Charlotte Hille and Renée Gendron's "Circassia: Remembering the Past Empowers the Future," published in Iran and the Caucasus (2019), examines how Circassian communities in the North Caucasus and the diaspora have reconstructed and disseminated the narrative of their nineteenth-century deportation. Drawing on a combination of literature review and structured interviews with Circassian activists, academics, and organisational leaders, the authors situate their analysis within the theoretical framework of collective memory studies, particularly Pierre Nora's concept of lieux de mémoire—sites and commemorative practices through which a community's historical experience acquires symbolic permanence. The article traces the trajectory of Circassian historical consciousness from the Caucasian Wars through Soviet-era policies of both cultural indigenisation and administrative fragmentation, to the post-1991 resurgence of ethnic and political mobilisation.

The article's central contribution lies in its identification of three interlocking strategies through which Circassian organisations have sought to recover and assert their historical narrative: the discovery and dissemination of previously inaccessible archival evidence, the institution of formal commemorative practices such as the May 21 Circassian Memorial Day, and the coordination of diaspora and homeland communities through NGOs. The authors draw on first-hand testimony from figures including Amjad Jaimoukha, Iyad Youghar, and Danyal Merza to illustrate how a historically suppressed or fragmented family memory has gradually been transformed into a coherent, publicly articulated political claim. This transformation culminated in milestones such as Georgia's 2011 parliamentary recognition of the deportation as genocide, even as the Russian Federation has continued to resist any equivalent acknowledgment.

For researchers working on the historiography and political memory of the Circassian Genocide, this article offers a valuable perspective: rather than documenting the violence of the 1860s directly, it analyses the subsequent decades-long struggle over who has the authority to narrate that violence, and to what political effect.