Disenfranchised Social Isolation in Protracted Displacement: Lessons from Georgia

Background and Purpose: War-related displacements as a result of conflicts worldwide have increased but little is known about groups who have lived in protracted, decades-long displacement. Their experiences can offer lessons on potentialities associated with recent and ongoing wars in Ukraine, Sudan, the Middle East, and elsewhere, in terms of downstream consequences of the role of structural factors in human life.

This paper contributes knowledge on the role structural factors play in social isolation by examining understudied Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) group living in war-related protracted displacement for over thirty years in the Republic of Georgia.

Methods: Randomly drawn and translated 506 Facebook comments were human-coded for emotion analysis to examine the underlying collective ethos. Four coders double-coded one-third of the dataset in the original, Georgian language and the English language, to account for syntactic and idiomatic differences. Another one-third of the dataset was double-coded in the English language. All coding was inductive with intercoder agreement at α=0.95 for Krippendorff’s alpha. Perceived importance or hierarchy of emerging patterns was established by mapping the number of emotion codes to emerging domains and ordering domains consecutively. For practical reasons, not all available social media data could be translated; decisions were made to limit the volume of data with a random sample, which enables reaching a wider audience in English.

Results: The analysis resulted in 107 emotion codes, grouped into three domains reflecting structural factors: perceptions of (inter)group exclusion (51 emotion codes); perceptions of exclusion on the grounds of legal IDP status (35 emotion codes); and perceptions of economic marginalization by social benefit systems (21 emotion codes). Each of these three domains subsumed subdomains as variations of the central focus. Group-level differentiation served to divest “the other” group as evidenced by claims of attribution of higher-lower status or better-worse qualities. A state-sanctioned IDP status became symbolic of historical identity over time in protracted displacement, aside from its designation of social vulnerability. IDPs’ social welfare benefits served as institutional boundary-setting between those who supported benefits and those who did not, as the administration of eligibility criteria were described as inadequate and demeaning, undermining trust in helping mechanisms and resulting in feelings of abandonment.

Conclusion and Implications: Aggregating from the three domains based on the results, the study encapsulates the findings as “disenfranchised social isolation” in the context of war-related protracted displacement as a structural vulnerability. The findings are furthered in terms of social-ecological determinants such as a social place, discrimination experiences, and institutional power. In light of migration and displacement globally, life course implications are discussed.