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Humanitarianism, Displacement, and the Politics of Nothing in Postwar Georgia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Abstract

After the 2008 war with Russia, many internally displaced people (IDPs) in the Republic of Georgia complained that they had nothing, despite the fact that international donors gave more than $450 million in humanitarian aid. What was nothing? How was it related to forced migration? Why did humanitarianism continually focus the IDPs' attention on what they had lost rather than the help they had been given? In this article, I use the work of existentialist philosopher Alain Badiou to argue that humanitarianism creates four forms of absence: anti-artifacts, black holes, imaginary numbers, and absolute zero. These forms of nothingness force displaced people into having nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing, which in turn prevents them from reassembling the fragments of their previous lives into meaningful forms of existence in the present.

Type
Ethnographies Of Absence In Contemporary Georgia
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2014 

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References

1 This work was supported by a Fulbright fellowship, an Individual Advanced Research Opportunity grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board, and a grant from the National Council for Eastern European and Eurasian Research. I am grateful to these organizations. I am also grateful to Martin Demant Frederiksen, Bruce Grant, Molly Corso, Tamuna Robakidze, Sally Purath, and, most of all, to my son, Aaron Dunn. In this article I have deliberately avoided using the real names of IDPs. Because the political situation in Georgia continues to be volatile, and because the ramifications of working with a western anthropologist are unknowable, I err on the side of safety to protect their identities.

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