On the Factors of Conflict and Stability in the North Caucasus

The article attempts identifying and analyzing the factors, which, on the one hand, promote the growth of social and political instability, conflicts, various ethno-national, regional, religious and other conflicts in the North Caucasus, on the other hand, determine the unity both in the region as a whole and in the individual national republics. The author shows that those social and political forces, which in the 1990s acted with radical slogans of providing each major ethnic group with the status of autonomous entity up to an independent ethnocratic state, are currently relegated to marginal positions and have no support from the vast majority of the population. The main attention is focused on the complex factors that ensure the unity of the region as a whole, and individual republics as part of the Russian Federation.