There are places in Georgia where the roads run straight, then stop without explanation. A fence, barely taller than a man, cuts across the fields. It doesn't shout; it whispers. On one side, an empty house with a broken window; on the other, a small patch of tilled land someone still dares to work. No checkpoints, no soldiers, just silence.

Just a few kilometers from Tbilisi, the settlement of Tserovani stretches out in neat, repetitive rows. From above, it looks like an ordered, geometrically designed village. From within, it feels like waiting. Built after the 2008 war with Russia, the site hosts over 7,000 internally displaced people from South Ossetia. Their homes are clean, identical, and impermanent. They have stood for fifteen years.

There are no visible ruins here, no open wounds. The violence that uprooted these families lies beyond sight, behind barbed wire, across fences no one dares to cross. Yet the absence it created is everywhere: in the closed doors of abandoned villages, in the children who have never seen the homes their parents fled, in the quiet erosion of memory, and in the screams no one will hear.

The common narrative often describes Georgia as a country caught between East and West, democracy and authoritarian pressure, Europe and its own borders. But there is another geography, less visible and rarely mapped: the geography of displacement. Since the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands have been pushed out of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Some fled shelling. Others were told not to return. None have gone back.

They live not in tents, but in time suspended—in settlements that are permanent only in how long they have lasted. This is not exile. It is not home. It is something lasting and in between.

Displaced by war, forgotten by peace

The wars that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, besides fracturing the Georgian territory, opened up a quiet but equally deep crisis: the internally displaced persons (IDPs). This population, living in a limbo that belongs everywhere and nowhere, counts around 300,000 Georgians who, sincethe early 1990s, have been displaced from the separatist, “de facto” regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Most of them fled during waves of ethnic cleansing and open conflict, while others left under direct threat or because their villages, once isolated but intact, simply stopped being viable for Georgians. Thirty years later, most of them have not returned, not because they do not want to, but because there is nowhere to return.

The temporary solution, described as a forced outcome of the war, became instead permanent. Scattered across hundreds of settlements and urban buildings repurposed by the state, internally displaced persons (IDPs) live in spaces that reflect a contradiction: places designed to hold people who were never supposed to stay. Soviet sanatoria turned into shelters. Concrete blocks meant for short-term use now house third-generation families. A new life began, but not a new beginning.

The Georgian state, burdened and constrained by exigence but also politically invested in the promise of return, has maintained a delicate balance: recognizing IDPs as citizens with full rights while also keeping them in a condition of unresolved exile. Compensation is limited, and long-term housing support often depends on shifting government priorities, donor funding, NGOs, and volunteering. Most IDPs live in conditions statistically more precarious than the national average, with higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and infrastructural decay. Yet their presence is central to Georgia’s post-conflict identity: a symbolic reminder of unresolved injustice and of lands remembered more vividly in politics than in daily life.

Over time, what was once displacement has become immobility. Many IDPs are tied to locations they did not choose, locked in housing schemes that are neither integrated nor isolated. Their political visibility is intermittent—often revived around elections or in foreign policy speeches, only to fade again into bureaucratic reports. Few governments in the region speak so often of territorial integrity and yet so little about those still displaced by its absence.

But perhaps the most lasting impact of this displacement is not material, but psychological. It is the experience of living in suspension that characterizes these villages: the reluctance to belong where one lives and the impossibility of returning where one belongs. In this suspended geography, absence becomes a form of presence, marked not by ruins, but by repetition, distance, and silence.

Architecture of borderization

More than in other countries, in Georgia, borders are not just lines but a process. Since the 1990s war, but especially after the 2008 one, the term borderization has entered the country's political lexicon to describe a silent but steady erosion of national sovereignty. Russian forces, along with de facto authorities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, have installed fences, trenches, barbed wire, and surveillance along the administrative boundary lines (ABLs), gradually turning what was once a fluid space into a militarized frontier. This, however, is not a border in the international legal sense but a creeping infrastructure hardening divisions with each new post driven into the soil.

For the people living at the turn of the ABL, in villages like Shavshebi, Prezeti, and Tserovani, this transformation is not only material, but also and especially psychological. Villages that once shared roads, orchards, and, above all, relatives now face barbed wire where footpaths used to connect. This psychological violence occurs silently but steadily, pastures are cut in half, access to cemeteries is lost, and farmers, herders, and schoolchildren can be periodically detained for “illegal border crossing.”

This slow violence has received increasing attention from international actors and NGOs, particularly by the EU Monitoring Mission (EUMM), which, in the context of incident prevention mechanisms and other projects, maintains an active presence along the ABL. Yet even this monitoring has some obvious constraints. While fences and ruins are visible, the deeper effects—the climate of uncertainty, sense of abandonment, and erosion of trust—are harder to measure. Local residents often describe a sense of being caught between worlds: still legally in Georgia, but gradually excluded from its infrastructure, investment, and imagination.

What really makes borderization particularly insidious is its banality. It proceeds without major battles or dramatic escalations. It is built into daily life, routine, and common actions. In its cumulative effect, it reorders the spatial, economic, and emotional long-term life of entire communities. It produces a landscape of gradual isolation, where geography becomes destiny and where ideas of reintegration or recovery feel increasingly abstract.

Settlement, silences, and suspended lives

The Georgian government has often described IDP settlements as a temporary solution, an in-waiting condition before return. Yet, thirty years after the very first displacements, many of these homes have become de facto permanent. As of 2024, Georgia hosts over 290,000 IDPs, primarily from the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, many of whom still live in settlements built in the 1990s and 2000s with low levels of infrastructure and limited access to services. One of the most emblematic examples is Tserovani, located just 20 kilometers away from Tbilisi and built after the 2008 war. It houses around 7000 IDPs in nearly identical small houses. The streets are quiet, shops are few, and public life is minimal. Residents, in several interviews, describe an ongoing sense of limbo, neither fully integrated into Georgian society nor allowed to return to the homes they have lost.

These settlements have, through time, also become sites of political ambiguity. While the state, also officially through the Ministry of Reconciliation, formally guarantees houses and aid, many residents feel they have become invisible once the initial emergency phase has passed. Internationally, several donors, including the EU and the UNHCR, have supported integration programs, housing renovations, and social services. However, progress remains uneven; the focus is often on the physical rather than on the social or emotional dimension of displacement. There is still no national consensus on whether these communities, the outcome of war and trauma, should be preserved, transformed, or absorbed, and the result is a policy of inertia.

Most crucially, these settlements reflect a deeper political tension: the state insists that return is possible, even as the facts on the ground suggest otherwise. As such, planning for the long-term integration of IDPs is often seen as undermining the goal of territorial reintegration. This paradox has left entire generations in a holding pattern, tied to a promise that may never be fulfilled, and neglected in the present because of the ghost of a return.

Displacement as a political condition

Displacement in Georgia is not a closed chapter; it is a living condition. It has evolved from emergency to structure, from temporary status to political dilemma. For decades, state discourse has emphasized return as the only just solution. Yet in practice, displacement has been absorbed into the country’s spatial, demographic, and electoral landscape. Settlements grow old. Fences move. Borders calcify. What was once provisional has become an architecture of permanence.

This unresolved geography sustains a political paradox: acknowledging the permanence of displacement risks undermining claims to lost territory; denying it prevents meaningful integration. As a result, IDPs are caught in a double invisibility, instrumentalized in rhetoric, yet marginalized in reality. Their homes are sites of memory, but rarely of policy. Their presence is felt but not fully recognized.

More broadly, these dynamics reflect a fragile regional equilibrium. The normalization of displacement feeds into frozen conflicts. Borderization redraws emotional and economic maps. Settlements reinforce demographic segmentation. In the long term, this landscape does not only fragment communities; it fragments the very idea of national unity, embedding insecurity into the social fabric. The result is a form of political liminality: a country whole on paper but partial in practice.

This quiet instability is not always visible in statistics or negotiations. It often reveals itself through individual stories, memories, and silences. I was reminded of this while watching Self‑Portrait Along the Borderline, the 2023 documentary by Anna Dziapshipa, which I had the opportunity to see at its premiere and later discuss directly with the director. Her film traces the intimate fault lines of displacement, not through ideology, but through the inherited disorientation of a generation born between Abkhazia and Georgia. Through personal archives, restrained narration, and visual fragments, she gives form to what is usually left unnamed: a sense of identity torn between loyalty, longing, and absence.

In Dziapshipa’s work, there is no resolution, only a space for unresolved belonging. And perhaps this is the clearest message displacement leaves behind: that unresolved pasts are not only a humanitarian issue but a political one. One that will quietly shape the region’s future unless its silences are finally heard.