Contingent Homes: Mobility and Long-Term Conflict in the Contested Periphery of Georgia GO ¨ RKEM AYDEMIR Department of Anthropology, The George Washington University, 2110 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20037, USA gorkem@gwmail.gwu.edu MS received September 2020; revised MS received November 2020 Displaced Georgians in the de facto Georgia-Abkhazia borderland have lived in a zone of protracted ambivalence and contingency for almost three decades. During the war between the post-Socialist 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, thousands of displaced people started to access their homes in Gali, the southern borderland of the de facto state of Abkhazia. By persistently navigating shifting places and sovereignties, displaced Georgians from Gali construct lives on the move in a disputed and militarized borderland where contingency, surveillance, and economic precarity infiltrate everyday life. In such a space of life projects grounded in contested mobilities, home emerges as a question of being able to move across a disputed border rather than returning to a singular and fixed place. Keywords: home, displacement, border, uncertainty, the Caucasus On a hot August evening, I found myself in a car on the way to the Enguri Bridge, a World War II-era structure connecting Georgia with the breakaway Abkhazia. The driver, Giorgi, zigzagged among cows meandering on the road as his wife Nino and I surveyed the houses and lush green gardens of Georgia’s Samegrelo region. When we reached the police station a few hundred meters before the bridge, Giorgi pulled up next to the horse-drawn carriages that waited to carry passengers across the bridge to the Abkhaz checkpoint. Cars were not allowed to proceed further, and we started to walk alongside several women rushing back to Abkhazia before the end of crossings at 8 pm. The evening was tranquil, inter- rupted only by the hoofbeats and chirping birds. That serenity was in ironic con- trast to the harsh and violent history of the disputed border and its on-going tensions (Figure 1). Giorgi let out a long sigh when we got to the bridge. Since beginning work as a special tasks officer on the Georgian side of the de facto border four years earlier, Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 34, No. 1 V C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com doi:10.1093/jrs/feab004 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jrs/article/34/1/23/6310118 by guest on 28 June 2021