Contingent Homes: Mobility and Long-Term Conflict in the Contested Periphery of Georgia

Abstract

Abstract Displaced Georgians in the de facto Georgia-Abkhazia borderland have lived in a zone of protracted ambivalence and contingency for almost three decades. During the war between the post-Socialist Georgian state and Abkhaz forces supporting the independence of Abkhazia, Georgian residents of Abkhazia were forced to flee to Georgia proper. Soon after the war’s end, thousands of displaced people started to access their homes in Gali, the southern borderland of the de facto state of Abkhazia. By persistently navigating shifting places and sovereignties, displaced Georgians from Gali construct lives on the move in a disputed and militarized borderland where contingency, surveillance, and economic precarity infiltrate everyday life. In such a space of life projects grounded in contested mobilities, home emerges as a question of being able to move across a disputed border rather than returning to a singular and fixed place.