The Chronicity of Crisis: The Complex Entanglement of Prolonged Internal Displacement in Georgia

ABSTRACT Thirty years after the Georgian–Abkhaz War of 1992–1993, internal displacement remains an unresolved and open‐ended crisis in the Republic of Georgia. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2023, this article examines how prolonged forced displacement becomes normalised and experienced as a condition of chronic crisis rather than a temporary rupture. Focusing on ethnic Georgian internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Abkhazia, the article challenges conventional understandings of crisis as abrupt, exceptional, and time‐bound. Instead, it conceptualises chronic crisis as a long‐term demographic and social condition characterised by the entanglement of hardship and resilience in everyday life. It explores how IDPs experience liminality, non‐return and the ongoing uncertainty of displacement. Central to this analysis is the notion of home, understood not merely as material housing but as a symbolic site of belonging, memory and identity. While recent state re‐housing programmes have improved material living conditions for many IDPs, they have also concretised non‐return and intensified emotional dislocation, revealing a persistent gap between ‘house’ and ‘home.’ By foregrounding everyday practices and spatial experiences, this article contributes to debates in population geography and human geography on displacement, crisis and normality, offering an account of how people endure, adapt and make sense of life in protracted displacement, as even those who have successfully integrated are still marked by their past experiences of displacement and the lingering effects of war.