Whose ethnicity matters? The gendered trajectories of mixed families in the Georgian–Abkhaz war and its aftermath

Abstract

Violent ethnic conflict frequently takes place in regions with high levels of social integration among local populations. Yet few scholars have taken a close look at the trajectories of those most intimately connected: the intermarried and their children. This article asks: how do ethnically mixed families position themselves in violent ethnic conflict and what is the role of gender in this process? Drawing on the life stories of women from Georgian-Abkhaz mixed families in the war over Abkhazia, it explores how the intersection of ethnicity and gender can shape the trajectories of the intermarried and their children. Families in which the husband was Abkhaz and the wife Georgian were more likely to stay in Abkhazia than the other way around. This was linked to patrilineal and patriarchal family structures which positioned the wives on the side of their husbands’ family and was further strengthened through the husbands’ military involvement. This enabled them to continue their lives in Abkhazia while limiting their ability to express their Georgian identity. Yet, while intermarriage did not necessarily weaken ethno-political boundaries, the article also attests to the ways in which the women resisted ethnic antagonism, acting as everyday peacebuilders within the microcosm of the family.

Introduction

During one of my trips to Abkhazia, a breakaway territory of Georgia in the South Caucasus, I met Astamur. ¹ He was my contact in one of the villages in Eastern Abkhazia, where he showed me around what was left of the houses once inhabited by local Georgians who became permanently displaced during the war in 1992 to 1993. He stressed that relations between Georgians and Abkhazians were good before the war. In fact, he told me, his own mother was Georgian (Mingrelian). ² Having married an Abkhaz man in Soviet times, Astamur’s mother remained in Abkhazia, whereas many of her Georgian relatives fled to Georgia proper. ³

Astamur was not the only child of ‘mixed’ Georgian-Abkhaz parents I encountered. To my interlocutors, there was nothing strange about this; after all, ‘we always lived together, so why wouldn’t people get married?’ ⁴ Studies of intercommunal violence have indeed highlighted that ethnically framed violent conflict often takes place in regions with high levels of integration among local populations (Fujii, 2009; Shesterinina, 2021). Research on cases such as Rwanda (e.g. Burnet, 2023; Fujii, 2009) or Bosnia (e.g. Bergholz, 2016; Bringa, 1995) shows that ordinary people frequently lived side by side peacefully prior to the outbreak of atrocities. This was also the case in Abkhazia, where ‘[s]hared education, employment, and social activities tied individuals and families from different groups in institutions of neighborhood, friendship, and intermarriage’ (Shesterinina, 2021: 6).

Despite the frequency of such entanglements, few scholars have taken an in-depth look at the experiences of mixed families as they are confronted with violent conflict. Most are concerned with the broader question of why people engage in intimate forms of violence and how such acts transform social relations (e.g. Bergholz, 2016; Fujii, 2009). Within this scholarship, the emphasis is on connections between neighbours and friends, with the familial being treated ‘primarily as one component of the broader quotidian ties that encompass everyday social ties’ (Ketola, 2025: 117). This overlooks the particular challenges that those with cross-ethnic familial ties face. In ethnic conflict, loyalty is primarily determined by a person’s ethnicity and therefore rarely a matter of choice (Kaufmann, 1996). The resulting ambiguity in the case of mixed families, where people of different backgrounds are intimately linked through kinship, makes them susceptible to assaults from both sides in the conflict and increases the pressure to align themselves with a single ethno-national category (Conrad, 2014).

This article puts the intermarried and their children at the forefront. It asks: how do those in mixed families respond to the pressures to take sides? Against the background of my experience in Abkhazia, I explore the process through which families like Astamur’s ended up on one side or another. More specifically, I ask: why did Astamur’s parents stay in Abkhazia instead of going to Georgia proper, or somewhere else entirely? And what was the role of gender? For while I met numerous children from mixed families, it was always the mother who was Georgian, but the father’s ethnicity that my interlocutors identified with.

I answer these questions through a close reading of a collection of biographical stories from women in Georgian–Abkhaz mixed families. Their stories reveal a clear pattern: families in which the husband was Abkhaz were more likely to stay in Abkhazia than families in which the husband was Georgian. This was linked to patrilineal family structures which positioned the wives on the side of their husband’s family and further strengthened through the husbands’ military involvement. But the women’s accounts also indicate that it became increasingly difficult for all mixed couples to stay together. While it was easier for husbands to protect their wives, both Abkhaz and Georgian husbands (and wives) came under intense pressure to separate. This explains why many mixed families left the region entirely, highlighting other important factors that shaped the families’ trajectories, such as the husband’s role in the war.

Capturing their strategies of accommodation and resistance during and after the war, the article also sheds light on the women’s complex agency. In Abkhazia, the Abkhaz military victory did not end the conflict. Instead, the Abkhaz began building a de facto state that remained widely unrecognised. Georgian women living in post-war Abkhazia were pressured to demonstrate their alignment with the Abkhaz state-building project. One strategy was to stress their position as mothers of Abkhaz children. Confronted with anti-Abkhaz sentiment, the Abkhaz wives in Georgia also felt pressured to conceal their ethnicity, although less so. Yet, while further subordinating their ethnicity, the women’s accounts demonstrate their efforts to preserve ties across the divide and transmit to their children a ‘love for both nations’. The article therefore also considers the ways in which the mothers act as agents of ‘everyday peace’ (Berents, 2015; Mac Ginty, 2021).

By critically examining the gendered trajectories of mixed families through the lens of the female spouse, the article contributes both to the interdisciplinary literature on ethnic mixing and to ongoing debates on local agency in peacebuilding. Importantly, it sheds light on the family – an institution often neglected in international relations (Mac Ginty, 2021: 20) – as a site where pro-peace thinking can be forged while also considering its limits (see also Voyvodic and Sagherian-Dickey, 2025). Focusing on women in mixed families, it also advances knowledge of women’s gendered agency in peacebuilding, taking seriously how ‘experiences and practices of peace are conditioned by the ways in which gender structures everyday life’ (Blomqvist et al., 2021: 224).

The remainder of this article is organised as follows. In section 2, I discuss the gendered approach to ethnic mixing and theoretically unpack the concepts at the core of the argument – family, gender, and war – and how they intersect. Following a brief reflection on methodology, sections 4–7 focus on the empirical data, tracing the experiences of women in Georgian–Abkhaz mixed families from the pre-war to the post-war period. In section 8, I reflect on the limitations of the data by considering who has not been included – mixed families living in neither Abkhazia nor Georgia proper – and the implications of this missing piece of data for one of the key insights of this article: that the intersection of ethnicity and gender played an important role but was not in itself sufficient to determine a family’s trajectory. In the conclusion, I reflect on the larger significance of the findings, drawing links to other relevant cases, and consider the potential of the women’s everyday peace efforts to scale out and up.

Mixed families through the lens of gender, ethnicity and war

Intermarriage and the intersection of ethnicity and gender

Intermarriage has received much attention in the social sciences, as its occurrence is often taken as an indicator for the porousness/rigidity of group boundaries within societies (e.g. Lendák-Kabók, 2024; Rodríguez-García et al., 2016). Sociologists and anthropologists in particular have explored the extent to which intermarriage blurs boundaries based on ethnic, racial and/or ethno-religious affiliation. As romantic partners from different backgrounds negotiate cultural differences within their relationship, some form of adjustment inevitably takes place. This can take the form of one partner adapting to the culture of the other or through a more balanced approach. Questions of identity become ever more crucial as children are born and parents are forced to make choices that inevitably impact their offspring’s identity, such as choosing a name, language or nationality.

Empirical studies demonstrate a continuum of ‘identity projects’ that families engage in. On one end, there is the emergence of mixed or hybrid identities. In Quebec, research revealed that the majority of mixed couples interviewed engaged in a ‘pluralist discourse in which differences appear as an asset’ (Le Gall and Meintel, 2015: 113) and sought to transmit a wide range of cultural resources to their children which often led to the development of hybrid identities (Le Gall and Comtois-Garcia, 2022; Le Gall and Meintel, 2015). Such identities might transcend existing categorisations, as in the case of the emergence of a Eurasian identity in Singapore (Rocha and Yeoh, 2021), or be understood in fractional terms, as being ‘half-half’ (Song, 2017: 37).

Towards the other end of the spectrum are cases where boundaries are reproduced rather than weakened. Focusing on Mauritius, Nave (2000), found that inter-ethnic marriages do not blur group boundaries, as ‘children of inter-ethnic marriages tend to take on the ethnic identity and corresponding cultural norms of a single parent’ (p. 329). Buric (2016) similarly points out that although being ‘mixed’ is associated with ambiguity, this does not necessarily reflect the subjective identity of those concerned. Reflecting on his own experience growing up as the child of a Bosniak father and a Croat mother, he notes: ‘yes, I condemn all three nationalisms [. . .]; however, it is my mother who is a Croat, not me’ (Buric, 2016: 339, emphasis added). At least at this point in his life he appeared to identify exclusively with the ethnicity of his father.

Whether it is the father’s or the mother’s norms that become dominant can depend on a range of intersecting factors such as the ethnic make-up of the local population and broader ethnic power relations. If one partner is from a minority but the percentage of the minority population in the area of residence is low, the culture of the majority partner might prevail (e.g. Finnäs and O’Leary, 2003). Another determinant can be religious affiliation. In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the Catholic church only recognised a marriage as valid if both partners signed a declaration to raise their offspring Catholic, thus putting pressure on the Protestant spouse to adapt – something that began changing in the 1970s (Finnäs and O’Leary, 2003; Todd, 2018). Gender dynamics play an important role too. For example, in the case of intermarriages between individuals from the Swedish-speaking minority and the Finnish-speaking majority in Finland, Finnäs and O’Leary (2003: 489) found that the ethnic group of the mother is the better predicator of the child’s affiliation than that of the father, as it is women who traditionally take on greater responsibility for the raising of the child. But gender differences can also have the opposite effect as they shape ‘conjugal modes of adjustment’ (Collet, 2015). According to Collet (2015), the persistence of patriarchal norms means that ‘[w]hatever her status – migrant or descendant – a woman will tend to adjust by adapting to the man’s culture, whether he is part of the majority or of a minority’ (p. 145). Consequently, it can also be the father’s ethnicity that seems ‘naturally’ more dominant.

Feminists have long argued that marriage is not simply a union between equal individuals. Traditional gender norms shape family relations in profound ways, prescribing different roles to men and women but also creating hierarchies between them; to use Cockburn’s (2013) words, ‘gender is a relation of power’ (p. 435). From a feminist perspective, family is thus best conceptualised as a ‘realm of gendered power relations’ (Ketola, 2025: 6). This has important implications for studying intermarriage. It means that understanding how those in mixed families position themselves requires a closer look at the underlying gendered power relations as they intersect with ethnic belonging. Some recent studies have highlighted these dynamics: in her book on intermarriage in Soviet Central Asia, Edgar (2022) demonstrates that the success of mixed marriages was often due to the willingness of women to adapt to local customs and become proper ‘Eastern wives’. Focusing on Georgian–Armenian and Georgian–Azerbaijani marriages in Georgia, Oganesyan (2020) similarly shows that, due to patrilocal residence and patrilineal family structures, it was the woman who was expected to join her husband’s family and adapt to their culture.

Gender, ethnicity and war

Works like Edgar’s and Oganesyan’s draw attention to the significance of patriarchal and patrilineal norms. They also raise an interesting question. What are the implications of these gendered dynamics for mixed families in the context of armed conflict? Both Edgar and Oganesyan consider the rise of ethno-nationalism and violent conflict, mentioning the fears of mixed families during and after the civil war in Tajikistan (Edgar, 2022: 196) and the uncertainty faced by Armenian–Azerbaijani families following the first war over Nagorno–Karabakh (Oganesyan, 2020: 242–243). What they do not touch upon is how the gendered dynamics of ethnic mixing play out in the context of armed conflict. McLean Hilker’s (2012) work proves insightful in this regard. Researching how young Rwandans of mixed heritage identify, and are identified, in terms of racial categories, she found that whether it was the father or the mother who was Tutsi was a factor that contributed to the categorisation of mixed individuals as one or the other and thus had an important impact on the forms of victimisation they experienced during and after the genocide. She does not, however, consider what this means for how men and women can experience mixing differently and the impact this has on the trajectories of mixed families.

In this article, I both build on and expand these studies by exploring the experiences of mixed families through a specific focus on the intersection of gender, ethnicity and warfare. There is a rich feminist literature that stresses how war is sustained through gendered power relations (e.g. Cockburn, 2010; Enloe, 2000). While it is men who are typically called upon to fight, armed conflict is also fundamentally enabled through women’s labour – material, emotional and symbolic – in the household (Hedström, 2022), making the family central to war and militarisation. It also serves as an important symbolic construct in the justification and legitimisation of violence. Through the biological capacity to bear children, women are not only seen as the biological reproducers of individual soldiers, but as responsible for the continuity of the nation (e.g. McClintock, 1993; Yuval-Davis, 1996). In the national imagination, this reproductive capacity is what makes them vulnerable to sexual abuse, and therefore contamination, by the enemy in war (Mostov, 2000). As a result, they must be kept at home and defended by men, both from within the family and the whole nation (Mostov, 2000). In nationalist movements, women are thus attributed significant responsibility but frequently denied agency, and instead cast as passive and in need of protection (Aretxaga, 1997; McClintock, 1993). Of course, the relationship between nationalism and women’s agency is not always as clear-cut, with some scholars pointing to the emergence of feminist articulations of nationalism in some nationalist movements (eg. Al-Ali and Tas, 2018; O’Keefe, 2013).

The literature on gender, war and nationalism raises interesting questions. What – or whose – nation do mixed families reproduce? And if traditional gender roles are reinforced in war and it is men who, as soldiers, act as protectors, does this lead to even greater subordination of women in terms of their ethnicity? Or is there space for them to (re)assert themselves and resist ethnic antagonism? Some scholars have highlighted the empowering effects of war. In the absence of men, women are often forced to take on traditionally ‘male’ duties which exposes them to new opportunities (e.g. Yadav, 2021). Others draw attention to women’s agency in and after war by highlighting women’s peace activism and resistance efforts. This literature demonstrates how resistance can be rooted in traditional gender roles, emphasising how women draw on motherhood to campaign for peace (e.g. De Alwis, 2008).

At the heart of these works is the attempt to capture the ways in which women are active agents in a war and post-war context. For while there is much value in recognising forms of domination, it also risks reproducing the notion of women as victims. However, it has been debated whether activism emerging out of feminine roles (such as motherhood) is indeed subversive or in fact reproduces patriarchal norms (e.g. Zarkov, 2007). The problem with this question is that it tends to reduce women’s agency to resistance (Ketola, 2020), seeing women as agents only as far as they align themselves with progressive goals (O’Reilly, 2018). Women whose motivations and actions do not fall into the category of resistance can then only be understood as passive. To avoid this, I employ an understanding of agency as ‘enacted within particular structures’ (Martin, 2021: 467). Following O’Reilly (2018), who draws on feminist theories of relational autonomy, I approach women as ‘simultaneously agents and subjects of power’ (p. 64) whose agency is shaped by competing discourses that exist in a particular historical, socio-cultural and institutional setting and allow women to adopt a range of subject positions. This opens a space where women’s agency is recognised not only when it is opposed to war, nationalism, and the patriarchy. Instead, it allows us to engage with the complex experiences of women in mixed families and the gendered subject positions that emerge from them.

Finally, the article also aims to take seriously the affective dimension of familial ties and their significance for war and post-war developments (e.g. Jensen, 2023; Ketola, 2025; Ketola and O’Reilly, 2025; Matarazzo and Baines, 2021). As Ketola and O’Reilly (2025) point out,

what makes familial ties matter is not simply the existence of gender norms that structure family as a social institution or the material labour that goes into sustaining the household, but also the affective investments in these ties and in the norms that structure them. (p. 8)

Familial relations – especially those between parents and children – are not simply special because they are relations of blood, but because they are invested with love and care; they ‘do not simply exist, but need to be constantly crafted, cultivated and invested in’ (Ketola and O’Reilly, 2025: 7). Matarazzo and Baines (2021) refer to this process as ‘becoming family’. While their research focuses on how becoming a father shaped soldiers’ involvement in the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, this article sheds light on what it takes for women in mixed families to sustain family and how this effort shapes their positioning in the conflict, drawing attention to ‘the mutual embeddedness of the political and the intimate’ (Jensen, 2023: 462).

Methodology

To trace the gendered trajectories of mixed families in war I draw on a collection of 30 biographical stories from women in Georgian-Abkhaz mixed families, some of which had been displaced to Georgia proper and some of which were able to stay in Abkhazia. The stories were gathered by the nongovernmental Georgian-Abkhaz organisation ‘Face to Face’ and the ‘Association of Women of the Lower Zone of the Gali District’ and published in Russian and Georgian by the Open Society Foundation in 2006. ⁵ The collection entails the life stories of 15 Georgian and 15 Abkhazian women, accompanied with a short fore- and afterword. Although of varying lengths, they are structured similarly: the women first talk about their parents, where they grew up and how they met their spouse. They then reflect on the increasing ethnic tensions in the late 1980s and their impact on family and social life. At the centre of the stories is the onset of war and the difficult choices they had to make. This is followed by a recollection of the post-war challenges of rebuilding their lives and preserving family ties across the conflict divide in a context of ‘neither war, nor peace’.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using data collected by somebody else. Given the sensitivity of the topic, it would have been difficult for me – a Western researcher – to gain access to as many participants, let alone establish the trust that allowed them to share their personal stories in such depth. Being themselves members of mixed families, the organisers were uniquely positioned to gather such information. That the narratives were collected only 12 years after the war further means that participants were able to recall their experiences in detail while having enough distance for critical reflection. A clear disadvantage is the lack of control over who was selected to participate and how the data were collected (i.e. what questions were asked). When analysing the data, I therefore also critically engage with the collection as a source, reflecting on who participated and who did not. What aids me in this process is my long-term engagement with people affected by the conflict over Abkhazia, including those from mixed families. Between 2016 and 2019, I conducted a total of 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork among ordinary residents of Abkhazia, and to a lesser extent among displaced people in Georgia proper. I use parts of my own data – notes from participant observation, interviews and informal conversations – to complement the life stories. These combined data allowed me to elicit clear patterns using thematic analysis.

The ‘patchwork’ methodology (Günel et al., 2020) employed for this research is also a response to a series of disruptions. Plans to return to the field for more interviews, including among families in Russia, were halted by the COVID-19 pandemic and further complicated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which reactivated tensions and severely restricted access to Abkhazia (backed by Russia) and Russia itself. When I returned to Georgia in June 2022, I encountered reluctance to re-engage with the topic. Given this reaction, there is also an ethical argument for using existing data, as it limits the burden of recounting traumatic experiences for the purpose of academic knowledge production. Ultimately, the article is also driven by an ambition to recognise the important work undertaken by local NGOs under difficult circumstances, and to make it accessible to an international academic audience. The women’s narratives constitute a rare document of oral history that deserves broader scholarly attention.

‘Ethnicity did not matter’: Georgian–Abkhaz intermarriage before the war

In 1922, Abkhazia – a small territory on the Black Sea coast – joined the Soviet Union as part of the larger Transcaucasian Federation. Nine years later, it was subordinated to neighbouring Georgia as an Autonomous Republic. This, combined with the repression of Abkhaz culture and the resettlement of large numbers of Georgians to Abkhazia under Stalin, caused grievances among the titular Abkhaz population. Following Stalin’s death, Abkhaz elites regularly protested perceived Georgian domination (Coppieters, 2004). Political tensions, however, did not keep ordinary people from establishing close relationships. Reading through the women’s recollections of life before the war, there is a recurring theme: that nationality did not matter. A woman who identified as Georgian remembered:

The thought that I should not marry someone who is not from my nation never even crossed my mind. I always lived among Abkhaz, my parents were friends with Abkhaz. It was the Abkhaz elite. I was part of this circle and knew all the customs and traditions. (Marshania et al., 2006: 88)

Cultural familiarity was an important factor facilitating Georgian–Abkhaz marriages. As Nave (2000: 337) noted in the context of Mauritius, one reason why ethnic endogamy tends to be the norm is the assumption that the behaviour of someone from one’s ethnicity is more predictable and the relationship therefore more stable. That Georgians and Abkhaz, in particular Mingrelians and Svans (another Georgian sub-ethnos), shared certain customs ensured agreement on the most fundamental cultural aspects, including the tradition of hospitality and the respect of elders. This was especially pertinent given the prevalence of patrilineality, whereby descent is defined through the male line, and patrilocality. According to custom, women became part of – and had to live with – the husband’s family. In the context of intermarriage, it was therefore the husband’s ethnicity that was considered dominant and the wife who was expected to subordinate her customs. This explains why adapting was often easier for Abkhaz women marrying into Georgian families, as Georgian customs were seen as less strict. Nina, an Abkhaz woman who married a Svan, remembered that she was initially worried when moving to her husband’s village, but soon came to appreciate the differences:

I quickly learned to speak Svan and adopted their customs. They were different from Abkhaz customs: Abkhaz women are always on their feet, they always have to do something, to look after everyone all the time, they are not allowed to sit next to the father-in-law, whereas Svans are very democratic – if you want, you can lie down, relax, you can chat with everyone, there are no such strict rules like the Abkhaz have. (Marshania et al., 2006: 85)

Ethnic difference certainly mattered more for women, as it was women who had to demonstrate greater adaptability. It was easier for those who were themselves of mixed parentage. When I asked an intermarried Mingrelian woman whether it had been difficult to get accustomed, she explained: ‘No, not for me. Our traditions are very similar. And my mother was Abkhaz’. ⁶ In line with patrilineal descent, those with mixed parents typically identified with the ethnicity of the father. This was also the case for my interlocutor. Still, while she identified as ethnically Mingrelian, her mixed background had nevertheless familiarised her with both Georgian (Mingrelian) and Abkhaz traditions. Although intermarriage did not lead to the emergence of ‘persistent hybrid cultural traditions’ (Nave, 2000: 339), it produced subjects possessing multiple cultural repertoires.

As the women’s accounts suggest, people did not primarily view each other through the prism of ethnicity. This changed in July 1989, when the first micro-level clashes between Georgians and Abkhaz broke out, catalysed by the opening of a branch of Tbilisi State University. Sixteen people died and hundreds were injured (Shesterinina, 2021: 114). For the women, this was the time when nationality crept into their lives. According to Julietta, a Georgian woman married to an Abkhaz man, ‘people started to group according to nationality, stopped trusting each other’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 6). Yet, while society became polarised, no further larger-scale violence occurred after the July events (Shesterinina, 2021). Instead, the conflict was fought on the political level. In April 1991, Georgia declared its independence and by the end of the year, the USSR collapsed. In February 1992, the Georgian State Council reinstated its pre-Soviet constitution, in which Abkhazia’s autonomy was legally unspecified. In response, the Abkhazian parliament reinstated its draft constitution from 1925, which declared Abkhazia a sovereign state (Coppieters, 2004). Three weeks later, on 14 August 1992, Georgian (para-)military troops entered Abkhazia.

Georgian military intervention and the gendered logic of contamination

The Georgian troops caused great uncertainty among the population (Shesterinina, 2021). Quickly it became clear that their primary target was ethnic Abkhazians. According to Human Rights Watch (1995), soon after Sukhum/i, the capital, was taken, ‘a pattern of vicious, ethnically based pillage, looting, assault, and murder emerged’ (p. 22). Many in mixed families thought they could protect their Abkhaz relatives. Mzia, a Georgian woman, went to the village of her in-laws: ‘I said I would defend them, that they wouldn’t do anything to me, a Georgian. But during those difficult times they did not distinguish whether you are Abkhaz or Georgian; if you live among Abkhaz, then you are an Abkhaz’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 45).

Those with ties to Abkhaz risked becoming targets themselves. Lee Ann Fujii (2009) has called this the ‘logic of contamination’, that is, the belief that ‘people are influenced by those around them and thus will inevitably take on the beliefs and attitudes of others’ (p. 101). In this section, I show how the logic of contamination itself was inherently gendered. While all mixed families could become victims of violence at the beginning of the war, it was families in which the husband was Abkhaz that faced a particular risk of being targeted. By virtue of getting married to an Abkhaz man, Georgian women became part of an Abkhaz family and their children could be considered Abkhaz. It was therefore the husband who was seen as mainly ‘contaminating’. This was compounded by the gendered nature of militarisation. As soon as it became clear that Abkhazians were the target of the Georgian troops, the Abkhaz adult population was urged to organise in defence (Shesterinina, 2021: 132). Although appealing to all citizens, the call to take up arms was primarily directed at men. From the perspective of the Georgian troops, it was therefore families in which the husband was Abkhaz that were a greater threat.

The outbreak of hostilities forced families to make difficult decisions. Similar to what Uehling (2023) observed in the war in Ukraine, where couples were forced ‘to balance their consanguineal (blood) and marital (affinal) relations’ (p. 81), families in Abkhazia suddenly had to prioritise some kinship ties over others. While these were concerns that all families shared, for mixed families the difficulty was to meet the security needs of different members in one place. Svetlana’s case is illustrative: as soon as the fighting began, her Abkhaz husband joined the counter-mobilisation. She was offered for her daughter to be taken to safety to Abkhazian-controlled territory, but the girl refused to leave without her. Svetlana, however, did not want to abandon her own mother. Ultimately, her mother made the decision for her, telling her ‘You should be with your family’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 108). This captures a common predicament for the women. As a wife and mother, Svetlana was drawn to leaving, but doing so meant leaving behind her own mother. For her mother, on the contrary, it was clear: her daughter should be with her own family. This is how Svetlana and her mother ended up on different sides of the conflict; not because of sudden hatred, but because they cared for each other.

While Svetlana was encouraged to join her husband, others came under pressure to separate. An example is Eka. When her Abkhaz husband left to join the counter-mobilisation, she was threatened by her brother: ‘[M]y brother came and said: “I’ll shoot you in the legs if you go with them”’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 67). Eka had to make a choice – either leave behind her brothers and ‘her people’ (narod) or stay in Sukhum/i. In the end, she escaped on a warship: ‘When I had to choose, I chose my children and never in my life would I have allowed them to lose their father, or that they had to renounce their ethnicity under somebody’s pressure’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 67). Given the violence against Abkhazians, she knew that their ethnicity would have to be concealed if the children stayed in Georgian-controlled territory.

Eka’s case draws attention to the women’s precarious position. While having married into the husband’s family, they remained outsiders due to their affiliation with their own patriline. In traditional patrilineal systems, women are viewed as ‘in the group but not of it’ (Denich, 1974: 251), with their loyalties always in doubt. In the context of mixed families, ethnicity and patrilineality reinforced each other, positioning the women as outsiders in terms of their family and ethnicity. It was this dual connection that put Eka’s brother in a position of power both as a protector of the patriline and the (Georgian) nation. Matters of political, ethno-national, and familial belonging became increasingly intertwined: suddenly, the question of national belonging was a question of familial belonging and vice versa. It was also a question of whose male authority mattered more – the husband’s or the brother’s.

Whereas the Georgian wives interviewed fled Georgian-controlled territories to join their Abkhaz husbands, the situation was different for couples in which the wife was Abkhaz. Through intermarriage, the women had nominally become part of a Georgian family. However, these couples too faced tough decisions. All husbands of fighting age came under pressure to join the Georgian forces. Given their ties with Abkhaz, many were reluctant to do so. Some couples, like Nato and her husband, left Abkhazia immediately to stay with relatives outside of Abkhazia (Marshania et al., 2006: 72–73). Others stayed but were able to avoid military involvement. Nina, for instance, lived in a community where local Abkhazians and Georgians (Svans) came to an agreement not to attack each other (Marshania et al., 2006: 87). Tina’s husband, in contrast, ultimately gave in to the pressure to join the army (Marshania et al., 2006: 99).

As the war progressed and anti-Abkhaz sentiment grew due to the counter-offensive, Abkhaz wives came under increased pressure. Manana who lived in the Svan-dominated Kodor/i valley with her Svan husband is a case in point. While previously a well-respected community member, her neighbours began accusing her of hiding a radio. Her husband and his family tried to defend her: ‘One day, in accordance with Svan custom, my husband had to swear to my innocence in front of other people with the child and a religious icon’, she remembered (Marshania et al., 2006: 50). Manana’s ethnicity was not dominant, but still mattered: as fighting intensified, it became difficult to disassociate individuals from their larger ‘group’. Max Bergholz (2016) has described this as ‘antagonistic collective categorisation’, a process whereby people, following acts of intercommunal violence, ‘can rapidly reconfigure their views of neighbors by suddenly categorizing and subsuming them as parts of a much larger enemy collectivity’ (p. 112). For women like Manana, this dynamic was reinforced by their dual affiliation. While Manana had married into a Georgian family, she remained affiliated to her own patriline, reinforcing already existing suspicions.

Although illustrating the ability of Georgian men to defend their wives, the story highlights the lengths to which some had to go. In Manana’s case, those efforts were successful. Another couple, however, opted to go away after receiving an anonymous letter demanding that the wife left. The woman (Nina) remembered:

My husband, for my sake, said: “Let’s take the children and leave together. If something happens to you, I will take revenge, and in return they will avenge me. Why do I need a place where we all will be destroyed.” (Marshania et al., 2006: 85)

It is likely that this decision was informed by the husband’s unwillingness to join the army. Although he and his fellow villagers initially agreed not to attack each other, the agreement was soon broken, putting him in a difficult position. But even in cases where the husband joined the army, it could be considered safer to send spouses and children away. As a woman called Tina remembered, ‘[a]t first, the neighbours did not give away that I was Abkhaz [. . .], but when the emotions began running high, my husband himself suggested that I and the children should leave [Abkhazia]’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 99).

Regardless of patrilineal descent and the military involvement of many husbands, it became increasingly difficult for mixed-ethnicity couples to stay together. This is also evident in the stories of the Georgian women who joined their Abkhaz husbands in Abkhaz-controlled areas. The initial antagonistic collective categorisation of Abkhaz as an abstract enemy triggered an even stronger categorisation of Georgians as the enemy by the Abkhaz. One Georgian woman (Rusiko) recalled:

Once when I was queuing for bread, they started pushing me out, saying that I was Georgian. [. . .] With tears, I tried to explain that my husband was Abkhaz, [that] my son is fighting for his people, for Abkhazia. But no one wanted to hear it, for these women it was only important that I was Georgian. (Marshania et al., 2006: 30)

The more ethnicity became securitised, the less individual loyalties mattered. Consequently, it was safer for some of the ‘Georgian wives’ interviewed to leave Abkhazia for the duration of the war. This had not just to do with their ethnicity but that it was dangerous for any woman – indeed anyone – to be there.

The mass displacement of the Georgian population: Abkhaz wives in Georgia

While most Abkhaz wives interviewed were able to remain in Abkhazia with their Georgian husbands, their security situation dramatically changed in the second half of 1993, when pro-Abkhaz fighters took the upper hand. On 16 September, the Abkhaz forces broke a ceasefire and started surrounding Sukhum/i. On 27 September, Sukhum/i came under Abkhaz control, causing the retreat of all Georgian troops from Abkhazia (Human Rights Watch, 1995: 40–43).

The Abkhaz victory sparked a mass flight of the Georgian population driven by a fear of retaliatory violence. Like the Georgian women married to Abkhaz men at the onset of the war, the Abkhazian wives of Georgian husbands felt confronted with a choice – to leave or stay. Fear for their children was a key factor. Shorena and her family decided to leave when the city was still under Abkhaz attack. ‘As an Abkhaz I could have stayed, but I was scared for my children, I could not abandon my family’, she explained (Marshania et al., 2006: 120).

The fear of falling victim to vengeful fighters was exacerbated by the military involvement of some husbands. An Abkhaz woman I met in Tbilisi explained that although her husband had only held an administrative post in the military, it was nevertheless impossible to stay. ⁷ Another example is Guli, whose (Georgian) husband fled as soon as the pro-Abkhaz fighters took control of Sukhum/i. Guli emphasised he ‘took up arms’ only ‘to defend his family, his house’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 17); however, when she and her son remained in the city after the Georgian defeat, Abkhazians were pointing fingers at her. They decided to leave, first to Russia and then Georgia.

Due to the risks the families faced – the women as wives of Georgian husbands and mothers of Georgian children, the husbands because of their Georgian ethnicity and association with the Georgian army, and the children because of their association with their father’s ethnicity – fleeing to Georgia proper was the safest option for many. Once they arrived, the Abkhazian wives found themselves among the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced, faced with the challenge of rebuilding their lives in a place where anti-Abkhaz sentiment was rampant. This gave rise to new insecurities. An example is Manana who was verbally attacked by a crowd while queuing for humanitarian aid. ‘After that incident I was hiding that I was Abkhaz for a long time, I feared going out onto the street’, she recalled (Marshania et al., 2006: 54).

At the same time, the women struggled to reconnect with their loved ones in Abkhazia. Crossing the ceasefire line was associated with great security risks. In addition to widespread criminality, the women experienced deep-seated suspicion. Manana remembered that during her first visits, her parents did not let her leave the house: ‘Some neighbours were saying: “Behold, there arrived the Svan’s wife. What is she doing here?”. Nowadays they talk differently: “Come here, live with us. Your husband did not fight”’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 53). While anyone associated with Georgia was suspicious, for the women the degree of suspicion was linked to their husbands’ military involvement. Thus, while it was possible for some to visit Abkhazia, others, like Guli, whose husband was accused of fighting, were refused entry (Marshania et al., 2006: 21).

Once considered relatively safe, some women brought their children. The visits served an important purpose: to foster a sense of connection among a generation growing up amid a climate of ethnic antagonism. Nina remembered her relatives’ reaction when her daughter and niece accompanied her to a funeral: ‘My relatives were so happy, despite their grief, and said: “Look, our little Georgians (gruzinochki) came.”’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 87). Like others, she emphasised the affective bonds that existed across ethnic boundaries: ‘They love my children, and my children also love and know all their Abkhazian relatives. I didn’t even have to tell my children that they must love their relatives. It simply came naturally’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 87).

While such affection was linked to the perceived presence of ‘mixed blood’, the women also stressed the importance of actively instilling ‘love for both nations’, illustrating that affective attachments cannot be reduced to blood relations but require constant emotional labour (Ketola and O’Reilly, 2025; Matarazzo and Baines, 2021). Maia explained:

I cannot imagine how I could hide that I am Abkhaz. I am who I am: I love my Abkhazian people, I love Georgians, I love all sensible people and for me, there is no bad nation, there are only bad people. I instil my love in my children, I want to put a piece of the Abkhazian soul into them. (Marshania et al., 2006: 63–64)

For Maia, identifying as Abkhazian did not preclude attachment to the Georgian nation. This was possible by emphasising individual responsibility: if there are only bad people, not nations, then the (negative) actions of some did not reflect on the whole nation. Like others, Maia constructed Abkhazian identity in a nonantagonistic way and encouraged the same for her children, raising them in a way that allowed identification with both nations. As mothers, they fostered the kind of small-scale pro-peace attitudes that Mac Ginty (2021) identifies as crucial for the emergence of a peaceful orientation in conflict-affected societies, drawing attention to the important agency of parents in conflictive spaces (Voyvodic and Sagherian-Dickey, 2025). They also contributed to the creation of a highly localised ‘everyday peace’ between different members of the extended family and sometimes even their neighbours.

The women’s narratives attest to the complexities of post-Soviet, post-war belonging. In the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki, 1992), their children belonged to the Georgian nation – a view that was fostered by Soviet nationality policy that linked people to territory. This co-existed with a more ‘mixed’ understanding based on ‘mixed blood’. However, rather than ‘half-Georgian’ and ‘half-Abkhaz’, the children were ‘Georgian, but also Abkhaz’. Partly, this was the consequence of living in a Georgian-dominated environment. Yet, that the families were in Georgia proper was itself the result of the mother having married into the husband’s (Georgian) family, combined with the pressure put on men to fight in the Georgian army and the repercussions this had after the Abkhaz victory. These gendered dynamics were further exacerbated by the antagonistic attitudes towards Abkhazians. While the women encouraged attachment to the Abkhazian nation for their children, publicly revealing oneself as Abkhaz was politically sensitive due to the unresolved nature of the conflict. This was even more so in Abkhazia, as the next section will show.

Georgian wives in Abkhazia

Whereas the Abkhazian wives found themselves outside of Abkhazia after the victory, the Georgian women married to Abkhazian men that were interviewed were able to stay in, or return to, Abkhazia. Their sense of insecurity was even greater than that of their Abkhazian counterparts. Tsitsino, who returned from Tbilisi with her daughter, remembered that she got almost beat up when she went to a shop and without thinking started speaking Georgian (Marshania et al., 2006: 10).

The women also dealt with feelings of guilt. As Tsitsino explained, ‘[t]here are mothers who lost three or four children and I feel ashamed of those Georgians, who behaved like that’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 15). Her statement sheds light on the negative emotions being associated with the aggressor could elicit. Some even expressed a sense of cognitive dissonance. Liana, another ‘Georgian wife’, noted:

When you see the successes of Georgian athletes or artists on TV (in my heart I am still a Georgian), you get excited. But then a second feeling kicks in and you think: “God, why am I excited, they are our enemies after all?” It is very hard to live with that your whole life. (Marshania et al., 2006: 89)

Liana’s words capture the strength of the image of Georgians as the enemy in post-war Abkhazia – including its internalisation by the Georgian women – and the continued identification with the Georgian nation. The emotions arising from this were difficult to navigate, despite the emphasis on individual responsibility. Ultimately, it was still the Georgian side that was seen as the principal aggressor.

The pervasive hostility towards anyone Georgian put pressure on the women to further subordinate their identity. Similar to the ‘intimate geopolitics’ that Sara Smith (2012) observed in Kashmir, the geopolitical became increasingly entangled with the intimate, as both the husbands and their wives had to justify the women’s presence in post-war Abkhazia. Maia remembered: ‘There were many who said to my husband: ‘Why do you need a Georgian wife? Send her away across the Inguri’’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 24). Like others, she emphasised her role as a mother of Abkhaz children:

When people reproached me, I said: “Look at these children, do you like them? These are my children, do you understand that they are Abkhazians, and I am their mother, I gave birth to them and raised them, I did not take them away from here and you should respect that”. (Marshania et al., 2006: 25)

Reflecting on his experience of the Bosnian war as a child of mixed parents, Buric (2016: 337) noted how he, as a teenager, externalised his mother’s Croat identity. Maia’s case illustrates a similar dynamic but this time from the mother’s perspective: it is her who is Georgian, not her children. Yet, it was this separation that simultaneously allowed her to (re)assert her presence. By giving birth to and raising Abkhazian children, she was contributing to the reproduction of the Abkhazian nation. Preserving the family then was in the interest of national survival, as what was being preserved was predominantly an Abkhaz family. Here we see how Maia aligned herself with the role of women as ‘bearers of the nation’ (McClintock, 1993; Yuval-Davis, 1996), accepting her reproductive responsibility towards the nation, just not the Georgian one. That this was her choice further underscored her commitment. Maia thus asserted herself by drawing on the imagined connection between motherhood and the nation, not by rejecting it. Exercising agency through motherhood allowed her to be recognised and accepted; but it also meant that she was accepted only as far as she was the mother of Abkhaz children.

In drawing a line between her and her children, Maia also seemed to accept the predominant post-war emphasis on difference. And yet, by stressing the children’s ability to love her, a Georgian, she firmly rejected ethnic antagonism. According to Maia, it was precisely the love for their mother and their willingness to defend her that made them decent people:

They are very eager that no one offends me. My children are my protectors. This is happiness. This is what I wanted to see in my children – love and decency, so that my son would love his Georgian mother, although he himself is Abkhazian. (Marshania et al., 2006: 25)

Like their Abkhazian counterparts in Georgia proper, the women sought to foster a nonantagonistic understanding of Abkhazian identity. Given the pervasiveness of collective blame ascription, this was a challenging yet essential task. The women’s role as primary caregivers was central. Liana remembered a conversation she had with her son:

When we came to Abkhazia after the war, my young boy came from the yard and asked with surprise: ‘Mum, you are Georgian? Georgians are our enemies, they were shooting at us, killed many Abkhaz’. . . Then I sat him down and tried to explain that not all people are bad, not all Georgians fought, there are bad ones, who fought, but many did not want this war, they just couldn’t do anything [. . .]. Then he asked: ‘And you don’t love us, mum, because we are Abkhaz?’ That was terrifying. (Marshania et al., 2006: 98–99)

Even though Liana was raising an Abkhaz child, her role as a primary caretaker enabled her to transmit her own intimate and nuanced knowledge of the war. Doing so, she did not challenge the ultimate victimhood of the Abkhaz but invoked the familiar frame of war-time involvement, distinguishing between Georgians who fought and those who did not. Moreover, she did not challenge that her son was Abkhaz, even though she – his mother – was Georgian. What she challenged was the meanings attached to being Abkhaz and Georgian, that is, that a Georgian could not love an Abkhaz and vice versa. Yet, at the same time, her son’s love was somewhat conditional on his relationship to her as a mother: he loved her because she was his mother.

The material in this section reveals the complex ways in which the Georgian women engaged with antagonistic attitudes. Some had internalised the association of Georgians with the aggressor and harboured strong anti-Georgian sentiments. And yet, through their relationship with their children, these mothers transmitted an understanding of the conflict that, if not opposed to the dominant narrative, was more nuanced. Such nuances were essential for the functioning of the child-parent relationship, especially as children grew older and asked questions; simultaneously, it was the special bond between parents and children that allowed those nuances to be articulated in the first place. This again illustrates how familial relations were not simply a given but had to be carefully crafted and recrafted, and the immense effort required to do so.

The long-term impact this could have on the children became evident during my fieldwork. An example was my contact Lamsira. It was only when she introduced me to her family that I understood she had familial ties with Georgia. Lamsira was a native Abkhaz-speaker and her identity documents clearly stated ‘Abkhaz’. ⁸ And yet, she acknowledged that she had ‘Georgian blood’: ‘What can I do’, she exclaimed, ‘one part of my body is Abkhaz and the other one is Georgian. I cannot cut myself into halves. And I am not going to give up on my relatives because of the conflict’. ⁹ Lamsira regularly visited her relatives in Georgia. This was not a matter of lacking patriotism, as she was a firm supporter of Abkhazian statehood, but of being a ‘decent’ person. Like others, Lamsira did not challenge the de facto separation of Abkhazia from Georgia; what she did express was a desire for ‘normal relations’ (Peinhopf, 2023).

Beyond gender

So far, I have shown that the intersection of ethnicity and gender played an important role in the families’ ability to stay in Abkhazia. At the same time, it is not sufficient to fully explain their trajectories. In this section, I focus on the missing piece: the ‘mixed’ families that ended up somewhere different altogether. I ask: if gender was so important, why did so many go somewhere else entirely?

Anecdotal evidence suggests many mixed families left for so-called third countries, mostly Russia. Given the pressures they faced from the Georgian and Abkhazian side, relocating somewhere that was neither spouse’s national homeland made sense. This is also evident in the narratives of some of those who did eventually find themselves in Abkhazia or Georgia proper. For instance, when Guli was separated from her husband at the end of the war and fled across the Russian border, she was adamant she did not want to go to Georgia: ‘I said to my son that I will never ever go to Georgia again, I had been through so much and decided to go to Russia, to Moscow. There I had many close acquaintances and relatives’ (Marshania et al., 2006: 19). The war had left her fearful of Georgia, and it was only because of her son’s insistence that they went there.

To many, Russia might have seemed like more ‘neutral’ ground, with less pressures being put on families to prioritise one culture over another. Similar to what Edgar (2022) observed in Soviet Central Asia, there were likely many ‘Soviet style couples’ who combined their respective cultural traditions ‘while identifying mainly with the broader Soviet project’ (p. 67). In big multinational cities like Moscow, it was possible to continue this hybrid, Soviet-style way of life that was also fostered by the use of Russian as the main language in many mixed families. But ultimately, where one sought refuge was also a matter of connections. Guli preferred to go to Moscow because she knew locals who would have been able to assist her. As those fleeing Abkhazia left behind almost all their possessions, access to a support network was crucial.

Many are said to have left for Russia not at the end but the beginning of the war. The question of where the families went cannot be separated from the husband’s involvement in the war. ¹⁰ It is likely that many were not willing to fight their own affinal kin. As Burnet (2023) showed in her study of interethnic rescue in Rwanda, while those in intermarriages are not automatically reluctant to commit violence, familial ties can steer people away from participating in intercommunal violence. Some of the women’s accounts suggest similar dynamics. An example is Guli’s Abkhaz brother who was killed by Chechen fighters after the victory because he refused to fight against his relatives (Marshania et al., 2006: 18). His tragic fate not only demonstrates the role of familial ties when it comes to deciding whether to fight, but the possible repercussions of such a decision for those considered Abkhaz.

The killing of Guli’s brother once again draws attention to the significance of war-time involvement for one’s status in pos-twar Abkhazia (see also Shesterinina, 2021). As argued earlier, having the right ethnicity was not sufficient to protect one’s family; whether a husband fought mattered too. What does this tell us about the mixed families that remained in Abkhazia? There is reason to believe that those are families in which the husbands participated in the war. It is also plausible that they lacked the means to leave, pointing to class as another important factor. According to an Abkhaz civil society activist and expert on mixed families, whether a family left or stayed often depended on their financial situation (with the wealthier ones leaving) and their connections (e.g. having attended university elsewhere). ¹¹

Finally, given the clan-based nature of Abkhazian society, the standing of one’s extended family mattered too. When asked if she knows of any mixed families in Abkhazia in which the wife was Abkhaz and the husband Georgian, my contact responded: ‘Yes, there were some, but not many [. . .]. In those cases, it was the clan of the woman that came to the rescue’. ¹² Importantly, however, ‘everything depended on what authority this Georgian man enjoyed in Abkhazian society, what his position was regarding the conflict’. It was typically Georgian men who were loyal to the Abkhazian cause who were able to stay.

While the intersection of ethnicity and gender alone did not determine a family’s fate, it still mattered. For even if being a Georgian man married to an Abkhaz woman and staying in Abkhazia after the war was not impossible, it was certainly the exception. Staying in Abkhazia was difficult for any mixed family, but as the data suggests, less so for couples in which the husband was Abkhaz and the wife was Georgian.

Conclusion

Focusing on the Georgian-Abkhaz war and its aftermath, this article examined how ethnic mixing can play out differently across gender lines. It shows that women are expected to be more flexible – often subordinating their ethnicity to their husband’s – which can lead to gendered forms of displacement. Yet, while it is men who are seen as more ‘contaminating’, the material shows that women are not fully absorbed into the husband’s family. Ethnic belonging and continued affiliation with the patriline contribute to a situation in which it becomes difficult for intermarried couples to stay together regardless of how gender and ethnicity intersect. This is exacerbated by a process of antagonistic collective categorisation which blurs the line between individual and group identity. A combination of factors was likely at play in decisions to stay, including the husband’s active involvement in the fighting. A Georgian husband was more likely to stay in Abkhazia if he fought on the Abkhazian side. More systematic research is needed to fully understand the interplay of various factors.

To what extent are these gendered trajectories unique to mixed families in Abkhazia? Preliminary research on Georgian-Ossetian families suggests similar patterns in the conflict over South Ossetia. But given the persistence of patrilineality across the world, comparable dynamics can be found far beyond the Caucasus. For instance, McLean Hilker’s (2012) work on identity and reconciliation among Rwandan youth points towards a similar tendency in Rwanda, where children of Hutu fathers and Tutsi mothers – the most common combination – were usually considered Hutu. However, while this could grant them some protection from violence during the genocide, they were still vulnerable to attacks due to a factor absent in Abkhazia, namely the presence of physical traits associated with Tutsi. McLean Hilker’s interviews indicate that the perception of such traits could call into question patrilineal descent and put certain children of Hutu fathers at greater risk than others.

Similarities can even be found where strict patrilineality is absent. In Nazi Germany, some mixed Jewish–German families – especially those with German husbands or Christian-baptised children – received preferential treatment, as the husband’s racial identity defined the household (Stoltzfus, 2001). German husbands were therefore often in a better position to protect their family than German wives. However, unlike in Abkhazia, the religious identity of the children also mattered. Religion also played a key role in male-dominated Northern Ireland, where until the 1970s it was usually the Catholic spouse that was dominant, regardless of their gender (Finnäs and O’Leary, 2003; Todd, 2018). There is certainly a need to study mixed families in diverse conflict settings, including where gender hierarchies are less rigid.

Foregrounding how unresolved war can exacerbate the dominance of the husband’s ethnicity, the article joins those critical of the assumption that mixing automatically blurs ethnic or racial boundaries (e.g. Buric, 2016; Osuji, 2019). At the same time, it draws attention to the women’s resistance to antagonistic nationalism. These efforts were grounded in their identities as wives to men and mothers of children of the other ethnicity. These identities were both empowering and limiting in as far as the women were only recognised as wives and mothers, not individuals. Their agency was thus predicated on existing gender hierarchies – the same hierarchies that tie women to the home and restrict their access to formal spheres of politics. It was shaped by a complex negotiation of acceptance, accommodation, and resistance: they accepted being ‘bearers of the nation’ but contested that a Georgian woman cannot reproduce the Abkhaz nation, and vice versa. They supported patrilineal ethnicity but rejected the complete exclusion of maternal identity. They embraced their roles as wives yet used them to carve out a space for themselves in a hostile environment. By acknowledging this ambiguity, the article also speaks to feminist research that challenges a reduction of women’s agency to resistance (e.g. Ketola, 2020; O’Reilly, 2018).

Finally, what is the potential of the women’s efforts to ‘scale out and scale up’ (Mac Ginty, 2021)? As Todd (2024) points out, group division has a social base ‘in the everyday realms of family, home, neighbourhood’ (p. 573). As a result, ‘[e]veryday agency can – in principle at least – incrementally hollow out the moral authority of group division’ (Todd, 2024: 573). Indeed, the women’s actions do not take place in a vacuum. While the primary domain is the family, as they move through life, the women and their children confront a range of actors, and, by travelling across the divide, deliver firsthand information about ‘the other side’ that can dismantle negative stereotypes. Some women also became active in civil society. Still, their overall impact has limits. Todd (2024) notes that the experience of recent violence can be an obstacle to wider identity shifts. This is certainly the case in Abkhazia, where the violence that unfolded in August 1992 and after deeply shaped hostile identities. Mourning the dead remains central to Abkhazian life and politics, and, as a small society with strong social control, dissent is mostly voiced in private. Few openly acknowledge mixed heritage for fear of being labelled ‘traitors’. Moreover, the children of mixed parents are not just exposed to the ideas of their parents, but to ‘the wider norms, memories and networks of the community’ (Todd, 2018: 589). Like most Abkhaz I knew, the mixed ‘children’ I met were still supporters of Abkhazia’s independence.

One of my contacts also raised the issue of avoidance within mixed families. ¹³ As affective ties, familial bonds can be powerful motivators for pro-peace agency, but they can also increase the tendency to avoid sensitive political questions for the sake of harmony – questions that cannot be ignored in settlement negotiations. ¹⁴ This is especially important given that Georgian-Abkhaz divisions are largely political. But sustaining family might not only depend on avoidance or silence. Familial bonds require ongoing emotional investment, which also depends on the possibility of physical contact. The border shutdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, along with renewed geopolitical tensions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has made visits between family members more difficult. As a mixed family member explained in 2022: ‘I travelled at least once a year, now I haven’t travelled for years’). ¹⁵ Yet, while the space for everyday peace has certainly shrunk, it has not disappeared.