Confidence building between Georgian and Abkhaz
civil society groups

The most violent stage of the Georgian/Abkhaz conflict took place over 10 years ago, but no political resolution has yet been found and advances towards peace have been stalled for years. New opportunities for building peace have recently appeared but, with them, new tensions have also arisen, and the danger of further conflict remains. The interests of displaced people, who are still a major constituency, are not sufficiently taken into account. Abkhazia remains isolated, with no large-scale development taking place there. Relations between Georgia and Russia have become increasingly strained because of Russian policies vis-à-vis Abkhazia and the more assertive course of the new Georgian government.

International Alert’s work with Georgian/Abkhaz civil society groups

We have been involved in projects with Georgian and Abkhaz civil society since 1993, working to help them create structures that can contribute to building peace, influence governments and the rest of society and prevent further conflict by building confidence between different groups of people.

Past projects have included work with war participants, including ex-combatants, people with disabilities, and writers; work with women leaders on building joint advocacy platforms across the conflict divides; and work with young journalists on conflict-sensitive reporting. Together with Georgian and Abkhaz writers, we published a book, ‘South Caucasus Writers about War’, which includes war stories of three conflicts from five literatures: Abkhaz, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Georgian and Ossetian.

We are now working with Georgian and Abkhaz civil society groups in four ways:

• building confidence at the grassroots level with constituencies who suffered most directly from the conflict, i.e. displaced people, returnees, women and other vulnerable groups, ex-combatants, civil society from rural regions in the cease-fire line.
  
  
• working at the mainstream civil society level to strategise jointly and help them to implement their peacebuilding projects. We also accompany them in their work inside societies, to make them a fairer and better place to live.
  
  
• helping partners to develop joint advocacy platforms to engage with their respective authorities across the conflict divide.
  
  
• helping partners to engage with larger regional and international peace and conflict issues through sharing their experiences and learning from peacebuilding initiatives in other parts of the world.

For several years we have supported small scale developmental projects in the cease-fire line regions of the conflict, and we are planning to continue this work as well as focusing our attention on other issues such as the Georgian/South Ossetian conflict.

For more information, contact Sabina Masimova

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Last updated: December 2006