Wounds that won't heal: cartographic anxieties and the quest for territorial integrity in Georgia

Kabachnik, Peter

doi:10.1080/02634937.2012.647842

Cited by 23 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Indeed, return is still believed by both parties to represent the only valid solution to the displacement and the conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia. Kabachnik (2012), for example, describes the discourse of return and issues related to Georgian nationality and territorial integrity as Georgia's 'cartographic anxiety'. He likens the gaining of independence by a separatist region to an "'amputation ', leaving 'wounds' and 'scars'" (ibid.…”

Section: Displacement and The Discourse Of Return In Georgiamentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Common for the internally displaced people I have interviewed is their experience of violence in the process of displacement. In the case of Georgian IDPs, the past may be expressed as the idealized and harmonious past before the conflict or as the violence experienced during the war and displacement (Kabachnik et al 2012). Violence encountered in the past continues to imprint the present, and for victims of violence, Das (2000) maintains, a most important strategy for healing is getting on with one's everyday life.…”

Section: Agency-in-waiting: the Temporality Of Protracted Displacementmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Active Waiting and Changing Hopes: Toward a Time Perspective on Protracted Displacement

Brun¹

2015

Social Analysis

191

135

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This article introduces a time perspective on 'protracted displacement' and seeks to theorize 'agency-in-waiting' through a focus on the ways in which people simultaneously carry on during displacement, feel trapped in the present, and actively relate to alternative notions of the future. The article analyzes the protracted case of internally displaced Georgians from Abkhazia and the dominant discourse of return that characterizes their lives in displacement. Changing notions of hope are analyzed in order to understand the role that an uncertain future plays and the potential for agency that people develop during displacement. Agency-in-waiting and future perspectives, it is suggested, contribute valuable conceptual and political dimensions to the ways in which protracted displacement can be understood and addressed.

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Section: Displacement and The Discourse Of Return In Georgiamentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Agency-in-waiting: the Temporality Of Protracted Displacementmentioning

confidence: 98%

Active Waiting and Changing Hopes: Toward a Time Perspective on Protracted Displacement

Brun¹

2015

Social Analysis

191

135

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“…Kabachnik (2012b, 45) also analyzes what he calls “cartographic anxieties,” the “fear of a country’s loss of territory,” which feed into the Georgian national discourse and the narrative of territorial integrity. This narrative represents separatist regions as integral parts of the Georgian “geobody” that feels them as wounds which “won’t heal” until they are separated from it (Kabachnik 2012b, 47). These national sentiments are manifested in different areas, including government policies, political speeches, maps, patriotic youth camps, and popular music.…”

Section: Fieldwork and Research Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Trapped in the Past: Memories of Georgian Internally Displaced Persons on the Margins of Society

Toria

Pirtskhalava

Kekelia

et al. 2019

Nationalities Papers

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From the early 1990s through the 2008 “Russo-Georgian war,” waves of armed conflicts in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia/Tskhinvali regions of Georgia forced thousands of residents, mainly ethnic Georgians, to leave their homes. More than two decades of protracted internal displacement, marked by tough economic and social problems, led this vulnerable community to a common trap in reckoning with the past: an overwhelming sense of the fundamental ruptures between the idealized past and current, miserable reality. Failures of the displacement policy and “side effects” of numerous humanitarian aid projects hinder internally displaced persons’ social integration and leave them on the margins of Georgian society with almost a singular option: to constantly recall meaningful life in the lost homeland, which they remember as free of ethnic phobias and economic problems. In this article, we suggest that for persons who are internally displaced, memories are defined not only by their past lived experiences and present hardships, but also by the official historical narratives that argue that Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-Ossetian “endemic” unity and cohabitation was destroyed by Russian imperial politics. Living in constant pain also narrows the future expectations of the internally displaced persons. However, it is the past and the memories that are supposed to be useful in achieving the utopian dream of a return.

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“…In the case of Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese nationalist discourse represents Sri Lanka as a sacred island where Buddhists have a responsibility to preserve Buddhism and associated concepts of race, land and nation to be left untouched in its purity. 49 For Georgia, Kabachnik 50 has shown how the new borders and the breakaway regions create wounds and scars visually on the maps and in the national identity. However, the borders, marked by fences, checkpoints, military installations, landmines and flags, also constitute a materiality that restricts the actualisation of power and agency, preventing people's mobility, and taking away land and livelihoods from people.…”

Section: Lost Access To Context and Power: The Materials Impacts Of Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living with Shifting Borders: Peripheralisation and the Production of Invisibility

Brun

2017

Geopolitics

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The article analyses the experiences and material impacts of shifting borders in the historical case of Sri Lanka's civil war and the contemporary case of shifting border between Georgia and South Ossetia. The two cases point to some lesser known geopolitical practices in which border-shifts and strengthening of control in contested areas take place without much international attention, partly because the shifts are so minor and gradual that they do not reach the news headlines. Living with shifting borders create a state of inbetweenness and losing of control, where forms of visibility and invisibility produces individual uncertainties and vulnerabilities in homeplaces and people's everyday lives. By analysing the borderland and bordershifts from the perspective of the peripheral, the article emphasises the ways in which border practices become part of social action through a rescaling of the understanding of the border encouraged by feminist geopolitics. The article begins by discussing what borders may mean and how borders shift and may produce particular forms of visibility and invisibility. Then the contexts of the Sri Lankan and Georgian villages are introduced before a short discussion of the methods applied. The article then analyses how the bordershifts create particular material and symbolic outcomes, an experience of 'displacement in place, and the particular invisibilities created on the ground in the two cases. The article concludes by reflecting on how border-practices produce forms of visibility and invisibility that continue to render people in the borderlands peripheral. In the Borderlands you are the battleground where enemies are kin to each other; you are at home, a stranger, the border disputes have been settled the volley of shots have shattered the truce you are wounded, lost in action dead, fighting back;

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Wounds that won't heal: cartographic anxieties and the quest for territorial integrity in Georgia

Cited by 23 publications

References 31 publications

Active Waiting and Changing Hopes: Toward a Time Perspective on Protracted Displacement

Active Waiting and Changing Hopes: Toward a Time Perspective on Protracted Displacement

Trapped in the Past: Memories of Georgian Internally Displaced Persons on the Margins of Society

Living with Shifting Borders: Peripheralisation and the Production of Invisibility

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