Policy Commentary | Center for Circassian Studies
Huseyin Oylupinar
Director, Center for Circassian Studies, Institute for Knowledge, Research, and Society
Affiliated Researcher, Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University
May 2026
Beyond Security Management and the Imported Vocabulary of Instability
European policy analysis has often made the North Caucasus visible through a narrow vocabulary: terrorism, insurgency, radicalisation, separatism, instability, integration, and Russian federal control. These categories are not invented from nothing. The region has experienced war, authoritarian rule, insurgent violence, counter-insurgency, repression, displacement, and social fragmentation. But the problem is not whether security questions exist. They do. The problem is what happens when security becomes the dominant frame through which the North Caucasus is made visible to Europe.
For much of the post-Soviet period, European policy writing treated the North Caucasus primarily as Russia’s internal security periphery. The region appeared in analysis when violence escalated, when Islamist militancy was discussed, when Moscow’s control seemed fragile, or when events in Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, or elsewhere appeared to threaten wider Russian stability. In this framework, the North Caucasus was rarely approached first as a region with its own political histories. It was approached as a problem of Russian state management.
The security frame is not false; it is insufficient. Its insufficiency becomes political when it makes Russian sovereignty appear natural and North Caucasian historical claims appear suspect. Violence becomes visible. Islam becomes visible. Insurgency becomes visible. Russian territorial integrity becomes visible. Federal governance becomes visible. What becomes less visible is Russian imperial conquest, Circassian genocide, Indigenous dispossession, deportation, exile, memory politics, and non-Russian political subjectivity.
The issue is not that European think tanks simply reproduced Russian propaganda. That would be too crude and too easy to dismiss. The problem is more structural. Russian state categories, global counter-terrorism vocabulary, and European security concerns often converged around the same language: extremism, separatism, terrorism, territorial integrity, foreign agitation, stabilisation, and integration. The result was that Moscow’s preferred vocabulary could appear in European analysis as neutral policy language.
How the frame developed
This analytical pattern has a history. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the North Caucasus entered European attention largely through the Chechen wars, Russian state violence, separatism, and the fear of post-Soviet fragmentation. The brutality of Russia’s wars in Chechnya generated criticism of Moscow, but the subsequent shift toward counter-terrorism also allowed Russian officials to reframe anti-colonial, separatist, Islamist, and local resistance currents under one security label.
After 9/11, the language of global counter-terrorism made Russian security claims more internationally legible. Moscow’s framing of the North Caucasus as a zone of terrorism, extremism, and separatist threat could now circulate in a wider Western vocabulary. The region was no longer only Russia’s internal conflict zone; it was increasingly read through the global grammar of jihadism and radicalisation.
Around 2010–2014, the Sochi Olympics briefly exposed another layer of the region’s history. Circassian activists drew attention to the fact that Sochi and its surrounding region were not neutral Olympic landscapes, but part of the historical geography of Circassian conquest, mass death, and exile. SWP’s Uwe Halbach explicitly connected the 150th anniversary of the Circassian expulsion, the unresolved legacy of Russian colonial history, and Putin’s prestigious Sochi project. (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP)) Yet even then, Circassian mobilisation was often interpreted through the lens of protest risk, diaspora nationalism, or disruption to Russian state prestige rather than through the deeper history of genocide and Indigenous dispossession.
After 2014, European Russia policy focused understandably on Crimea, eastern Ukraine, sanctions, NATO security, disinformation, and Russian military revisionism. The North Caucasus remained largely peripheral. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a new vocabulary became more available: empire, colonialism, decolonisation, non-Russian peoples, Indigenous rights, and the imperial structure of Russian power. This post-2022 opening matters. But it remains uneven. The North Caucasus is still too often folded back into older categories of instability and security.
The security-centred analytical field
Several influential European policy sources illustrate this pattern. The 2011 Ifri paper “What the North Caucasus Means to Russia” is useful precisely because it reveals a Russia-centred structure of analysis: the region is examined through what it means for Russian security, territorial integrity, and state management. The paper’s own summary states that the crisis in the North Caucasus had negative effects across Russia, including instability in southern regions, interethnic tensions, and terrorist attacks. (Ifri) That perspective should not be treated as neutral regional analysis. It is analysis from within the logic of the state that governs the region.
OSW’s 2011 commentary “‘Creeping’ Civil War in the North Caucasus” described deteriorating security, attacks, armed clashes, and the spread of destabilisation across the region. (OSW Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich) OSW’s broader 2014 report “No Change in the Russian Caucasus” called the North Caucasus the most volatile region in the Russian Federation and foregrounded violence, clashes with the armed Islamic underground, and acts of terror. (OSW Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich) Such analysis is not useless. It describes real dynamics. But when this vocabulary dominates, the colonial genealogy of those dynamics recedes.
Chatham House’s “The North Caucasus: Islam, Security and Politics” placed Islam, security, politics, militant networks, and radicalisation at the centre of discussion. The document also carries the standard Chatham House disclaimer that the views expressed belong to the author and not the institution, which matters when assigning responsibility for the framing. (Chatham House) Still, the title itself captures the European policy grammar of the period: Islam plus security plus politics. The region becomes legible through possible threat.
RUSI’s later work on integration fits the broader pattern in a less alarmist form. Elena Zhirukhina’s 2021 RUSI article defines Russia’s integration model as state-led policy linking “problematic regions” with Russian political, legal, economic, social, cultural, and public-discursive spaces. (Royal United Services Institute) A second RUSI piece investigated the integration model being implemented by national and regional authorities. (Royal United Services Institute) These pieces tell us something about Moscow’s priorities, but less about the historical legitimacy of the order Moscow seeks to consolidate. The word “integration” must be handled critically. Integration into what? On whose terms? After what history of conquest, deportation, settlement, and coercive state-building?
The EUISS event “The North Caucasus: Resting or Restive?” shows that even in recent European policy discussion, the region continues to be framed through volatility, conflict potential, and regional security. (European Union) Again, this is not wrong. But it is incomplete. The repeated use of categories such as “restive” risks naturalising disorder. It asks whether the region is quiet or dangerous, not why its political history has been made so difficult to narrate outside Russian state categories.
The point is not that these publications invented the security problem. The point is that the security problem became the organising lens through which the region’s other histories were filtered.
Narrative control without conspiracy
The question is not only what European think tanks have written about the North Caucasus. It is which categories they have made available.
Narrative control does not require direct coordination. It can operate through selection, repetition, and institutional habit. If policy editors commission security analysts, Russia specialists, and counter-terrorism experts more often than scholars, activists, and institutions rooted in Circassian, Chechen, Ingush, Dagestani, or other North Caucasian contexts, the resulting literature will predictably privilege certain questions over others. It will ask how Moscow manages the region before it asks how Moscow came to possess it. It will ask whether local mobilisation threatens stability before it asks what historical claims that mobilisation expresses. In this way, a Russia-centred field can reproduce Russian state assumptions even without endorsing Russian state policy.
The problem is one of epistemic asymmetry: Russian state concerns enter European analysis as policy-relevant, while North Caucasian historical claims often enter as identity politics, activism, or instability. Moscow’s view of the region becomes the baseline. North Caucasian views become data, grievance, or risk. The structure is not neutral.
This matters because analytical vocabulary allocates legitimacy. To describe the North Caucasus primarily as a zone of radicalisation is to make one kind of policy imaginable. To describe it as a region shaped by Russian imperial conquest, Indigenous dispossession, genocide, deportation, and managed memory is to make another kind of policy imaginable. The first vocabulary asks how Europe should understand Russia’s security problem. The second asks how Europe should understand Russia’s imperial problem.
What the dominant frame misses
The North Caucasus is not merely a volatile borderland inside the Russian Federation. It is a region incorporated through imperial conquest, military violence, administrative restructuring, demographic transformation, and repeated attempts to discipline non-Russian peoples. The Circassian case is central to this history.
Circassia was destroyed in the nineteenth century through Russian imperial conquest, mass killing, forced deportation, and the expulsion of large parts of the population across the Black Sea. The modern Circassian diaspora is not voluntary in origin. It is the demographic afterlife of conquest. To treat Circassian mobilisation mainly as diaspora nationalism, separatist agitation, or identity grievance is to miss the structure of the claim. Circassians are asking Europe to recognise that Russian rule in the north-western Caucasus was built through colonial violence.
None of this requires denying the reality of insurgent violence or religious militancy. It requires refusing to let those phenomena become the only language through which the region is understood.
The Circassian case is diagnostic. If European analysis cannot recognise the Circassian question as a matter of genocide, exile, Indigenous dispossession, and historical justice, then it will struggle to understand the wider North Caucasus outside Moscow’s security vocabulary. Circassian recognition politics tests whether Europe can distinguish between destabilisation and historical claim-making.
This is why Halbach’s SWP paper remains important. “The Circassian Question: Russian Colonial History in the Caucasus and a Case of ‘Long-distance Nationalism’” explicitly connected Circassian mobilisation to Russian colonial history, the expulsion of Circassians from their North Caucasian homeland, and the symbolic importance of Sochi. (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP)) That paper opened a more productive analytical path. It did not reduce the Circassian question to security. It placed memory, diaspora, colonial history, and Russian state symbolism in the same frame.
The contrast is decisive. A security frame asks whether Circassian mobilisation creates instability. A colonial-history frame asks why Circassians are mobilising around memory, recognition, homeland, and the erasure of historical geography. A Russia-centred frame asks how Moscow manages the North Caucasus. A North Caucasian-centred frame asks how Moscow came to rule it, what forms of violence made that rule possible, and how non-Russian peoples remember that history.
The post-2022 opening
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has changed the European debate. It has made it harder to treat Russian violence as episodic, reactive, or merely security-driven. Across Europe, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, and parts of the South Caucasus policy community, Russia is increasingly discussed as an imperial formation. Maria Mälksoo’s widely cited essay on the “postcolonial moment” in Russia’s war against Ukraine argues that Central and Eastern European states have played a newly assertive role in challenging Russia’s denial of Ukraine’s and other former imperial subjects’ political agency. (University of Helsinki) This creates an opening for a more serious North Caucasus policy.
Recent European policy work has begun to move in that direction. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s 2025 paper “Russia as a Colonial Power in the Caucasus” explicitly frames Russian rule in the Caucasus through colonial domination and identifies mass deportation, forced resettlement, and the destruction of local communities as part of Russia’s imperial legacy in the region. (Konrad Adenauer Stiftung) This marks a real shift: colonial analysis enters a policy space that long treated the Caucasus mainly as a problem of Russian governance and security.
The ICDS report “Agents of Decolonisation? The Chechen and Circassian Diasporas in Europe Since 2022” is another important development. It argues that Chechen and Circassian diaspora political organisations in Europe have reactivated since 2022 and have had to adapt their message and position themselves in relation to Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. (ICDS) That matters. Diaspora organisations are not only ethnic lobbies, and they should not be approached primarily as security concerns. In many cases, they are repositories of historical memory and political knowledge that European institutions have failed to incorporate.
The post-2022 decolonial vocabulary is promising, but it is also vulnerable to superficial use. “Decolonisation” cannot become a slogan detached from specific histories, peoples, institutions, and political claims. If decolonisation becomes only a slogan for weakening Russia, it will repeat the same instrumental logic that has long made North Caucasian peoples visible only when useful to others. The North Caucasus is precisely where the term has historical substance. Russian rule there was built through conquest, military occupation, settlement, deportation, and cultural hierarchy. A serious European discussion of Russian decolonisation cannot exclude the North Caucasus.
Circassians and the danger of securitised recognition
Circassian genocide recognition tests whether Europe can move beyond inherited security categories. Russian state narratives have long had an interest in framing North Caucasian political claims as extremist, separatist, foreign-directed, or destabilising. This does not require every Circassian activist to be portrayed as a terrorist. It is enough to surround the field with suspicion. Once recognition activism is coded as geopolitical agitation, the historical claim becomes easier to dismiss.
This is why European institutions must distinguish sharply between political memory and security threat. Circassian commemoration of 21 May, demands for recognition, documentation of genocide, discussion of historical toponyms, and diaspora advocacy are not forms of extremism. They are normal practices of historical justice. Treating them as suspect reproduces the logic of the state that benefited from their suppression.
The problem is especially acute because Circassians are dispersed. Diaspora politics is often vulnerable to being described as “long-distance nationalism” in a dismissive way. Halbach used the term analytically, not dismissively, to explain the transnational character of Circassian mobilisation. But European policymakers should be careful. A people expelled from its homeland will necessarily remember from outside. Diaspora memory is not artificial simply because it is transnational. In the Circassian case, transnational memory is the direct result of forced displacement.
The current political vocabulary around the North Caucasus is itself one of the afterlives of conquest. If the descendants of deportation are treated as suspicious because they remember deportation, the logic of erasure continues under the language of security.
What Europe should change
European Russia policy should stop treating imperial history as background and security as the main text. A different approach does not require romanticising North Caucasian politics or ignoring security risks. It requires changing the order of questions. Instead of beginning with Moscow’s problem of control, European analysis should begin with the region’s history of conquest, the political memories of its peoples, and the categories through which their claims are made suspect.
First, European think tanks and public institutions should audit their inherited vocabulary. Terms such as radicalisation, separatism, extremism, and integration should not be abandoned where they describe real phenomena, but they should be used with precision and context. They should not become default categories for all North Caucasian political expression.
Second, European analysis should separate Russia’s security claims from North Caucasian historical claims. Moscow’s view of the region is not a neutral baseline. It is the view of the state that conquered and incorporated the region. Russia’s emphasis on territorial integrity, extremism, and foreign interference must be studied as discourse, not adopted as analytical common sense.
Third, Circassian genocide recognition should be treated as a legitimate historical-justice issue. Georgia recognised the Circassian genocide in 2011; Ukraine followed in 2025; Lithuania has become a site of parliamentary advocacy and public discussion. These developments place the Circassian question inside European memory politics and Russia policy. They should not be reduced to anti-Russian symbolism. (Ukrainian World Congress)
Fourth, European institutions should include Circassian, Chechen, Ingush, Dagestani, and other North Caucasian voices in policy discussions. Expertise on the region should not be monopolised by Russia-centred analysts, security specialists, or scholars whose categories reproduce Moscow’s priorities. Inclusion does not mean uncritical endorsement. It means the region’s peoples should be treated as political subjects, not only as objects of analysis.
Fifth, the North Caucasus should be connected to Black Sea and South Caucasus policy. Europe cannot discuss Ukraine, Georgia, the Black Sea, energy corridors, and Russian imperial power while leaving the North Caucasus invisible. The north-eastern Black Sea coast, Sochi, Qbaada/Krasnaya Polyana, Abkhazia, Circassian memory, and Russian military geography belong to the same strategic map.
Finally, European policy should recognise that memory is not secondary to security. In the North Caucasus, memory is security-relevant because denial sustains imperial legitimacy. The refusal to name conquest, deportation, and genocide is not historical neutrality. It protects the narrative architecture of Russian rule.
Conclusion
The North Caucasus has too often entered European Russia policy through the language of danger. It is described as unstable, restive, radicalised, difficult to integrate, or vulnerable to insurgency. These descriptions capture some realities, but they also reproduce a Russia-centred map of the region. They tell Europe what the North Caucasus means for Russia, not what Russian rule has meant for the North Caucasus.
Europe does not need to abandon security analysis of the North Caucasus. It needs to stop allowing security analysis to monopolise the field. A Russia policy that sees the North Caucasus only through instability will keep reproducing the political map of the empire it claims to analyse. The region should be treated not as Russia’s troublesome periphery, but as one of the clearest sites where the imperial structure of Russian power becomes visible.
Selected Reading and Sources
Halbach, Uwe. “The Circassian Question: Russian Colonial History in the Caucasus and a Case of ‘Long-distance Nationalism’.” SWP Comments, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, 2014.
Górecki, Wojciech. “‘Creeping’ Civil War in the North Caucasus.” OSW Commentary, Centre for Eastern Studies, 2011.
Górecki, Wojciech. “No Change in the Russian Caucasus: The Winter Olympics Amid a Local War.” OSW Studies, Centre for Eastern Studies, 2014.
Malashenko, Alexey. “What the North Caucasus Means to Russia.” Russie.Nei.Visions, Ifri, 2011.
Matveeva, Anna. “The North Caucasus: Islam, Security and Politics.” Chatham House Meeting Summary, 2012.
Zhirukhina, Elena. “Identifying an Integration Model for the North Caucasus.” RUSI Newsbrief, 2021.
Zhirukhina, Elena. “An Integration Model for the North Caucasus: Culture and Discourse.” RUSI Newsbrief, 2021.
Halbach, Uwe. “The Circassian Question.” SWP Comments, 2014.
Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. “Russia as a Colonial Power in the Caucasus.” 2025.
Kłyszcz, Ivan U. “Agents of Decolonisation? The Chechen and Circassian Diasporas in Europe Since 2022.” International Centre for Defence and Security, 2026.
Mälksoo, Maria. “The Postcolonial Moment in Russia’s War Against Ukraine.” Journal of Genocide Research, 2022.