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Since the end of the second Chechen campaign, the North Caucasus counterinsurgency has experienced the shift from military involvement toward prevalence of law enforcement instruments. This paper discusses the composition of repressive tactics that the Russian state developed as a result of the two decades long evolution of a counter strategy designed to eliminate illegal armed groups operating in the North Caucasus. It is focused on the late stages of conflict (2007-2014) when the violence that had spread across the region started in the early 2000s had symbolically culminated in 2007 with the proclamation of the Caucasian Emirate. This paper advances a reconceptualization of the Russian counterinsurgency by devising an analysis of indiscriminate and discriminate repressive tactics. It demonstrates that security agencies incorporated more selective uses of violence into their tactics, thereby reducing the number of indiscriminate violent actions to an insignificant level. Moreover, along with selective violence, security institutions reinforced their effort by conducting preventive work such as the detection of secret caches of weapons, seizures, and arrests. Findings regarding the current composition of repressive tactics are illustrated by means of new disaggregated media-based data that were especially collected and analyzed to form the basis of this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on problems of the national movement of the Circassians – a small nation in the Caucasus, most of whose population is dispersed all over the world. The paper researches the development of the Circassian movement from 1989–2000 and its contemporary structure since 2005. The modern Circassian movement as a whole has never been approached from a political science viewpoint. This research aims to answer several core questions: What are the different strands of the movement? What principles are they based on? Who are the participants? What political forces support them? How do these political forces interact with each other? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abkhazia during the Stalin era was at the same time a subtropical haven where the great leader and his lieutenants built grand dachas and took extended holidays away from Moscow, and also a key piece in the continuing chess match of Soviet politics. This paper will examine how and why this small, sunny autonomous republic on the Black Sea, and the political networks that developed there, played a prominent role in the politics of the south Caucasus region and in Soviet politics as a whole during the Stalin period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance and role that Islam plays in defining the Chechen national identity. Chechnya's embrace of Islam, the author states, developed during a period of colonization as Chechens struggled to stop the Russians from encroaching on their land. Other topics include the 80 years Chechens spent under Soviet rule after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the geographic isolation of the Caucasus Mountains, and the Chechen victory over the Russian Federation during the 1994-1996 war.

The article presents one of the first attempts at a scholarly reassessment of the notions of the Caucasus and Caucasian identity. It consists of two parts, the first of which explores the main historical events that had formative influences on the Caucasian region and its inhabitants and the second of which deals with the challenges of post-Soviet nation building in the region. In this context, Russia regarded its relations with the state of Kartli-Kakheti, one of the most powerful state creations in the region, as being of particular importance.

In nineteenth-century Russia, the Caucasus was a large region composed of various territories and ethnic and religious groups. This region included Circassia, Mingrelia, Georgia, a part of Armenia, the ancient Media, Daghestan and the territories of Suanctians, Ossetians, Abkhazians, Karakalpaks and other mountaineer nations. In this study, focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, and how Russians occupied the Caucasus because the way Russians occupied and controlled the Caucasus had great impact on relations between them and the Caucasians. As Edward Allworth writes, Russian conquest, forced migrations and other brutal measures that the Russians used for their conquest of the Caucasus "inflicted scars upon the relationships between the invaders and invaded."

Focuses on the specific geographical and ethnocultural characteristics of the North Caucasus predetermined the role od Sufism in its societal and political evolution. Factors affecting the increase of traditional Sufi, Islam and Wahhabism; Dynamic of the Russian-Chechen conflict; Official and physical crackdown on Wahhabism.