Ambiguous nationhood: Identity and belonging in the unrecognised state of Abkhazia

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The primary aim of the fellowship is to turn my PhD thesis into a monograph. In my thesis, I traced the process of ethnic un-mixing in Abkhazia, a contested region in the South Caucasus that became de facto independent from Georgia after a war in the 1990s. In particular, I focused on the impact of violence on people's identities, a phenomenon which has received limited attention in the study of the post-Soviet wars. Adopting an approach that is sensitive to lived experience, the thesis departs from the prevalent view that violence is a result of antagonistic identities. It argues that although there were tensions, a cross-ethnic community nevertheless existed in Abkhazia. While society became increasingly divided from the 1980s, large-scale violence was ultimately provoked by military intervention. Once unleashed, atrocities triggered a process of antagonistic collective categorisation that paved the way for the displacement of Georgians. But looking beyond the event of war, it also illustrates the challenges a community faces once war is over and the conflict becomes frozen, a period in which an external enemy continues to unite people but, due to physical and temporal distance, also becomes distant. The thesis thus argues that it is not just the experience of violence that shapes post-war relations, but also the experience of post-war changes. Turning the thesis into a book allows me to further explore the region's complexity and expand on the impact of frozen conflict and the changing conflict dynamics (such as Russia's recognition of Abkhazia's independence) on people's identities. In its current form, the thesis focuses on the contradictions and ambiguities resulting from unresolved war and mass displacement and hence makes an original contribution to the literature on post-war identity. For the book, I intend to place greater emphasis on the role of international isolation and limited recognition. In particular, I want to further develop my reflections on the phenomena of 'ethnic claustrophobia' and intra-ethnic mistrust as the flipside of ethnic intimacy, focusing on the ways in which international isolation not only fosters a so-called 'siege mentality' but also a recurring desire to 'take a break' and 'escape'. In doing so, I hope to produce a manuscript that makes a strong contribution not only to the scholarships on nationalism, ethnic conflict and political violence, but also to the literature on de facto states.While this manuscript will be largely based on data collected during my PhD, the second aim of the fellowship is to conduct limited additional fieldwork in western Abkhazia. As much of my previous fieldwork took place in central and eastern Abkhazia, this will ensure that the findings presented in the book are grounded in geographically varied data. The third aim is to develop a funding proposal that will allow me to explore more deeply the phenomenon of ethnically mixed families in frozen conflict, which I became intrigued by during my fieldwork in Abkhazia, where some of my participants who identified as ethnic Abkhazians were, in fact, children of Georgian mothers who were able to stay in Abkhazia after the war because they were married to Abkhaz men.The fourth aim of the fellowship is to organise a workshop that brings together academics, policy-makers and peacebuilding practitioners. Drawing on the concept of everyday peace (Mac Ginty, 2014), the purpose of the workshop is to gain a better understanding of the strategies that ordinary actors use to navigate and circumvent unresolved conflict and how those strategies and practices can inform formal peacebuilding initiatives. The fifth aim of the fellowship is to write three short, non-academic articles targeted at a wider public audience. This will include publications on the role of violence in the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, the fate of Georgian-Abkhaz mixed families living in Abkhazia, and an essay about responsible travel to a de facto state.