In my understanding, the ongoing violence in the North Caucasus can be understood as an outcome of the continuous intermingling of ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism (some call it “Jihadism” and militant Islam) and customary law of the mountainous Caucasus.
This article provides a brief overview of bottom-up peace-building and its practice in the North Caucasus. The hypothesis developed in this study is an assumption that the conflict in North Caucasus starts at the community, or grass-roots, level. Therefore, peaceful resolutions to conflict should be sought by implementing a local, bottom-up type of peace-building. Such peace-building measures, in turn, require the active participation of civil society and, in particular, independent and functional local and international NGOs.