Wartime Outcomes and Post-War Violence: The Case of Abkhazia

• In Event: Patterns of Violence And The Legacies of Internal Conflict

Abstract

What explains the patterns of violence after civil wars come to an end? How do broader conflict processes shape post-war violence? Multiple forms of organized political violence have emerged in most countries after civil war. Yet, we lack a strong conceptual and theoretical foundation to understand this phenomenon. Conceptually, existing studies look at the variation in post-war killings along the individual and collective axis in the areas with differential war-time presence of armed actors, but do not differentiate between the types of collective violence after civil wars. Theoretically, scholars trace post-war violence to the patterns established during civil war or to the political projects that actors aim to achieve after war’s end, but do not relate actors’ post-war political goals to those of the pre-war and wartime periods.

This paper argues that post-war violence reflects the winning and losing parties’ political goals to respectively protect or challenge the outcomes of the war. The war’s outcomes, however, are rarely uniform across the territory where the civil war was fought. This, in part, accounts for the emergence of different forms of violence post-war. In turn, actors’ political goals are shaped by their shared notions of struggle that evolve during pre-war and wartime mobilization, which helps explain why armed actors continue to employ violence even in areas that are strategically insignificant or hard to control

The paper introduces a typology that captures the variation in actors and forms of post-war violence. This typology broadens our scope of the concept of post-war violence. I then analyze spatial and temporal variation in post-war violence in Abkhazia, a breakaway territory of Georgia, from 1994 to 2008, between the Georgian-Abkhaz war and the recognition of the territory as a de facto state by the Russian Federation in 2008.

Based on an original news dataset and 180 in-depth interviews with participants and non-participants in wartime and post war mobilization, I demonstrate that the variation in post-war violence followed the different outcomes of the war across Abkhazia and prewar visions of Abkhaz sovereignty. Irregular violence characterized the areas where the Abkhaz achieved prevalent but contested control after the war (Gali) and where the goal of the Abkhaz counter-insurgency was to root out Georgian guerrilla forces that challenged the Abkhaz victory. In contrast, conventional violence took place in the areas of Abkhazia predominantly controlled by the Georgian forces after the war (Kodori), where the Abkhaz engaged in armed combat to regain territory they historically considered their own. This study has implications for comparable separatist cases, including Kosovo and South Sudan, as well as the broader universe of cases of post-war violence.

Author

• Anastasia Shesterinina, The University of Sheffield