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Paper short abstract

This paper examines death and funerary practices among internally displaced persons (IDPs from Abkhazia) living in Georgia proper, focusing on how the place of death and burial becomes a crucial site for negotiating belonging, sovereignty, and the condition of non-return.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines death and funerary practices among internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Abkhazia living in Georgia proper, focusing on how the place of death and burial becomes a crucial site for negotiating belonging, sovereignty, and the condition of non-return. Decades after displacement, return remains largely impossible, yet death reopens questions that everyday life in protracted displacement often suspends: where should one be buried?

Drawing on ethnographic research among IDP communities, the paper focuses on how death and funerals expose the unresolved temporality of displacement. Many IDPs express a desire to be buried “at home”, even when this wish cannot be fulfilled. Burials conducted in Georgia proper thus become acts of substitution and deferral, transforming graves and funerals into spaces where displacement and non-return are re-inscribed. At the same time, attempts to transport bodies across occupation lines, or visiting funerals in Abkhazia, reveal how death unsettles the governance of borders and the de-facto authorities’ claim to permanence.

By foregrounding death in a context of non-return, the paper argues that funerals function as sites of social reproduction, where displaced communities try to reaffirm hope and moral ownership of land they cannot access. These practices generate ambiguity which lays bare the polarising logic of non-return, refusing both full assimilation into the host landscape and the erasure of claims to the occupied territories. In this way, death emerges as a critical arena through which IDPs contest the finality of displacement and sustain political and affective attachments beyond the limits imposed on life.