The research focuses on the lives of women forcefully uprooted from Abkhazia, as a result of the armed conflict that erupted at the beginning of 1990s. Based on ethnographic research and life-story interviews with IDPs, the paper will focus on women’s voices as they reflect on their lives during and after the armed conflict, while living in prolonged displacement. This research explores how displaced women’s experiences and memories of armed conflict are linked to their present circumstances and to their lives in peaceful times, distanced from the violent events, yet characterized by the uncertainty caused by the protracted nature of displacement and the indefinitely long rupture of the everyday. In particular, I am interested in how displaced women have coped with the extremes of dramatic change and their consequences after displacement, and how the violent events of their past lives have become an inseparable part of the everyday by. I will explore the forms and tactics of everyday resilience during and after the armed conflict that allowed individuals to cope with and survive traumatic events – experiences of fragmentation, the disruption of unity and the rupture of the everyday. By allying with the scholars who challenge the construction of human beings as either resilient or vulnerable/passive, within this research I will attempt to offer new ways of conceptualizing the vulnerability and resilience manifested by internally displaced women after armed conflict in the situation of forced and protracted displacement.

A full-length study is available here.