European Russia Policy Must Reckon with the Circassian Question, Scholar Argues

European Russia Policy Must Reckon with the Circassian Question, Scholar Argues

A new policy commentary published by the Institute for Knowledge, Research, and Society (IKRS) calls on European think tanks and policymakers to fundamentally rethink how they approach the North Caucasus — and places the Circassian genocide at the heart of that challenge.

Written by Dr. Huseyin Oylupinar, Director of the Center for Circassian Studies at IKRS and Affiliated Researcher at Uppsala University's Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the May 2026 commentary argues that European policy analysis has long made the North Caucasus visible through a narrow vocabulary: terrorism, insurgency, radicalisation, separatism, instability, and Russian federal control — a framing that, in Oylupinar's view, serves Moscow's interests more than it serves historical truth.

The author does not deny that security challenges exist in the region. His argument is structural: when security becomes the dominant frame, Russian sovereignty is made to appear natural while North Caucasian historical claims appear suspect. Violence becomes visible. Islam becomes visible. What becomes less visible is Russian imperial conquest, Circassian genocide, Indigenous dispossession, deportation, exile, and non-Russian political subjectivity.

Oylupinar traces this analytical pattern from the post-Soviet 1990s through to the present, examining publications by major European institutions including Ifri, OSW, Chatham House, RUSI, and EUISS. He argues that after 9/11, the global counter-terrorism vocabulary allowed Russian officials to reframe anti-colonial and local resistance movements under a single security label — and that European policy writing largely followed suit.

The Circassian case is treated as diagnostic. 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. Oylupinar argues that treating Circassian political memory primarily as diaspora nationalism or a security risk reproduces the logic of the state that carried out that expulsion.

The commentary acknowledges a meaningful shift since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It highlights recent contributions — including Konrad Adenauer Stiftung's 2025 paper framing Russian rule in the Caucasus through colonial domination, and an ICDS report examining the reactivation of Chechen and Circassian diaspora organisations in Europe — as signs that colonial analysis is beginning to enter policy spaces. Georgia recognised the Circassian genocide in 2011, Ukraine followed in 2025, and Lithuania has become a site of parliamentary advocacy. These developments, Oylupinar writes, place the Circassian question squarely inside European memory politics.

Yet he cautions against superficial adoption of decolonial language. If "decolonisation" becomes a slogan stripped of specific historical content, it risks repeating the same instrumentalism that has long made North Caucasian peoples visible only when useful to others.

His recommendations are concrete: European institutions should audit their inherited vocabulary, separate Russia's security claims from North Caucasian historical claims, recognise Circassian genocide recognition as a legitimate historical-justice issue, and systematically include Circassian, Chechen, Ingush, and Dagestani voices in policy discussions. The North Caucasus 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.

https://ikrs.org/the-north-caucasus-in-europes-russia-policy/