Displacing Blame: Georgian Internally Displaced Person Perspectives of the Georgia–Abkhazia Conflict

Abstract

This article analyzes the views of Georgians, focusing primarily on those displaced from Abkhazia, and examines who they blame for the Georgia–Abkhazia conflict and what they think about Abkhazians. How groups assign blame affects the potential for reconciliation. Very different justifications are offered by those affected by conflict. These discourses of legitimation help to explain the conflict, and provide a narrative for the hostilities/war. For Georgian internally displaced persons, the blame for the conflict falls on Russia. For Abkhazians, the blame is placed on Georgians. Although both discourses are different, they each displace blame from themselves and their own agency and actions that played a significant role in the conflict, as well as in some of the atrocities that have been documented to have taken place on both sides.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this research was presented at the 2011 Association for the Study of Nationalities Convention. The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies. This research, entitled ‘Forced Migrants Living in Post-conflict Situations: Social Networks and Livelihood Strategies’, was funded by the National Science Foundation through the Human and Social Dynamics program (No. 0624230). The authors would also like to thank their Georgian collaborators, Nana Sumbadze and George Tarkhan-Mouravi, and the interviewers at the Institute for Policy Studies in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Notes

See also ‘Beyond reconciliation: social reconstruction after the Bosnian war’, a special themed section of Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2010, Vol. 57, pp. 3–76, edited by M. Eastmond & A.H. Stefansson.

See Ghosn & Khoury (2011) for an analysis of the attributing of blame among multiple groups in Lebanon, rather than the usual two or three parties or ethnic groups.

When the topic was breached by our respondents, it was usually in response to questions regarding their displacement from Abkhazia and questions about the major obstacles in their life.

Meanwhile, no respondents blamed Abkhazians and four blamed the Georgian government.

The information following the quotations from our interview data refer to respondent number, gender, location (T for Tbilisi, K for Kutaisi and Tsk for Tskhaltubo) and age.

Gegeshidze (2011b) also argues that this image of Abkhazia has a number of counterproductive repercussions.

This viewpoint also ignores the repeated, though less violent, conflicts between Abkhaz and Georgians, and Abkhaz protests of the Soviet Union, during the Soviet period.

However, simply bringing up the war and who is to be blamed may not provide the clearest path to reconciliation, as Stefansson (2010) shows in the case of Bosnia, with individuals avoiding such topics as a strategy to enable better rapport.