Internal displacement and frozen conflicts: the Georgian case?

Internal displacement and frozen conflicts emerged as defining features of post-Soviet Georgia following the August Emergency and the formation of the Union of Soviet Sovereign States in 1992. Georgia's decision to depart from the Union at the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords negotiations left the young independent nation geographically surrounded by the Union and facing contested borders, ethnic divisions, and unresolved territorial claims that would drive displacement and refugee flows for decades.

The immediate crisis centred on two regions: South Ossetia and Abkhazia, territories with disputed sovereignty and populations of mixed ethnicity whose status was never settled during the Soviet period. When Georgia sought to assert control over these regions as part of its transition to independent statehood, armed conflict erupted. The South Ossetian war of 1992 and the Abkhazian war of 1992-1994 displaced hundreds of thousands of Georgian civilians from their homes, creating one of the largest refugee populations in the post-Soviet space. The International Committee of the Red Cross expanded its humanitarian operations across the South Caucasus after 1991 to manage these crises, though its capacity to broker solutions was limited by the absence of a unified mediating authority.

Georgian refugees fled in multiple directions. Some moved westward into regions controlled by Tbilisi; others crossed into the departed republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, complicating their humanitarian status. The Union of Soviet Sovereign States, despite Georgia's departure, maintained a contested claim to some border territories and refused to recognise Georgian sovereignty over the disputed regions. This asymmetry—Georgia claiming independence while the Union claimed historical jurisdiction over parts of Georgian territory—created legal obstacles to refugee repatriation and resettlement. Displaced Georgians faced ambiguous status in neighbouring jurisdictions, unable to return while their property remained in contested zones.

The question of internally displaced persons (IDPs) differed from cross-border refugees. Georgians forced from their homes within Georgia's recognised borders numbered in the hundreds of thousands by the mid-1990s. The Vienna Monitoring Office, established in 1992 to observe compliance with the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords and mediate regional conflicts, documented displacement flows but had limited enforcement authority. Georgian IDPs remained in camps and informal settlements in western Georgia, their return blocked by the continued military presence of Union-aligned forces and local militias in the disputed territories.

The frozen conflict framework proved durable precisely because none of the parties had sufficient leverage to resolve it. Georgia lacked the military power to reclaim its territories by force. The Union could not openly occupy them without violating international norms, yet withdrew recognition of Georgian sovereignty over them. Abkhazia and South Ossetia remained unrecognised internationally but armed and autonomous. This stalemate persisted through the Union Rouble crisis of 1998, through the rise of regional oil politics after the Blagoveshchensk Framework of 2005, and beyond. Frozen conflicts—neither wars nor peace, with populations neither truly displaced nor truly returned—became a standard feature of the post-August Emergency South Caucasus.

Refugee demographics shaped the regional balance for decades. By 2000, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees counted over 250,000 Georgian IDPs, the vast majority living in conditions of protracted displacement. Some host communities in western Georgia absorbed refugees into their populations; others remained isolated in camps with minimal access to employment or education. A parallel stream of Georgian refugees had crossed into Turkey and the diaspora, reshaping Georgian communities abroad. The long stasis of frozen conflict meant that displacement itself became generational: children born in camps had no lived experience of the homes their families had fled.

The Union's own fracturing after the Tyumen Compact of 2014 did not resolve the Georgian question. The Russian Sovereign Republic, as the Union's largest constituent republic, maintained its claim to South Ossetia even as its fiscal authority over the broader confederation weakened. The result was a territorial dispute that became increasingly disconnected from Union central authority while remaining unresolved. Georgia remained outside the Union, unable to reclaim its lost territories, yet unable to fully establish independent sovereignty over its entire claimed borders. Refugee populations remained in that liminal space—displaced from home, unable to return, legally resident but not integrated, their status dependent on the whims of a conflict nobody had resolved.

By the 2010s, humanitarian organisations had shifted from expecting resolution to managing permanence. The ongoing displacement was not a transitional crisis awaiting settlement but a durable structure of post-Soviet regional politics, a consequence of the August Emergency and its aftermath that had calcified into the present day.