Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia

by Anastasia Shesterinina

Overview

Winner of the Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies
Co-winner of the Charles Taylor Book Award

How do ordinary people navigate the intense uncertainty of the onset of war? Individuals mobilize in different ways—some flee, some pick up arms, and some support armed actors. Drawing on nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with participants and nonparticipants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992–1993, Mobilizing in Uncertainty explores Abkhaz mobilization decisions during that conflict.

Anastasia Shesterinina uncovers that to make sense of the violence, Abkhaz leaders, local authority figures, and others relied on shared understandings of the conflict and their roles in it—collective conflict identities—that they had developed before the war. People consolidated mobilization decisions within small groups of family and friends and based their actions on whom they understood to be threatened and mobilized to protect. Their decisions shaped how the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict unfolded. Mobilizing in Uncertainty sheds light on broader processes of violence, which have lasting effects on societies marked by intergroup conflict.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501778964
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2024
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Anastasia Shesterinina is Chair in Comparative Politics and Director of the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Puzzle of Mobilization
1. Studying Civil War Mobilization
2. A Sociohistorical Approach to Mobilization
3. Collective Historical Memory
4. Prewar Conflict Identities
5. From Uncertainty to Mobilization in Four Days
6. From Mobilization to Fighting
7. Postwar Abkhazia
Conclusion: Uncertainty and Mobilization in Civil War

What People are Saying About This

Bruno Coppieters

Anastasia Shesterinina gives a thorough, detailed analysis of the mobilization of the Abkhaz population against the Georgian military intervention in 1992. Her arguments are clearly formulated and highly original.

Susan H. Allen

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is a high-quality work that brings together mobilization literature with the case study of Abkhazia. The Abkhaz perspective on Abkhaz-Georgian relations is rarely treated in English to such in depth exploration as this book offers.

Editorial Reviews

Her interviews led her to important conclusions. This work of oral history is incredibly valuable for any future researcher.

Choice

Shesterinina's attention to local networks offers significant additional insights into the nature of conflict.

Caucasus Survey - Mathijs Pelkmans

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is an outstanding book: it is theoretically ambitious and empirically rich, and draws on extensive fieldwork, which must have been extremely challenging to conduct. The war began very differently in the east and the west of Abkhazia, in part due to the latter's proximity to Russia, and Shesterinina makes clever use of this subnational variation in her micro-comparative research design. In a field increasingly dominated by quantitative analysis, this book is an excellent and much-needed example of the benefit of rich qualitative data for the study of civil wars. It demonstrates the value of political ethnography and the importance of analysing the micro-dynamics of civil wars

Symposium Review Ethnopolitics

The book is a model for theory development, relying on ethnographic research from a little-explored empirical case to develop new questions and theoretical insights. Mobilizing in Uncertainty is certainly a book that leaves the reader inspired.

Perspectives on Politics

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is a model of clear and impactful interpretive social science. Shesterinina gives reason for scholars to take seriously the peculiar and profoundly disorienting nature of uncertainty that colors people's lives at the early onset of conflict.

Charles Taylor Book Award

Shesterinina's work is theoretically and empirically strong, and we expect that it will be employed by multiple generations of scholars to study other conflicts in the region and beyond.

The Davis Center Book Prize

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is an outstanding book: it is theoretically ambitious and empirically rich, and draws on extensive fieldwork, which must have been extremely challenging to conduct. The war began very differently in the east and the west of Abkhazia, in part due to the latter's proximity to Russia, and Shesterinina makes clever use of this subnational variation in her micro-comparative research design. In a field increasingly dominated by quantitative analysis, this book is an excellent and much-needed example of the benefit of rich qualitative data for the study of civil wars. It demonstrates the value of political ethnography and the importance of analysing the micro-dynamics of civil wars

Ethnopolitics