According to the Concise Atlas of the World, Second Edition (2008), the Ciscaucasus region lies on the European side of the "commonly-accepted division" that separates Europe from Asia.

Between the 1850s and World War I, about a million North Caucasian Muslims, including Circassians, Chechens, Ingush, Ossetians, and others, became refugees in the Ottoman Empire.

The region was informally occupied by the Soviet Union shortly afterwards, and the republic was forced into accepting a nonviolent annexation in January 1921.

[12] In June 2022, the US State Department advised citizens not to travel to the North Caucasus, including Chechnya and Mount Elbrus, due to terrorism, kidnapping and risk of civil unrest.

The North Caucasus is considered part of peripheral Russia, and suffers from very low levels of economic development.

[14] The United States' National Intelligence Council in 2004 described the region as being dominated by corruption, weapons smuggling, and lagging economies.

[15] The main source of employment in the North Caucasus is the black market,[16] and organized crime is powerful in local business and politics.

Luxembourgish politician Anne Brasseur wrote in 2004 that "There is no other region in Russia or Eurasia in general in which so many peoples and ethnic groups with their various languages and cultures live together in such a small area.

In contrast, the eastern portion of the North Caucasus (including Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia) is dominated by Sufism.