The Georgia IDP Project: "post"-conflict IDP livelihoods and social networks
http://georgia.idp.arizona.edu/


Research Project Goals by Beth Mitchneck, February 17, 2009

Recent reports estimate the number of internally displaced persons 
(IDPs) worldwide to be 26 million. IDP populations often live in the 
poorest areas, with little access to food, appropriate shelter, or 
employment opportunities. As a consequence, the development of coping 
mechanisms and strategies for the accumulation of resources for 
livelihood become very important. Over the past twenty years, a number 
of intergovernmental, international humanitarian aid organizations and a 
large variety of other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have worked 
with governments and local populations to manage the IDP situation and 
to help provide necessary emergency relief and resettlement assistance. 
But in spite of the mobilization of resources and assistance, IDPs 
remain displaced for long periods of time.

Our study explores the case of forced migration in Georgia, a country 
between Russia, Turkey, and two other Caucasian countries, Armenia and 
Azerbaijan. Because of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the 
recent non-violent Rose Revolution resulting in political regime change, 
and a series of violent conflicts resulting in IDPs, the entire 
population of Georgia has experienced significant social and economic 
displacement but only a portion has experienced territorial displacement.

A series of civil wars beginning in the early 1990s, two in Abkhazia, a 
Georgian region along the Russian border, and another in South Ossetia, 
created an estimated 260,000 IDPs. The Russian civil war in Chechnya 
generated an additional inflow of roughly 4,000 refugees into Pankisi 
Gorge, just south of the Russian border in Georgia. After more than a 
decade, neither the Abkhaz or South Ossetian conflict situation has 
reached a stable resolution. The Russo-Georgian war in August 2008 
created another flow of new IDPs into the Georgian system.

This multi-disciplinary research project has three overarching research 
goals:
* to analyze how forced migrants in "post"-conflict situations, and IDPs 
in particular, use social networks in the construction of livelihood 
strategies (means of accumulating resources for human security, both 
material and non-material, and financial and in-kind);
* to analyze the extent to which those strategies and networks result 
directly or indirectly from interactions between IDPs and governmental 
and non-governmental organizations involved in "post"-conflict management;
* to analyze the extent to which in "post"-conflict situations there are 
differences across gender and dwelling type as well the local and the 
IDP populations in the ways that they construct livelihood strategies 
and social networks

http://georgia.idp.arizona.edu/


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