconnected episodes. For the Genocide Recognition Dossier, this is the central conceptual point: recognition is not only about what happened in 1864. It is about how the history of empire is named, how responsibility is discussed, how collective memory is institutionalised, and how contemporary Russia policy can move beyond narrow security language toward a fuller understanding of imperial violence and its afterlives.
Selected Reading and Sources
Selected Reading and Sources
Catic, Meliha B. “Circassians and the Politics of Genocide Recognition.” Europe-Asia Studies 67, no. 10 (2015): 1685–1708.
Richmond, Walter. The Circassian Genocide. Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Shenfield, Stephen D. “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?” In The Massacre in History, edited by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts. Berghahn Books, 1999.
Schabas, William A. Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes. Cambridge University Press, latest editions.
Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. “Russia as a Colonial Power in the Caucasus.” 2025.
Caspian Policy Center. “Ukraine Looks to the North Caucasus to Advance a Post-Colonial View of Russia.” 2025.
Jamestown Foundation. “Russia Future Watch II: Decolonization for Security: Ukraine’s Strategic Policy Toward Indigenous Peoples Colonized by Russia.” 2025.
Helsinki Commission. Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative. 2023.