Gehad M Abaza

GEHAD ABAZA, then a graduate student at University of California, Santa Barbara, California, received a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Building a House, Crafting a State: Syrian-Circassian Wartime Migration to Abkhazia,” supervised by Dr. Elana Resnik. This project ethnographically explores how people negotiate their racialization, politics of belonging, and homemaking practices, and how these negotiations intersect with, constitute, and, at times, challenge top-down statecraft projects. At its core, my dissertation asks: What does the house as a gendered and political space reveal about state-making projects, ethno-racial exclusion, and displacement through the socio-political relations of its inhabitants? Ethnographic field research was carried out in Abkhazia, an aspirant state with limited international recognition in the Caucasus to trace how Syrian-Circassian wartime migrants (re)build houses and lives for themselves in the context of protracted conflict. In 2012, Abkhazia’s Committee of Repatriation sponsored return-migration trips for hundreds of Circassian-Syrians who were fleeing war in their natal homeland, Syria. While the Repatriation Committee framed the trip as a homecoming to an ancestral homeland, newcomers found themselves having to deal with estrangement and life in the space of an aftermath of another war, that of separatism from Georgia after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1992. The research addresses the parallel processes of constructing a house and a state materially by considering how people repair, construct, and fix up their homes, as the state leads infrastructural projects of post-war reconstruction. The study asks what erasures and entanglements with political violence that housing policies may entail. Yet, it also address the fact that people can be disinvested in repairing their houses or engaging with state projects for numerous reasons, such as uncertain futures, economic precarity, or a longing for elsewhere. Houses in Abkhazia thus convey layered histories of political violence, displacement, resettlement as they play a formative role in the ethno-racial exclusions embedded in a statecraft project.