Minna Lundgren

Riskscapes: Strategies and practices along the Georgian-Abkhazian boundary line and inside Abkhazia

ABSTRACT The Georgian–Abkhazian war in 1992–1993 caused the forced displacement of around half of the population of the former autonomous Abkhazian republic. Over 200,000 of them were ethnic Georgians, out of whom at least 46,000 have returned mainly to southern Abkhazia. Abkhazia today functions as a de facto independent state, and the Russian–Abkhazian border control along the administrative boundary line between Abkhazia and Georgia poses an obstacle to young people from returnee families who are studying in Georgia proper and want to visit their families in Abkhazia. This study focuses on young migrants navigating the consequences of war and ethnic conflict on human mobility in the border area. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and five in-depth qualitative interviews with young people aged 18–25 years, the aim is to examine the strategies and practices that the young respondents employ to cross the border. To reach their homes in Abkhazia they need to navigate through riskscapes—landscapes or physical settings embedded with multiple layers of risk. Depending on their social positions (gender, ethnicity, citizenship, age) different riskscapes are unfolded. To handle riskscapes these young people adopt preventive measures; they change routes and behavior.

Place matters: return intentions among forcibly displaced young Georgians from Abkhazia living in Tbilisi and Zugdidi

ABSTRACT Around 250,000 people are internally displaced within Georgia today as a consequence of violent conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the early 1990s and the Georgian-Russian war in 2008. The majority of the internally displaced persons originate from Abkhazia, which declared independence in 1999. While the conflict is still unresolved, the majority of those who fled remain displaced, most of them living in the vicinity of the capital Tbilisi, or in Zugdidi and the Samegrelo region bordering Abkhazia. The aim of this article is to study factors that impact on young people’s intentions to return to Abkhazia, with a focus on youth presently living in the Tbilisi and Zugdidi areas. The study is based on a quantitative survey (n = 131) with youth aged 18–25 years, who were displaced when very young, or who were born in displacement, have few or no memories of prior residences, and may have different opinions on returning from their parents. A chi-square analysis was used to measure differences among the respondents’ intentions to return permanently to Abkhazia withinx five years, in relation to their reasons for returning and factors in the past and the present. There was a significant association between return intentions and the current place of residence (Tbilisi or Zugdidi), with Tbilisi respondents more inclined towards return. Separate chi-square analyses for the two cities showed that different factors (birthplace, property in Abkhazia, socio-economic conditions, reasons for return and so on) have different impact on the return intentions of the respondents from the two cities, which allows us to conclude that place matters in thinking about post-conflict return trajectories.