Many Faces of the Caucasus

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Notes

¹The conference was organised with financial support from CEELBAS (Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies), ASSC Seed Corn Fund and the Department of Political Science and International Studies, both at the University of Birmingham. The editors and contributors would like to express their thanks to those organisations for their financial support and to the editorial team at Europe-Asia Studies, and to numerous anonymous reviewers for help and assistance.

²The Birmingham research group aims to contribute to filling the existing academic shortcomings in British studies of both the Caucasus and Central Asia by generating comprehensive, in-depth and language-based research into the region. The research group emphasises its genuinely multi-disciplinary nature reflected in its members' affiliation to a range of disciplines (area studies, political sciences, security studies, history, geography, archaeology, anthropology and theology).

³Albiet somewhat dated, for a primer on the Russian military responses to the conflicts in Chechnya, see Kramer (2005).

⁴It is worth noting that some researchers and commentators stretch the notion of the Caucasus even further to include the north-eastern part of Turkey and north-western part of Azerbaijan because for many centuries these areas were part of a single socio-economic and ethno-cultural entity (Akkieva 2008, p. 270).

⁵For a detailed discussion of notions of the Caucasus see Akkieva (2008, pp. 253–73). The Russo-centric view of the Caucasus has also affected Western scholarship. For example, King (2008) effectively begins with the Russian Empire's annexation of Kartl-Kakheti in 1801.

⁶Thus, social and cultural changes in post-Soviet Muslim Caucasus and their political implications are addressed in Ware (2010); Gammer (2008); Sagramoso (2007); Dannreuther and March (2010); Pilkington and Yemelianova (2003); and Yemelianova (2010). The historical development of Circassian, Abaza, Abkhaz and Ubykh languages and myths is examined in Colarusso (2002) and Richmond (2008).

⁷Notable exceptions would include the likes of Allen and Muratoff (2011) and Gammer (2006).

⁸Some works have made headway in addressing this problem since the opening of the region and its archives to scholars. See: Ro'i (2000) and Zelkina (2000).

⁹See, for instance, the seminal work by Derluguian (2005). See also: Dunlop (1998).

¹⁰An example of a notable exception would be the work of Marie Bennigsen-Broxup (1996).

¹¹Examples of the ways forward for research can be found in the two edited collections on Islam and the state in the Caucasus and wider Eurasia by Moshe Gammer (2008) and Galina Yemelianova (2010).

¹²Some authors point to the role of war-torn Abkhazia as a breeding ground for armed resistance of many hues. They highlight the fact that a considerable portion of the volunteers in the Abkhaz conflict were from Chechnya. In 1994, they went back to Chechnya and played a pivotal part in the Russo-Chechen wars. See, for example, Moore and Tumelty (2009) and Derluguian (2007).

¹³For more on this, see for instance, Gurr (1993, 2000).

¹⁴For one of the earlier publications on this project see Singer and Small (1972).

¹⁵For an example in English of the incompatibility of such accounts, see Alijarly (1995) and Walker (1995).

¹⁶See for example the discussion on the Ingush–Ossetian conflict in Tishkov (1997, pp. 155–56).

¹⁷See for example the article by Georgia's then Minister for Reintegration Temur Yakobashvili (2010).

¹⁸Of interest in this respect is a book by Cerwyn Moore (2010) on Contemporary Violence: Postmodern War in Kosovo and Chechnya which challenges the orthodox accounts of ethnic conflict and the transformation of armed resistance movements by using hermeneutics and theories of narrative identity to analyse Kosovo and Chechnya.

¹⁹CEELBAS is a partnership of University College London, the University of Oxford and the University of Birmingham with a network of partners at the Universities of Bath, Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Sheffield, Warwick and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

²⁰The essays are based on six papers (out of a total of 21), which were presented at the conference's seven panels. Those panels covered ‘Language, Narration and State-Building in the Caucasus; ‘Ethno-Nationalism and Politics in the South Caucasus'; ‘History of the Caucasus'; ‘Central Asia and Caucasus and the Outside World’; ‘Traditionalism versus Reformism in Islam’; ‘Domestic and Foreign Policies of the Central Asian and Caucasian States' and ‘Culture and Society in the Caucasus.’ The essays by Andrew Foxall, Brian Grodsky and Cerwyn Moore were added to the collection at a later stage.

²¹Or, to be more accurate, in the short term at least scholarship may reveal why certain solutions can be ruled out.

²²Krasnodar Krai and the Republic of Adyghea are the only places in the North Caucasus that administratively belong to the Southern Federal District—one of eight federal districts of the Russian Federation. The other territories in the region constitute part of the North Caucasus Federal District, created in January 2010.