Eventful Things of a “Frozen Conflict”: Contingency, Materiality, and Movement in the Contested Periphery of Georgia
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This dissertation explores the eventfulness of everyday life amid a decades-long “frozen conflict.” Scholars and policy makers have categorized the series of conflicts in the space of the former USSR as “frozen,” by which they mean ones characterized by a situation of stalemate and lack of progress towards a settlement. The Georgia-Abkhazia conflict is one of them, and I focus on a de facto borderland dividing the sides of this conflict. During the war (1992-1993) between the post-Soviet 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, displaced people began to access their homes in Gali, the southern borderland of the de facto state of Abkhazia. They have maintained their ties on both sides, and constructed lives and homes on the move. Despite the negotiations, the conflict is still unresolved, impacting lives in less dramatic but transformative ways. Thousands of people navigate a disputed and militarized borderland where uncertainty, surveillance, and economic precarity infiltrate life. Through a study of contingency and cross-border mobility, I explore this experiential dynamism and its everyday materiality. Twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Zugdidi, Gali, and Tbilisi have shown that, for the people of Gali, contingency is a daily concern, a matter of tactical anticipation. Although contingent events are unpredictable, certain contingencies take place in patterns, and thus serve as templates to manage future unknowns. By tracing these critical contingencies in each chapter, I explore the subtle, deft ways that people maneuver shifting moods of the border guards, arbitrarily changing documentation regimes, and the river’s capricious water levels in crossings. In doing so, I also demonstrate how people develop various and ambivalent senses of home, displacement, and border-ness as they navigate unstable landscapes. To investigate evolving patterns of contingencies, this dissertation applies innovative methodologies (e.g., mapping-storytelling and photo album interviews) that center on things rather than specific events. I examine eventful things (e.g., passports, houses, rivers, and hazelnuts) as points of intersection of multiple actors and processes generating unexpected effects. I use them as prisms to demonstrate how people experience temporal, material, and affective dimensions of a long-term conflict with all of its continuities and limit points. This dissertation also takes up exhaustion as an analytical concept. Exhaustion indicates not only a process of expenditure and a state of weariness, but also a perceived limit and intensity. In that sense, I approach exhaustion as a generative threshold that urges people to act and make changes in structurally diverse ways. Exhaustion thus renders visible the agentive and generative thresholds of lives under protracted conflict without eclipsing the destructive processes and their consequences on people. In addition to its contributions to the studies of borders, mobility, and political conflict, this dissertation offers an analytical framework—through interlaced concepts of critical contingencies, eventful things, and exhaustion—to investigate the temporal and material nuances of everyday life in diverse contexts of long-term displacement and uncertainty.
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