Taming a Conflict Zone: Mobility and Persistence in Georgia's De Facto Borderland with Abkhazia

The series of conflicts in the former USSR are often protracted, marked by stagnation and uncertainty. The Georgian-Abkhaz conflict is considered one of them. It is a conflict that materializes as an unrecognized borderland where a community of displaced Georgians from Gali have constructed mobile lives through contingent and contested movements. In that sense, the conflict zone is anything but static. It is characterized by constant mobility, and contingent events and crises caused by various actors, ranging from Russian patrols to a flooding river. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research on the crossings of the Gali people, this presentation examines how people develop anticipatory tactics, spatial knowledge, and creative resourcefulness to generate manageable lives in a zone where livelihoods are dependent on a shifting, militarized boundary line. In doing so, this talk argues that persistence in protracted conflict zones is an active practice of mitigation and calibration of everyday volatility, and an ongoing attempt to secure a livable present when the future remains uncertain.