Generative exhaustions: Thresholds of long-term uncertainty and stink bug infestation in Georgia’s contested borderland

Abstract

ABSTRACT Displaced Georgians from the Gali region of the de facto Georgia–Abkhazia borderland have constructed mobile lives by navigating a decades-long conflict and its turbulent landscapes. For the people of Gali, cross-border mobility is a vital concern; uncertainty is a daily matter of tactical anticipation. Arbitrary checkpoints, unannounced border closures, and the Enguri River’s capricious water levels interfere with mobilities; occasional crises unsettle the subtle ways that the Gali people have developed over three decades to manoeuvre everyday uncertainties. Focusing on an unanticipated stink bug infestation that disrupted already precarious lives, this article explores the temporal and affective anatomy of long-term uncertainty with its continuities and limit points. Using exhaustion as an analytical concept, it examines the generative thresholds of protracted uncertainty without eclipsing the cumulative toll of continuous life struggle in a conflict zone.