1 “Unpacking the meta-conflict: claims to sovereignty, self-determination and territorial integrity in the Georgian--Abkhazian conflict.” (This is the author’s accepted manuscript of a book chapter, published in Stephen F. Jones, ed., The Making of Modern Georgia, 1918-2012. The First Georgian Republic and its Successors, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014, pp. 263-283.) Laurence Broers Research Associate Centre for the Contemporary Central Asia and Caucasus School of Oriental and African Studies University of London laurencebroers@gmail.com Introduction One impact of the August 2008 war in and around South Ossetia was the increased prominence of the “meta-conflict” surrounding Georgia’s conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia: in other words, the conflict over the nature of the conflict. Georgian officials insisted that there is only one conflict, and that there has only ever been one conflict - an international conflict between Georgia and Russia, played out on the territory of the Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 1 South Ossetians and Abkhazians insisted that there are two ethno-territorial conflicts, between Georgians and Ossetians and Georgians and Abkhazians respectively. While these different definitions of the conflicts had long informed the conflict parties’ approaches, after August 2008 being unable to agree on the nature of the conflict became more than ever a significant obstacle to resolving it. Questions of terminology and definition have also become a sword of Damocles hanging above efforts at intervention; failure to explicitly